Читать книгу Jim Brent - Sapper - Страница 14

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It was on the Aisne I took it. Through that ghastly fourteen days we had slogged dully south away from Mons, ever getting nearer Paris. Through the choking dust, with the men staggering as they walked—some asleep, some babbling, some cursing—but always marching, marching, marching; digging at night, only to leave the trenches in two hours and march on again; with ever and anon a battery of horse tearing past at a gallop, with the drivers lolling drunkenly in their saddles, and the guns jolting and swaying behind the straining, sweating horses, to come into action on some ridge still further south, and try to check von Kluck's hordes, if only for a little space. Every bridge in the hands of anxious-faced sapper officers, prepared for demolition one and all, but not to be blown up till all our troops were across. Ticklish work, for should there be a fault, there is not much time to repair it.

But at last it was over, and we turned North. A few days later, in the afternoon, my company crossed a pontoon bridge on the Aisne, and two hours afterwards we dug ourselves in a mile and a half beyond it. The next morning, as I was sitting in one of the trenches, there was a sudden, blinding roar—and oblivion.