Behind the Lines (19 page)

Rawley refilled his teacup by dipping the mustard tin into the can of tea on the fire. “Stuff he's looted from round about, I suppose,” he remarked.

Alf nodded. “And then he's got 'is lidy friends in Armeens. They brings 'ome some passionate Percy, and while he's gettin' on with the love-making, Kelly socks 'im one and takes the dibs.”

“What! Do you mean he goes into Amiens and lives with women there!”

“Lord, yes! And brings two or three tarts out 'ere when the red-caps get busy in Armeens. He's a proper coughdrop, he is—he and his perishin' bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard!”

“Yars. That's what we calls 'em. They're his mates he brought with him from Etapps. About half a dozen of 'em, and they ain't arf a 'ot lot neither. They all mess together in the Jaeger Redoubt, and they've got Lewis guns, Vickers, and bombs, and thousands of rounds of ammo. It would take a bleedin' brigade to clean them out.”

From force of habit Rawley took his pipe from his pocket, and then remembering that he had no tobacco, he put it back. But Alf jumped up from his box and thrust his arm into a hole in the revetting boards. He returned to the table with one hand held behind his back, and then, in the manner of a conjurer, made some elaborate passes with the other hand, and finally produced a dusty half-packet of ration tobacco from behind his back.

“No, I say,” said Rawley. “I can't take that. Is that all you've got?”

“Go on,” persisted Alf magnanimously. “I smoke fags.” And he took a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and lighted it at the candle.

Rawley filled his pipe with the dry dusty mixture in the packet and drew at it appreciatively. “How do you—that is we—stand with regard to Kelly and his push?” he asked.

“We keep out of their perishin' way,” answered Alf. “But when he has one of his field days—cleanin' out a canteen or
something—after he and his lot have taken their fancy he lets us other chaps muck in.”

“Who are the other chaps?”

“Why the chaps that don't belong to Kelly's bodyguard There's several of us livin' round 'ere in these old trenches mostly working in pairs. But I never took to any of 'em, and kept on me own.”

“And you and the other chaps have nothing to do with Kelly?”

“Not more than we can help.”

“But you were with him tonight. You said it was Kelly who took my money.”

“Yars. He copped me and Pearson for a fatigue.”

“Fatigue! He makes you do fatigues for him?”

“Yars. Carrying water this was, only he heard your perishin' footmarks on the
pavé
and he shoves me into a hole and tells Pearson to arsk you for a light; and then ups and socks you with a bit of sandbag.”

Rawley nodded thoughtfully. “We must get our own back on Mr. Kelly one of these days,” he said.

“I'm with you there, mate,” agreed Alf. “Only he carries a gun and I ain't forgot about that perishin' red-cap at Etapps.”

Rawley yawned and pulled back his cuff, only to remember that his wrist watch had been taken. “How the deuce do you ever know the time!” he said. “Though I suppose it doesn't matter out here.”

“No, nor the date neither,” agreed Alf. “But I know both,” he added with an air of pride. From his breeches'
pocket he fished a battered Ingersoll tethered by a greasy lanyard to his braces. “Brigade time is eleven fifty-three pip emma,” he announced. “And the dite is”—he peered at a small calendar that hung among the pictures of actresses above his frowsy bed—“is the thirteenth.”

“I might have known it,” remarked Rawley cynically.

“Now don't get down'earted, mate! 'Ere you are, spending a holiday in Sunny France for nothin'. Why, you'd pay quids to come to a plice like this in peace time!” And he began to whistle cheerfully “Roses in Picardy!”

To his amazement Rawley leapt from his box and, with a face white with passion, shouted: “For God's sake stop that row.”

“Orl right, orl right,” answered Alf in an injured tone. “I thought a little music might cheer you up.”

Rawley plumped down again on the box. “Never whistle that tune again,” he said vehemently. “Never let me hear it again.”

Alf produced a pile of sandbags from his dump of salvage, and with these and a mud-caked spare blanket Rawley made his bed. He pulled off his field boots and put a sandbag on each foot. As he took off his tunic his thumb slid into the little waist-band pocket and encountered crisp paper, and it was then that he remembered that he had absent-mindedly put the change from a fifty-franc note there. He transferred the notes quietly to his breeches pocket. He was glad they had escaped the fingers of Kelly; they might be very useful later on. He regretted the loss of the other money, but still more he regretted the loss of the
wallet that contained it; for behind a mica shield in one flap was a photograph of Berney. He took off his collar and tie, and was ready for bed.

Alf blew out the candle, rolled himself up in his frowzy blankets, and cried “ 'Appy dreams”; but for a long time Rawley lay awake watching the dying embers glowing in the darkness and listening to Alf's heavy breathing and the scurryings of rats.

CHAPTER XIV

I

Rawley awoke cold and stiff the next morning. The warm light of flames flickered on the dark-brown earth-wall of the dug-out, and the dancing shadow of Alf as he knelt before the brazier was bent grotesquely where the head and shoulders overlapped on to the ceiling.

Rawley put on his tunic and pulled on his boots. He thrust his hands into his breeches' pocket and with tousled hair stamped up and down the narrow space. Another tin of bully-beef and two of the hard, unappetising biscuits constituted breakfast, but the strong, hot tea was very welcome. He felt his stubbly chin and eyed his grimy hands as he warmed them on the tin of hot liquid, but there was no water to spare for washing. The source of supply was a well in the flattened village they had stumbled through the night before, and in the dug-out Alf had enough for drinking purposes only.

After breakfast, however, they set out carrying the three petrol tins possessed by Alf and an old and bleached canvas bucket of which he was very proud. Rawley followed him through the hole under the landslide into the grey daylight of a rainy autumn morning. They clambered out of the muddy, weed-grown trench and set off for the village. A cold, blustering wind drove the rain in their faces. Alf had a tattered ground-sheet tied with string about his shoulders,
but Rawley could only turn up the collar of his tunic about his collarless neck.

In daylight the place was even more depressing than at night. They were descending a gentle slope into a wide depression, bisected by a narrow and half-obliterated road. The low weed-grown banks of old trenches straggled in all directions. Here and there wooden stakes or bent screw pickets grew forlornly from the barren soil, and tangles of barbed wire lay like black cobwebs on the tortured earth. To the right, in the lowest part of the depression, the narrow road petered out, and the brimming shell holes lay in such profusion as to produce the illusion of a vast net—countless circles of stagnant, scum-covered water strung together by narrow strips of barren soil. A few ragged walls and blackened tileless rafters marked the site of a village, and half way up the slope beyond, the bleached and ragged trunks of a leafless wood stood gaunt and dead, like hop-poles beneath the low, grey clouds. The only distant view showed the same desolate country undulating in a dreary tundra to the rain-swept horizon.

The two men, trudging through the mud, seemed to be the only living things in the landscape, and when a solitary bird rose ahead of them and shot away on the wind, Rawley exclaimed, “By jove, there's a pigeon!”

Alf pulled his dripping ground-sheet closer about his shoulders. “Going back to the perishin' Ark,” he growled.

They reached the village through which they had stumbled in the darkness of the previous night. By daylight it was but a few parallelograms of ragged, foot-high walls,
though here and there a blackened rafter or a bent and rusty iron bedstead protruded from the weed-grown rubble of brick and plaster. Alf led the way to the well, and they filled the three cans with water. Then Rawley stripped to the waist and washed as well as one can in a leaky canvas bucket without soap or towels. He put on his damp shirt and sodden tunic, and they plodded back up the slope.

II

These first few days in the devastated area were active ones for Rawley. He had no desire either to meditate upon his position or to speculate about the future. The time that elapsed before sleep came to him each night in the tomb-like darkness of the dug-out was all too long for that purpose, and he realized that the hours of daylight must be fully occupied if the fruitless thought cycle of bitterness, desperation, and despair was not to daze his reason.

He threw himself feverishly into task after task. Many journeys were made to the lifeless wood on the hillside, and the splintered branches were dragged to the dug-out and stacked for firewood. The accumulated filth of months was swept from the dug-out floor, stuffed into a sack, and emptied into a shell hole. Some measure of comfort was introduced into the cheerless den. Among Alf's gleanings from that once populous trench system were a pair of wire-cutters, some rusty nails, and an old German saw-bayonet; and with these simple tools Rawley constructed shelves on which to stow their belongings, a wire-netting bed for
himself and—his greatest triumph—an easy chair with wire-netting seat and back.

But all this was not done in a day nor all at once. Many hours were spent in exploring the neighbouring and more remote trenches in search of the salvage on which they depended for their supplies.

It was the pioneer-like atmosphere of these expeditions that appealed to Rawley. Tramping through those deserted trenches that stretched with all their ramifications mile after mile across that wilderness of grass-grown shell holes, rubble heaps, and dead, shivered trees, he could well imagine himself to be an explorer who had stumbled upon the mouldering dwellings of some dead and long-forgotten race. And down in those burrows underground where they had lived were the evidences of that race—evidences that sometimes told a story of comedy or tragedy more eloquently than any of the excavations in ancient Pompeii. For sometimes he would enter a dug-out to find it just as its former occupants, German or British, had left it; mouldy blankets on the beds, a half-burned candle stuck to the table, illustrations torn from magazines pinned to the walls and bearing dates in 1915 and 1916, half packets of mildewy cigarettes, and once a gramophone with a warped record on the turntable.

Alf, however, was interested only in the practical side of these explorations. He inspected an abandoned dug-out with the speed and thoroughness with which a tramp will go through a dustbin, often taking objects which Rawley would have considered not worth salving, but unerringly
rejecting the really worthless. On the good days they would return to their dug-out with their sacks stuffed with an odd variety of lumber: a tin or two of bully beef maybe, half a dozen candle ends, a few periodicals and tattered books, a mud-encrusted puttee and a grimy sock, a chipped enamel mug and a rusty fork, and perhaps a frowzy blanket or an old gum boot. One day they found an unopened drum of paraffin and were heartened during the long and difficult journey back to the dug-out by the knowledge that it was many future hours of cheerful light that weighed so painfully on their shoulders.

On these expeditions they seldom saw a soul. Occasionally in the distance Rawley saw one of the other outcasts moving furtively across country to disappear presently into some burrow. They were like rats that appear for a few moments in search of scraps and then go to earth again. Occasionally among the rubble heaps of a flattened village the figure of an old peasant woman would be seen wandering forlornly in search of some relic that would identify a particular heap as her home. Only on the few main roads that switchbacked across that desolate country, straight and white like the wake of a ship on the ocean wastes, was there any constant movement. Sometimes on his salvage expeditions Rawley came within sight of one of these, and from the shelter of the wilderness would watch a company of infantry trudging towards the Line, or a convoy of supply lorries roll by on the distant road. Once he saw a battery of eighteen pounders on the march and crept closer. Water ran from the shining steel helmets of
the men and their heads were sunk low in the upturned collars of their British warms as they jogged along slowly through the rain. No doubt they were cursing the mud, the weather, and the Line that lay ahead, but Rawley envied them with all his heart.

III

One morning, when the December sun had broken through the clouds, and the wet weeds and grass that straggled over the trench side glittered in the cheerful light, Rawley was returning to the dug-out with a petrol tin of water. He rounded a crumbling traverse, and in the old fire-bay beyond came suddenly face to face with a stranger. The man had evidently heard him coming, for he was waiting there in the middle of the old fire-bay with one hand thrust into his breeches' pocket, and his eyes, as they met Rawley's startled look, wore an expression of amused and contemptuous hostility.

He was a very big man, standing well over six feet, and the service rifle that was slung by a strap over one broad shoulder looked little bigger than a boy's air-gun. He was hatless and collarless and wore a civilian tweed jacket, undone so as to display a dirty pink flannel shirt. Beneath the jacket a bulging revolver holster was attached to the leather belt which supported his khaki cord riding breeches. Mud-spattered field boots completed the equipment.

Rawley had recovered from his surprise and was about to pass on, but the big man turned slowly and put one of his feet on the crumbling fire-step, thus blocking the way. He did not speak, but he continued to regard Rawley with the same baleful and disconcerting smirk.