With Haig on the Somme Part 42

In a flash of time Dennis saw many things: the slanting rain on our helmets, the wisp of fog that rolled lazily between him and that Homeric combat. He recognised his brother, half a head taller than anybody else, thrusting and hewing like a hero of old, and Littlewood working a Lewis gun on the top of the sandbags, the shots just clearing our own fellows'

heads.

From an embrasure in the angle of the salient above him the hateful hammering of a German machine-gun began. The brutes were playing into the melee, regardless of their own men, in a frantic endeavour to stop the Reeds.h.i.+res' rush, and as A Company recoiled before that stream of bullets, Dennis drew his revolver.

Already one of the Prussian battalions had swarmed over into their own trench, paying no heed to the solitary figure in the black shadow as they pa.s.sed him, and, marking the position of the gun, Dennis scrambled up in their wake with the agility of a cat, and darted into the gun emplacement single-handed, just as young Wetherby and Hawke saw him and gave a shout of recognition.

The Germans were chained to the piece, and as he shot the last man of the gun crew, his brother officer overtook him.

At his heels A Company had arrived with a heartening roar, and jumped down on to the crowded ma.s.s in the trench below them, a perfect forest of arms going up as the demoralised runaways bellowed for mercy.

"Bravo, Hawke! Go it, boys!" shouted Dennis, almost overturning Wetherby.

"My hat!" exclaimed the boy, as they gripped each other to save falling into the tightly packed trench below them, "that was no end of a stunt of yours. If we hadn't s.h.i.+fted forward we should have been killed to a man. Hadn't left our position five minutes before their sh.e.l.ls found us!"

"And I never knew you'd moved," said Dennis. "Look at those chaps bolting into that dug-out there! Give 'em a couple of bombs!"

Young Wetherby hurled two Mills grenades into an opening in the wall of the German parados, and the double explosion was followed by a chorus of piercing screams. As for the trench, it was piled up with bodies five and six deep, for the Prussians were st.u.r.dy men and fought like wild cats.

But already the Highland battalion on the Reeds.h.i.+res' left had come up.

Other battalions away to the east were making good, and the brigade was carrying all before it.

"Forward!" rang the whistles, and, leaving the supports to consolidate, the leading battalions cleared the parados and pushed on.

It was a wild flounder over the sodden ground, three hundred yards of it, with sh.e.l.l-holes where the rain took you up to your armpits, but the Reeds.h.i.+res had tasted the glories of conquest, and there was no holding them back, if, indeed, anyone had wished to do so.

"Next stop, Berlin!" yelled Harry Hawke, tripping up as the words left his mouth, and sliding twice his own length to the edge of a crump-hole, into which another inch would have plunged him head foremost.

"Stick it, Den!" shouted a voice in his ear, and he saw that it was his brother Bob, a red smear on his cheek and a light in his eyes Dennis had only seen there on the football field.

"Come on, old chap!" yelled the C.O., "every fifty yards is worth a monarch's ransom to Haig. Let's see if we can't carry that wood yonder while their searchlights last"; and he pointed to the ridge beyond the captured trench. "I'd like to know who silenced that machine-gun just now. I suppose half a dozen men will claim it to-morrow, while the real chap may be dead."

"Oh no, he isn't," laughed a voice.

"Shut your head, young Wetherby, unless you want it punched!" was Dennis's angry retort, but his fellow subaltern only laughed the louder.

"It was Dennis," said the boy; "he went in alone and shot the whole lot, Major!"

Bob Dashwood opened his lips to speak, but made a mental note instead, for the searchlights had been suddenly withdrawn, and were now concentrated in one blinding blaze about fifty yards in front of the charging brigade.

The German gunners also had shortened their fuses, transferring their barrage to the spot, where they poured in a hail of sh.e.l.ls through which no man might try to pa.s.s and live.

"Halt there--hang you--halt!" roared the Major commanding; "don't you see we've reached our limit for to-night?"

The whistles shrilled amid the red and yellow sh.e.l.l bursts, and the victory-maddened men, realising the impossible, even before the word reached them, pulled up and looked to their right.

"Dig in--dig in!" shouted somebody.

"No, fall back, you fools!" bellowed a stentorian sergeant, and, checked in full career, they fell back by companies in any sort of order under a rain of shrapnel.

Bob and his brother, still side by side, were retiring after them at a brisk walk, when a man of Dennis's section pa.s.sed them at the double, going in the direction of the redoubt which they had carried, and they saw him run up alongside Hawke, who was a few yards ahead of them.

The crash of the sh.e.l.ls in their rear drowned Hawke's exclamation, but they saw him stop and turn, look under his hand at the barrage, and dart back towards it like a hare.

"Hawke, stop! Are you mad?" cried Bob, making a grab at him as he went by, but Hawke's face was white and set, and he paid no heed as they watched him curiously.

"I know!" shouted Dennis in his brother's ear, "his chum's. .h.i.t. Look at that, Bob--there's devotion for you! Those two fellows are the greatest toughs in the regiment, and they're inseparables."

They saw the little c.o.c.kney private fling himself down on his knees beside a fallen man, tear with both hands at the front of his tunic, and then fling his arms up above his head with a tragic gesture of despair.

Then he slung his rifle, and, stooping again, dragged the figure up, hoisted him across his shoulder, and came staggering back under the heavy load, the heroic group telling blackly out against the searchlights' white glare.

A sh.e.l.l burst thirty feet way, but the little c.o.c.kney came doggedly on, and they waited for him, even retracing their steps to meet him.

"What's up, Hawke?" shouted Dennis; "do you want us to give you a hand?"

And he was about to add something else, but the look of piteous entreaty in Hawke's eyes checked the words.

"I'd rather take him in myself, sir," he said hoa.r.s.ely; "it's true what they says in the papers abart making a man a new face in the 'orspitals, ain't it? They'll be able to patch 'im up, don't you think, sir?"

Dennis and Bob exchanged a look, for the savage earnestness. .h.i.t them both hard from its very hopelessness.

Tiddler's visage was nothing but a hideous pulp.

And they knew in a moment that poor Tiddler had already pa.s.sed beyond all human aid; Major Dashwood made another mental note, to be placed upon official record later on--if he himself should be spared!

At the mouth of a communication Hawke paused to readjust his burden. The limp figure was somehow slipping from his grasp, and, seeing at last, he realised that his errand had been in vain.

As he stood looking down at the crumpled thing that a few minutes before had been a living, moving part of the great war machine, Dennis laid a hand on his shoulder.

"He was a good plucked 'un, Hawke, and you did your best for him," said Dennis; "now you've got to keep a stiff upper lip."

"Yus, I know, sir," was the husky reply, as something rolled glistening down the dirty cheek. "'Im and me 'listed the same day, and Tiddler was the only pal I ever 'ad."

He turned a fierce and flas.h.i.+ng eye towards the enemy barrage; an eye that positively flamed vengeance to come, and then he pointed with his hand.

"See that, sir?" he cried hoa.r.s.ely, "ain't that Mr. Wetherby?"

A long way out across the wet slope, where the raging Reeds.h.i.+res had taken heavy toll of the flying foe before the German gunners had drawn that barrier of fire across the way, a figure was crawling back towards them, dragging one useless leg behind him.

A very wicked piece of shrapnel had carried young Wetherby's knee-pan away, and, lodging in the joint, gave the sufferer excruciating agony every time he knocked it. More than once he almost fainted, and each time the wounded knee jarred against the rough ground young Wetherby groaned through his clenched teeth.

"Why don't the stretcher bearers come out?" he moaned.

He could see the strong enemy trench from which they had made their final advance, and knew by the bustle there that active preparations were being made to hold it should the Prussians counter-attack again, which was not unlikely.

The enemy searchlights still concentrated upon it, and the barrage never ceased to boom and burst behind him with useless expenditure of sh.e.l.ls which had already served their object.

No doubt behind that barrage the discomfited Prussian battalions were being reorganised, but young Wetherby had no thought of them, all his energies were directed to getting in as soon as possible that the doctor might ease his pain.

An unusually heavy burst of shrapnel cut up the ground round about him as he gained the crest of a bank, where three dead men lay piled one on top of the other, and, taking advantage of that gruesome cover, a Prussian officer was crouching on his face. Wetherby paused a moment as he came alongside him.