Behind the Lines (17 page)

“Never mind, it's a good game,” grinned Cane. “And Phillips is the sort of chap I've been looking for for years. Come on, Whedbee, I will show you what I mean about those old oil drums.”

Cane and Whedbee disappeared up the dug-out steps, and Rumbald, with pencil and paper, began to work out odds more favourable to the bank. Phillips lighted a cigarette and looked on ruefully.

From outside came suddenly a long drawn whine, followed by a bump and a muffled explosion. The dug-out shook convulsively. Then in rapid succession came again that whine—crash; whine—crash; whine—crash. And at each crash the dug-out flinched, and smoke drifted across the top of the steps.

Phillips made a grimace and looked up. “Much of a roof over?” he asked.

“Wouldn't stop that sort,” replied Rawley.

The mess-cook's voice came calling down the steps: “Sir! Mr. Rawley! Mr. Rawley! The C.O. and Captain Whedbee are lying out there—copped it, sir!”

Rawley, followed by Phillips, dashed up the steps. Every three or four seconds a shell, preceded by its hurtling whine, burst with a thunder-clap—“c-r-r-ump!”—and a great uprearing fountain of earth.

“Come on!” cried Rawley. “By short dashes—after the next one.” Whine—crash! The three men darted out. Again that swiftly travelling whine hurtled towards them, and they went flat. Crash! They were up again and on. They found Cane lying badly wounded in the thigh and shoulder. Rawley and Phillips took his head and shoulders, and the mess-cook took his legs. They brought him in and laid him on the table, which was still covered with Phillips' improvised Minoru cloth. They left
Rumbald to get busy with field dressings, and went back for Whedbee.

His left knee-cap was shattered, and he screamed when they raised his legs. But with shells still coming in, every five or ten seconds, it was no time for squeamishness. They had brought him nearly to the dug-out when, with a deafening roar, a shell burst within a few yards. They went flat; but when they rose again the mess-cook's fingers were dripping blood from a wound in the arm, and Whedbee uttered no cry when they seized his injured leg and hurried him down the steps. Then as they laid him on the floor they saw that he was dead. A fragment of the last shell had broken his back.

At the end of a few minutes the shelling ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and it was possible to get a stretcher and send Cane back.

II

Rumbald and Rawley returned to the mess dug-out, where the mess-cook was swabbing the table with one hand.

“You get along, Reeves, and have that arm properly dressed,” Rawley told him. “And have some antitetanus juice pumped in.”

“But there is nobody else here, sir. Corporal Jones has gone to the canteen at Aidecourt.”

“It doesn't matter; we don't want anything,” said Rawley. “You get along.”

He took Cane's compass from the nail on which it hung by its long strap. “This ought to have gone down with his other kit,” he muttered. “Well, Rumbald, you are O.C. for the moment.”

Rumbald glanced at his wrist-watch. “We shall just be in time to stop Piddock,” he remarked.

“But there is no need to do that,” protested Rawley. “Brigade will send us another fellow presently, and we can carry on meantime.”

Rumbald shook his head. “We are too short-handed,” he objected.

“Oh, rot!” retorted Rawley. “Look here, Rumbald, Piddock needs this leave damned badly. He's just about done in. He has been out here longer than any of us, and he has had a pretty thin time lately. This leave may just save him. We can carry on all right till brigade sends us another man.”

Rumbald shook his head. “There's too much to do. We want a chap at the O.Pip, and another with the guns, and there's the wagon lines. He can take his leave as soon as a reinforcement comes. Meantime, we'll have him up here. . . .”

“Up here!” echoed Rawley. “Why up here?”

Rumbald rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “Well, he is more used to O.Pip work than I am, and—”

“Much more used,” agreed Rawley, cuttingly. “And what are you going to do, pray?”

“There must be an officer at the wagon lines.”

Rawley thumped the table. “Damn you, Rumbald, you can't do that. Piddock is second-in-command now, and if
he stays his job is at the wagon lines and yours is up here. Cane always stayed with the guns.”

“I'm more used to the battery at the wagon lines,” persisted Rumbald.

“More use be blowed! You're not thinking of the battery; you're thinking of yourself. It's just wind up—thinking of your own skin.”

Rumbald grinned exasperatingly at Rawley's heat. “Anyway, I'm running the battery now,” he retorted. He stood up and looked at his watch. “I must get my servant to pack my kit, and we shall just be in time to stop Piddock before he leaves.”

“You can't be such a skunk, Rumbald; you damn well can't.”

“You can't stop me,” said Rumbald, as he moved towards the steps.

“I can,” shouted Rawley. “By God, I can and will. I'll ring up brigade. I'll speak to the colonel.” He moved towards the telephone.

Rumbald turned and seized him by the arm. No you don't,” he snapped.

Rawley shook him off and stretched again towards the telephone, but Rumbald's big hand gripped the lapels of his coat into a bunch and stayed him. Rawley turned his head slowly and saw the big red face at the end of the arm that held him. The smouldering anger of weeks burst into flame. His fist shot out. “Take your hands off me,” he panted.

Rumbald let go his hold and staggered back. His tie and tunic were dribbled with blood. His nose was bleeding
like a tap. He rushed forward with fury-contorted face, and Rawley, with no room to retreat, could only duck under the great swinging fists and throw his arms round the thick body.

By sheer weight he was forced back against the dug-out wall, but he locked his hands in the small of Rumbald's back and hugged like a bear. The big body began to pant, and then, step by step, they tottered across the dug-out, Rawley gripping with all his strength and trying to bend his opponent backwards. Rumbald's heel came against a box; Rawley flung all his weight forward, and the pair came down with a crash.

They scrambled to their feet, Rawley panting and furious, Rumbald dishevelled and dangerous looking. He came on again with swinging arms. Rawley, backing before the onslaught, collided with the little table, and the hand he put behind him to steady it closed over an old entrenching-tool handle lying there. He swung it up and struck hard as one of the wild, swinging blows sent him crashing on top of the table.

Rumbald staggered back, one hand to his head; his heel came again against the box, and he went over backwards with a crash.

Rawley sat up on the collapsed table and dabbed the blood from his face with a handkerchief. Rumbald lay where he had fallen like a half-filled sack of corn, his legs apart and his chin tucked deeply into his chest by reason of a pit prop against which he had cracked his head. His forehead was cut and bleeding from the blow
of the entrenching-tool handle; and blood from his nose covered his tunic.

Rawley scrambled to his feet and went down on one knee beside Rumbald. The eyes were open and the whites were turned up. Knocked right out by that crack on the head, he thought. And the head was certainly in an uncomfortable position; propped up like that with the chin in the chest.

He linked his arm under Rumbald's shoulder and dragged him a foot or two from the post; and the moment the head was free it dropped back with a thud to the floor and lolled to one side in a horrible manner like a rag doll.

Then it was that Rawley realized that the neck was broken, had been snapped when the head came into contact with the post. Rumbald was dead.

Dead—killed in a brawl! It was true then what was always said about people who took too much care of themselves: that they got themselves killed in an air raid on leave, or were run over in the street. What a great flabby hulk he looked, lying there with his legs wide apart and blood all over his chest.

Rawley rose wearily to his feet, and then plumped down again on the box. His head was whirling. It came upon him in a flash that he would be accused of killing Rumbald. Rumbald lay there with a broken neck and his forehead all cut and bloody from a heavy blow. Striking and killing his superior officer! That meant shooting or hanging.

“My God, what an end! To be hanged for murder in war time, as though killing were a crime. Hanged, when
one might be killed any day—and kill, kill hundreds and be called a hero for it.”

He stared at the silent figure on the floor. If only the shell that had got poor old Whedbee had got Rumbald instead.

He stood up. What ought he to do? Pick up the telephone and say to the signaller at the other end: “Send the stretcher bearers to the mess; I've just killed Mr. Rumbald.” Clear out? There was time. The mess-cook would not be back for another ten minutes or so.

III

He put on his cap and went up the steps. No one was about. The gun-pits and other dug-outs were hidden by the curve of the river bank. A few yards away the weed-grown remains of an old communicating trench began and continued diagonally up the slope. Dark clods of earth from several freshly made shell holes littered the ground. A long-range “heavy” moaned lazily overhead and detonated a few seconds later with a distant crunch.

He crossed the few yards of broken ground and dropped into the disused trench. Broken duckboards and rotting sandbags impeded his steps, and here and there a landslide partly blocked the trench. But once over the crest of the slope and out of sight of the battery he clambered out and turned south-west away from the pot-holed road.

He tramped on like an automaton, avoiding subconsciously the heavy batteries, earth burrows, and
derelict huts that dotted this forward area. Occasionally a high-velocity shell lashed through the air and sent the black earth spouting skywards, or a long-range heavy waddled lazily overhead and detonated grumpily in the distance.

Behind him he heard the mournful swish of gas shells—many of them. They sounded very close to B Battery, and he half turned at the thought. But he turned again with a shrug. That was now no concern of his.

He pulled out his pipe and filled it. There was very little tobacco in his pouch; he had left a tin three parts full in the dug-out. He must have tobacco.

He turned towards some huts, on one of which he could distinguish the red triangle of the Y.M.C.A. It was fortunate that he had some money. Whedbee had drawn him a hundred and twenty-five francs from the field-cashier only yesterday. He took a fifty-franc note from his wallet and entered the hut. It seemed very cosy with its tables and benches and shelves with tins of fruits, milk, biscuits, and tobacco. He took his tin of tobacco, stuffed the notes of his change into the ticket pocket in the waistband of his tunic, and went out.

He tramped on away from the huts and the road. A nice mess he had made of things, he thought bitterly. This was the end of everything—of B Battery, of Berney.

He had not a notion what to do. He was driven onward by the instinct of self-preservation. He thought vaguely of stealing some clothes and posing as a civilian till after the war. But of course that was absurd. He spoke French very
imperfectly, and how would an English civilian without papers explain his presence in France? He would be arrested and shot as a spy.

He had been a fool to run away. It would have been simpler to have stayed and faced the music. And then he would have been hanged because, instead of blowing Germans to bits with high explosive, he had accidentally broken the neck of a useless skrimshanker like Rumbald. Because Rumbald wore khaki and not field grey, he, Rawley, would be hanged. He had a licence to kill any number of men in grey, no matter how excellent and useful members of humanity they might be, but it was a horrible crime to kill one useless and worthless fellow who wore khaki. What a farce it all was.

He tramped on. The huts, horse-lines, and dumps that lay in rear of the Line were left behind. Around him stretched the devastated area, the old Somme battlefields in which no village, house, or building stood; a belt of desolation thirty miles in breadth, shell-pocked, trench-scarred, weed-grown, and littered with rusty wire, rotting sandbags, mouldering debris of battle and the rubble heaps of flattened villages.

He seated himself on the parados of an old trench and smoked a pipe. He must devise some plan. Various schemes floated through his mind, but none of them was really practicable. In England he might enlist under another name and bury his identity in the ranks; but he was not in England. There was the Foreign Legion, of course. It was said foreigners were enlisted without too many questions
being asked, and that once enlisted they were protected from the consequences of anything done before enlistment. He had better make for the zone of the French armies then. In any case, he must get away from the area in which there were units and divisions that knew him.

He rose and tramped on. Darkness fell. Behind him the invisible horizon was lit by the summer-lightning-like flicker of the guns, and their voices were a distant grumble. Overhead an invisible night bomber forged its way through the darkness, but soon the steady pulsating drone of its twin engines dwindled and died away. No cheerful light gleamed in the surrounding darkness. The silence of death and decay brooded over the devastated area.

He tramped on hopelessly, stumbling into weed-grown shell holes, and disentangling his feet from curled strands of rusty wire. He found himself at length on a narrow pot-holed road and followed it.

The sudden scrape of a boot close ahead pulled him up short. A form loomed in the darkness and a voice asked: “Got a match, mate?” He could distinguish the outline of a battered service cap against a starry rift in the clouds. As he fumbled in his pocket, something soft and heavy fell upon the back of his head. He sank drunkenly to his knees. Darkness rushed in.