Читать книгу The Test of Scarlet - Coningsby Dawson - Страница 4

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IT’s morning. We’re always safe when the light has come. The most dangerous hour in the twenty-four is the one when day is dawning Throughout that hour the infantry always “stand to” with rifles, bombs and Lewis guns, on the alert for an attack. S. O. S. rockets are kept handy, so that help can be summoned. At every observation-post an especially keen look-out is kept; at the batteries the sentries stand with eyes fixed on the eastern horizon to catch the first signal of distress.

The anxious hour is over and morning has come. For another day men breathe more freely; till night returns, death has been averted. The narrow slit, just above the level of the ground, through which I spy on the enemy, reveals a green and dewy country. The little flowers of the field are still asleep, their faces covered by their tiny petal-hands. I want to shout to them to wake up and be companionable. After watching many dawns I have discovered that poppies are the early risers among the flowers and that dandelions are the sleepy heads.

The ridge fans away from where I am. Beneath the slope, directly in front, there is a village destroyed by shell-fire. To the right there is another village equally desolate. Still further in front there are two more villages which have been trampled into dust by attacks and counter-attacks. Every tree is dead. Every wood has been uprooted. Every Calvary, with its suffering Christ, has been knocked down. When the morning clears I shall be able to see for miles across all the intricate trench system of the Huns, defence line behind defence line, to the barricade of cities on the eastward edge of the plain. In those cities life seems to follow its normal round. The clock in the town-hall of Douai is so accurate that we can set our watches by it. Plumes of smoke puff lazily from chimneys and drift across the red roofs of houses. Through a telescope one can pick up lorries speeding along roads and trains steaming in and out of cuttings. Throughout the day we search hollows and woods for the flash of guns, taking bearings to them when they have been found. Early morning is the time to spot infantry movement. The men approach out of the distance in twos and threes. They may be carrying-parties or they may be runners. By careful watching you get to know their routes and even the places to which they are going. You telephone back the target to the guns and keep them “standing to” until your victims have reached a favorable point, then you send back the order for one gun to fire. You observe where the shell lands, send back a rapid correction and, when you’ve got the correct line and range, bring all your guns to bear upon the target, adjusting the range and line of your shots as they run. In the dull round of an observing officer’s life these little spells of man hunting are the chief excitement. There is another, however—when the enemy has spotted you and sets to work to knock you out. Neither of these diversions is likely to happen for some time yet; it’s too early. Long scarves of mist are swaying low along the ground. The more distant landscape is a sea of vaporous billows, above which only the blackened fangs of trees show up.

One day the greatest excitement of all may happen: camouflaged in a pit to my right we have an anti-tank gun; in the dug-out below me I have a specially selected detachment of gunners. Should the Hun make up his mind to break through, he would certainly employ tanks—perhaps some of our own, which he captured further south. Any one of these fine mornings when night is melting into dawn, our great chance may come. Then our gallant little thirteen-pounder, which has held its tongue ever since we dropped it in the trench, will start talking and we shall have a merry time, taking pot-shots over open sights, till the enemy Is beaten back or we are all dead.

How many days, weeks, months have I sat here gazing on this same stretch of country? I know it all by heart—every blasted tree, every torn roadway, every ruined house. We have names for everything—Dick House, Telephone House, Lone Tree; all the names are set down on our maps. Through summer, winter and spring, ever since we first stormed the ridge, we have watched the same scene till our eyes ache with the monotony—and now again it is summer. Every now and then they have withdrawn us to put on an attack in a new part of the line, but always they have had to bring us back. This ridge is the Gibraltar of the entire Front from Yprhs to Amiens; if the British were thrown back from here it would mean a huge retreat to the north and south. The Hun knows that. Directly we march out and another corps takes over from us, he begins to make his plans for an offensive. In the spring, when we were away, he put on an attack and gained a dangerously large amount of ground. As soon as we re-appeared he fell back. He has learnt the cost of provoking the Canadians—the white Gurkhas as he has called us—and prefers to express his high spirits elsewhere. So here we sit guarding our fortress, with orders to hold it at any price The most we can do is to annoy the Hun when we’re itching to crush him.

Each day we hope that our turn has come. The line is being pressed back to the south of us. Amiens and Rheims are threatened. Big Bertha is shelling Paris. Our nurses near the coast are being murdered by airmen. We hear of whole divisions being wiped out—of both the attacking and the attacked being so spent with fighting that they cannot raise their rifles, and crawl towards each other only to find that they have no strength in their hands to strangle.... And here we sit watching, always watching. It is because we are so fed up that we send out raiding parties. The damage they do doesn’t count for much when compared with the total damage that the enemy is doing to us; but it’s consoling. It’s our way of saying, “You think you’re top-dog; but the Canadians are here with their tails up. You haven’t finished with the British yet—not by a damned sight.”

The enemy settled his account with some of our boys last night. It appears that our party got safely to their rendezvous in No Man’s Land, where they had to lie in hiding in shell-holes till the artillery started. Everything was going well and it was only a few seconds to zero hour when a returning enemy patrol stumbled across them. Our chaps didn’t dare to shoot lest they should warn the garrison in the Hun front-line. They had to use their bayonets, trip them up and choke them into silence. While this was in the doing our barrage came down and then, since noise no longer mattered, they made short work of the patrol In this preliminary scrap Silborrad, the scout-officer, was killed. He was hugely popular with his men, for he had a reputation of always recovering his wounded. His death made them see red. When our barrage lifted and they stormed the Hun trench, they killed everything in sight; it was only when nothing living was left that they remembered that they had taken no prisoners. The proper thing to have done would have been to have come back. Their orders were not to remain in enemy territory longer than fifteen minutes; there’s always the danger that the enemy supports may move up for a counter-attack and his artillery is almost certain to place a wall of fire in No Man’s Land to prevent the raiders from getting back. It was Battling Brown who decided the question. “We’ll take a chance at their second-line,” he said. “If we don’t find anyone there, we’ll poke about in their communication-trenches till we do find someone.”

They found the second-line strongly held by machine-gunners. There was bloody work, but they secured their prisoners. The problem now was how to get back with their dead and wounded. The green lights which the men in our front-line were shooting up to guide them, showed very faintly and were often lost to sight on account of the rolling nature of the country. The return journey was made still more difficult by snipers who picked them off as they retired. They had already entered our wire, when word was passed along that one of our men was missing. Dick must have heard it; when they were safe in our trench and called the roll, it was discovered that he too was absent. This much I learnt in the early hours from the wounded who limped up the sunken road to my left. It wasn’t until dawn that I heard the rest of the story: that was when they were bringing out the dead. The engine of the ambulance had quickened its beat, getting ready to climb the hill. I ran out and found them lifting something wrapped in a blanket.

“‘E was some man,” one of the bearers was saying; “but ‘e’s too ‘eavy. They ‘adn’t ought to ‘ave brought ‘im out.” Then I caught sight of Dick’s gray hair Beneath his half-shut lids his eyes still seemed to twinkle, mocking at anything good that might be said about him.

They told how, when within reach of safety, he had gone back to find the missing man. He had been gone two hours, when something was seen moving behind our wire. Just as they challenged, they recognized him by his great height. He was half-carrying, half-dragging the missing chap who had lost his way through being blinded in the encounter with the patrol. They went out to help him in with his burden. When they got to him, he said, “Boys, I’m done.” After he’d spoken he just crumpled up. Blood was trickling from his mouth and, when they unbuttoned his tunic, it was sticky. Before they could bind him he pegged out.

As I gazed down at him in the early morning twilight I could guess exactly what had happened—just as surely as if his lips had moved to tell me: he had been frightened to go back, so he went.

He had wanted to go straight for her. Because he’d feared that his loneliness might trap him into beastliness, he’d come back six days ahead of time to meet his death. I wonder how much she’ll care. Out here one continually wonders that about the women men spend their hearts on, idealizing them into an impossible perfection. Would she have, turned her pretty back on him if he had lived to meet her? No matter, Dick; to have gone straight, even for the sake of a delusion, was worth while.