Behind the Lines (12 page)

Rumbald looked up from the depths of the one armchair and winked solemnly. “Plenty of room on the floor, Piddy boy.”

“I'm going on duty in half an hour,” said Piddock coaxingly. “I'll toss you for it till then. You will have to give it up when Cane comes in, anyway.”

Rumbald shook his head. “Nothing doing. But I'll tell you what I'll do. When I die I'll leave it to you in my will.”

Piddock shied a map case at him and went out into the kitchen where he whispered with the mess corporal. A few minutes later the corporal approached Rumbald and said, “Sergeant Warner wants to speak to you, sir.”

Rumbald growled angrily, but at last reluctantly heaved himself up from the chair and went out; and when he returned a few moments later with flushed angry face,
Piddock was lying back in the plush armchair, singing lustily: “Old Rumbles never die-e, never die-e, never die-e, old Rumbles never die-e, they simply fade away-e.”

III

Cane took Rawley up to the forward observation post the next morning to register the battery. The communicating trench began on the left of the road a short distance from the orchard. It was a well-dug trench, and for the first fifty yards or so was neatly floored with bricks from the village. The telephone cable was carried along the wall of the trench by wire staples.

Rawley enjoyed forward observation work. It was far more satisfying than the blind mechanical task at the guns. Places where enemy movement was noticed from time to time were cautiously registered and tabulated so that the tap could be turned on at a moment's notice. And then one morning perhaps when the mist rose suddenly a party of the enemy would be seen approaching one of these points. A few brief directions into the telephone while one watched with galloping pulse the party drawing nearer and nearer to the trap. Then the words ‘battery fire' were followed by the pom, pom, pom, pom, pom of the guns behind one and the scream of the shells overhead. The target disappeared in clouds of smoke and spouting earth, and sometimes one had the satisfaction of seeing a body whirling slowly, windmill fashion, in the smoke.

In pre-war days Rawley had vaguely imagined a battlefield as a stirring pageant of cheering men, bursting shells, and charging squadrons. Under such conditions no modern war could last more than a few months: both sides would be annihilated. Men must take cover. It was obvious: but he had never grown quite accustomed to the desertedness of the firing line. One peeped over the parapet, and all one saw was the undulating, shell-scarred country; a shattered wall or two, a few ragged trees, some rusty wire, and the irregular line of the enemy's parapet. Not a living thing to be seen. No movement; desolation like a lunar landscape. Behind the lines there was tramping of feet, blowing of bugles, and all the martial sounds and movements one associates with armies; but in the Line—nothing.

One spot in particular fascinated Rawley: it was where the front line fire trench crossed the
route nationale
. One left the support trench on the crest of the hill and zigzagged down the forward slope by the deep communicating trench that here and there, where a passing head might be visible from Hunland, was roofed with battered sheets of rusty iron. Then two gaunt and bullet-pitted tree trunks that had been visible from various angles off and on for the last few minutes suddenly appeared towering directly above the trench, and a few minutes later one was in the fire trench. One passed two traverses and in the second fire bay the hard thick section of road metal could be traced in the parados behind and below the sandbagged parapet. One peeped through a periscope and saw that one was standing in the middle of a broad road, one's eyes just above the level
of its surface. There it ran broad and straight, and grass-grown to the bottom of the slope and up again till it was cut by the brown, tumbled line of the Hun parapet. Tangles of rusty barbed wire and fallen telegraph wire lay across it, and its straight edges were here and there indented by black or grass-grown shell holes; but it was still a road that ran on up the opposite slope to the low, ragged walls and blackened gables of the Hunland village a quarter of a mile away.

In pre-war days the farmers of that village had no doubt walked every day to the fields on this slope and driven their wagons along the road. But for more than two years now no vehicle had passed from one to the other, and no living thing had moved up that dip of the road except at night, when men crawled on their bellies and went in fear of death. It occurred to him that one of the most interesting results of peace would be that a man would be able to walk down that grass-grown bit of road and up into the village beyond. And he wondered whimsically whether no-man's-land would be filled with chattering mobs of Germans and English comparing notes and gaping like tourists.

IV

Rumbald did not like forward observation work. He was quite candid about it. His chassis was not designed, he said, for long tramps through narrow communicating trenches. And anyway, there was never anything to see when one reached the O.Pip. The only bright spot was that good whisky was always to be had in the infantry
company headquarter dug-out nearby. And besides, Pete and Piddy liked the job; Pete positively revelled in it and actually killed Huns. Personally, he didn't think that all that watching and scheming and surreptitious registering was worth it, in order to kill a Hun now and then. Life wasn't long enough. No, he preferred the battery in the orchard that was only a quiet stroll from the mess; and since Pete preferred the O.Pip, why not let him do it? That was a fair division of labour, surely.

Rawley, for his part, was quite content to do more than his share as forward observation officer. And Cane, after a mild protest, fell in with the arrangement; for he was equally keen on the offensive spirit, and it irked him to have an officer in the forward O.Pip who never called on the guns except when the S.O.S. rockets demanded retaliation.

Rumbald thus became almost a fixture at the battery, and since two other officers were nearly always there also, he gradually, by reason of other self-created jobs, ceased to do his full share as officer on duty at the guns. He set about improving the men's quarters, and while employed on this job he persuaded Cane to release him from other duties. He was also Mess President, P.R.I., and O.C. Amusements, and in fairness it must be admitted that these useful but unwarlike duties he performed admirably. He was a master of the art of ingratiation, and was always able to raise a car to take him back to buy mess stores or stock for the canteen. He became an institution in the village. Everybody knew him and he knew everybody. The little cottage mess-room
became a rendezvous for officers of every branch of the service. Infantry subalterns on their way back from leave dropped in to enthuse over the latest London revue; gunner officers from the neighbouring batteries came in for a chat on the local situation; infantry quartermasters bringing up rations called in to say goodnight and stayed for a drink; and sapper officers waited there for their working parties to arrive. It became a kind of club in which one heard the latest gossip, the latest rumours, and the hottest stories. It was crowded at all hours of the day and night, and Rumbald lounged in his green plush armchair calling everybody by some endearing nickname and dispensing hospitality in the manner of a patriarchal baron, while Rawley, Piddock and even Cane, appearing at intervals for food and sleep, seemed like strangers in their own mess.

The green plush armchair had been the object of much jealousy. Rumbald had annexed it, and it was very irritating to Rawley and Piddock on returning from a long tramp to the O.Pip, or from a tiring spell at the guns, to find the only comfortable chair in the mess occupied by Rumbald or one of his visitors. Piddock's sarcasm was wasted on Rumbald's hearty complacency, and in a fury he searched the whole village for another armchair. He found three or four, but none unclaimed, and in spite of great ingenuity was unable to make off with any of them. Finally, with the help of two handymen of the battery, he set to work to build a settee framework out of lengths of “four-by-two.” He stretched wire netting over the seat and back, covered it with new latrine canvas, and stuffed it
with straw. The result was a comfortable if rough-looking settee, which was kept in Piddock's room across the passage, and was carried into the mess whenever he or Rawley wanted it.

V

But this leisurely type of warfare was not to continue. Other batteries dug pits in and around the village, and their registering, though done as unobtrusively as possible, did not escape the notice of the enemy. The old mutual agreement to let sleeping dogs lie came to an end. Wagons and limbers no longer were able to roam about the village in daylight in the former carefree manner. The drone of a German plane threading the cotton-wool anti-aircraft bursts became a familar feature of the sky above, and from dawn till dusk the dumpy, livid sickle of a German observation balloon hung motionless and menacing above the slope eastwards.

Tiles and bricks began to litter the streets. Holes like ink-stains appeared in the cottage roofs. Here and there a house-front collapsed and the homely furniture of a cottage bedroom lay in a jumbled heap on the edge of the sagging floor above a tangled garden. And the squat, square church tower was whittled to a ragged tapering finger above a mason's rubble heap. At any time of the night or day and without warning would come that hurtling roar as of an express train, and the terrific crash of the burst, followed
by the patter of falling debris and the dense black cloud slowly dissolving above the cottages.

But, although casualties were unavoidable, B Battery fared better than any of the batteries near them. As a sleeping place the cottage was abandoned in favour of the shelters that had been dug in the steep bank at the end of the garden, and Rumbald had his precious green plush armchair carried down to the cellar, although the mess-room upstairs with its window protected from splinters by three tree trunks was still used.

He had nearly finished the improvements he was making in the men's quarters at the guns, and had begun to talk suggestively about new brick horse-standings for the wagon lines. “Doesn't like the look of the weather,” remarked Piddock dryly. “Thinks it will be healthier farther back.”

Cane, however, while admitting the desirability of new brick horse-standings, and the other schemes for wagon-line improvement which Rumbald enthusiastically sketched, said that they would have to wait, and that for the moment he could exercise his ingenuity on the construction of a new observation post in the support line. “Meanwhile, Rawley and I will be delighted to keep your chair warm for you,” observed Piddock maliciously. “And we will post it to your people if you don't come back.”

The following morning, therefore, Rumbald in tin hat and gas helmet, looking “all hot and bothered,” as Piddock put it, trailed off up the long communication trench in the
wake of Cane, to be shown the position of the new O.Pip, and the same evening after dark he was to take up a fatigue party to do the necessary work.

VI

Phillips and Anderson of A Battery were in the mess that night playing bridge with Cane and a sapper captain whom Rawley did not know. Rumbald had already gone out to take up the working party, and Rawley, who was due to relieve Piddock on duty at the guns in a few minutes, lay on the home-made settee watching the game. Occasionally the tree trunks that rested against the wall outside became visible through the dark, uncurtained square of the window as they were silhouetted for a second against the vivid flash of the six-inch howitzer in the next garden. The gun was firing straight over the cottage, and at each blast the roof seemed to lift an inch or two and then drop back, while the flames of the two candles stuck in bottles on the table jumped, and all but went out.

Rawley glanced at his wrist-watch, yawned, and reluctantly put his feet to the floor. He took his steel helmet from a corner of the room and went out. It was very dark in the orchard, but the trees ahead were dimly silhouetted by the greenish glow of Verey lights that now and then soared up from the Line ahead. A little enemy whizz-bang shelling was going on. The lash of a giant whip swept suddenly through the night above his head and a spurt of flame and an ear-ringing crack followed
simultaneously in the tangled garden beyond the road. He walked quickly through the orchard towards the guns. Again, out of the night came that vicious lash and earsplitting crack, and in the silence that followed, broken only by the patter of descending earth and stones, he was startled by a cough in the darkness close at hand. He turned towards the sound, and in a few paces reached the low hedge that bordered the orchard. He realized that the cough had come from the road beyond, and he was about to turn back again when he was arrested by a shuffling of feet. He stared intently into the darkness, and was just able to distinguish a row of dark heads on the far side of the road.

“What are you fellows hanging about here for?” he called.

He heard the scrape of a man's feet turning smartly, and Corporal Turner's voice answered, “This is the working party for the O.Pip, sir. We are waiting for Mr. Rumbald.”

Again out of the night came that whistling lash, crack. Silence. And then again lash, crack, and a fragment of steel struck a spark from a flint as it smacked into the road.

“It's no good keeping the men hanging about here, corporal,” said Rawley. “Get them under cover and parade them when Mr. Rumbald arrives.”

“Very good, sir,” came the corporal's voice from the darkness, and the soft thud of an invisible hand falling from the salute could be heard.

Rawley strode fiercely between the trees to Rumbald's dug-out. A light shone at the bottom of the steps.

“Rumbald!” he called. “Rumbald!”

“Hullo! Is that you, Pete?” came Rumbald's voice from below.

“Come on out of it. What about that fatigue party?” called Rawley.