Behind the Lines (22 page)

Alf's approval of this find was unstinted. He nodded his head emphatically several times, and in elaborate dumb show drank the health of the sentry on the road.

Rawley disappeared again under the tarpaulin. He crawled up beside one of the rough wooden cases, and guided by his sense of touch, inserted the blade of his jack-knife under the lid. He increased the pressure gradually, but the board did not move. A sharp jerk might do it, but that would almost certainly splinter the wood with an audible crack or produce a loud squeak as the nails were prised up. There was nothing for it but to explore farther in the hope of finding an opened box.

He began to burrow in among the cases and sacks and tins and crates. It was very slow work. The old civilian jacket he was wearing caught frequently on the corners of cases and held him, and he had to be particularly careful in moving his feet lest his boots should strike against a box or tin. But his perseverance was rewarded. Somewhere he judged near the middle of the dump he found several open cases partly full of tins. In the darkness he examined the contents by his sense of touch. In one case there was no mistaking the peculiar shape of bully beef; another held
round flat tins that might contain either butter, salmon, crab or dubbing. In another the tins were round and long; that might mean jam or pork and beans. He took a sample of each and started back.

In the dim light they examined the booty, Alf kneeling in the rank grass and Rawley lying flat on the platform, with his head protruding from the tarpaulin. They classified it as one tin of butter, one tin of jam, one of pork and beans and one of rabbit. Alf nodded approval, and Rawley went back for more.

Inch by inch he wriggled in again among the sacks and cases, and reached the place where his outstretched hand should have touched one of the open boxes. Crates, sacks and cases hemmed him in, but none of them were open. In the dark, with only his sense of touch to guide him, he had gone astray. Somewhere within a yard or two of him must be those open boxes, but they were as completely lost as if they had been dropped into the sea, and he was seeking them on the ocean bed.

He lay still for a moment and tried to think out to which side he had strayed—to right or left. The planks of the platform on which he lay did not fit closely together; there were gaps between them through which blew chilly draughts, and now as he lay over one such crack he saw the coarse grey grass and earth below slowly dawn in the headlights of a car approaching along the road. The long shadows of the grass shortened and lengthened and moved this way and that as the car bumped over the pot-holed road, and the light increased rapidly like a stage
dawn, till he could see worms twisting and glistening in the powerful flood.

He took his eye from the crack and tried to distinguish the dim shape of sacks and cases about him, hoping that enough light would filter through to allow him to find those open cases before the car passed. Then he realized that the car had stopped. The light had ceased to grow stronger; nor did it wane. The grass shadows were motionless and clear-cut like stage scenery. The low hum of the engine flared up and ceased. He heard the clatter of the sentry's rifle and the smack of his hand on the butt. Then followed the unmistakable clash of a car door being closed and the scrape of feet on the road.

It was time for him to go, he felt, but with those strong headlights flooding the tarpaulin the slightest movement would be noticeable. The footsteps were passing to the right, towards the huts, but he could still hear the scrape of the sentry's feet near him. He wondered what Alf was doing. Judging from the direction of the shadows of the grass and platform supports the car stood a few feet from the end of the platform, and its headlights would therefore light up all the ground beneath the platform and part of the back as well.

Voices sounded from the direction of the huts, and then came the tramp of several pairs of feet. The voices grew clearer. “Well, we'll just have this off and check up that chit and then I will get on,” said one.

He heard men stumbling and moving on both sides of the platform, and he realized with chill that they were
untying the lashings of the tarpaulin. Heavy boots clumped on the platform and made the boards vibrate beneath him. Then a strong beam of light revealed the upper part of the crate beside him, and he lay like a watcher in a dark valley when the sun is on the mountain tops. They stripped off the heavy tarpaulin; a sergeant swung a lantern, and he lay there uncovered like a wood louse when a brick is removed.

III

“Hullo! What the devil!” exclaimed the sergeant. And he reached out a hand and dragged the apparently sleeping figure to its knees. “What the hell are you up to?” he demanded, holding up the lantern, so that its light fell upon the disreputable figure.

“What's that, sergeant?” said a voice from the road. The sergeant jerked Rawley to his feet. “A Frenchy, sir, after rations. I found him here under the tarpaulin—shamming sleep.”

Rawley was dragged down to the road where the lights of the car fell full upon him. An A.S.C. captain and subaltern eyed the miserable-looking object from head to foot. What they saw was an old man with bent shoulders and knees, long, tousled hair, grimy face and unkempt scrubby beard. He wore a dirty shirt of nondescript colour, no collar or tie, a tattered mud-stained jacket and baggy, muddy-kneed corduroy trousers, tied with string around his waist. His hands were filthy, and the nails long and black.

“Looks like the boy whom France forgot!” commented the subaltern.

The A.S.C. captain spoke in halting French. “
Qui êtes-vous? Que faites vous sous le—le drap là?
” He waved a hand towards the tarpaulin. “
Vous volez les choses Anglais
, eh?”

Rawley shook his head vigorously, and waved his hands in the manner of the French peasant, and then broke into a torrent of incoherence punctuated here and there with a word of French.

The officer rubbed his chin. “What the hell does he say. They all talk so damned fast. Look here, Mosu.
Parlez lentement, très lentement. Et prenez garde. Il est très serieuse pour vous
. Come on now. What—er—
que faites vous ici?
”

Rawley went off again into a torrent of incoherence, and then stood twisting his hands and wobbling his head in the manner of an old Frenchman he had seen suffering from shell-shock.

“He's dippy,” said the subaltern.

“Or shamming,” said the captain. “Search him, sergeant.”

Rawley's pockets were turned out, but they revealed nothing more illuminating than an old jack-knife and some bits of string.

“Anything gone from the dump?” asked the captain.

“There's a bread sack slit open here,” called one of the men presently. “And there's several loaves gone by the look of it.”

“What has he done with them, I wonder,” said the captain. “Can't have eaten several loaves.” He turned again to Rawley. “
Vous avez prenez les pains, n'est-ce pas?
”

Rawley took refuge again in voluble incoherence.

“Oh, damn the fellow!” exclaimed the captain impatiently. “He's probably only some old daftie trying to steal a mouthful, but we had better hand him over to the French Mission or the A.P.M. Put him in the guard-room, sergeant. I will take him in to Peronne when I come back.”

The corporal of the guard was called, and the prisoner was handed over. The corporal jerked his head towards the guard-hut and took his prisoner by the sleeve. “Come on, Charley,” he said. And Rawley shuffled off between his captors.

The guard-hut was small, but its occupants consisted only of the corporal, the two men not on sentry-go, and their prisoner. A short form ran along the wall facing the door, and here Rawley sat, staring vacantly at the floor and twisting his hands and wobbling his head whenever he felt that eyes were upon him. He felt that his only chance was to sustain this role of a harmless half-wit in the hope that the guard would become careless and allow him an opportunity of making a sudden dash for it. He could not hope to deceive the A.P.M. with his incoherent pseudo-French.

The guard took little notice of him. The corporal read a tattered, paper-covered novelette by the light of a candle-end stuck in a tin, and the two men played some obscure card game on the floor. Once he heard a faint tapping on
the wall of the hut behind him, and wondered whether Alf were trying to signal to him. He waited till the two men on the floor made some remark to each other, and then, under cover of the sound, he cautiously tapped back. An answering tap followed. It was cheering to know that he had not been abandoned, although it did not seem possible that Alf could be of any help at the moment.

The time passed slowly, and Rawley's hopes rose when the corporal glanced at the watch hanging on a nail above his head and said, “Just time for you to go on, Baker.” For a few moments during which the relief took place there would be only one man in the hut. Then it ought to be possible to make a dash for it. But his hopes fell again when he heard the sentry's voice outside the door. “What's the time, corp? Ain't George ever coming on?”

The corporal tightened his belt and rose to his feet. “Come on,” he said. One of the men also rose grumbling to his feet and took up his rifle. They went outside, and as Rawley had feared, the relief took place within a yard of the door. In a few moments the corporal was back again, and the relieved sentry was drinking tea from a canteen.

The men dozed, but always one of them was sufficiently awake to make any attempt at escape hopeless. Rawley sat on, sick at heart, fighting against his desire to sleep, hoping against hope that at the last moment some chance of escape, however desperate, would present itself. But none did. Dawn came and when the sound of voices and of men moving about outside told him that his vigil had been useless he allowed his eyes to close.

He was awakened by someone shaking his arm. One of the guard stood beside him with a mug of hot tea and a chipped enamel plate of greasy pork. “Here y'are, Charley. Muck in. Make your miserable life happy.” He ‘mucked in,' and the hot strong tea and the pork and bread, which was a banquet in comparison with his previous breakfasts of broken biscuit and bully, put new life into him.

IV

Towards the middle of the morning the captain of the previous night returned, and Rawley was taken from the guard-hut and put into the back of a car. “Here, Ellworthey, you come along with him,” said the captain. “And see that he doesn't jump out.” An A.S.C. private climbed in beside him, and the car moved off.

They went south through country new to Rawley, but the same dreary landscape stretched around him—weed-grown, shell-pitted earth, villages that were mere heaps of rubble, derelict huts, and woods that were clumps of bare, white splintered poles. Occasionally the truncated chimney of a
sucrerie
stood ragged against the sky or a rusty perforated water tank hung drunkenly on its twisted supports. The road switchbacked through the wilderness between the white splintered corpses of its bordering tree stumps.

The car stopped before a house in one of the shattered streets of Peronne. A sentry stood on guard beside the two splinter-pocked brick pillars that led to the little
rubble-littered garden beyond. The heavy iron gates were open; one of them lay among the weeds and tumbled bricks in the garden, and the other, rusty and ripped and perforated like a colander, hung crazily from one twisted hinge. Rawley was taken from the car and led over the broken pavement of the garden path towards the house. Many of the tiles had gone from the mansard roof and the rafters showed skeleton-like beneath. The ornate brickwork and stone facing of the windows was pitted by splinters, and the window spaces themselves were filled with yellow aeroplane fabric. He was led up three chipped stone steps to the hall and into a small room on the left.

He was relieved to find that it was a guard-room and not the office of the A.P.M., for desperately though he still clung to the hope of escape he could not disguise from himself how small his chances would be once he were examined by that officer. Outside in the hall the A.S.C. captain who had brought him to Peronne was talking to another officer, and he gathered from the conversation that he was to be lodged in the guard-room pending the return of the A.P.M., who was away at the moment.

The men of the guard were just about to have their dinner. They were taking mess-tins and knives and forks from packs which hung from nails on the wall. One of them in shirt sleeves and with tousled hair came in drying his face on a grubby towel, and a moment later there came a cry of “Dinner's up!” and a man entered carrying an iron dixie of hot stew. Rawley was given a share and a battered lead spoon to eat it with.

The men paid no attention to him; they sat on their kits on the floor and jabbered noisily as they ate. Rawley sat on the floor at one end of the room facing the door. The room was bare of furniture, and the plaster of the wall behind him was furrowed fan-wise by splinters that had evidently passed through a window in the wall on his left from a shell-burst outside. This was the only window in the room, and like those in the front of the house was covered with aeroplane fabric which imparted a warm, rich orange light, like summer evening sunshine. A black, twisted bit of wire, like a dirty bootlace, hanging from a broken ornamental medallion on the ceiling was all that remained of the electrolier, and the laths showed through in many places from which the plaster had fallen. The door was open, but Rawley's view of the narrow hall beyond was limited to a portion of the staircase with its banisters as it cut diagonally across the upper part of the doorway. Below the staircase was a small cupboard door standing ajar.

Occasionally men passed along the passage, men in shirt sleeves and often with greasy caps, and Rawley concluded that the old kitchens at the end of the passage were occupied by cooks and fatigue men. Feet also passed up and down the staircase, but they were visible only from the knee downwards. Some of them belonged to officers and some of them to men, and he guessed that the offices of this headquarter were upstairs, and that the ground floor was occupied only by the guard, cooks, and orderlies.