Part 9

III

Oberleutnant von Scheldmann sat on a bank by the roadside, to lunch in haste. Behind him, parallel to him, in front of him, went the German army; and the thunder of the guns, down by the Marne, told of the rearguard fight. As they tramped past, the soldiers gazed enviously at the bread and cheese and wine, for the country was clear of food, and, even had it not been, the rapid advance and rapid retreat left but little time for plundering.

Von Scheldmann knocked the top off the wine bottle with a blow from a stone, and, with care to avoid the sharp edges of the glass, he drank long and deep. As he bit greedily into the sandwich, his teeth met on something thin and tenuous, and he pulled the two bits of bread apart. Inside was a scrap of paper. With a curse, he was about to throw the paper away, when some pencilled words caught his eye.

"I leave it to God," he read, "to decide whether you live or die. If you have not drunk any wine, do not, for it is poisoned. If you have, you are lost, and nothing can save you. The victorious French will find your corpse, and will rejoice. Væ victis! Woe to the conquered!"

And even as he read the hurriedly written words, von Scheldmann felt the first awful sense of numbness that presaged the end.

VII

THE ODD JOBS

We sat in a railway carriage and told each other, as civilians love to do, what was the quickest way to end the war. "You ought to be able to hold nearly 400 yards of trench with a company," my friend was saying. "You see, a company nowadays gives you 250 fighting men to man the trenches."

And then the muddy figure in the corner, the only other occupant of the carriage, woke up. "You don't know what you're talking about," he snorted as he tossed his cap up on to the rack, and put his feet on the opposite seat.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he repeated. "You're lucky if your company can produce more than 150 men to man the trenches; you forget altogether about the odd jobs. Take the company I'm in at the front, for instance. Do you imagine we've got 250 men to man the trenches? First of all there are always men being hit and going sick, or men who are sent off to guard lines of communication, and their places aren't filled up by fresh drafts for weeks. As for the odd jobs, there's no end to them. My own particular pal is a telephone orderly--he sits all day in a dug-out and wakes up at stated hours to telephone 'No change in the situation' to battalion headquarters. It's true that he does jolly good work when the Huns 'strafe' his wire and he has to go out and mend it, but he doesn't go forward in an attack; he sits in his dug-out and telephones like blazes for reinforcements while the Germans pepper his roof for him with 'whizz-bangs.'

"Then there's old Joe White, the man like a walrus, who left us months ago to go and guard divisional headquarters; there are five officers' servants who are far too busy to man a trench; there is a post corporal, who goes down to meet the transport every night to fetch the company's letters, and who generally brings up a sack of bread by mistake or drops the parcels into shell holes that are full of water; there's a black, greasy fellow who calls himself a cook, and who looks after a big 'tank' called a 'cooker,' from which he extracts oily tea, and meat covered with tea-leaves. Besides all these fellows there are sixteen sanitary men who wander about with tins of chloride of lime and keep the trench clean--they don't man the trenches; then there are three battalion orderlies, who run about with messages from headquarters and who wake the captain up, as soon as he gets to sleep, to ask him to state in writing how much cheese was issued to his men yesterday or why Private X has not had his hair cut.

"Do you imagine this finishes the list? Not a bit of it. There are half a dozen machine gunners who have nothing to do with company work; half a dozen men and a quartermaster-sergeant attached to the transport to look after the horses and to flirt with girls in farms; two mess waiters whose job it is to feed the officers; and there are four men who have the rottenest time of anyone--they're the miners who burrow and dig, dig and burrow day and night towards the German lines; poor half-naked fellows who wheel little trucks of earth to the pit shaft or who lie on their stomachs working away with picks. And it's always an awful race to see if they'll blow up the Germans, or if it will be the other way about.

"There are still more odd jobs, and new ones turn up every day. Mind you, I'm not grumbling, for many of these fellows work harder than we do, and we must have someone to feed us and to keep the place clean. But the difficulty is nowadays to find a man who's got time to stand in the trench and wait for the Hun to attack, and that's what you people don't seem to realise."

"And what do you do?" asked my friend as the other stopped to yawn.

"What do I do? What do you think I've been talking for all this time?" said the man in khaki. "I'm the fellow who stands in the trench and waits for the Hun to attack. That's a jolly long job, and I've got some sleep owing to me for it, too."

Whereupon he stretched himself out on the seat, pillowed his head on his pack, and proceeded to extract noisy payment of his debt.

"That rather complicates matters, doesn't it?" said my friend, when the muddy figure had safely reached the land of dreams. "If you've only got 150 fighting men in a company, your division has a strength of ..." and he proceeded to count away on his fingers as hard as he could. Presently he gave it up in despair, and a brilliant idea seemed to strike him.

"Those generals and staff fellows," he said, "must have a lot of brains after all." And we have come to the conclusion that we will not criticise them any more, for they must know as well as we do, if not still better, how to win the war.

VIII

THE "KNUT"

We were sitting round the fire in the club, discussing that individual colloquially known as the "knut."

"The 'knut,'" said Green, "is now virtually extinct, he is killed by war. As soon as he gets anywhere near a trench, he drops his cloak of affectation, and becomes a reasonable human being--always excepting, of course, certain young subalterns on the staff."

Rawlinson leant forward in his chair. "I'm not sure," he said, "that I agree with you. It all depends upon how you define a 'knut.'"

"A 'knut' is a fellow with a drawl and an eyeglass," said someone.

"That just fits my man. I know of an exception to your rule. I know of a 'knut' who did not disappear at the front."

"Tell us about him," suggested Jepson.

Rawlinson hesitated, and glanced round at each of us in turn. "It's not much of a story," he said at length, "but it stirred me up a bit at the time--I don't mind telling it you if you think it sufficiently interesting."

We filled up our glasses, and lay back in our chairs to listen to the following tale: