THE TEST OF SCARLET

THE raid is over. The frenzied appeal of the Hun flares has died down. Flares are the deaf and dumb language of the Front. Sometimes they say, “We are advancing”; sometimes, “We are beaten back.” Most often they say, “We are in danger; call upon the artillery for help.” Tonight they seemed to be crying out for mercy—speaking not to friends, but to us. We were silent as God, and now they too are silent.

In the welter of darkness one can still make out the exact location of the enemy’s front-line by the glow of his burning dug-outs. Our chaps set them on fire, standing in the doorways like avenging angels, and hurling down incendiary bombs as he tried to rush up the stairs. A horrid way to die, imprisoned underground in a raging furnace! Yet at this distance the destruction looks comfortable as the reflection of many camp-fires about which companions sit and warm their hands. The only companions in those trenches now are Corruption and his old friend Death.

I can see it all—the twisted terror of the bodies, the mangled redness of what once were men. I see these things too clearly—before they happen, while they are happening and when I ‘m not there. It is only when I am there that I do not see them, and they fail to impress me. It was so tonight as I crouched in my observation post, my telephonist beside me, waiting for the show to commence. As the second-hand ticked round to zero hour, I had an overpowering desire to delay the on-coming destruction. I peopled the enemy line with imaginary characters and built up stories about them. I pictured the homes they had left, the affections, the sweethearts, the little children. God knows why I should pity them. And then our chaps—they are known personalities; I can paint with exact precision the contrast between what they are and what they were. I see them always with laughter in their eyes, however desperate the job in hand. Their faces lean and eager as bayonets, they assemble in some main trench, as likely as not facetiously named after some favorite actress. On our present front we have the Doris Keane, the Teddie Gerrard and the Gaby. A sharply whispered word of command! They move forward, shuffling along the duckboard, come to the jumping-off point and commence to follow the lanes in the wire which lead out from safety across No Man’s Land. They crouch like panthers, flinging themselves flat every time a rocket ascends. Within shouting distance of the enemy, they drop into shell-holes and lie silent. All this I see in my mind as I gaze impotently through the blackness. My turn comes later when the raid is in full swing; it consists in directing the artillery fire and reporting to the rear what is happening.

I consult the illuminated dial of my wrist-watch—five seconds to go. Some battery, which has grown nervous, starts pooping off its rounds. A machine-gunner, imitating the bad example, commences a swift rat-a-tat-tat: Destiny demanding entrance on the door of some sleeping house. In the wall of darkness, as though a candle had been lighted and a blind pulled aside, a solitary flare ascends—then another, then another. North end south, like panic spreading, the illumination runs. With the clash of an iron door flung wide, all our batteries open up. I look behind me; flash follows flash. The horizon is lit up from end to end. The gunners are baking their loaves of death. The air is filled with a hissing as of serpents. Shells travel so thick and fast overhead that they seem to jostle and struggle for a passage. The first of them arrive. So far no eye has followed their flight. Suddenly they halt, reined in by their masters at the guns, and plunge snarling and golden on the heads of the enemy. Where a second ago there was blackness, a wall of fire and lead has grown up. Poor devils! Those who escape the shells will be destroyed by bomb and bayonet. Pity there is none; this is the hour of revenge. We shall take three prisoners, perhaps, in order that we may gather information, but the rest.... Our chaps have to think of their own safety. There is only one company in the raid, consisting of not over a hundred men. They might easily be surrounded. Their success depends on the element of surprise and the quickness of their get-away when they have done their work. If they took too many prisoners they would be hampered in their return. If they left any of the enemy alive behind them, they would be fired on as they retired. So the order is “No quarter and kill swiftly.”

Now that the attack has started, I cease to be concerned for the Hun: all my thought is for our chaps. I knew so many of them. Silborrad, the scout officer of the nth Battalion is there; a frail appearing lad, with the look of a consumptive and the heart of a lion. It was he who with one sergeant held up sixty Huns at Avion, driving them back with bombs from traverse to traverse. Battling Brown is in charge of the company; he’s the champion raiding officer of our corps and, with the exception of the V. C., has won every decoration that a man can earn. Curious stories are told about him. It is said that in the return from one raid he had brought three prisoners within sight of our lines when suddenly, without rhyme or reason, he lined them up and shot them dead. The moment he had done so he fell to weeping. This particular raid had been put on to gain identifications of the enemy Division that was facing us. By killing his prisoners he had failed in the purpose for which the raid bad been planned. You cannot wring answer? from the dead. Having seen his men safely back into our trenches, he set out alone across No Man’s Land. What he did there or how he did it, he has never told to anyone; but by dawn he came padding back through our wire, driving three new prisoners in front of him. For every Hun he shoots he makes a notch in the handle of his revolver. He has used up the handles of three revolvers already. He’s tall and slim as a girl, with nice eyes and a wistful sort of mouth. When he came to the war he was barely eighteen; today he’s scarcely twenty-one. War hasn’t aged him; he thrives on it and looks, if anything, more boyish. It’s only in a fight that his face loses its brooding expression of thwarted tenderness. Of a sudden it becomes hard and stern—almost Satanic. There never was such a man for clutching at glory.

And then there’s big Dick Dirk. When he first joined our Brigade, he got the reputation for being yellow because he talked so freely about being afraid. He has no right to be in the raid. It isn’t his job; he’s supposed to be deep underground in the Battalion Headquarters’ dug-out, carrying on his duties as liaison-officer. None of the artillery know, except myself, that he intended to go over the top with the infantry tonight. When our Colonel learns of his escapade, he’ll give him hell.

Dick is six-foot-three, slow in speech, simple as a child and so honest that it hurts. He stoups a little at the shoulders, falls forward at the knees and is as gray as a badger. His expression is worn and kindly, and his lower lip pendulous. You would set him down as stupid, if it were not for the twinkle in his eyes. I don’t think Dick ever kissed a girl; he would not consider it honorable and, in any case, holds too humble an opinion of himself. Since he’s been at the Front he’s managed to get engaged to one of his sister’s school-girl friends. She’s a Brazilian. He knows nothing about her, has never seen her, but like all of us, dreads the loneliness of “going West” without the knowledge that there is one girl who cares. She started the friendship by adding postscripts to his sister’s letters. Then she asked that he would send her a photo of himself. For some time he dodged her request, and afterwards spent weeks of wracking nervousness lest his looks should fall below her standards. Now that he’s engaged, he treats the entire war as though it were being fought for her. He still talks of being afraid. He refuses to lie about his sensations. The more he sees of shell-fire the stronger grows his physical dread. Because of this, he continually sets traps for his cowardice. Tonight he set another trap. I suppose he got to thinking how he’d hate to be an infantryman in a raid, so he decided to go over the top with them. At the present moment he might be in England, but cut his leave short, returned from Blighty and was sent up forward as liaison-officer. It was only yesterday that he surprised me by raising the gas-blanket and pushing in his head.

“You!” I exclaimed. “I was picturing you in Piccadilly. What’s brought you back from Blighty six days ahead of time?”

He flushed, but his eyes mocked his confusion. “It was devilishly lonely in London,” he said slowly; “there were too many girls.” And then, with an embarrassed smile, “I wanted to go straight because of her.”

So because he wanted to go straight for her, he’s out in No Man’s Land tonight, re-testing his worth and taking his life in his hands. There’s a woman at the back of each one of us who inspires most of our daring. With some of us she’s the woman whom we hope to meet, with others the woman whom we’ve met. Whether she lives in the future or the present, we carry on in an effort to be worthy of her. And when it’s ended, will she be worthy? Will she guess that we did it all for her? We shall never tell her; if she loves us, she will guess.

A sunken road, rotten with rain and mud, runs twenty yards to my left. I shall know when the raiders return, for I shall hear the weary tread of the wounded and the prisoners as they pass this point. A little higher up the road I can already hear the muffled panting of an ambulance, waiting to carry back the dead. Should I miss them, the quickened beat of the engine will warn me. The enemy knows that this is the route by which they must return; he’s lobbing over gas-shells and searching with whizz-bangs. A messy way of spending life Did God know that it was for this that He was creating us when He launched us on our adventure through the world?

II

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.

III

The larks are singing above the melting mists and there’s a sense of peace in the air. One by one the signallers tumble up the dug-out stairs; they stand in the trench yawning, stretching themselves and breathing in the golden coolness. Very lazily they set to work preparing breakfast. They have to be careful lest any smoke escapes and gives away our post to the enemy. If once the Hun suspected we were here, it wouldn’t take him long to knock us out. They’ll be bringing me in some stewed tea presently; I can hear the bacon sizzling. I wish there was some water to wash with; but we gave must of ours to the wounded last night.

I was in England this spring when the big Hun drive against Paris started. I’d just recovered from being wounded and directly I heard the news, commenced moving heaven and earth to get back. Heaven and earth didn’t require much moving—men were too badly needed. I reported back to my reserve depot on a Wednesday and within the hour was told that I could proceed on the next draft leaving for France. I was given a two days’ leave to collect my kit, and permission to join the draft at the London station.

That London leave is curiously blurred in my memory. It was only my body that was in England; my soul was in France. I rushed from tailors to bankers, from bankers to bootmakers, from bootmakers to lunches and theatres; I met people and laughed with people and said “Good-bye” to people, but there was nothing real in anything that I saw or did. In imagination I saw myself on the Amiens road fighting. “Our backs are to the wall,” Sir Douglas Haig had told us. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe”—that was how my Corps Commander’s special order had run. Every moment that I was not there with the chaps seemed shameful. If we were beaten back it seemed that it would be my fault—one more man in the line might make all the difference.

How little I was noticing the world about me was emphasized by one small incident. I had been taxi riding all over the map in a frenzied effort to collect my gear. In these war-days London taxi-drivers have developed short tempers, especially for fares who keep them waiting. My man had been extraordinarily docile. At the end of two hours, when I had deposited some of my baggage at Victoria, I said to him, “I suppose I’d better pay you off now. I’ve got to go to Battersea; you won’t want to go there, so I’ll have to go by train.”

“My time’s yours,” said the man. “We can’t get any jobs since this offensive started; all the officers have left for France.”

It was true, and I hadn’t noticed it. The restaurants were empty, except for a few civilians. You could get seats for any theatre and as many as you wanted. Almost over night the soldier-men had departed.

I remember with peculiar vividness the attitude of my friends towards me. They treated me as a person who tomorrow would be dead—the way we treated men in khaki in 1914, before we had learnt that not every man who goes into battle stays there a corpse. My two brothers got leave from the Navy and came to see me off. I left them to do the booking of rooms at the hotel: when we went up to bed the night before I started, I found that instead of booking three rooms, they had booked one room with two beds. I didn’t comment on it.

It was dark when we rose. While we dressed, we talked emptily with a feverish jocularity. In the midst of a hurried breakfast four friends appeared, who had given me no previous warning of their intentions. They were people who liked their comfort; they must have travelled by workmen’s trains to get there. Chatting with a spurious gaiety, we walked over to the station through the damp raw half-light. I wasn’t allowed to carry anything. As though their minds were clocks ticking, I could hear them repeating over and over, “The Canadians will advance, or fall with their faces to the foe. Our backs are to the wall—He’ll fall,” they kept repeating; “he’ll fall.”

The platform was dense with khaki. Here and there one saw a frail old lady seeing her son off; there was a sprinkling of girls, who clung to their men’s arms and made a brave attempt to laugh. Then, before anything sincere had been done or said, everyone was taking his seat and the doors were being locked. There was no khaki on the platform now—only the drab of civilian costume, which made its wearers look like mourners. I leant out of the window. Suddenly one of my women friends, who had never done such a thing before, drew herself up by my hand and kissed me. The wheels began to revolve. “When you get there, keep your heads down,” the men on the platform called “Cheerio, old things,” we answered. The girls tried to say something, put their hands to their throats and choked. Their smiles became masks. Then we were out of the station, speeding past housetops, with the wheels singing triumphantly, “The Canadians will advance—advance—advance.”

We were all Canadians in my carriage. We had all been wounded—some once, some oftener. “Well, we can’t get there too soon,” one said. To parade our assumed indifference, we began to play cards. Farther down the train, above the roar of our going, we could hear the cheery voices of the “other ranks” singing,

“Good-bye-ee

Don’t cry-ee

Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee”

We were trying to bluff it out to all the sleeping country that we didn’t care and rather liked dying.

The base-port across the Channel at which we landed was in strange contrast to London’s haggard smiling. It not only did not care, but it totally ignored the fact that “our backs were to the wall.” Nothing had changed since we had seen it last. People were no cheerier, no duller. They had the same bored air of carrying on with what they obviously regarded as “a hell of a job". The dug-out Colonels and Majors, who handed us our transportation, were just as fussily convinced as ever that they alone were conducting the war. On the journey up the line the only signs of menace were trench-systems hastily thrown up far back of where any had been before, a rather unusual amount of new ordnance on trucks and the greater frequence of hospital trains, hurrying towards the Channel. The idea that we were soon to be corpses began to fade; we played cards more assiduously that we might keep normal. Now and then, as we passed towns, we looked out of the window. We began to recognise the names of stations and to guess at the part of the Front to which we were going. We ceased guessing; we knew at last.

“So he’s attacking the Viny Ridge,” we thought.

It was a year since our Corps had captured it: if the capturing of it had been a bloody affair, the defending of it against overwhelming odds would be twice as bloody. In imagination I could smell the horror of the unburied dead of Farbus and see the galloping of the shells, like the hoofs of invisible cavalry, up the road from Willerval. The fallen victors of last year’s fight would be stirring in their shallow graves and pushing their bones above the ground in protest.

All this I saw as I journeyed and played cards.... And when I got here I found that it was to this I was returning—to this intolerable inertia of watching. “The Canadians will advance or fall with their faces to the foe". Brave words! But we have neither advanced, nor fallen. In utter weariness, but with purpose unbroken, other men are crawling into battle on their hand and knees before Amiens, while we sit still, with the indignity of not dying upon us.

IV

THE Major has just phoned me to say that there’s an officer coming forward to relieve me, and that he won’t be one of us. That sets me wondering; does it mean that we’re going to be pulled out to take part in the fight? There have been all kinds of rumours going the rounds this summer—rumours to the effect that when Foch has let the Hun advance far enough our Corps is to be made the hammer-head of the offensive which is to push him back. There would seem to be some truth in the report, for every time we’ve been withdrawn from the line it’s been to practise open warfare. We’ve rehearsed with tanks and aeroplanes, and fought sham battles in which nearly all our work has consisted in coming into action at the gallop. We’ve been nicknamed “Foch’s Pets,” which may not mean very much; but it at least seems certain that when the Allies’ drive starts we shall be in it. The thought is intoxicating: it means the end of waiting.

But what will become of Bully Beef and his mother if we sail off into the blue on a great attack? Bully Beef and his mother need explaining; they have no official standing—they are members of our battery whom the Army does not recognize. Bully Beef is a little boy in skirts, about four years old I should hazard. His mother is a French girl of not more than twenty; she is not married. Bully Beef introduced himself to the battery about two months ago when we were out at training. He used to hide himself in the hedge of a deeply wooded lane which climbed the hill to the sergeants’ mess; from this point of vantage he used to throw sticks and stones at anyone in khaki. He had long hair down to the middle of his small fat back; this, taken in conjunction with his skirts, left all the battery fully persuaded for a week that he was a girl. On account of his supposed sex he was not chastised for his stone-throwing. We called him “Little Sister".

Our wagon-lines lay at the bottom of the hill in a meadow the length of which a tiny river ran. Along the sides of the river bushes grew in tangled profusion. It was here that we held our watering parades, leading our horses close to the edge of the bank so that they could dip their noses in the ripples. In the woods near by our men had their bivouacs, creating the appearance of a gipsy-camp At the top of the meadow our guns anti wagons were parked; behind them in three straight lines our horses had their standings. In the bowl of the valley, as far as eye could stretch, the wheat grew yellow. Round the lip of the bowl, where the hills touched the sky, the coolness of woods drew a thick green line. It was a very quiet spot, mellow with nightingales, and lazy with summer. It gave no hint of battle, except at night when the bombing planes came over to destroy us and the chalky fingers of searchlights unravelled the clouds and suddenly pointed. When they pointed, every Archie for miles round would open up at an intense rate of fire.

I say it gave no hint of battle. That is not quite precise. What I mean is that the country itself gave no hint of unrest in its own appearance. Among the people the signs were plentiful. There were ourselves for instance. Every village was parked with storm-troops, being fattened up like turkeys for killing. There were Chinamen building new railways through the grain in preparation for the retreat which seemed inevitable. All kinds of new trench-systems were being dug, that we might dispute every inch of territory. Down the gleaming roads little processions of refugees were continually passing, led by an old horse, tied together with rope and string, and harnessed into a creaking dilapidated wagon. The wagon was invariably overloaded with things which looked absolutely worthless. On the shafts of the wagon a disconsolate man would sit, staring vacantly at everything and nothing. Following behind on foot would come a dog, some dirty children and a draggle-tailed woman. The woman seemed to be the least important part of the man’s possessions. Only the mouldy skeleton between the shafts seemed to hold any place in his affections; it helped him to escape. Every day such processions crawled through the sunshine. Our men laughed and shared their rations with the children. Ah, how merry we were and how much we laughed while we waited for death to call us! The refugees were fleeing towards life—a life which they dreaded. We had nothing to fear from living—life had done its worst.

Not for an hour in the day or night did the guns cease their distant chiding, lowing like cattle and bidding us return. That we would return dramatically and without warning we were well aware. We were only ignorant of the place and time. We had cut down our kits to what was absolutely necessary; everything superfluous had been returned to Blighty. Our brigade held itself in readiness to march at a two hours’ notice. Most significant of all, every day both officers and men spent hours at the ranges, learning to be marksmen. This in itself was prophetic of close and desperate fighting—it meant that the enemy was expected to be up against the muzzles of our guns. Who ever dreamt until now of training artillery to be riflemen!

These were the conditions under which we made Bully Beef’s acquaintance. The sergeants’ mess was in the cottage where his mother lived; he soon made friends with the Sergeant-Major. It wasn’t long before he began to appear upon parades, his grubby hand held fast in the big brown fist of one of the drivers or gunners. It was bad for good order and discipline, but none of us officers had the heart to forbid him. He soon learnt to obey the orders “Shun” and “Stand at ease,” and would hold himself steady with “eyes front” to be inspected. It was about a fortnight after we had been billetted in the village that we discovered that we could no longer call him “Little Sister": he fell into the river when the horses were watering and had to go naked while his clothes were drying.

His parentage was a problem. Some said that he was the child of a rich married Frenchman; others that his father had been a quartermaster in a Highland battalion. We rather clung to the legend of his Scotch origin; his sturdy habit of throwing stones at people bigger than himself seemed to prove that he was British.

His mother is difficult to describe. She’s a pleasant, sun browned girl, with a happy smile and kindly ways of showing her contentment. She rarely looks at you; her eyes, which are gray, are always demurely cast down, and yet you feel that all the time she’s watching. Her head is always bare so that her hair, which would naturally be brown, is bleached to the colour of honey. Whenever you pass her she is humming a little song, and sometimes she laughs beneath her breath. Her hands are interminably busy, doing something for Bully Beef or some of our men. She devours her little son with a hungry passion and pushes him away from her in pretence that she does not care. Everything that she does she clothes in an atmosphere of tenderness. What her name is none of us know for certain, but we call her Suzette.

When we received the order to march out from her village, we thought that we were going into an attack, instead of which at the end of the long night march we found ourselves again on the Ridge. Because it was night when we moved, nobody noticed that Suzette was following. I don’t believe she walked; I suspect that she rode in a G. S. wagon with the connivance of the Captain and the Quartermaster-Sergeant. When we found her at our new wagon-lines in the morning, no one felt like reporting officially on her presence.

Since then she has made herself the mother of our battery; it’s to Suzette that we all go when we’ve lost a button or our clothes need patching. And it’s to Suzette that we go when the letters from our girls aren’t up to scratch. We just sit a little while and look at her; after that we renew our faith in women and feel better.

The men have built her a little bivouac a short distance away from theirs, yet within ear-range if she should need them. Woe betide any blackguard who tries to molest her. It’s happened twice; the men lay cold for the best part of an hour. They were strangers from another unit.

How does she exist on active service? The cook feeds her on the sly from the battery-kitchen. The men share with her the boxes that are sent to them from home. Our first thought on looking through a present of comforts is, “Ah, that will do for Suzette".

For the rest, the Quartermaster supplies her with necessities and blankets. Of late she has taken to wearing a Tommy’s tunic and a khaki shirt.

Suzette has become an institution; the Colonel and General are aware of her; they both wink at her presence. They may well, for she keeps our men straight; there’s been no drunkenness since she came among us. She’ll be the last woman to be seen by many of our chaps; the casualties in our counter-offensive are bound to be heavy.

What I’m wondering is will she be allowed to accompany us if we go into open warfare; we can scarcely have a woman with us then. I’d bet the shirt off my back, however, that the Captain will manage it. He never speaks to her or of her—never seems to notice her; but if you watch him closely, you know that he listens for her laughter and her footstep. He’s a man to whom something shattering has happened—something not done by shells. He was badly wounded last year at Vimy; we none of us expected to see him back. He rejoined us suddenly in the spring. He’s come back to die; we all know that. By this time next year, if he can contrive it bravely, he won’t be listening for Suzette or any girl.

V

THE officer who’s going to relieve me has just arrived and gone forward to battalion headquarters with one of my linesmen. He’s poking round the Front just at present; as soon as he comes back, he’ll take over from me and I shall report to my Major at the guns.

Queer, the places men go to in this war and the circumstances under which they meet! This chap went to school with me in London, I discover. I remember him chiefly by one of those inconsequential incidents of childhood; he had a hoydenish sister who laid me out by throwing a snowball with a stone in it. She’s a married woman with children now—the wife of one of the props of the upper-middle-classes.

Her husband has a seat in Parliament; before the war she owned a Rolls Royce and everything else that was respectable. She’s been going up in the social scale ever since she threw that snowball. It’s by the snowball that she recalls me, her brother tells me, whenever my name is mentioned.

This chap’s been to the east; he was present at the taking of Bagdad. He speaks of all that magic country as though it were just as commonplace as this desolate plain of ruined villages on which I gaze.

Tonight we pull our guns out. Where we’re going nobody knows. Our infantry are already marching out in sections and the Imperials are taking over from us. Staff officers with their red tabs go up and down the trenches. Brass-hats pass down the sunken road and pop their heads in at my observation post to enquire their direction. There’s mystery and excitement in the air. They can’t be withdrawing us for a third time merely to go into training. It must be for the counter-stroke which we have so long expected. But when are we going to strike and where?

I’d like to see our Captain at this moment. The whole impatience of our corps through this summer seems to be summed up in his person. Like all of us, only more so, he has listened since the spring with a kind of agony for the galloping of the black horseman who rides alone. He himself is a man who rides solitarily. His eyes have a steady forward gaze, quiet and firm and unflinching. I shouldn’t say he was a good soldier—not in details or in the ordinary sense; he came into the war, as most of us did, too late in life for that. In peace times he was a painter and a dilletante, noted for many oddities which do not matter now. He was successful and courted and on the crest of the wave. When war broke out, he downed tools at once and offered himself for cannon-fodder. In August 1914 a new way of valuing men came into fashion. Death is the sincerest of all democrats. It did not matter who we were, what our attainments, wealth, position: the chimney-sweep and the genius were of equal worth. Kreisler’s bow-arm was only of service to his country for firing a rifle. A man might have the greatest singing voice in Europe; his voice would not help. We required of him his body; it would stop a bullet. When we reached the trenches, we learnt even more dramatically that nothing that we had been counted. Only the heart that was in us could raise us above our fellows—or to use the more colloquial army term, “the guts". Guts would enable a man to fight on when hope had retreated, until hope in very shame returned. A man who hadn’t guts was shot at the back of the line by his comrades as a deserter. A man who had was shot up front as a white man with his face towards the enemy. There was no appeal from these alternatives; birth, talents, money could not disturb the sentence. There was only one standard by which our worth was estimated—-the measure of our sacrificial courage.

Of course we were all inefficient. We had never dreamt of being soldiers till the deluge of brutality poured out of Germany and threatened to destroy the world. We were specialists in various small departments of human knowledge; our special knowledge, unless it was military, was no longer of service. That was the hard part of it—that many of us who had known the pride of being specialists, were now called upon to approve ourselves in an effort for which we were totally unfitted. Of all the qualities which we had cultivated so carefully the world asked for the one to which we had paid least attention—our courage. So the Captain laid down his brush, turned his canvases to the wall, joined as an artillery driver and went to grooming horses. When his training was ended and he was shot out to the Front, he learnt almost over-night the tremendous lesson that it’s the spirit that counts—the thing that a man is essentially inside himself and not the thing which his social advantages make him appear to other people. A man cannot camouflage under shell-fire; in the face of death his true worth becomes known to everybody. When war started, Judgment Day commenced in the world for every man who put on khaki. God estimated us in the front-line, and God’s eyes were the eyes of our fellows.

I believe the Captain had expected that he would prove himself a coward—most of us expected that for ourselves. When he found that he could be fearless, the relief was so triumphant that he became possessed by an immense elation. He took the wildest chances and was always trying to outdo in heroism his own last bravest act. Promotion came rapidly; at the end of eight months he was a sergeant and before the year was out had gained his commission. He joined our brigade as an officer in September of 1916, when we were waiting on the high ground behind Albert, preparatory to being flung into the cauldron of the Somme offensive. He was treated with suspicion at first; no one expected much from a chap who had been a painter. The Colonel sniffed contemptuously when he reported at the tent which was brigade headquarters.

“What were you before you became a soldier?”

“A painter, sir.”

“Of houses?”

“No. Of landscapes and portraits.”

To a hustler who has flung railroads across continents, outwitting nature and abbreviating time, to have been a painter seemed a sorry occupation—an occupation which indicated long hair, innumerable cigarettes, artists’ models and silken ways of life. The Colonel himself had been in the North-West Mounted Police and had lived furiously, tracking outlaws and rounding up Indians.

“So you’ve been a painter, Heming,” he sniffed. “Out here we don’t do much that’s in your line. We deal in only two colours: the mud-brown of weariness and the scarlet of sacrifice. We don’t copy landscapes—we make them.”

Heming was attached to a battery whose Major was noted for his “guts". He either made or broke his officers in the first week that they were with him. He didn’t have to wait long to be put to the test. The whole of our brigade was crowded into the narrow valley, know as Mash Valley, which parallels the road which runs along the ridge from Albert to Pozihres. It was a direct enfilade for the Hun. The batteries were strung throughout the length of the valley at about two-hundred—yard intervals, so that when we weren’t being pounded by the enemy, we were being wounded by prematures from the friendly guns behind us. When a strafe was on, it was as though two contending gales had met above our heads and were pushing against each other breast to breast. In those days we made landscapes at a tremendous rate. There met at the Somme the most ingenious artists in the science of destruction which the world had seen till that date. They found a pleasant country of windmills, snuggling woods, villages with tall, clear spires, nests of embowered greenness upheld by hills against the sky, and they trampled it with shells into dust and mixed the dust with tire blood of men, till as far as eye could stretch it was a putrescent sea of mud.

In the first week of September 1916, when we crept into our positions under the heavy morning mist, the clay was baked to the brittle hardness of pottery; two months earlier the rains and carnage had washed away all signs of friendliness and greenness. Hands, heads and stockinged feet of the dead stuck out where the mud had dried up; one tripped over them and, at touching them, shrank back with a thrill of horror. It was a good place from many points of view to test a man’s capacity for “guts". It was especially good at night, for directly darkness had fallen the Hun drenched the length and breadth of the valley with gas-shells You could hear them coming over with a whistling sound, like an army of wild geese. You waited for the explosions and, when you heard nothing but stealthy thuds, you knew that it was time to run along the gun-pits and give the alarm for the wearing of gas-helmets. The helmets with which we were issued in those days were rather horrid affairs. They were like gray flannel shirts drenched in treacle and sewn up at the top so that you could not push your head through. You pulled them on and tucked the shirts in under the collar of your tunic. Then you shoved a rubber mouth-piece between your teeth, peered out through the goggles in the side of the gray flannel and slowly suffocated. Seeing that we were in a valley, all the gas from the shells drifted down to the low ground where the gun-pits had been dug and hung there ready to stifle your men directly the suffocation of their helmets became too much to bear. Mash Valley was most excellently chosen as a place in which to test one’s guts.

Heming had been with us two days when the Major took him up with him to make a reconnaissance of the front. At that time I was corporal of the B. C. party, so I went ahead to lay in wire in order that we might keep in touch with the battery should the Major wish to register the guns. At the head of Mash Valley there was an engineers’ dump, known as Kay, and it was at this point that the main trench-system began. We ran our wire in as far as Kay and were met there by the Major and Heming at three in the morning.

A Scotch mist was drifting across the desolation. The air was piercingly cold and a watery moon looked down, I think the first thing that impressed one about the trenches of the Somme was their desertion. The dead far outnumbered the living, and the dead were for the most part unburied. One wondered from where the men would spring up to fight should a Hun attack commence. The walls of the trenches were honey-combed with little scooped out holes. In those holes, with their knees drawn up to their chins and the mist soaking down on them, unshaven haggard men slept. They were polluted to the eyes and wearied to extinction. Sometimes their feet stuck out across the duck-board. You stumbled across them, but they did not waken; they only moaned. When they did not moan, you were puzzled; until a man made some motion or spoke, you were never certain whether he was living or dead. The slain defenders and those who had taken over from them huddled side by side, keeping guard together.

Here and there one of the kennels had been crushed in by a shell and the inmate had been killed while he slept. His putteed legs and heavy army boots were still thrust out across the duck-board; they were the only reminders of his sojourn there.

As one drew nearer to the front-line through the winding labyrinth of trenches, he noticed that the sides were walled up with the dead. Men’s bodies had proved cheaper than sandbags; moreover, they had saved labour in spots where no unnecessary men ought to be asked to jeopardize their lives. The bodies, where they showed through the mud, had flaked off white like plaster exposed to the wind and sun. Flies rose up in clouds as one passed; their wings filled the air with an incessant buzzing.

Horrors multiplied as the world grew grayer and the dawn began to break. We came to a ditch levelled nearly flat by the Hun barrage, in which Jocks and coloured troops had fought side by side. They were buried to the waist; in the process of decay the black men had turned white and the white black.

I watched the effect of all this on Heming. The Major watched hun. Perhaps most closely of all the signallers watched him. When a new officer joins any unit, the men are overwhelmingly eager to find out whether he has guts. They know that the day is always coming when their chance of life may depend on his judgment and courage.

Heming’s face was the face of a dreamer. He never was nor could have been a man of action. He imagined too far ahead. He visualized and fought the horror which lurked behind each traverse before he came to it. A thousand times that morning he must have seen himself mutilated and dead. His expression was tense and excited, but an amused smile played about the edges of his mouth. His eyes beneath his steel-helmet were brilliant and forward-looking. He seemed to contemplate his inward struggle against terror with the unimpassioned aloofness of a spectator.

Trenches were becoming shallower. It was some time since we had passed any sentries or working-parties. A horrible, brooding silence was over everything, broken only by the secret dripping of rain and the scuttling of rats among corpses. The Major became more frequent in the examining of his map. At last he ordered us to crouch down while he stealthily peered over the lip of the trench in an effort to get his bearings. It began to dawn on us that we had come too far and were lost in No Man’s Land.

While we waited, behind the mist we heard talking. The mist parted and we saw, not fifty yards away, the smoke-gray uniforms and red-cross armlets of a party of Hun stretcher-bearers. The Major was standing up. The Huns dropped the stretcher they were carrying; at the same instant a rifle rang out. The Major toppled backward, tearing at his breast.

Then we learnt once and for all whether Heming had guts. His face leapt together—these are the only words in which to describe his sudden change of expression. The entire man became knit in one purpose, to out-daunt the challenge of the danger His eyes were merry when he turned to me. “There are just enough of you to carry the Major out. He may live if you get him to a dressing-station. Work your way back down this trench; you’ll strike our front-line somewhere in that direction.”

“But what about you, sir?” I asked.

He was examining his revolver to see whether it was clean and ready. “I’m going forward,” he answered. “If I can get in a few pot-shots, I’ll divert their attention and help you to make good your getaway.”

It was the damnedest bit of folly—one man with a revolver, going forward to stir up an unknown number of the enemy He was an officer, so we had to obey him; besides, there were only just enough of us to carry out the Major. Just as we had started, Heming came crawling back to me on his hands and knees.

“Corporal,” he said hurriedly, “if anything should happen to me, just drop a line to this address and let her know that I wasn’t yellow. I don’t suppose she’ll care, so you don’t need to be sentimental. Just state the fact, and say that I did everything that she might feel proud of—of our friendship.”

The address which he slipped into my hand bore the name of a married woman. I recognized her name, for I had seen her portrait often in the London Illustrateds. I wondered whether it was true what he had said, that she would not care.

There wasn’t much time for wondering; the mist was lifting. It was easy to see one’s direction now and easy to be seen by the enemy. The trench was shallow; it was exhausting work, crouching to take advantage of every bit of cover and dragging at the body of the wounded man. We hadn’t been gone ten minutes before a barrage came down on the spot where we had been discovered, setting up a wall of fire between ourselves and Heming. In the brief silences between the falling of the shells, I could hear the ping of rifle-bullets. They were passing far over to our left; I could picture how Heming was exposing himself to draw the fire away from us.

It took us two hours to get the Major back to our lines. The last part of the way we grew reckless and carried him overland. Our infantry saw us and came out with a stretcher to help. At the dressing-station the M. O. who attended to the wound broke the news abruptly, “He hasn’t an earthly.”

The Major’s eyes opened. He repeated the words, “Not an earthly.” And then, “Tell Heming he’s all right, and say—say I’m sorry I doubted.”

The Major went west one hour after that and we returned to the guns to report to Brigade what had happened. The report went in across the wire, but the Colonel at once sent for me to give him the details in person. When I had ended, he sat twisting his moustaches thoughtfully. Then, “That fool painter,” he said, talking more to himself than to me, “I suppose he knew I thought he was afraid.” And then to me, “But he’s all white, Corporal, and it’s up to us to get him out. D’you think you could find the way back?”

I told him I could by following the wire which we had laid to that point.

When we again reached Kay Dump and Tom’s Cut, which was the main trench leading to the frontline, we found that the usual morning “hate” was in progress. The wounded of the night before were being carried out; as the bearers, carrying the stretchers on their shoulders, reached the high ground, the Huns caught sight of them and started to mow them down with enfilade fire. Our guns opened up in retaliation; by the tine the strafe had died down the morning had become too clear for anyone to approach No Man’s Land without being observed. It was in the first dusk of evening that Heming came back. We were in the front-line waiting for him, when the Hun snipers opened up. We saw him come running in zig-zags through the rusty wire and shell-holes. When he jumped into the trench beside us, he was laughing. “I’ve had a simply ripping time, Corporal,” he commenced. Then, seeing the Colonel, he stood stiffly to attention and saluted.

“What doing?” the Colonel asked.

“Making landscapes,” said Heming, with a twinkle, “and letting daylight into Huns.”

So that was how our Captain proved that he had guts; he’s done nothing but add to the reputation which he then earned. It was on the way down to the battery that he asked me to give him back the address. “And you must never mention her name, Corporal. Promise me that.”

Today I am an officer with Heming in the same battery, and we have never referred to the matter. I am sure he is in love with her and I believe he was in love with her before she married. Why he missed her or what are their present relations, I cannot guess; all I know is that he is out here to die and that she is the inspiration of all his reckless courage. Now he knows that the counter-stroke is to be struck and that the big chance of death has come, his heart will be singing. The men as they go about their packing up will be following him with their eyes and whispering, “The Captain’s mighty cheerio. He’s all for it.” In watching him they will feel a thrill of excitement; they, too, will become “all for it.” They will go with him anywhere—if need be, to hell.

Mighty cheerio and all fur it! That’s the way the entire Canadian Corps must be feeling at this moment. All through the sunny days of spring and summer we have had to sit tight and watch while other men marched out to meet their death. Thank God, our turn to sacrifice has come. The indignity of not dying is at last removed from us.

VI

IT was growing dusk before the observing-officer of the relieving battery returned from his reconnaissance of the Front to take over from me. The Hun planes had already come out like monstrous bats from their hiding-places, and were dipping their wings in the aquamarine and saffron of the fading sky. Our machine-gunners and riflemen for miles round were busy taking pot-shots at them, trying to drive them back so that they should not detect the unusual movement of troops behind our lines.

One may say what he likes about war, but it has moments which possess a surpassing and enthralling beauty. One such moment came this evening as I watched what is likely to prove to be my last sunset over the Vimy plain. I know it all—every charred tree, every hollow, every shattered ruin. I ought to know it for it has made me suffer; Death, mounted on his black stallion, has waited for me behind almost every bit of cover within sight. I have felt him when I could not see him; there have been times when across the distance I have caught the gleam of his shrouded eyes. Because of these things, because of the friends who have died here, because of the risks we have taken and shared, because of the ice-cold nights, the poker-games, the brief escapes into cleaner country, the letters from a certain girl and the home-sick dreams which have wiled away tedious hours in dug-outs—because of all these things, in an obstinate kind of way I love the scarred, forsaken horror of this country. “For the last time,” I told myself as I watched the sunset glow grow fainter upon the enemy domes and spires of Douai.

If I live through the war I may come back to this ridge which has been my home for over a year; but, if I come back, it will not look the same. All the challenge to one’s daring will have vanished. There will be no gassing, no shelling; one will be able to expose himself as much as he likes. Everything will be desperately and conventionally safe. Curious how one learns to admire danger!

While I watched and the light faded, men became symbols and shadows. They crept along the trenches, going up to die, as men have gone up to die through the ages. Even in peace times we were soldiers for one cause or another, and none of us were immune from dying. We are fighting from the day we draw breath till the day when our bodies, like beggars’ rags, drop from us and our spirits in their swift lean whiteness escape. Death! What is it but just that, the casting aside of tattered clothing!—and how tattered one’s body can become in the front-line!

The dance of destruction commenced as darkness settled. Like ropes of pearls flung up, the luminous tracer-bullets of machine-guns darted towards the sky. From somewhere in the clouds the Hun planes replied, flinging down similar ropes of ruin, Against the horizon, like lilies floating, Hun flares soared and swayed. While they lasted, Gavrelle sprang ghostly into sight and the contorted skeleton of what once was Oppy. The flares sink and die, everything is again swallowed up in obscurity. Down the sunken road to my left go the anonymous feet of marching men. Other feet have, trampled that mud, and they now are silent. There are feet among those who march tonight which will not make the return journey.

The phone rings sharply. “You’re wanted, sir.” The message is shouted up from the depths of the dug-out. I press the button of my flash-lamp and hurriedly slither down the innumerable greasy stairs. As I take the receiver, I tell the signaller to light another candle as there may be a message to pencil. He lights the candle and sticks it against the planked wall in the orthodox way, by warming the wall with the flame so that the heat may melt the wax.

“Hulloa! Hulloa!... Oh, it’s you sir!” It’s my Major.

“No, the friend who came to see me, this morning has not returned; he went somewhere.... Yes, I know; he ought to have taken over from me... O, here he is.... You’ll have horses for... all my party. Yes, sir, I understand. I won’t waste any time.”

I turn round to the officer who is to relieve me, “You took your time, old thing, I must say. I hope the dinner at battalion headquarters was a wet one. But you’ve rather crowded me; my battery hits the trail tonight.”

He starts a lengthy explanation, but I’m in a hurry to be gone. While I hand over to him my fighting maps, my linesmen are loading themselves with reels of wire and instruments.

“Well, so long,” I say.

“Good luck,” he replies.

How often I have spoken such words in this cramped death-trap; now I’m speaking them for the last time. I take a final look round; there’s the frame-work bunk, with the chicken-wire nailed over it, on which I have spent so many restless nights; there’s the ground-sheet tacked over the second exit through which the draught was so persistent in coming; there’s the penciled message on the wall to his sweetheart in the Argonne from the captured French soldier who slaved for the Hun—a message of deathless love, which I forwarded to her as directed. This place was a home of sorts, and now it is another’s.

We scramble up the steep, clammy stairs into the trench. The night air is soft and warm; stars are coming out. Round the traverse where the thirteen-pounder lies concealed, the gun-detachment is waiting for me. I raise the camouflage to take one last look at the brave little piece; then I’m tempted to enter and to place my hand upon the smooth cold breech-block, which shines like silver.

“We never got our chance to fire you, old girl,” is my thought: “but we’d have done our bit, if the Hun tanks had come, you and I. If the chance does come, you’ll have to play the game with some other chap now.”

We’re in the sunken road, climbing the ridge where the chalk gleams white as snow in the darkness. Some runners go past us, smoking cigarettes. They belong to the relieving troops; none of our men would do that. A cigarette shows up like a lamp from this point of vantage. I halt the men and order them to put out their cigarettes.

We’re on the crest now, where a sentry challenges. To the right and left shells are falling with a sullen crash. Our faces are turned towards the west, where the horizon is still faintly flame-coloured and evening has not yet sunk into night. To our right the splinted tower of Mount St. Eloi points a martyred finger at the clouds. Beneath our feet runs the Concrete Road, built at such sacrifice across the torn battlefield. All our transport comes up along this route, as the Hun knows well; he makes it the special target of his harassing fire. We note the new hits which the enemy has scored on it since last we made the journey. The ground is ploughed with shells on either side; here and there one finds black pools of blood, dead horses and broken limbers. From craters and places of concealment our forward guns belch fire. Their flash is hidden from the enemy by the ridge; but he has guessed their approximate locations, and searches and sweeps day and night in an effort to find and destroy them. Now and then, like the blast of a furnace, a torrent of flame shoots up where he has exploded an ammunition dump. Against the swift and momentary illumination one sees the shadowy figures of men running and dropping into shell-holes. The spectacle of death fails to move us. We have become too used to dying.

As we plod along under our heavy loads of instruments, kit, revolvers and reels of wire, we spread out so that one shell may not get the lot of us. My men are singing; from the words I gather an idea of what is happening in their minds:

I said “Good-bye” to the flowers

And “Good-bye” to the trees,

And the little church which sleeps so quietly,

I said “Good-bye” to on my knees;

I said “Good-bye” to my sister

And my dear old mammy, too;

But my heart was almost breaking

When I said “Good-bye” to you.

They’re conscious of something different and devastating approaching, and are singing their farewell to security.

Foch’s Pets! The hammer-head of the counterattack! If that’s the game, there won’t be many of us left to celebrate peace. It’s August now; how many of us will be above ground by Christmas?

VII

WE found our horses waiting for us with the grooms and horse-holders in a trench about fifty yards off the road. They had had to take cover there on account of enemy shelling attracted by an anti-aircraft battery. The anti-aircraft battery being mounted on motor-lorries, had made a swift get-away the moment the retaliation, which they had called down, had started. Our boys couldn’t get away; they had received explicit orders to wait for me and my party with their horses at one specific point on the Concrete Road. Three horses had been slightly wounded and one of the men had been killed. A splinter of shell had cut his throat as completely as if a knife had been drawn across it.

Kneeling beside the body, I drew back the saddle-blanket which had been thrown over if and scanned the face with my flash-lamp. My groom touched me on the shoulder, “You won’t recognise him, sir; he’s a remount—only came to the Front for the first time yesterday evening.”

It was a young face, with scarcely any beard on it. Nineteen, at most. The eyes were blue, and filmed, and wide. They had a sudden expression of surprise and protest. Death doesn’t often disturb me now-a-days, but I couldn’t tear that scarlet mark across the throat.—One day at the wagon-lines being chaffed for having come into the army late—the next night dead! Poor laddie! I don’t know who you are or where you came from. If I could have prevented it, things shouldn’t have happened this way. They ought to have given you a better run for your money. I’m sorry.

The horses are snorting and jumping back against the reins, so I switch off my flashlight and cover up the face.

“Have any arrangements been made?” I ask.

They tell me “None”—the accident only happened within the last half-hour.

“Then one of you will have to mount it in front of you. Hand it over to the Captain of the relieving battery. He’ll have to see to its burial: we march within the next three hours.... Where’s the Major?”

I learn that he’s still at the guns, so I tell my groom to lead on down the road to the battery-position and I order the rest of the party to get mounted. As I turn to take a short-cut through the rusty wire of old defenses and the water-logged craters of unrecorded fights, I glance back to catch the silhouettes of the horsemen as they ride towards the red lip of the horizon, with the drooping body hanging sack-like in front of the last rider’s saddle. An inconspicuous ending to one lad’s dreams of glory! He won’t be here for the counter-stroke. Letters from home will arrive full of anxiety and affection. They’ll have to be returned unread and unopened. The old, sad story! And yet, who knows! Perhaps he’s lucky.

Ahead of me in the misty vagueness of the chalk lies a ray of light like a golden dagger. I slide down into a trench, which was the Hun front-line. Poppies and cornflowers grow in tufts along its sides. Beneath my feet I feel the slats of duckboard. Dug back into the wall is a six-foot square room, with anti-gas blankets hung before it. The curtain which they form has not been properly adjusted; from between its edges light escapes. I lift the curtain and enter.

About a trench-made table a group of officers are seated. All of them are strangers to me except my Major; they’re the new chaps who are taking over from us. On the table there are two whiskey bottles, one empty and one just broached There’s a tin jug of water, a medley of glasses, piles of matches which are bring used as poker-chips and a dealt-out hand of cards.

My Major’s face, which is usually pale, is flushed tonight. His eyes are wrinkled and red about the edges; but the eyes themselves are like two blue pools of fire. As he catches sight of me, he raises his glass, “We don’t know where we’re going, Chris. Everything’s secret. All we know is that we march tonight and that they’ve get a labour battalion digging graves for us somewhere behind the line. Oh yes, and a special lorry of Victoria Crosses has arrived at Corps. We’re storm-troops, my boy, and going to be in it right up to the neck. Wherever we march and whenever we fight, here’s the old toast, ‘Success to crime.’.rdquo;

I manage to let him know that our horses are outside and hint that it’s about time we were going.

“Time! There’s heaps of time,” he says. “We pulled our guns out early this evening. The battery is all packed and back at the wagon-lines. Heming will have it standing to when we arrive. Sit down and take a hand. God knows when we’ll get a chance of a round of poker again.”

My mind is not on the game. I’m losing steadily, but I don’t worry. The candles drip away in wax; others take their places. I scarcely see the cards; I watch only one face through the wreaths of tobacco-smoke—my gallant little Major’s. I would never have known him in peace life; neither of us would have considered the other quite his sort. He looks like a cross between a clown and an ostler. He’s very small and slight; his legs are bowed with too much riding. If one were to see him in civilian dress, it would seem right that he should be chewing a straw. His face is white as death and terribly worn. His hair is sandy and thin in places. His teeth are filled with chunks of gold and not very regular. His uniforms are never smart; after he’s had them a week, they’re always torn and stained. He’s like a bantam cock; he makes up in spirit what he misses in height. He says “Good-bye” to his temper on the first provocation and is always most handsomely sorry afterwards. He’s adored and dreaded by his men. He’s the best field-gunner for open warfare in the whole Canadian Corps. His superior officers twit and admire him. He has an extraordinary talent for collaring affection. One trusts his judgment absolutely and yet follows him with a feeling that he must be protected. Life hasn’t been very good to him; he’s not particular as to whether or no he survives the fighting! There used to be a girl in the background—Well, there’s no harm in telling. He would write ten letters to every one that he received from her. He was fearfully humble about her. “You wouldn’t expect a girl,” he used to say “to write very often to such an ugly pup as I am.” When he spoke like that he would grin self-derisively and purposely show all his gold stoppings. He went home on leave to England six months ago determined to make sure of her and to bring matters to a crisis. She met him with the news that she was going to be married to an officer whom we all knew to be a quitter. She begged him to be present at the wedding so that people might not talk. He went to the wedding and returned to the Front six days ahead of time. Since then he’s seemed to be more white and small and bow-legged than ever.

I’m the only man who knows what lies behind his life. We’re the best of friends and, when we’re in the line, we always sleep in the same dug-out—which occasions a certain amount of jealousy among the other officers. When we’re on the march, he has to follow the routine etiquette and share his billets with the Captain. I hate to see him go up front for fear he should die. He shares the same fear for me, and is continually inventing excuses for getting me on the wire when I’m forward. God created him a caricature—the potter’s thumb slipped in the moulding of his clay; but to make amends God gave him the heart of a lion. You love him, protect him, declare him “quaint,” but never for a moment do you cease to admire him with a strangely simple and passionate loyalty. He’s as straight as John the Baptist; it would be impossible to tell him a lie.

We have a race-horse in our battery which the Major uses as his charger—a dainty, fine-boned aristocrat of a fellow, red and lean as a rusty sword. When our little Major rides him, leading his battery down the long white roads of France, strangers halt to gaze at the almost childish figure with the short bowed legs, wondering how he ever contrived to climb up so high. At the head of his battery, where he ought to appear most imposing, he looks more like a jockey than a field-officer. It doesn’t matter what strangers wonder or what he looks like, now that we’re bound on a death and glory adventure there’s no man to whom we would sooner entrust or for whom we would sooner lay down our lives. We forget the carelessness of the putter’s thumb and remember only the stoutness of heart which the feeble body hides. His name is Wraith—Charlie Wraith; and his age—. I should guess him to be thirty, though three and a half years of war have so battered his body that he looks forty-five.

At last the game ends. It’s eleven o’clock; we march at midnight and can just reach the wagonlines by short-cuts and hard riding. The Major has been in luck; he’s pocketing all the winnings. The glasses are filled for a final toast. The new Major who is taking over from us, raises his glass, “Here’s to Hell with the Kaiser and, if you’ve got to die, may you all die smiling.”

We laugh as we make a no heeler of it; dying might be the merriest of sports. But to me—I can’t help thinking of that laddie, a single day at the Front, lying beneath a saddle-blanket with his throat cut and that amazed expression of protest in his staring eyes.

We’ve climbed out of the trench and stand looking down at the faces clustered in the angle formed by the lifted curtain. A few paces to my left a cross shows plainly, upon which is written, “Here lies an Unknown British Soldier.” Unknown! A hundred years from now we shall all be unknown. We shall be massed together in an anonymous glory as “the heroes who stormed the Vimy Ridge.” It won’t mean any more to be remembered as John Smith than merely as “An Unknown British Soldier” who did his duty faithfully.

“Good-luck,” the faces in the candle-light cry.

“Cheerio,” we answer. But the words which are in all our minds are, “Those about to die, salute thee.”

Waving our hands, we turn away. The old racehorse, Fury, from a hundred yards has recognised his master’s voice and whinnies. With a pat on the neck and some coaxing words we get mounted, and walk carefully through the pit-falls of craters till we strike the road, when we grip with our knees and set off at the gallop.

Beneath the moonlight the chalk of the shell-ploughed battlefield creates the illusion of a country under snow, spreading beneath the velvet darkness for miles. The horses are impatient and refuse to be reined in. They need no guiding. With Fury in the lead, they leap trenches and take short-cuts where we would hesitate.

Ahead of us through the shadows we discover the battery drawn up in line, not a light or so much as a cigarette showing for fear our doings should be betrayed to the enemy planes. Heming rides out as we approach. He salutes the Major smartly. “Just in the nick of time, sir; our battery leads and we march as a brigade. There are no route orders. Everything’s secret. The Colonel alone knows where we’re going; even he doesn’t know beyond tonight.”

The adjutant gallops up and reins in importantly. “The Colonel’s compliments, and he’s waiting for you, sir. He wants to know what’s the delay.”

“No delay,” says the Major curtly, and wheels about to face the battery.

“Stand to your horses,” he orders. “Gunners and drivers prepare to mount.... Mount.” There’s a jingling of stirrups and the sound of men leaping to their places. As they sit to attention on the limbers and in the saddles, all grows silent.

“Column of route from the right. Walk. March,” the Major commands.

The horses of A Sub-section gun-team throw their weight into the collars. There’s a commotion of prancing in the darkness and the merciless sound of the cracking of whips: then through the shadows the big bays of A Sub strain forward and take shape; the B. C. party gallops to the head of the column and we’re off on our mysterious march in pursuit of the greatest of high adventures.

BOOK II—THE MARCH TO CONQUEST

I

THERE’. no end of a thrill in night-marching, if one doesn’t get too much of it. One feels curiously winged when mounted in the darkness, as though the limitations to speed, space and possibility had broken down. The present merges with the past and with eternity. Doors open in the night, giving entrance to previous incarnations. The mounted men are a robber-band; the guns are wagons piled with loot. The villages, lying flattened by shell-fire, are walled towns which hide medieval palaces. The country through which we pass, takes on a hundred exquisite and grotesque shapes, the one melting into the other at the bidding of the imagination. Everything is unusual, everything is shifting, everything is distorted and capable of being changed at will. One has an extraordinary sense of timelessness and an overwhelming certainty that he has done all this before, marching to the sack of cities, and suffering weariness and death for unremembered causes. The ghosts of those forgotten tragedies and triumphs throng about him, bewildering him with a faint familiarity which he fails to associate with any land or clime.

On that first night-march we had to keep our column closed up to prevent straggling, since on a secret march to an unknown destination a straggler inevitably gets lost. If a vehicle had to halt to refit harness, to have a horse shod or for any other cause, we had to leave out-riders at every cross-road to guide it back to the main body.

The first part of our journey was through country we had fought over, every contour of which, despite the darkness, was pictured vividly in our minds. We passed the narrow valley behind the Maison Blanche, in which our battery had lain hidden up to the time when the Ridge was captured. We passed the cross-roads at the Ariane Dump, where we used to assemble midnight after midnight to build the artillery road up to the Front-line, that our guns might pass forward across No Man’s Land within four hours of the start of the offensive. Many spots were memorable to us because of men who had died. It was over there to the right that the Hun sniper got our signalling sergeant, when we were observing from behind the Five Hundred Crater. It was over there to the left that a Hun shell scored a direct hit on B. Sub’s gun-pit and sent all the gun-detachment west. Though we were to forget these homes that we have had in the mud, our horses remember and remind us; each time they pass one of their old wagon-lines, they try to turn in off the road from force of habit.

Through the mist and moonlight we can just make out the twin towers, blunted and splintered, of Mount St. Eloi. They look like the thumb and index-finger of a solemn hand, pointing heavenward.

One tower is tall and defiant: the other has been shorn by shell-fire. The Huns commenced their work of destruction during the Franco-Prussian war; since this war started, they have done their utmost to complete it, even sending over bombing-planes for that purpose. They have a good military reason, for the towers command a panoramic view of forty miles of country. But still the towers stand, exclaiming in a valiant gesture of architectural oratory that God still dwells beyond the clouds.

In the hollow, between Mount St. Eloi and the road which we travel, lies God’s Acre, with its endless forest of white crosses. It is there that very many of the pals who have served with us are taking their last rest. They are wrapped in the army blankets which made so many journeys with them. Each has a little scooped out hole, three feet beneath the ground and only just big enough to take his body. The blanket is pulled up over the face and hurriedly sewn into place for fear the sleeper should stir and be cold beneath the sod. As I gaze through the darkness towards the hollow, I can feel the wounds of the sleeping men. There’s Rennet with a bullet through the centre of his forehead: that happened when we were observing from Sap 29 in front of Ecurie. There’s Gordon, who came bark from a gay leave in Paris to have his leg shattered at the entrance to the Bentata Tunnel. How he made us laugh the night before he died with his account of “ze lady wiz ze vite furs,” who tried to make him pay for her dinner at the Cafi de la Paix! And there’s Athol, who was Brigade medical officer when we occupied the railroad in front of Farbus. Brigade headquarters were on the Ridge and the batteries were in the plain. The moment he saw that we were being strafed, he would come racing down through the shell-fire to our assistance. He got smashed to atoms when he was binding up some of our chaps in a blown-in dug-out; there was nothing but his face left undamaged. I wonder why it is that I still walk the earth while they sleep there so quietly. We all took the same risks. We all dreamt of the same adventure—the adventure on which we now are bound—of the day when trench-warfare would end and we should break the German line, and take our guns into action at the gallop. Do they strain their ears where they lie so narrowly as they catch the rumble of our departing guns? Do they push back the earth from their sunken eyes, raising themselves on their elbows to listen? Dick Dirk is there by now—he who returned ahead of time from Blighty because he wanted to “go straight for her.” His house underground is newer than the others. Does he wish us luck, or does he pay us no attention?———No, they do not stir. They lie heedless and silent. Having done their bit, they are contented, for they were very tired. As the hollow is swallowed up in the all-surrounding pool of night, I look back just once to where my dead companions rest, and again the words take shape in my mind, “Those about to die, salute thee.”

We wheel out on to the straight pavi road which runs like an arrow’s flight from Arras to St. Pol. In a long and regular line on either side stand pollarded trees, marking its direction for miles. They seem gigantic sentinels, silent and impassive. From all directions, from main-roads and bye-roads, comes the muffled roar of transport pouring along every artery of travel to the same unknown bourne to which we journey. A tremendous movement of troops is taking place—taking place under cover of darkness, anonymously, timed absolutely and without hurry. If we doubted that a big offensive was on foot, we do not doubt it now. But whose is the controlling brain? Rumour says that even our Corps Commander has had no warning as to our ultimate destination. The Sergeant-Major rides back to tell me that the Major wants me at the head of the column. I trot forward and find that he is walking, while his groom leads Fury a few paces behind. I salute, dismount and hand over my horse to a signaller.

II

THE Major wants to talk—he feels lonely. We begin by making guesses as to the scope of the new offensive. We converse very quietly for fear we should be overheard by any of our men. A corps order has been published forbidding any discussion of the object of our present movements. Such discussion, if it takes place in public, comes under the heading of “Giving information to the enemy.” It’s impossible to say who of the people with whom we associate are spies. Many a good life has been thrown away as the result of careless and boastful conversations in estaminets and officers’ tea-rooms. Some bounder, out of the line for a day, wants to air his superior knowledge of doings up front; he talks with a raised voice in order to impress strangers who may or may not be in British uniforms. In any case, the uniform is no proof of integrity; many an English-speaking Hun has passed secretly through our lines in the uniform of the man he has murdered. The result of such loose speaking is that the raid, which ought to have succeeded, fails. The Huns are forewarned: their trenches are stiff with machine-guns and many of our men go west.

Every precaution is being taken this time that no information of importance to the enemy shall leak out. In the first place, we know nothing ourselves; in the second, we are forbidden to conjecture out loud. Though we recognise landmarks in the landscape, we are under orders not to mention the fact. We are only to march when night has blindfolded our eyes; our tongues, under pain of court-martial, are to be kept silent.

To judge by the north-easterly direction in which we are marching, we might be going up to Flanders to recapture the Hun gains at Kernel. The Major believes, however, that our present direction gives no indication, as we’re probably only going to a railroad junction at which we shall entrain. He thinks that our goal lies to the south. It may be the Rheims salient, in which case we shall be in entirely new territory, fighting with the French and joining up with, the Americans, concerning whom we are exceedingly optimistic and curious. On the other hand there are rumours that the Americans are taking over from the French in the Argonne sector, thus releasing many French veteran troops who will be behind us to back us up in the counterstroke of which we are the hammer-head. One fact is known definitely—Canadians have been sent north to Ypris; but whether to fool the Hun or because the thrust is to be made there, remains uncertain.

The Hun knows that the Canadians have been trained to be the point of the fighting-wedge; he, therefore, knows that where we are there the blow is to be struck. All summer he has made every effort to keep track of our position in the line, his object being that he may have his reserves rightly placed to push back our thrust. For the war on the Western Front has become entirely a game of the handling of reserves. Neither side has sufficient man power to defend its trench-system if an attack were to take place all along its front. So it remains for the attacker to muster his storm-troops with such stealth that the people to be attacked may be kept unaware of what is planned against them and may be tricked into withdrawing their reserves to a place remotest from the point where the blow is to fall. If such strategy succeeds, the attacker has the element of surprise in his favour and gains so much ground in the impetus of his first rush that, by the time the enemy reserves can be brought up, the entire defense has become disorganised.

The great aim of the new strategy is to make a gap—to get through the enemy so that his right and left flanks are out of touch and railroad communications in his rear can be cut.

The new strategy was first practised by our Third Army in its November Drive against Cambrai; that drive failed for want of sufficient reinforcements to back it up. Until that time the Allies had always gone after what were known as “limited objectives,” such as high ground, trench-systems, villages, salients. When the objective had been taken, the attack rested. The Vimy Ridge was a limited objective. We didn’t want to break the Hun line; what we desired was the Ridge, because it commanded a great enemy plain on the other side. For two months before we actually struck, we advertised the fact that we were going to strike by the intensity of our incessant shell-fire. Systematically, day by day and night by night, we cut the enemy’s wire-entanglements, blew up his dumps, mined beneath his front-line, pounded his cement machine-gun emplacements, harassed his means of communication and stole his morale by making his life perilous and wretched. He knew as well as we did what was planned; his only uncertainty was as to the exact hour at which the attack was to be launched. We kept him wearily guessing, and wore his nerves to a frazzle by putting on intense bombardments at inconvenient times. Usually these bombardments took place at dawn, lasted for fifteen minutes and had all the appearance of being the genuine zero hour. When our barrage had descended, he would man his trenches, call up his reserves and set all the machinery for his counterthrust working. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the hell would die down into the intensest quiet.

The new strategy does not advertise the point to be attacked. It does not cut wire-entanglements with shell-fire many days before the show commences; it tramples down obstacles with battalions of tanks at the very moment that the infantry are advancing. It does not set out to capture a given and solitary object; its ambition is to double up the enemy’s line and to penetrate as far as success will allow. The new strategy is in all things more stealthy, more tiger-like, more reckless, more deadly; its most dangerous feature is the use which it makes of surprise.

This new method of fighting has developed out of the necessity for defeating a heavily entrenched enemy. It is a method which the Allies at last are able to adopt because of the almost limitless resources in man-power which America has placed at their disposal. For the Western Front to be rightly understood, must be regarded as a banjo-string, composed of living men holding hands from Switzerland to the English Channel. Under pressure the string may give and give, but it must never break. The moment it breaks, the thing happens which takes place when a banjo-string snaps—it curls up towards the ends and leaves a gap. The only power that can save the day when the banjo-string has snapped, is the masterly strategic employment of the reserves. The reserves may stop the rush by selling their lives to a man, or they may do it by luring the attacker on until he has advanced beyond his strength. But if the side attacked has guessed wrongly as to the point to be attacked, so that its reserves are at a distance when the disaster happens, a calamitous retreat on either flank will have to be begun or the jig is up. To compel this retreat is the purpose of Foch’s present thrust.

In adopting these hide-and-seek tactics of night-marches we are borrowing a lesson from the Hun. He has already tried to do precisely what we now intend to accomplish. In his great drive of the spring, when he all but took Rheims and Amiens, he massed his storm-troops seventy miles behind his objective. Day by day he kept them hidden from spy and aeroplane observation, moving them only by night. His railroad and transportation arrangements were so perfect that, commencing at dusk, he was able to fling the whole weight of his fighting-wedge up front and have it hammering at our doors by daylight.

As we rode beneath the August night, my Major summed up the situation: “We’re trying to bluff the Hun into expecting us up north, while we make for the south as fast as we can hurry. I’ll tell you what it is, Chris; we can afford to die, now that the Americans are behind us with their millions. Believe me, before this month is ended, there’s going to be some tall dying.”

That phrase, “We can afford to die,” arrested my attention. It was so brutally financial, as though human lives were only so much national capital, and not the focus-points of loyalties and affections. It was as though the casualties for the military year could be apportioned ahead of time, so that the national books of birth and death might be made to balance. It was making a mathematical calculation as to men’s uncalculated and individual sacrifice; no more must be killed in any given twelve months than the bodies of the living could re-supply. And yet———

Yes, it was true: for the first time in the history of the war we could afford to die. During the previous four years we had died, but we could not afford it. We had had to be careful about our deaths, so that our man-power might not sink below that of the enemy who faced us. Now at last, because the Americans were behind us, we could afford to become lavish in the spending of our lives. Where one British soldier fell, three American boys would spring up. Though we became sightless, soundless, nameless, trodden by shells into the oozing horror of the mud, other idealists of another nation, but still of our tongue and blood, would cross by the bridge our bodies had made, lighting on and up till the decency for which we had perished was won. Viewed in this light, the knowledge that we could afford to die became not brutal, but glorious.

The Major whistled softly, strutting through the darkness on his little bowed legs. The thought that they could afford to let him die caused his spirits to rise.

III

KEEP to the Right,” and, after an interval, “Ha-alt!” Passed back down the unseen column ahead of us come the hoarse cries, followed by a sudden cessation of wheels and then, sharp and emphatic, “Dismount the drivers.”

Our Major shouts back the orders to the Sergeant-Major; from him they are picked up by the Section-Commanders and Numbers One. We listen to them as they travel down the battery through the darkness, altered in tone and made more faint as each new voice takes up the cry. The B. C. party back their ridden and led animals into the grass on the side of the road, loosen the reins and allow their beasts to graze. This is the first halt that we have made, so it should be long enough to give us time to check over the fitting of the harness and to make sure that everything is correct. I climb into the saddle to ride down the line; as I turn away, the Major calls to me, “Oh, Chris, one minute!” I bend down to catch his words: “Find out what’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette.”

What’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette? That question has been in my mind, in the mind of the Major, and probably in every gunner’s and driver’s mind ever since we marched out from the wagon-lines. It’s dead against all army orders that a woman and child should accompany a fighting unit into action. Since the war started, camp-followers of whatever sort have been forbidden. From time to time, even the dogs in the army areas have been shot because many of them were spies, carrying messages to the Germans across No Man’s Land at night. It’s dead against every dictate of decency and humanity that fighting-men should take non-combatants with them into the kind of furious carnage towards which we——. But, somehow, Bully Beef and Suzette do not seem to be non-combatants; we regard them as soldiers. They march with us as representatives of the impassioned soul of France. Yes, and more than that—for they stand to us for everything tender and kindly that would have been ours, had we not been selected to die. Suzette is to us what Joan of Arc must have been to her soldiers—the dream of the woman we would have married had Fate been more lavish with life. And Bully Beef—he’s the might-have-been child of every boy and man in the battery.

Gun-carriages and wagons have been pulled well over to the right, clear of the pavi road, so as not to cause a block in the passing traffic. It’s difficult to see them in detail on account of the blackness caused by the wall of trees on either side. One can just make out the heads of horses and the huddled figures of men on the limbers, too tired to know that we have halted. Usually when I enquire, I find that the sleepers were on guard or picket the night previous. We let them sleep on. They are wise; none of us know how far we have to go or how many nights of wakefulness lie before us.

Behind the darkness I can hear the drivers lifting up the feet of their horses and feeling for stones. Good boys, these drivers! They love their beasts and speak to them as pals. There’s so much discipline that one doesn’t get much time for loving in the army. I remember a march on this same road when the drivers were so frozen that they had to be lifted out of their saddles; no one had the strength to unfasten a bit till he had thawed his fingers between the horse’s back and the saddle-blanket. Yet there wasn’t one man who quit when we limped into our muddy standings. Every gunner and driver went to work on the horses, grooming them with a will and trying to make them comfortable before he thought of himself—and this, not because it was ordered, but because he realised through his own misery the forlornness of his four-footed comrades. Good boys, all of them! I think the Lord of Compassion, when the final reckoning comes, will remember kindnesses even to horses. When he judges those drivers, he’ll not forget the bitter cold of that winter’s march and what it meant to stand grooming in the snow and sleet when you were bitten to the bone and almost crying with misery. So he’ll pass over their swearing and the times when they got drunk, and he’ll say, pointing to the horses who will also be in Heaven, “inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me.” If that should happen, the drivers will be most awfully surprised, because according to their standards they only did their duty.

Some of the chaps in my section, which is the leading and senior section of the battery, try to ask me questions as I pass.

“Are we going far, sir?”

“Are we going out for training?”

“Do you think, sir, that it’s the Big Push at last?” I cannot see their faces, but I recognise them by their voices. They are drawn from every class of society. Some of them were college boys, some were mechanics, some day-laborers, some adventurers, some came out of gaol to join. Now only one quality lifts one man above another—his courage. Their questions are asked from all kinds of motives—friendliness, curiosity, nervousness. I am conscious of an atmosphere of tension throughout the battery. It seems a shame that, they should be told nothing. In no other game in the world would you march men to their death, without so much as warning them that it was to their death that they were going. From one of my questioners—a man who was wounded eight months ago and has just re joined us—I pick up a significant piece of information.

“I can see you’re not telling, sir, but I know. It’s to the Big Push that we’re going. And here’s why I know—when we left England, they were emptying every camp—sending drafts to France secretly every night. When I got to our Corps Reinforcement Camp, not thirty kilometres from here, I found the place so jammed that you could hardly find a space to spread your blanket. With the men they have there, the Corps must be fifty per cent over-strength. That means just one thing, sir——that we’re getting ready for fifty per cent casualties.”

“Perhaps,” I answer him, “but, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about it.”

I reach the centre section, which Tubby Grain is commanding. Tubby is a plump little officer and rides a wicked little Indian pony as well-fleshed as himself.

“The Major’s compliments, and he wants you to look over your section and report on it,” I tell him.

His reply is, as usual, insubordinate and cheery. “Holy, jumping cat-fish! What does the Major think I am? Don’t I always look over my section when there’s a halt?” And then confidentially, “I say, old top, what about Bully Beef and Suzette?”

I tell him that I’m on my way to find out. As I ride away he shouts after me the latest catchword from Blighty, “How’s your father?” To which, if you are in the know, the proper reply is, “Very well, thanks. He still has his baggy pants on.” I’m in too much of a hurry to give the correct countersign, so Tubby facetiously sends a mounted bombadier after me, who catches me up while I’m speaking to Gus Ed wine, the commander of the left and rear section. The bombadier salutes without a smile and sits to attention, waiting for me to take notice of him in the darkness.

“Well, what is it, Bombadier?”

“Mr. Grain’s compliments, sir, and if you meet his father, would you tell him that he really ought to have his baggy pants on these cold nights.”

Gus gaffaws and steals my dynamite by sending a return message: “My compliments to Mr. Grain, and tell him that it’s all right; Suzette is repairing his father’s baggy pants.” Then to me, “But how about Suzette? I went to look for her three hours before we left the wagon-lines; her bivouac was pulled down, and she and Bully Beef weren’t anywhere in sight. I didn’t like to ask because——. Well, you know, if we’re going to buck Army regulations, there are some things that most of us shouldn’t know too much about. If the General or the Colonel asks questions and you don’t know, you can’t tell. Ignorance saves a lot of lying.”

At the tail of the column I find the transport—the G. S. wagons, the water-cart, the officers’ mess-cart, the cook-cart, the shoeing-smith’s cart—looking humpy and nomadic as a travelling circus. The prisoners are there on foot with their escort, A group of stragglers are regaining their wind before reporting back to their proper sections. Mongrel curs, which we have adopted in our travels, yap down at me from the tarpaulin-covered mountains of stores or run sniffing about the heels of the horses. This house-keeping portion of our military life is in the care of the Captain. It is here, if anywhere, that I shall get the news I want.

I find Heming with the Quartermaster, directing the re-packing of some bales of hay which have shifted with the bumping of the journey. It always makes me smile to watch him engaged upon an unimaginative and practical task; he still has the aloofness of the artist. Beneath his khaki I can still discover the privileged dreamer whom the world flattered and who scarcely knew how to tie his own shoe-lace. He has compelled himself to become practical; but if the war were to end tomorrow, he would at once cease to be a soldier and fall back into his old way of life. I believe in his secret heart it is just that falling back that he dreads; out here he has learnt to be lean as a rapier. He loathes the thought of again becoming self-applauding and flabby. If the price of keeping lean is “going west” on the battlefield, he is perfectly content. To quote his own words, “There’s nothing leaner than a skeleton.”

“Captain Homing!”

“Hulloa, Chris! Pretty black, isn’t it? I didn’t see you. What’s your trouble?”

“A message from the Major.” I sink my voice. “He wants to know what you’ve done about Bully Beef and Suzette?”

“Suzette!” I can’t see his face. As he pronounces her name, he sucks the air through his teeth the way a man does when he shudders. Then, “Look here, does the Major really want to know what I’ve done with them?”

“He told me to find out.”

“But if he knows, he ought to take action. If he doesn’t take action, he becomes my accomplice and may get into trouble with those higher up. He’d better take it for granted that we left them behind at Vimy, unless——”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he really does wish that we had left them behind.”

“So——so we didn’t leave them behind?”

“Hand your horse over to one of the chaps,” he says; “you shall see for yourself.”

We go on foot towards the wagon on which the bales of hay were being re-packed. The job is all finished now; the tarpaulin has been pulled tightly over the top and roped down. The Quartermaster is standing in rear of the wagon as though he were on guard. He’s an old soldier who has fought through many wars; he wears the African ribbon and several Indian decorations. He’s a big, comfortable sort of man, with an immense stomach and a body over six foot high. He has a wart on the right side of his nose, which he rubs thoughtfully when he talks to you. His voice is thick, as though his throat were grown up with fat. Of all our noncommissioned officers he’s the kindest. He plays the part of a father to the chaps, and has saved many a young soldier from going on the wrong slant. His name is Dan Turpin—“Big Dan.” The only beast of sufficient strength to carry him is an ex-Toronto fire-engine horse, called “Little Dan”—not that he is little, but to distinguish him from his master. As we approach, Big Dan is singing to himself in a sepulchral voice,

Old soldiers never die

They simply fade away.

It would take more than a drive against the Huns to get Dan’s wind up.

“Quarter!”

“Yes sir.”

We hear his heels click together and the jingle of his spurs.

“Is the wagon re-packed all right?”

“All correct, sir.”

“Just loosen the flap of the tarpaulin at the back; I want to see for myself.”

The rope securing the flap is untied and we slip our heads under the tarpaulin. Carefully, so that none of the light may spill on to the road and give us away to aeroplanes, Heming turns on his flash. At first the illumination is blinding; then one sees that the bales of hay have been so stacked as to leave a hollow. Inside the hollow someone stirs, sighs and turns over, disturbed by the light. The figure is slight and covered by an officer’s trench-coat. Heming shifts the flash, so that it creeps along the body and reveals the face. Suzette! Her khaki tunic is unhooked and unbuttoned at the neck. Bully Beef lies snuggled in her arms, with his small head hidden against her breast. Her soldier’s cap has slipped aside and her hair, which was like honey and sunshine, has been cut square against the neck. From beneath the trench-coat I see that she is wearing puttees. I understand—she will pass for a man now. But why does she want to accompany us into danger? Is she so desperately alone and fed-up with life? And Heming, why does he——? She opens her eyes and smiles sleepily, knowing that we are friends.

From farther up the column we hear the order being shouted back, “Get mounted the drivers.” The flash goes out. “Good-night, Suzette.” The tarpaulin is lowered anil tied into place. From far ahead comes the groaning of guns and ammunition-wagons taking up the march.

All night as I ride, there burns in my brain the picture of that refugee French girl with her fatherless child, journeying with us towards the Calvary from which all the civilian world is fleeing. She is escaping towards death. And I think of another mother, no less a soldier-woman, who fled by Eastern highways that she might bring her son back to the death from which she fled, in order that men might live better.

Suzette! Why does she accompany us? She knows that we need her love, perhaps. That knowledge brings her very near to the peasant mother of Nazareth.

The Test of Scarlet: A Romance of Reality

THE TEST OF SCARLET

A Romance of Ideality

By Coningsby Dawson

New York: John Lane Company London

1919

THE TEST OF SCARLET

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

BOOK II—THE MARCH TO CONQUEST

I

II

III

IV