With Haig on the Somme Part 1

With Haig on the Somme.

by D. H. Parry.

CHAPTER I

An Uncensored Letter Read Aloud

Private Harry Hawke, of the 2/12th Battalion Royal Reeds.h.i.+re Regiment (T.F.), sat on the step of the fire trench, his back against the parapet, busy with the bolt of his rifle.

There were two things he loved more than anything else in life, and that rifle was one of them. The other was his platoon commander, Captain Bob Dashwood, who chanced to be coming along the communication at the moment, and the c.o.c.kney private's eyes lit up as he saw him.

"Hallo, Hawke! All quiet?" said Captain Dashwood with a jerk of his head in the direction of the German lines, only one hundred and twenty yards across the mangled strip of Dead Man's Land that intervened.

"Quiet as the bloomin' grave, sir," replied Harry Hawke with a grin, though he had almost to shout to make himself heard.

A howitzer battery was sh.e.l.ling the enemy from the wood on the left, and the Germans were replying with "crumps," which luckily all went wide.

"Seen anything more of that sniper that picked Marshall and Brown off last night?" questioned the captain.

"Not likely, sir. I got 'im 'arf an hour after we took over the relief,"

grinned the marksman of A Company, pointing with an oily finger to a fresh notch cut on the rifle stock. "He tumbled out of the willer tree flat, same as if you chucked a kipper from the top of a bus."

Dashwood smiled, and the smile was reflected with interest in the wizened, mahogany-coloured face that looked up at his own from under the rim of the steel helmet.

"You're a terrible chap, Hawke," he said. "How many does that make?"

"Seventeen with the rifle, sir, but I've kept no tally of all I've done in wiv the bayonet," and he caressed his beloved weapon.

"Don't get up, Hawke," said his officer, moving along the trench. "I'm only going to take a squint at the beggars," and as the private dropped back into his seat again, Bob Dashwood put his foot on the fire step and raised his head above the parapet.

He looked across a broken waste, full of sh.e.l.l holes and mine craters, with a line of barbed wire fencing that followed the curve of the white enemy trench capped by sandbags.

The marksman, having got rid of an imaginary speck of rust that had troubled his soul, replaced the bolt, and was putting away the oil rag, when there was a sharp stifled gasp, followed by a slithering fall, and Captain Dashwood lay in a heap among the white wet mud at the bottom of the trench. His cap had spun round and dropped into a sump, and the blood was pouring down his face and neck as Hawke reached him.

"'Strewth, he's dead, and it's my fault!" he moaned, as a sergeant and several other men ran up.

"It was n.o.body's fault but his own," said the sergeant savagely. "I've warned him a dozen times--and he's not dead, either. Pa.s.s the word there. We must get him down to the aid post sharp."

While Hawke supported the battered head upon his knee the sergeant hastily applied a field dressing, and when a couple of bearers came running along the communication trench they laid the wounded man carefully on the stretcher, Hawke watching the receding figures with a dazed look until the angle hid them from view.

"Now, you rotter, I've got to get you set!" he muttered, bending down and peering into the periscope with his rifle gripped tightly in his hands.

Two or three days later news came up that the captain, still unconscious, had been sent to London straightway from the base hospital, and then for several weeks they heard no more of him, and a fresh notch cut on the stock of the Mark III. gave Private Harry Hawke very little satisfaction.

"If I hadn't told him that all was clear he'd never have shoved his 'ead over the blinkin' sandbags," he kept muttering to himself. "Home ain't like home without a mother, and I reckon 'e was father and mother to us all art 'ere. Wish I was dead--I'm fed up!"

"By Jove, mater, this is good news indeed. Fancy Dennis being gazetted to our battalion after all!" and Captain Bob's face lit up as he looked across the breakfast table with the telegram that had just arrived in his hand. "Only got a week's kit leave too, which means that he's to join at once. I'll put him through his facings and show him just what to get and what not to get, and if the Medical Board will only pa.s.s me fit for service again we can go over together. He will be here this morning too!"

A chorus of delight went up from the four youngsters on one side of the table, and Master Billy Dashwood, aged eight, clapped his hands and overturned the milk jug.

"Billy, Billy!" said his mother reprovingly. "When will you learn to behave yourself and to take care?"

"When will you let me join the Boy Scouts?" retorted her youngest born, gazing up at the ceiling with the face of an innocent cherub, and Mrs.

Dashwood was obliged to smile as she looked at her eldest son.

"Your father will be very pleased, Bob," she said. "There have been Dashwoods in the regiment for generations, and it is nice to feel that both my boys will be in a battalion in their father's brigade."

"You should be very proud, madame, that yours is such a military family," said a young man who sat opposite to the children with his back to the tall windows. "Let me see, you will now have four members serving at this great crisis?"

"Yes, it is an honour of which I am indeed more than proud, Monsieur Van Drissel," said his hostess.

"But Uncle Eric doesn't count--he's only at the War Office, and they do nothing there," interposed the irrepressible Billy.

"I shall send you out of the room if you're rude," said his mother. "The War Office is a most important branch."

It was a pleasant room in a charming house, whose grounds sloped down to the ornamental water in Regent's Park, and if one had not known it, one might have imagined it to be one of those countless English homes into which the war had not penetrated.

Captain Bob, looking very different now from the crumpled figure at the bottom of the trench, had escaped death from the sniper's bullet by a fraction of an inch, but he had made quick recovery, and before his month's sick furlough was at an end he was already secretly yearning to get back again. He knew that there was a great push in contemplation, and his only fear was that he might not be in it.

Everything in that room spoke of comfort and money, and everything was very English, except the young man with his back to the windows, and the young woman with the dark eyes on the opposite side of the table.

Lieutenant Van Drissel, of the Belgian army, whose wound, received in the fighting outside Dixmude long months before, obstinately refused to heal, found himself in very pleasant quarters, thanks to the hospitality of Mrs. Dashwood, who had also given his sister an asylum as French governess to the small fry.

Like Captain Bob, he was in khaki, but the contrast between the two officers was very striking. The one was lean and athletic in every line of his figure, with laughing grey eyes in a handsome face; the other, a stolid, fair-haired Fleming, whose square visage would have been rather colourless and commonplace but for the pleasant smile which showed his white teeth.

He followed Mrs. Dashwood's every movement with the expression of a grateful dog, and waited upon her hand and foot, doing his best to justify his presence there.

"Ah, you have better luck than I, Dashwood," he said in perfect English, with a doleful shrug of his shoulders.

"Don't worry, Van Drissel; keep smiling, as my fellows sing," laughed Captain Bob encouragingly. "Your turn will come, and we shall both march into Berlin one of these days."

"It is a long time," said the Belgian lieutenant gravely. "Even Ottilie here loses heart," and he looked across the table at his sister.

Mademoiselle Ottilie, as dark as her brother was fair, heaved a deep sigh and made a funny little gesture with her hands. "For myself, I dread to go back to poor Belgium," she murmured in broken English. "I wish it might be possible that perhaps I might stay here for evaire--you are all to me so kind."

"Mamma," said Billy with a perfectly grave face as he mimicked her accent, "I wish it might be possible that perhaps I could have that last piece of toast, eh?"

"Billy, go out of the room," said Mrs. Dashwood severely, but Mademoiselle Ottilie threw an impulsive arm round the young monkey's neck, and looked appealingly at his mother.

"Oh, no, please not, madame. He is so young," she interposed.

"Well," said Captain Bob, rising, "I think it's the weather that has given you the hump, old chap. Still raining," and he glanced at the windows. "What do you say to a game of billiards? I'll play you three hundred up if you like."

"With all my heart," replied Van Drissel, getting up with a limp and opening the door for Mrs. Dashwood, and the two officers went into the billiard-room, whence they were no more seen for a couple of hours.