No Man's Land Part 6

"Three 'undred yards, and 'e ducked like 'ell. It wasn't far off 'is nibs, but one can't tell for sure." He got down and stretched himself.

"I've waited 'alf an 'our for the perisher, too, without no breakfast."

He grinned and scrambled over the broken-down trench to remedy the latter deficiency, while once more the Sapper walked on. No need with this particular regiment to suggest rebuilding the broken-in trench; it would be done automatically--which cannot be said of them all.

At last he reached Boyau 94, and turned up towards the firing-line.

Twenty yards from the turn a ma.s.s of barbed wire crossed the trench above his head, the barbed wire which ran in front of the support line. For it is not only the fire-trench that is wired--each line behind is plentifully supplied with this beautiful vegetable growth.

The mist had cleared away, and the morning sun was blazing down from a cloudless sky, as he reached the front trench. Just to his left a monstrous pair of bellows, slowly heaving up and down under the ministrations of two pessimistic miners, sent a little of G.o.d's fresh air down to the men in the mine-shafts underneath. The moles were there--the moles who scratched and sc.r.a.ped stolidly, at the end of their gallery thirty or forty yards in front, deep down under the earth in No Man's Land.

A steady stream of sandbags filled with the result of their labours came up the shaft down which the pipe from the bellows stretched into the darkness--sandbags which must be taken somewhere and emptied, or used to revet a bit of trench which needed repair.

To right and left there stretched the fire-trench--twisting and turning, traversed and recessed--just one small bit of the edge of British land.

A hundred yards away, a similar line stretched right and left, where other pessimistic miners ministered to other monstrous bellows, and Piccadilly was known as Unter den Linden. The strange stagnation of it all!

Look through the periscope at the country in front. Not a sign of life in the torn-up crusted earth; not a movement between the two long lines of wire. A few poppies here and there, and at one point a motionless grey-green lump close to the farther wire. Impossible to tell exactly what it is from the periscope--the range is too far. But, in No Man's Land, such strange grey--and khaki--lumps may often be seen. The night, a wiring party, perhaps a little raid or an officer's patrol, and--discovery. You cannot always get your dead back to the trench, and the laws that govern No Man's Land savour of the primitive. . . .

The Sapper watched the phlegmatic bellows-heaver for a few moments curiously. His stoical indifference to any one or anything save the job in hand, the wonderful accuracy with which he spat from time to time, the appalling fumes from his short clay pipe, all tended to make of him an interesting study. Supremely apathetic to friend or foe, Generals or Huns, he did his s.h.i.+ft without comment and, as far as could be seen, without thought.

"Where are you putting the earth?" asked the Sapper after watching for a while.

"Round corner, in a 'ole." The speaker pointed with his pipe, and the subject dropped.

The officer turned away smiling slightly, and decided on the inspection of the rum jar. The answer was clear and succinct, even if not couched in the language of the old army discipline. He inspected the hole, and, finding it was at the back of the trench, in a crater that was formed nightly by German _minenwerfer_, and that more earth there not only would not block the trench but, _mirabile dicta_, would be an actual advantage, he pa.s.sed on and shortly came to a pa.s.sage leading out of the front of the trench.

The pa.s.sage was labelled Sap No. 130, and presented exactly the same appearance as the boyaux which ran out of the support line to the front trench. Only when one got into it did the difference become apparent, for whereas the boyaux had continued until finally opening into a new trench, the sap was a cul-de-sac, and finished abruptly in a little covered-in recess built into a miniature mountain of newly-thrown-up earth. And this great, tumbled ma.s.s of soil was the near lip of Vesuvius crater--blown up half way between the two front lines.

Over the top of the mountain there was no pa.s.sage. A man standing or crawling there in daytime would have been in full view of German snipers at a range of forty yards; while had he accomplished it in safety, he would have slithered down the farther side into a great cavity shaped like an egg-cup, at the bottom of which a pool of dirty, stagnant water was slowly forming. Moreover, if we imagine the man continuing his journey and climbing up the other side, he would run the gauntlet of the English snipers as he topped the farther lip, before reaching the German sap which ran out in just such a similar cul-de-sac to the one already described.

Thus are craters consolidated; each side holds the lip nearest to them, and hurls curses and bombs at his opponents on the other. The distance between the sapheads is perhaps twenty or twenty-five yards, instead of the hundred odd of the parent fire-trenches; and any closer acquaintances.h.i.+p is barred by the egg-cup crater, which stretches between them.

"Keep down, sir--well down. Lot of sniping to-day." A sergeant of the South Loams.h.i.+res whispered hoa.r.s.ely to the Sapper as he reached the end of the sap--it is etiquette to whisper in a sap. Three men inside the recess were drinking tea with the calmness born of long custom, while lying on his side, with a periscope to his eye, was Jackson, the subaltern.

"Anything fresh, Jacko?" muttered the Sapper, crouching down beside him.

"Yes--I think they're coming closer with their left sap round the crater.

Their periscope seems to be nearer than it was yesterday."

"Let's have a look." The two changed position, and the Captain turned the periscope gently round until he got the exact direction. Absolute stillness brooded over the ground he could see; a few rough strands of wire straggled about, and disappeared into the great mound of earth that formed the _debris_ of the crater.

There were the enemies' trenches--a railway embankment behind them with a derelict row of trucks--a great chimney, gaunt and desolate, with the buildings at its foot in ruins. But it was not on these old friends that he was concentrating; his target was the bit of ground just in front of him that lay close to the thrown-up earth of Vesuvius, along which the German sap was reputed to be creeping nearer.

At last he got what he wanted. Close at hand, perhaps twenty yards away, there stuck up out of the ground a motionless stick with something on the end--the German's periscope. Now it is reputed to be a fact by several people of apparent truthfulness that it is possible, in circ.u.mstances such as these, for each watcher to see the other man's eyes reflected from the mirrors of the periscopes; and it is an undoubted fact that the laws which govern the refraction of light would allow of this phenomenon.

Personally, I am glad to say I have never seen a German's eye through a periscope; but then personally I am inclined to doubt if any one has. It must be quite dreadful to see a thing like a poached egg regarding you balefully from the top of a stick a few yards away.

At last the Sapper got up. "He's no nearer, Jacko. What do you think, sergeant?"

"I don't think they were working last night, sir," one of the tea-drinkers answered.

"There was a party of 'em out, and we bunged some bombs. We 'eard 'em padding the 'oof back."

"Been pretty quiet, then?"

"Except for that there rum jar, sir," answered the sergeant. "We thought we was napoo[1] when we 'eard that little bundle of fun a-coming."

"Have you seen it, Jacko?"

"Yes, it rolled into the sap, and I've had it put into the fire-trench.

I'm taking it back to blow it up. I think it's a percussion fuse, but it seems fairly safe. I've sent for a stretcher to carry it on."

"Let's go and have a look at it."

The two officers walked down the sap and back into the trench, and started to investigate with a professional eye the object lying on the fire-step. Apparently of steel, and painted a dull grey, it looked harmless enough--but all those little love offerings of the Hun are treated with respect. About the size of an ordinary rum jar, with a fuse of sorts in place of a neck, it was at the time an unknown brand of abomination, to them at any rate.

"It differs only in appearance, I fear," remarked the Captain, after inspecting it gingerly, "from other presents they give us. Its object is undoubtedly nefarious. Where do you propose to blow it up?"

"In that little quarry near the Ritz. Will that do all right?"

"Most excellently." With a smile he looked at his watch. "Just set your watch by mine, Jacko--and p.o.o.p it off at 10.5 ak emma. Do you take me?"

The other looked puzzled for a moment; then his face cleared.

"I'd forgotten for the moment that Centre Battalion Head-quarters was not far from the quarry," he grinned. "Sir--I take you."

"My dear boy, the day is hot, and the Pumpkin is fat, and the flies are glutinous. He doesn't want to see the trenches any more than I do--and one's mission in life is to antic.i.p.ate the wishes of the great."

It was just as he finished speaking that from up the line in the direction of the Haymarket there came four dull, vicious cracks in succession, and some clouds of black smoke drifted slowly over his head.

"Just about No. 7 T.M. emplacement," he muttered to himself. "I hope to heavens . . ."

"Put it on the stretcher carefully, boys." His subaltern was speaking to the two men who had arrived with a stretcher. "Have you got the slab of gun-cotton?"

"Corporal 'Amick 'as gone to get it at the store, sir. He's a-going to meet us at the quarry."

"Right-ho! Walk march."

The cavalcade departed, and the Captain resumed his morning walk, while his thoughts wandered to the beer which is cold and light yellow. For many weary months had he taken a similar const.i.tutional daily; not always in the same place, true; but variety is hard to find in the actual trenches themselves. It is the country behind that makes the difference.

Time was when communication trenches existed only in the fertile brain of those who were never called upon to use them; but that time has pa.s.sed long since. Time was when the thin, tired breaking line of men who fought the Prussian Guard at Ypres in 1914--and beat them--had hard work to find the fire-trenches, let alone the communication ones; when a daily supervision was a nerve-shattering nightly crawl, and dug-outs were sh.e.l.l-holes covered with a leaking mackintosh. It was then that men stood for three weeks on end in an icy composition of water and slime, and if by chance they did get a relief for a night, merely clambered out over the back, and squelched wearily over the open ground with bullets pinging past them from the Germans a few score yards away.

But now there are trenches in ca.n.a.l banks where dead things drift slowly by, and trenches in railway embankments where the rails are red with rust and the sleepers green with rot; there are trenches in the chalk, good and deep, which stand well, and trenches in the slush and slime which never stand at all; there are trenches where the smell of the long gra.s.s comes sweetly on the west wind, and trenches where the stench of death comes nauseous on the east. And one and all are they d.a.m.nable, for ever accursed . . .

But the country behind--ah! there's where the difference comes. You may have the dead flat of pastoral Flanders, the little woods, the plough, the d.y.k.es of Ypres and Boesinghe; you may have the slag-heaps and smoking chimneys of La Ba.s.see and Loos; you may have the gently undulating country of Albert and the Somme. Each bears the marks of the German beast--and, like their inhabitants, they show those marks differently.

Ypres and the North, apathetic, seemingly lifeless; the mining districts, grim and dour; the rolling plains still, in spite of all, cheerful and smiling. But underlying them all--deep implacable determination, a grand national hatred of the Power who has done this thing. . . .

He turned out of the Old Kent Road into a siding which harboured the dug-outs of the Centre Battalion.

"Is the General here yet, Murdock?" A tall sergeant of the regiment--an old friend of his--flattened himself against the side of the trench to let him pa.s.s.

"Yes, sir." The sergeant's face was expressionless, though his eyes twinkled. "I think, sir, as 'ow the General is feeling the 'eat. 'E seems worried. 'E's been trying to telephone."