With Haig on the Somme Part 4

The mater rigged that girl out from top to toe, and paid her jolly well, too, and Van Drissel had the run of the house, and then went away with three boxes of the brigadier's cigars into the bargain. A German isn't a human being when you come to look at it--he's just a mean beast, a bully when he's top dog, and a grovelling worm when he's cornered. Does your crush take many prisoners, Dan?"

Dan Dunn smiled, and his faultless teeth gleamed in the coffee-brown of his face.

"Am I compelled to answer that question, your wors.h.i.+p?" he said, with an odd twinkle in his grey eyes, but he had already answered it to their complete satisfaction. "Do you?" he said.

"A few Saxons now and again, when they put up their hands," replied Captain Bob. "They're sick to death of the whole business, but Prussians or Bavarians, no. We've 'had some,' and we're not looking for more trouble."

Smithers made his appearance from the adjoining dug-out, which was their kitchen, and when Bob had fixed up the folding table and Dennis had dragged a Tate sugar box, which acted as cupboard, into the centre of the floor, they drank hot tea, which was good, and ate sardines and bread and b.u.t.ter, and finished up with jam, which Dan Dunn pa.s.sed with an apologetic grin.

"No, thanks; we had enough of that at Anzac," he said. "Forty flies to the spoonful and enteric to follow. Our boys put in a requisition for apricot so that you could see them better, but it didn't come off."

After tea they smoked and talked over things, especially the new divisions that were marching up in a never-ending stream, and the huge sh.e.l.l stores at the artillery dumps, which had struck Dan Dunn very forcibly as his battalion pa.s.sed them. And then Bob, having duties to attend to, went away in the gathering dusk, and they hung a ground sheet over the door and lit a candle, and Dan, with his huge arms behind his head, told in his quiet drawl of Quinn's Post and Lone Pine, and had hard things to say about the Higher Command, to all of which Dennis listened, enthralled, with his elbows on his knees.

At five minutes to ten by the wristlet watch there came a cough from the other side of the ground sheet, and Dan picked himself up.

"Right-o, Hawke!" called Dennis, with a glance at the watch. "Here's a spare revolver for you, Dan, or would you rather have a rifle?"

"Rifle's in the way if it's a long crawl," said his cousin. "I'll take the Smith and Wesson, old man."

Dennis settled his cap firmly on his head and extinguished the candle.

On either side of the door of the dug-out, as they pulled aside the ground sheet and came up the steps, a dark figure loomed--Harry Hawke and his chum, Tiddler.

Against the lighter grey of the sky one could make out the ragged edge of the sandbags, and a little way off the rosy glow from a brazier showed through the trench mist which hung low over the ground.

"The listening post knows we're coming through 'em, sir; they're lying out in front of the bay on the left," volunteered Hawke.

"Very well," said Dennis in a low voice, "the idea is this: we want to strike a bee-line--barring sh.e.l.l holes, of course--straight out to their wire. You and Tiddler will keep twenty yards behind to cover us if necessary, but no firing unless you are absolutely obliged. You understand that?"

Both men whispered "Yus, sir!" in a ready chorus, and Dennis led the way to the bay in the trench, and climbed on to the fire step.

Another figure stood motionless there, his rifle on a sandbag before him, and everything was unusually still.

"Anything moving?" said Dennis, in the man's ear.

"Haven't known it so quiet all the week, sir," was the reply. "But don't forget there's a machine-gun yonder, thirty paces to the left of the willow stump, and they generally shove one of their posts out in front of that, sir."

"I won't forget," said Dennis. "Come on, Dan! Over we go!" And the next moment four dark forms clambered across the parapet and dropped on to their faces on the other side.

A little way out, glued to the ground with their eyes and ears wide open, our listening post lay, and as they crawled towards it one of the men tapped with the toe of his boot to let them know that their coming had been heard.

A long way off to southward, so far that it came only as a dull booming, the German guns were sh.e.l.ling the French lines intermittently, and there was the sharp bark of rifles to the north.

"How long do you calculate it will take us to reach their wire, Baker?"

whispered Dennis to the last man of the listening post as he crawled up beside him.

"Somewhere about ten minutes, sir," was the reply. "There's one biggish crump-hole straight ahead, and two more on the left a bit farther on, and there's a tidy lot of dead lying out there."

Shoulder to shoulder Dennis and Dan crept forward across that No Man's Land, the wind rustling in the tangled gra.s.s, bringing with it the acrid odour of unburied corpses. Dan's hand encountered one of them, and he nudged his cousin to work away more to the right.

This brought them to the edge of the first crump-hole, and glancing every few yards at the luminous dial, they kept on for some distance unchecked.

"We ought to be on it now," murmured Dennis. "It's a quarter of an hour since we left the listening post." And he felt cautiously to the full extent of his arms, but without encountering an upright standard.

They did not know it, but they had pa.s.sed through a gap!

"Hold on!" whispered the Australian; "I thought I heard something quite close on the left there."

Dennis heard it, too, at the same moment. It was like the solemn rattle of earth falling into a newly made grave.

"It's only the chalk settling in those other crump-holes Baker warned us about," he said, after they had listened breathlessly for a few moments.

"Our two fellows must have gone wide and struck them."

But he was wrong. The crump-holes were on the left, far behind, if they had only known it; and it was from their right rear that a sudden m.u.f.fled exclamation came out of the stillness.

"'Evins!" said Tiddler, as he felt the sharp barbs of a low-stretched strand bury themselves in the slack of his pants. "'Arry, I'm 'ung up!"

"Shut yer 'ead! What's the trouble?" growled his companion; and as Harry Hawke groped for his mate he shook the strand; the well-known jangle of an empty bully-beef tin warning them all that they had struck one of the simplest expedients of modern warfare, freely used by both sides.

A tin dangling on the barbed wire does not ring like a cracked bell unless somebody touches it; and from the darkness just in front and above their heads, Dan and Dennis heard a guttural whisper, and, realising that they were immediately under the enemy's parapet, lay as flat as playing cards.

"It's those two fellows of mine," breathed Dennis in his cousin's ear.

"But how the d.i.c.kens have we pa.s.sed the wire without giving the alarm?"

Dan, with recollections of Anzac fresh upon him, remembered that slither of earth from those crump-holes on the left.

"I'll bet you anything there's a party gone out to your trench, and they've s.h.i.+fted a section of the wire to let them through," he replied.

"We may meet them on the way back. Don't move! We know, anyhow, that their new wire's not fixed!"

Voices were humming above them now, and the German trench guards were evidently on the alert. Still nothing happened, and Dennis was just congratulating himself that their presence there was unsuspected when there was a sharp sound from the top of the sandbags, and a pistol light soared above their heads, illuminating the darkness.

For a moment everything was distinctly visible, although they themselves were so far hidden by the German sandbags; but as Dennis looked back over his shoulder, he saw the luckless Tiddler lying p.r.o.ne and helpless in the open, and the white face of Hawke telling out strong in the glare.

A hoa.r.s.e shout from the German trench went up as the pistol flare died down, showing that they had been seen.

"Give us a hand, matey; I ain't 'arf caught!" entreated Tiddler, who, resting princ.i.p.ally on his face and one knee, was making violent efforts to disengage himself.

"'Old still!" growled Hawke, producing his nippers and snapping the strand in two places, leaving a short piece about a foot in length embedded in the tough cloth. "Now yer clear; back out of it." And as he seized his rifle a green star-sh.e.l.l soared overhead, and there was an ear-splitting screech above them.

"That's high velocity," whispered Dan Dunn, as they heard the splosh of a heavy sh.e.l.l in rear of the British parapet, followed by a deafening explosion and a red flame. "We've drawn them this time, old man, but I can't make out why these beggars in the trench here don't fire. I'm for making a bolt for it before they start. What do you say?"

Dennis gathered his legs under him, and signalled with his arm to Hawke and Tiddler to go back, and expecting nothing but death for themselves, the two cousins suddenly jumped up under the very noses of the men lining the parapet behind them, and sprinted for the gap in the barbed wire.

One bullet sang by Dan's ear, and another spurted up the chalk dust a few feet ahead of Dennis, and as the vicious rat-tat of the machine-gun farther down the trench opened, they found themselves at the edge of a deep crump-hole, into which they rolled.

It was cover from the machine-gun, at any rate, but a cry of surprise broke from the young lieutenant's lips as he landed on something soft at the bottom of the hole, something which gripped him with a similar cry of surprise.

A sh.e.l.l-burst eighty yards away drowned the crack of Dan Dunn's revolver, and two out of the three Germans who had taken refuge in the same place rolled back and lay very still, just as another star-sh.e.l.l, a bright white one this time, broke above them and lit up the hole like day.