Part 14

A steady glance down the sights. Crack! Miss! Crack! Got him but only slightly. Crack, crack! The unholy glee of it. You could see by the way he fell that it had gone home fatally. Crack--another five rounds are rammed into the magazine ... pump it into them, play hell with that Artillery while the chance lasts.

They stare wildly about in a frenzy. Crack, crack, crack! They have had enough and retreat a few hundred yards further south. Still, there lies a dozen or more who will not again pour into the quivering flesh shrapnel's hell-hot agony.

A glance along the Norman ranks during the late afternoon showed appreciably by the many gaps separating man from man how many casualties had already obtained. Shells claimed a large toll of victims even among the more or less screened rows of figures lying along the eastern edge of the canal. Le Poidevin and Le Page, lighting cigarettes from the same match, caught one in the right and the other the left leg, two flying pieces of shrapnel from a shell bursting over one hundred yards distant; fell and stared at each other in painful astonishment ... hobbled laboriously on the long journey (for a wounded man) into Marcoing.

Stumpy, secure behind a small mound, had gazed with black pessimism on life from the moment Tich had given ALL.

"Gawd," he observed generally, "ain't it orful. What with shells, an' dead, an' gas! An' I ain't 'ad any rum since last night. Wot a pore Tommy has got ter put up with."

Night. A night when men crouched over their rifle waiting to kill, when the owl had gone far from the slaughter and even not the fitful flutter of a bat sped through the dark pall. Only man: savage, primitive man, glared at where each remained hidden. The blood lust to kill, always to kill. Animal ferocity and passion: man's inheritance.

From No Man's Land came the sobbing call of wounded for succour. Far, far across the void sounded those despairing frenzied shrieks. Hoarse, appealing, incessant, until they weakened and nothing reached the ear but the smothered sobs of men whose life's sands were running out for want of that aid, so near, but which they were unable to reach.

Verey lights from Fritz's lines rose and fell with monotonous certainty, throwing faint glows on the huddled heaps lying in all directions between the two fronts. A gleam would catch reflection in the glassy eyes of a stiff form, fade and leave you staring hypnotised into the night. Was it distorted fancy ... then you would see it again, and again, until in its very frequency you noticed--nothing.

Shelling slackened. Now and again a pause when the stillness could be "heard." From the woods in intermittent intervals the one solitary gun still intact in an entire battery belched forth a lone shell into the enemy lines. In the fantastic flash of each explosion three shirt-sleeved forms showed a ruddy silhouette of blackened hands and features. A tearing, splintering crash awoke echoes as some great bough was shattered in impact with a "heavy" and crackled its cumbersome way past smaller branches to where it splashed into the canal.

Into an advanced dressing station about Rues Vertes one of the Duo stumbled, bleeding profusely from several wounds, dripping with slimy mud and water, features covered with the grey black dust that comes from close contact with a shell. Ozanne stared at him.

"Gawd," he said, "'ow'd you get that?"

"Scrap--with a Fritz outpost--got a stretcher?" He bent down in a half-faint, was carried to a stretcher and his wounds in body and arm bound. Fag in mouth he dozed, was startled into wakefulness by a call from the Padre.

"Boys," he was saying, "this village will be evacuated shortly--can't possibly hold on. Those wounded who can had better walk to Marcoing."

To Marcoing! Two and a half miles. The Norman moved dizzily out of his stretcher, stood up, and tottered to the entrance.

"Here, kid," a Corporal (R.A.M.C.) advised, "You can't do it."

"I can."

"You'll peg out on the way."

"Sooner that than--be--a prisoner. But I can--do it." He did!

Dawn! And with it an intensity of shelling over the whole area. Earth, limbs, trees were constantly somewhere in the air. Bodies of yesterday were torn asunder again and the wounded who had lasted out the night shrank and writhed in the fiery hail of shrapnel. Fritz came over again. He is a courageous warrior, not afraid of his own skin, but is at best when fighting in numbers. A lone fight, back to the wall, is not his métier; he, if at all threatened, retreats.

Rues Vertes fell.

It was a physical impossibility for the Ten Hundred to hold on. The casualties already exceeded three hundred, every man was utterly worn, hungry, had existed for twenty-four hours in a state of the highest nerve tension. Not one was there who had not missed death a dozen times by the merest of escapes. They had for ten or eleven days been engaged in an offensive and what meagre rest had been theirs was woefully insufficient to counteract the heavy demands made upon the stamina.

Out-numbered by twenty to one, completely out-gunned. No reserves, no supports, and only one small line of retreat. No aerial observation, no adequate cover, and an enemy who was aware that a mere shattered Battalion stood between them and the capitulation of one or more Divisions. They were half famished, tired out ... his troops were fresh. He had no doubts as to the result.

Again the 29th Division repelled an attack on its original front line. Fritz tried the flank, came on in waves stretching far over the hill crest. A fire stopped him--COULD there be only ONE corps before him. He rallied, swept on again, swarming over the canal banks and close up into the outer Masnières' defences; but on his lines hailed a rapid fire from the Normans, the like of which he had never deemed possible. Savident ran alone into the centre of a roadway with his Lewis-gun and poured every solitary shot by him in one long sweep up and down the wavering lines. Rifles cracked with the rapid reloading action of marksmen until the barrels burned hot in the hand. The Germans fell back. The Normans went forward in that reckless rush.

Rues Vertes was retaken!

In the outskirts of this village a number of the draft were isolated, became tangled in one great bloody mêlée with the angrily retreating enemy. There was nothing for it but a fight to the death.

Through the glasses they could be seen to hold off the Hun for a few brief minutes, met him in a ghastly lunging of bayonets, from which beads of blood were dropping ... but they went under one by one, until one thick-set lad remained, seized two Huns one after the other by the neck, twisted them with his own hands and went over the Divide, a bayonet through his heart.

But their example put the fear of death into the enemy and for an hour the thinning line of Normans had no attack.

He reformed, sent a large number of machine-guns with his first wave, concentrated a fearful artillery fire on the villages, and swept forward. The same fire met him, again the lines wavered, but that hail of lead was more than the men could withstand. They went back--many of the gunners without their machine-guns, not back a hundred yards or so but almost out of RIFLE RANGE.