VI

VISEEING REDTheMess, having finished reading the letters just brought in, were looking through the home papers. Harvey, who used to be a bank clerk, giggled over a page inPunchand passed it round. “Pretty true, too, isn’t it?” he said. The page was one of those silly jolly little drawings by Bateman of men with curly legs, and the pictures showed typical scenes from the old life of an average City clerk, trotting to business, playing dominoes, and so on, and the last one of a fellow tearing over the trenches in a charge with a real teeth-gritted, blood-in-his-eye look, and the title of the lot was “It’s the Same Man.”Everyone grinned at it and said “Pretty true,” or something like that. “It reminds me ...” said the Australian.Now this is the Australian’s story, which he said he had got from one of the fellowsin the show. For the truth or untruth I give no guarantee, but just tell the tale for what it’s worth.Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of thePunchpicture.When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be—well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anythingmore dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.Remembering this, it is easy to understand the consternation in Mrs. Teddy’s mind when, after the War had been running a year, Teddy announced that he was going to enlist. He was firm about it too. He had thought the whole thing out—house to be shut up, she to go stay with her mother, his separation allowance so much, and so much more in the bank to draw on, and so on. Her remonstrances he met so promptly that one can only suppose them anticipated. His health? Never had a day’s sickness, as she knew. His business prospects? The country’s prospectswere more important, and his Country Wanted Him. His “horror of blood”? Teddy twisted uneasily. “I’ve a horror of the whole beastly business,” he said—“of war and guns and shooting, of being killed, and ... of leaving you.” This was diplomacy of the highest, and the resulting interlude gently slid into an acceptance of the fact of his going.He went, and—to get along with the War—at last came to France, and with his battalion into the trenches. He had not risen above the rank of private, partly because he lacked any ambition to command, and in larger part because his superiors did not detect any ability in him to handle the rather rough-and-ready crowd who were in his lot. Far from army training and rations doing him physical harm, he throve on them, and even put on flesh. But because he was really a good sort, was always willing to lend any cash he had, take a fatigue for a friend, joke over hardships and laugh at discomforts, he was on excellent terms with his fellows. He shed a good many, if not all, of his suburbanpeace ways, was a fairly good shot on the ranges, and even acquired considerable skill and agility at bayonet practice. But he never quite shed his “horror of blood.” Even after he had been in action a time or two and had fired many rounds from his rifle, he had a vague hope each time he pulled trigger that his bullet might not kill a man, might at most only wound him enough to put him out of action. The first shell casualty he saw in their own ranks made him literally and actually sick, and even after he had seen many more casualties than he cared to think about he still retained a squeamish feeling at sight of them. And in his battalion’s share of The Push, where there was a good deal of close-quarter work and play with bombs and bayonet, he never had urgent need to use his bayonet, and when a party of Germans in a dug-out refused to surrender, and persisted instead in firing up the steps at anyone who showed at the top, Teddy stood aside and left the others to do the bombing-out.It was ridiculous, of course, that a fightingman who was there for the express purpose of killing should feel any qualms about doing it, but there it was.Then came the day when the Germans made a heavy counter-attack on the positions held by the Australians. The positions were not a complete joined-up defensive line along the outer front. The fighting had been heavy and bitter, and the German trenches which were captured had been so thoroughly pounded by shell fire that they no longer existed as trenches, and the Australians had to be satisfied with the establishment of a line of posts manned as strongly as possible, with plenty of machine-guns.Teddy’s battalion was not in this front fringe when the counter-attack, launched without any warning bombardment, flooded suddenly over the outer defences, surged heavily back, drove in the next lines, and broke and battered them in and down underfoot.Something like a couple of thousand yards in over our lines that first savage rush brought the Germans, and nearly twoscoreguns were in their hands before they checked and hesitated, and the Australian supports flung themselves in on a desperate counter-attack. The first part of the German programme was an undoubted and alarming success. The posts and strong points along our front were simply overwhelmed, or surrounded and cut off, and went under, making the best finish they could with the bayonet, or in some cases—well, Teddy Silsey and a good many other Australians saw just what happened in these other cases, and are not likely ever to forget it. The German attack—as in many historic cases in this war—appeared to fizzle out in the most amazing fashion after it had come with such speed and sweeping success for so far. Our guns, of course, were hard at work, and were doing the most appalling damage to the dense masses that offered as targets; but that would hardly account for the slackening of the rush, because the guns had waked at the first crash of rifle and bomb reports, and the Germans were under just about as severe a fire for the second half of their rush as they wereat the end of it when they checked. There appeared to be a hesitation about their movements, a confusion in their plans, a doubt as to what they ought to do next, that halted them long enough to lose the great advantage of their momentum. The first hurried counter-attack flung in their face was comparatively feeble, and if they had kept going should easily have been brushed aside. Thirty-odd guns were in their hands; and, most dangerous of all, one other short storm forward would have brought them swamping over a whole solid mass of our field guns—which at the moment were about the only thing left to hold back their attack—and within close rifle and machine-gun range of the fringe of our heavies. But at this critical stage, for no good reason, and against every military reason, they, as so often before, hesitated, and were lost. Another Australian counter-attack, this time much better organised and more solidly built, was launched headlong on their confusion. They gave ground a little in some places, tried to push on in others, halted and strove to securepositions and grip the trenches in others. The Australians, savagely angry at being so caught and losing so much ground, drove in on them, bombing, shooting, and bayoneting; while over the heads of the front-rank fighters the guns poured a furious tempest of shrapnel and high explosive on the masses that sifted and eddied behind. The issue hung in doubt for no more than a bare five minutes. The Germans who had tried to push on were shot and cut down; the parties that held portions of trench were killed or driven out; the waverers were rushed, beaten in, and driven back in confusion on the supports that struggled up through the tornado of shell-fire. Then their whole front crumpled, and collapsed, and gave, and the Australians began to recover their ground almost as quickly as they had lost it.Now Teddy Silsey, while all this was going on, had been with his company in a position mid-way across the depth of captured ground. He and about forty others, with two officers, had tried to hold the battered remnant of trench they were occupying, and did actuallycontinue to hold it after the rush of the German front had swept far past them. They were attacked on all sides, shot away their last cartridge, had their machine-guns put out of action by bombs, had about half their number killed, and almost every man of the remainder wounded. They were clearly cut off, with thousands of Germans between them and their supports, could see fresh German forces pressing on past them, could hear the din of fighting receding rapidly farther and farther back. The two officers, both wounded, but able more or less to stand up, conferred hastily, and surrendered.Of this last act Teddy Silsey was unaware, because a splinter of some sort, striking on his steel helmet, had stunned him and dropped him completely insensible. Two dead men fell across him as he lay, and probably accounted for the Germans at the moment overlooking him as they collected their prisoners.Teddy wakened to dim consciousness to find a number of Germans busily and confusedly engaged in setting the bit of trench in a state of defence. They trod on him andthe two dead men on top of him a good deal, but Teddy, slowly taking in his situation, and wondering vaguely what his next move should be, did the wisest possible thing under the circumstances—lay still.A little before this the Australian counter-attack had been sprung, and before Teddy had made up his mind about moving he began to be aware that the battle was flooding back on him. The Germans beside him saw it too, and, without any attempt to defend their position, clambered from the trench and disappeared from Teddy’s immediate view. Teddy crawled up and had a look out. It was difficult to see much at first, because there was a good deal of smoke about from our bursting shells, but as the counter-attack pushed on and the Germans went back, the shells followed them, and presently the air cleared enough for Teddy to see glimpses of khaki and to be certain that every German he saw was getting away from the khaki neighbourhood as rapidly as possible. In another minute a couple of Australians, hugging some machine-guns parts,tumbled into his trench, two or three others arrived panting, and in a moment the machine-gun was in action and streaming fire and bullets into the backs of any parties of Germans that crossed the sights.One of the new-comers, a sergeant, looked round and saw Teddy squatting on the broken edge of the trench and looking very sick and shaken. “Hullo, mate,” said the sergeant, glancing at the patch of coloured cloth on Teddy’s shoulder that told his unit. “Was you with the bunch in this hole when Fritz jumped you?” Teddy gulped and nodded. “You stopped one?” said the sergeant. “Where’d it get you?”“No,” said Teddy; “I—I think I’m all right. Got a bit of a bump on the head.”“’Nother bloke to say ‘Go’ bless the tin-’at makers’ in ’is prayers every night.” He turned from Teddy. “Isn’t it time we humped this shooter a bit on again, boys?” he said.“Looks like the Boche was steadyin’ up a bit,” said a machine-gunner. “An’ our line’s bumped a bit o’ a snag along on the left there.I think we might spray ’em a little down that way.”They slewed the gun in search of fresh targets, while from a broken trench some score yards from their front a gathering volume of rifle-fire began to pelt and tell of the German resistance stiffening.“Strewth,” growled the sergeant, “this is no bon! If we give ’em time to settle in—— Hullo,”—he broke off, and stared out in front over the trench edge—“wot’s that lot? They look like khaki. Prisoners, by cripes!”Every man peered out anxiously. Two to three hundreds yards away they could see emerging from the broken end of a communication trench a single file of men in khaki without arms in their hands, and with half a dozen rifle- and bayonet-armed Germans guarding them. Teddy, who was watching with the others, exclaimed suddenly. “It’s my lot,” he said. “That’s the captain—him with the red hair; and I recognise Big Mick, and Terry—Terry’s wounded—see him limp. That’s my mate Terry.”The firing on both sides had slacked for amoment, and none of the watchers missed one single movement of what followed. It is unpleasant telling, as it was unutterably horrible watching. The prisoners, except the two officers, who were halted above ground, were guided down into a portion of trench into which they disappeared. The guards had also remained above. What followed is best told briefly. The two officers, in full view of the watchers, were shot down as they stood, the rifle muzzles touching their backs. The Germans round the trench edge tossed bombs down on the men penned below. Before the spurting smoke came billowing up out of the trench, Teddy Silsey leaped to his feet with a scream, and flung himself scrambling up the trench wall. But the sergeant, with a gust of bitter oaths, gripped and held him. “Get to it there,” he snarled savagely at the men about the gun. “D’you want a better target?” The gun muzzle twitched and steadied and ripped out a stream of bullets. The Germans about the trench lip turned to run, but the storm caught and cut them down—except one or two whoducked down into the trench on top of their victims. Teddy found them there three minutes after, stayed only long enough to finish them, and ran on with the other Australians who swarmed yelling forward to the attack again. Others had seen the butchery, and those who had not quickly heard of it. Every group of dead Australians discovered as the line surged irresistibly forward was declared, rightly or wrongly, to be another lot of murdered prisoners. The advance went with a fury, with a storming rage that nothing could withstand. The last remnant of organised German defence broke utterly, and the supports coming up found themselves charged into, hustled, mixed up with, and thrown into utter confusion by the mob of fugitives and the line of shooting, bombing, bayoneting Australians that pressed hard on their heels.The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselvespenned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest—and there were anything over two thousand of them—were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting—shooting—shooting. ... Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough tosnatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire.And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message—“Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the —— ——!” with a shot after each sentence.And there was a killing. There were other results—the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their owndead—their murdered-prisoner dead—and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire.And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him——and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.”VIIAN AIR BARRAGETheGunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work—in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seenin the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.”Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning andan appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up.It sounds crazy, but then, as the Squadron protested, they, Guns especially, were crazy, and that’s all there was to it.But with these notions of theirs about the infallibility of machine-guns, and the range of their usefulness, you will understand how their minds leaped to machine-gun tactics when the Hun night-fliers began to come over and bomb around the ’drome. The first nightthey came Guns nearly broke his neck by falling into a deep hole in his mad rush to get to the anti-aircraft machine-guns on the ‘drome near the sheds, and he alternated between moping and cursing for three days because the Huns had gone before he could get a crack at them. He cheered up a lot when they came the next time and he and the R.O. shot away a few-million rounds, more or less. But as he didn’t fetch a feather out of them, and as the Huns dropped their eggs horribly close to the hangars, the two were not properly satisfied, and began to work out all sorts of protective schemes and sit up as long as the moon was shining in hopes of a bit of shooting.Their hopes were fully satisfied, or anyhow the Squadron’s more than were, because the Huns made a regular mark of the ’drome and strafed it night after night. And for all the rounds they shot, neither Guns nor the R.O. ever got a single bird, although they swore more than once that they were positive they had winged one. As none came down on our side of the lines, this claimwas a washout, and the two got quite worried about it and had to stand an unmerciful amount of chaff from the others on the dud shooting.After a bit they evolved a new plan. Careful investigation and inquiry of different pilots in the Squadron gave them the groundwork for the plan. In answer to questions, some of the pilots said that if they were in the place of the Huns and wanted to find the ‘drome in the dark, they would steer for the unusual-shaped clump of wood which lay behind the ’drome. Some said they would follow the canal, others the road, others various guides, but all agreed that the wood was the object the Huns would steer for. This found, all the pilots again agreed it was a simple matter to coast along the edge of the wood, which would show up a black blot on the ground in the moonlight, find the tongue or spur of trees that ran straight out towards the ’drome, and, keeping that line, must fly exactly over the hangars. One or two nights’ careful listening to the direction of the approaching and departing Hun engines confirmedthe belief that the Huns were working on the lines indicated, and after this was sure the plan progressed rapidly.The two machine-guns on the ’drome were trained and aimed in daylight to shower bullets exactly over the tip of the tongue of wood. A patent gadget invented by Guns allowed the gun-muzzles a certain amount of play up and down, play which careful calculation showed would pour a couple of streams of bullets across the end of the wood up and down a height extending to about a thousand feet, that is, 500 above and 500 below the level at which it was estimated the Huns usually flew on these night raids. It simply meant that as soon as the sound was judged to be near enough the two guns only had to open fire, to keep pouring out bullets to make sure that the Huns had to fly through the stream and “stop one” or more. It was, in fact, a simple air barrage of machine-gun bullets.With the plan perfected, the two enthusiasts waited quite impatiently for the next strafe. Fortunately the moon was up fairlyearly, so that now there was no need to sit up late for the shoot, and the second night after the preparations were complete, to the joy of Guns and the R.O. (and the discomfort of the others), there was a beautiful, still, moonlight night with every inducement for the Huns to come along.The two ate a hurried dinner with ears cocked for the first note of the warning which would sound when the distant noise of engines was first heard. Sure enough they had just reached the sweets when the signal went, and the two were up and off before the lights could be extinguished. They arrived panting at their stations to find the gun-crews all ready and waiting, made a last hasty examination to see everything was in order, and stood straining their ears for the moment when they reckoned the Huns would be approaching the barrage area, and when they judged the moment had arrived opened a long steady stream of fire. The drone of the first engine grew louder, passed through the barrage, and boomed on over the ’drome without missing a beat. There came the oldfamiliar “Phe-e-e-w—BANG! ... e-e-e-ew—BANG!” of a couple of falling bombs, and the first engine droned on and away. Two minutes later another was heard, and Guns and the R.O., no degree disheartened or discouraged by their first failure, let go another stream of lead, keeping the gun-muzzles twitching up and down as rapidly as they could. The second Hun repeated the performance of the first; and a third did likewise. After it was all over Guns and the R.O. held a council and devised fresh and more comprehensive plans, which included the use of some extra guns taken from the machines. For the moment we may leave them, merely mentioning that up to now and even in their newer plans they entirely neglected any consideration of rather an important item in their performance, namely, the ultimate billet of their numerous bullets.From the point of view of the defence it is an important and unpleasant fact that an air barrage eventually returns to the ground. Guns and the R.O. had been pumping out bullets at a rate of some hundreds per minuteeach, and all those bullets after missing their target had to arrive somewhere on the earth. The gunners’ interest in them passed for the moment as soon as the bullets had failed to hit their mark, and afterwards they came to remember with amazement that ever they could have been so idiotically unconsidering.Some distance from the ’drome, and in a line beyond the tip of the wood, there stood a number of Nissen huts which housed a Divisional Staff, and the inevitable consequence was that those up-and-down twitching gun-muzzles sprayed showers of lead in gusts across and across the hutments. The General Commanding the Division was in the middle of his dinner with about five staff officers round the table when the first “aeroplane over” warning went on this particular night of the new air barrage. The lights in the Mess hut were not extinguished, because full precautions had been taken some nights before to have the small window-space fully and closely screened against the possibility of leakage of a single ray of light. One ortwo remarks were made quite casually about the nasty raiding habits of the Huns, but since no bombs had come near in the earlier raids, and the conclusion was therefore reasonable that the Divisional H.Q. had not been located, nobody there worried much over the matter, and dinner proceeded.They all heard the drone of the Hun engine, and, because it was a very still night, they heard it rather louder than usual. Someone had just remarked that they seemed to be coming closer to-night, when the further remarks were violently interrupted by a clashing and clatteringB-bang...br-r-rip-rap,ba-bang-bang, the splintering, ripping sound of smashed wood, the crash, clash tinkle of a bottle burst into a thousand fragments on the table under their startled eyes. The barrage bullets had returned to earth.The group at the table had time for no more than a pause of astonishment, a few exclamations, a hasty pushing back of chairs, whenrip-rap-bang-bang-bangdown came the second spray of bullets from those jerking muzzles over on the ’drome. Now a bullet hittingany solid object makes a nasty and most disconcerting sort of noise; but when it hits the tin roof of a Nissen hut, tears through it and the wood lining inside, passes out again or comes to rest in the hut, the noises become involved and resemble all sorts of queer sounds from kicking a tea-tray to treading on an empty match-box. The huts were solidly sand-bagged up their outside walls to a height of some feet, but had no overhead cover whatever. The third burst from Guns and the R.O. arrived on the hut at exactly the same moment as the General and his Staff arrived on the floor as close as they could get to the wall and the protecting sandbags. They stayed there for some exciting minutes while Guns shot numerous holes in the roof, splintered the furniture, and shot the dinner piecemeal off the table.The shooting and the hum of the enemy engine ceased together, and the General and his Staff gathered themselves off the floor and surveyed the wreckage about them. “I just moved in time,” said the Brigade-Major, and pointed to a ragged hole in the seat ofhis chair. “D’you suppose it was a fluke, or have they got this place spotted?” asked the Captain. “Nasty mess of the roof,” said someone else. The General confined himself to less coherent but much more pungent remarks on all Huns in general, and night-raiders in particular. They seated themselves, and the waiter was just beginning to mop up the smashed bottle of red wine, when the distant hum of another engine was heard. This time the barraged ones reached the floor just a shade ahead of the first tearing burst from Guns and the R.O., and again they held their breath and cowered while the bullets clashed and banged on the tin roof, smacked and cracked on the ground outside, beat another noisy banging tattoo across the next-door huts. The group stayed prone rather longer after the ceasing of fire and engine hum, and had little more than risen to their feet when the third outbreak sent them flinging down into cover again.After another and very much longer pause they very gingerly resumed their places at the table, sitting with chairs turned to positionswhich would allow evacuation with the least possible delay. The conversation for the rest of the dinner was conducted in hushed whispers and with six pair of ears on the alert for the first suspicion of the sound of an approaching engine. It was agreed by all that the Hun must have them spotted, and the only matter for surprise was that some of the bombs heard exploding in the distance had not been dropped on them. It was also agreed very unanimously, not to say emphatically, that the first job for a party in the morning was the digging of a solidly constructed dug-out. “Sand-bags on the roof might be good enough for bullets,” said the General, “but we’ve got to allow for bombs next time, and there’s nothing for that but a good dug-out.”Someone suggested moving the H.Q., but this was rejected since they were busy at the time, and it would mean a good deal of time lost and work dislocated. The General decided to hang on for a bit and see what turned up.Next morning dug-outs were started andthickish weather the next night prevented further raids and allowed satisfactory progress to be made on the shelters. The following night was clear again, but dinner passed without any alarm, and everyone, except the Brigade-Major, who had some urgent work to keep him up, turned in early.At about 11.30 p.m. the first Hun came over, and at the ’drome the waiting and expectant Guns and R.O. set up their new and improved barrage, with four machine-guns all carefully trained and set to sweep over the same end of the same wood.The General was awakened by the first tea-tray bang-banging on adjacent tin roofs, and, without pausing to think, rolled out of bed and bumped on to the floor just as a couple of strays from the outside edge of the barrage banged, ripped, and cracked through his roof and walls. He crawled at top pace to the wall, cursing his hardest, groped round in the dark and found a pair of boots and a British Warm, struggled into these, sitting on the cold floor in his pyjamas, while a tornado of bullets hailed and clashed and bangedacross the Nissen hut roofs of the camp. He took a quick chance offered by a lull in the firing, flung the door open, and set off at a floundering run for the dug-out. As he doubled along the duckboards he heard the droning roar of an engine coming closer and closer, made a desperate spurt, expecting every moment to hear the ominous whistle and resounding crash of a falling and bursting bomb, reached the dug-out entrance, hurled himself through it, and fell in a heap on top of the Brigade-Major cautiously feeling his way down the dark steps. They reached the bottom in a tumbled heap and with a bump, their language rising in a mingled and turgid flow to the delighted ears of a Staff-Lieutenant, shivering at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas with his breeches under his arm and his tunic thrown round his chilly shoulders. But his grins cut off short, and he, too, hurtled down the steps as a bomb burst a few hundred yards off with a resounding and earth-shaking crash.Sitting there in the dark for the next hour the General meditated many things, includingthe mysterious ways of air Huns who so accurately machine-gunned his camp, and yet dropped nine out of ten of their bombs at various distances up to a full mile away from it.This mystery led him next day to diverge from his way and ride across the fields to the ‘drome to make a few inquiries into the ways of night-fliers. Guns was busy making some adjustments to his barrage guns with renewed determination to bring a Hun down some night. The General saw him, and rode over and asked a few questions, and listened with a growing suspicion darkening his brow to Guns’ enthusiastic description of the barrage plan. He cut Guns short with an abrupt question, “Where do your bullets come down?”Guns paused in bewilderment, and stared vacantly a moment at the empty sky. Somehow now in daylight it seemed so very obvious the bullets must come down; whereas shooting up into the dark it had never occurred. The General pulled his horse round and rode straight over to the Squadron office.There he found the Major and a map, had the exact position of the barrage guns pointed out to him, and in turn pointed out where the H.Q. camp lay. The R.O., who was working in the outer office, sat shivering at the wrathful remarks that boiled out of the next room and ended with a demand for the presence of the Gunnery Officer. The R.O. himself departed hurriedly to send him, and then took refuge in the hangar farthest removed from the office. A sense of fair play and sharing the blame drove him reluctantly back to the office in time to hear the effective close of the General’s remarks.“Barrage, sir!—barrage! Splashing thousands of bullets all over a country scattered with camps. Are you mad, sir? Air barrage! Go’ bless your eyes, man, d’you think you’re in London that you must go filling the sky with barrages and bullets and waking me and every other man within miles with your cursed row. Suppose you had shot someone—suppose youhaveshot someone. Blank blank your air barrage. You’d better go back to England, where you’ll be inthe fashion with your air barrages and anti-aircraft. Am I to be driven from my bed on a filthy cold night to ...” he spluttered explosively and stopped short. If the Division heard the details of his share in the incident, had the chance to picture him racing for the dug-out, sitting shivering in scanty night attire, and add to the picture as they’d certainly do, the joke would easily outlive the war and him. “That will do, sir,” he said after a brief pause, “I’ll have a word with your Major and leave him to deal with you.”Guns came out with his head hanging, to join the pale-cheeked R.O. and escape with him.Ten minutes after a message came to him that the General wanted him in the C.O.’s office, and Guns groaned and went back to hear his sentence, estimating it at anything between “shot at dawn” and cashiered, broke, and sent out of the Service.Now, what the C.O. had said in those ten minutes nobody ever knew, but Guns found a totally different kind of General awaiting him.“Come in,” he said, and after a pause a twinkle came in his eye as he looked at the dejected, hangdog air of the culprit. “H-m-m! You can thank your C.O. and the excellent character he gives you, sir, for my agreeing to drop this matter. I think you realise your offence and won’t repeat it. Zeal and keenness is always commendable; but please temper it with discretion. I am glad to know of any officer keen on his work as I hear you are; but I cannot allow the matter to pass entirely without punishment....” (Guns braced himself with a mental “Now for it.”) “... So I order you to parade at my Headquarters at 7.30 to-night, and have dinner with me.” He paused, said, “That’ll do, sir,” very abruptly, and Guns emerged in a somewhat dazed frame of mind.He said, after the dinner, that the punishment was much worse than it sounded. “Roasting! I never had such a dose of chaffing in my life. Those red-tabbed blighters ... and they were all soinfernallypolite with it ... it was just beastly—all except the General. My Lord, he’s a man, a properwhite man, a real brick. And he was as keen to know all about machine-guns as I am myself.”“Well, you taught him something about them—especially about barrages and the result of indirect fire,” said the Mess, and, “Are you going to barrage the next Huns?”But on his next barrage plans, Guns in the first place—the very first and preliminary place—used a map, many diagrams, and endless pages of notebooks in calculations on where his bullets would come down.VIIINIGHTMAREJake Hardingfrom early childhood had suffered from a horribly imaginative mind in the night hours, and had endured untold tortures from dreams and nightmares. One of his most frequent night terrors was to find himself fleeing over a dreary waste, struggling desperately to get along quickly and escape Something, while his feet and legs were clogged with dragging weights, and dreadful demons and bogies and bunyips howled in pursuit. This was an odd dream, because having been born and brought up in the bush he had never seen such a dreary waste as he dreamed of, and had never walked on anything worse than dry, springy turf or good firm road. There was one night he remembered for long years when he had a specially intensified edition of the same nightmare. It was when he was laid up as a child with a broken arm, and a touch offever on top of it, and he went through all the usual items of dreary waste, clogged feet trying to run, howling demons in pursuit, and a raging, consuming throat-drying fear. He woke screaming just as he was on the point of being seized and hurled into a yawning furnace filled with flaming red fire, saw a dim light burning by his bedside, felt a cool hand on his brow, heard a soothing voice murmur, “H-sh-sh! There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re quite safe here. Go to sleep again.”“I’m glad, Nursie,” said Jake, “I’m glad I’ve waked up; I’ve had a drefful dream.”All that is a long way back, but it serves to explain, perhaps, why Long Jake, 6 ft. 3 in. in height, thin as a lath, but muscled apparently with whipcord and wire rope, known throughout the regiment as a “hard case,” felt a curious and unaccountable jerk back to childhood in his memory as he lay on the edge of a wet shell-hole peering out into the growing grey light. “I’ve never been up here before,” he thought wonderingly, “and I’ve never seen any bit of front like it. Yet Iseem to know it by heart.” He knew afterwards, though not then, that it was the “dreary waste” of past dreams—a wide spreading welter of flat ground, broken and tumbled and torn and shiny wet, seen dimly through a misty haze, with nothing in sight but a few splintered bare poles of trees.But Long Jake did not get much time to cudgel his memory. It was almost time for the battalion to “go over the top,” although here to be sure there was no top, and the going over merely meant their climbing out of the chain of wet shell-craters they occupied, and advancing across the flat and up the long slope. Both sides were shelling heavily, but the British, as Jake could judge, by far the heavier of the two. The noise was deafening. The thunder of the guns rose roaring and bellowing without an instant’s break. Overhead the shells howled and yelled and shrieked and whistled and rumbled in every conceivable tone and accent from the slow, lumbering moan and roll of a passing electric tram to the sharp rush of a great bird’s wings. The ground quaked to the roll of the guns like jellyin a shaken mould; out in front of them the barrage was dropping into regular line, spouting in vivid flame that rent the twisting smoke veil quick instant after instant, flinging fountains of water and mud and smoke into the air.Jake heard no order given, did not even hear any whistle blown, but was suddenly aware that dim figures were rising out of the shell-holes to either side, and moving slowly forward. He scrambled out of his crater and moved forward in line with the rest. They went close up to the line of our bursting shells, so close that they could see the leaden hail splashing and whipping up the wet ground before them, so close that Jake more than once ducked instinctively at the vicious crack above his head of one of our own shells bursting and flinging its tearing bullets forward and down. But the line pressed on, and Jake kept level with it; and then, just when it seemed that they must come into that belt of leaping, splashing bullets, the barrage lifted forward, dropped again twenty or thirty yards ahead in anotherwall of springing smokeclouds and spurting flame.Jake pushed on. It was terribly heavy going, and he sank ankle deep at every step in the soft, wet ground. It was hard, too, to keep straight on, because the whole surface was pitted and cratered with holes that ran from anything the size of a foot-bath to a chasm big enough to swallow a fair-sized house. Jake skirted the edges of the larger holes, and plunged in and struggled up out of the smaller ones. The going was so heavy, and it was so hard to keep direction, that for a long time he thought of nothing else. Then a man who had been advancing beside him turned to him and yelled something Jake could not hear, and next instant lurched staggering against him. Jake just caught a glimpse of the wild terror in the staring eyes, of the hand clutched about the throat, and the blood spurting and welling out between the clenched fingers, and then the man slid down in a heap at his feet. Jake stooped an instant with wild thoughts racing through his mind. What was he to do for the man? Howdid one handle—couldn’t stop bleeding by a tourniquet or even a tight bandage—choke the man that way—why’n blazes hadn’t the ambulance classes told them how to handle a man with a bullet in his throat? (The answer to that last, perhaps, if Jake had only known, being that usually the man is past handling or helping.)Then before Jake could attempt anything he knew the man was dead. Jake went on, and now he was conscious of vicious little hisses and whutts and sharp slaps and smacks in the wet ground about him, and knew these for bullets passing or striking close.The barrage lifted again, this time before they were well up on it, and the line ploughed on in pursuit of it. That was the third lift. Jake tried to recall how many times the pretended barrage had lifted in the practice attacks behind the lines, how many yards there were there from their own marked position to the taped-out lines representing the German positions.Then through the bellowing of the guns,the unceasing howl of the shells, the running crashes of their bursts Jake heard a sharp tat-tat-tat, another like an echo joining it, another and another until the whole blended in a hurrying clatter and swift running rattle.“Machine-guns,” he gasped. “Now we’re for it,” but plunged on doggedly. He could see something dimly grey looming through the smoke haze, with red jets of fire sparkling and spitting from it ... more spurting jets ... and still more, both these last lots seen before he could make out the loom of the block-house shelters that covered them. Jake knew where he was now. These were the concrete redoubts, emplacements, “pill-boxes.” But they were none of his business. Everyone had been carefully drilled in their own jobs; there were the proper parties told off to deal with the pill-boxes; his business was to push straight on past them, clearing any Germans out of the shell-hole they might be holding, then stop and help dig some sort of linked-up line of holes, and stand by to beat off any counter-attack. So Jake went steadily on, looking sharply about him forany Germans. A rifle flamed suddenly from a couple of yards ahead of him, and he felt the wind of the bullet by his face, thought for a moment he was blinded by the flash. But as he staggered back a bomber thrust past him and threw straight and hard into the shell-hole where the rifle had flashed. Jake saw a jumping sheet of flame, heard the crash of the bomb, felt the shower of dirt and wet flung from off the crater lip in his face, steadied himself, and plunged off after the hurrying bomber.The next bit was rather involved, and Jake was never sure exactly what happened. There were some grey figures in front of him, scurrying to and fro confusedly, some with long coats flapping about their ankles, others with only half bodies or shoulders showing above the shell-hole edges. He thought some were holding their hands up; but others—this was too clear to doubt—were shooting rapidly at him and the rest of the line, the red tongues of flame licking out from the rifles straight at them. Jake dived to a shell hole and began firing back, felt somebody slide andscramble down beside him, turned to find the bomber picking himself up and shaking a blood-dripping left hand. “Come on, Jake,” yelled the bomber. “Rush ’em’s the game,” and went scrambling and floundering out of the hole with Jake close at his heels. There was a minute’s wild shooting and bombing, and the rest of the Germans either ran, or fell, or came crouching forward towards them with their empty hands high and waving over their heads.An officer appeared suddenly from somewhere. “Come along. Push on!” he was shouting. “Bit further before we make a line to hold. Push on,” and he led the way forward at a staggering trot. Jake and the others followed.They reached the wide flattened crest of the slope they were attacking and were pushing on over it when a rapid stutter of machine-gun fire broke out on their left flank, and a stream of bullets came sheeting and whipping along the top of the slope. The line was fairly caught in the bullet-storm, and suffered heavily in the next minute.There was some shooting from shell holes in front, too, but that was nothing to the galling fire that poured on them from the flank. Jake heard suddenly the long, insistent scream of a whistle, looked round and saw an officer signalling to take cover. He dropped promptly into a shell crater, and, hearing presently the bang of rifles round him, peered out over the edge for a mark to shoot at. Out to his left he caught sight of a sparkle of fire, and heard the rapid clatter of the machine-guns. He could just make out the rounded top of a buried concrete emplacement, and the black slit that marked the embrasure, and began to aim and fire steadily and carefully at it. The emplacement held its fire more now, but every now and then delivered a flickering string of flashes and a venomousrat-at-at-at. Jake kept on firing at it, glancing round every little while to be sure that the others were not moving on without him. The noisy banging raps of close-by machine-gunning broke out suddenly, and on Jake looking round from his shell hole he found a gun in action notmore than a dozen yards away; and while he looked another one began to fire steadily from another shell crater fifty or sixty yards farther along. Jake crawled out of his hole, slithered over the rough ground and down into the crater where the nearest machine-gun banged rapidly. A sergeant was with the team, and Jake bawled in his ear, “If you’ll keep pottin’ at him every time he opens fire, I’ll try’n sneak over an’ out him with a bomb in the letter-box.”“Please yerself,” returned the sergeant. “My job’s to keep pumpin’ ’em down ’is throat every time ’e opens ’is mouth.”“Watch you don’t plug me in mistake when I get there,” said Jake, and crawled out of the hole. He ducked hastily into another as he heard the enemy bullets spatter about him, shift and begin to smack and splash about the gun he had just left. That gun ceased fire suddenly, but the one fifty yards farther round kept on furiously. “Got him in the neck, I s’pose,” said Jake, “worse luck.”He had a couple of Mills’ bombs in his pockets, but added to his stock from a half-emptybucket he found lying by a dead bomber in a crater. He advanced cautiously, wriggling hurriedly over the dividing ground between craters, keeping down under cover as much as possible, working out and then sidling in towards the red flashes that kept spurting out at intervals from the emplacement. Once it seemed that the enemy gunners had spotted him as he crawled and wriggled from one hole to another, and a gust of bullets came suddenly ripping and whipping about him as he hurled himself forward and plunged head foremost into a crater with his left side tingling and blood trickling from his left arm. He fingered the rent in his tunic and satisfied himself that the side wound was no more than a graze, the arm one a clean perforation which did not appear to have touched the bone. Twice after that he heard the bullets’swish-ish-ishsweeping over his head, or dropping to spatter the dirt flying from the edge of a hole he had reached. But he worked steadily on all the same, passed the line of the front and side embrasures, and was pondering his next move,when a sudden rapid outburst of fire made him lift his head and peer out. A dozen men had appeared suddenly within twenty yards of the emplacement and were making as rapid a dash for it as the ground allowed. The machine-guns were hailing bullets at them as hard as they could fire, and man after man plunged and fell and rolled and squirmed into holes or lay still in the open.Jake did not wait to see the result of the dash. He was up and out of his cover and running in himself as fast as the wet ground would allow him. He was almost on the emplacement when a gun slewed round and banged a short burst at him. He felt the rush of bullets past his face, a pluck at his sleeve and shoulder strap, a blow on his shrapnel helmet, made a last desperate plunge forward, and scrambled on to the low roof. Hurriedly he pulled a bomb from his pocket and jerked the pin out, when a couple of rifles banged close behind them, a bullet whipped past overhead, and another smacked and ricochetted screaming from the concrete. Jake twisted, saw the head and shoulders oftwo men with rifles levelled over a hole, and quick as a flash hurled his bomb. The men ducked, and Jake drew the pin from another bomb and lobbed it carefully over just as the first bomb burst. The other followed, exploding fairly in the hole and evidently deep down since the report was low and muffled. Jake pulled another pin, and was leaning over to locate an embrasure when the gun flamed out from it. Jake released the spring, counted carefully “One and two and three and——” leaned over and slammed the bomb fairly into the slit. He had another bomb out as it burst—well inside by the sound of it—and this time leaned over and deliberately thrust it in through the opening. He had barely snatched his hand out when it went off with a muffled crash. Jake heard screams inside, and then an instant later loud calls behind him. He jerked round to see half a dozen arms waving from the hole where he had flung the first bomb. This, as he found after, was the underground stair down and up again into the emplacement,and the waving arms were in token of the garrison’s surrender.Jake stood on the roof and waved his arm, while keeping a cautious eye on the surrenderers, saw the mud-daubed khaki figures rise from their holes and come scrambling forward, and sat down suddenly, feeling unpleasantly faint and sickish.His officer’s voice recalled him. “Well done, lad, well done. This cursed thing was fairly holding us up till you scuppered it. We’ve got our objective line now.”Jake staggered to his feet.“You’re wounded,” went on the officer. “Get back out of this, and give a message to anyone that’ll take it, that we’ve got our third objective line, and want supports and ammunition quick as possible. Go on, off with you, now.”“Right, sir!” said Jake with an effort, and started off back across the shell-torn ground again.He felt a bit dizzy still—side hurt a heap—arm getting numb, too—must keep going and get that message through——A high-explosive shrapnel burst directly overhead, and Jake heard several small pieces whip-down and one heavy bit splash thudding into the ground a yard from his feet. And this was only the first shell of many. The Germans had seen that their ground was lost, and were beginning to barrage it. Jake staggered blindly across the broken ground, in and out and round the craters, over sodden mounds that caught at his feet and crumbled wetly under his tread. Huge clods of wet earth clung to his feet and legs and made every step an effort. The shell fire was growing more and more intense, thundering and crashing and hurling cascades of mud and splinters in every direction, passing overhead in long-drawn howls and moans and yellings, or the short savage screams and rush of the nearer passing. The ground was veiled in smoke and drifting haze, and stretched as far as he could see in a dreary perspective of shiny wet earth and ragged holes. He felt that he’d never cover it, never get clear of these cursed—what were they—shells, bogies, demonsscreaming and howling for his life. He plunged into a patch of low-lying ground, sticky swamp that sank him knee deep at every step, that clutched and clung about his feet and held each foot gripped as he dragged it sucking out and swung it forward. He wanted to run—run—run—but his legs were lead—and the bogies were very close—and now there were dead men amongst his feet—horribly mud-bedaubed dead, half-buried in the ooze—and helmets, and scattered packs, and haversacks. A festering stench rose from the slime he waded through. He tried again to run, but could only stagger slowly, dragging one foot clear after the other. Once he trod on something he thought a lump of drier mud, and it squirmed weakly under his foot, and a white face twisted round and up, mouthing feeble curses at him. There were other things, horrible things he turned his eyes from as he tried to hurry past—and red stains on the frothy green scum. He reeled on, stupid and dazed, with the thunderous crashes of a world shattering and dissolving about him, deafened by the demonscreeches and howlings. There were other people with him, some wandering aimlessly, others going direct the one way, meeting still others going the opposite, but all dragging clogged, weighted feet. Some fell and did not rise. Jake knew they had been caught. He saw two men who were carrying something, a stretcher, stop and look up, and lower the stretcher hastily and drop, one flat on his face, the other crouched low and still looking up. A spurt of red flame flung a rolling cloud of black smoke about them, and seconds after a flattened steel helmet whistled down out of the sky and thudded in the mud by Jake. When he came to where they had been there was only a hole with blue and grey reek curling slowly up its black calcined sides. Jake knew the three had been caught, too—as he would be caught, if he didn’t hurry. He struggled, panting.They were still yelling and howling, looking for him. Demons, bogymen—and here was the loudest, and fiercest, the worst of them all—louder and louder to a tremendous chorus of all the noises devils ever made.He was flinging himself down to escape the demon clutch (thereby probably saving his life, since the great shell burst a bare score yards away) when he heard the thunderous clash of the furnace-doors flung back, caught a searing glimpse of the leaping red flames, and was hurled headlong.As he fell he tried to scream. He did scream, but—although he knew nothing of the gap, and thought it was on the instant of his falling—it was days later—a queer choking, strangled cry that brought a cool hand on his hot forehead, a quiet voice hushing and soothing him and saying he was “all right now.”He opened his eyes and closed them again with a sigh of relief and content. A low light was burning by his bed, the shadowy figure of a woman bent over him, and between the opening and closing of his eyes, his mind flicked back to full fifteen years.“I’m glad I waked, Nursie,” he said weakly. “I’ve had a drefful dream; the very dreffulest I’ve ever had.”

VISEEING REDTheMess, having finished reading the letters just brought in, were looking through the home papers. Harvey, who used to be a bank clerk, giggled over a page inPunchand passed it round. “Pretty true, too, isn’t it?” he said. The page was one of those silly jolly little drawings by Bateman of men with curly legs, and the pictures showed typical scenes from the old life of an average City clerk, trotting to business, playing dominoes, and so on, and the last one of a fellow tearing over the trenches in a charge with a real teeth-gritted, blood-in-his-eye look, and the title of the lot was “It’s the Same Man.”Everyone grinned at it and said “Pretty true,” or something like that. “It reminds me ...” said the Australian.Now this is the Australian’s story, which he said he had got from one of the fellowsin the show. For the truth or untruth I give no guarantee, but just tell the tale for what it’s worth.Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of thePunchpicture.When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be—well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anythingmore dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.Remembering this, it is easy to understand the consternation in Mrs. Teddy’s mind when, after the War had been running a year, Teddy announced that he was going to enlist. He was firm about it too. He had thought the whole thing out—house to be shut up, she to go stay with her mother, his separation allowance so much, and so much more in the bank to draw on, and so on. Her remonstrances he met so promptly that one can only suppose them anticipated. His health? Never had a day’s sickness, as she knew. His business prospects? The country’s prospectswere more important, and his Country Wanted Him. His “horror of blood”? Teddy twisted uneasily. “I’ve a horror of the whole beastly business,” he said—“of war and guns and shooting, of being killed, and ... of leaving you.” This was diplomacy of the highest, and the resulting interlude gently slid into an acceptance of the fact of his going.He went, and—to get along with the War—at last came to France, and with his battalion into the trenches. He had not risen above the rank of private, partly because he lacked any ambition to command, and in larger part because his superiors did not detect any ability in him to handle the rather rough-and-ready crowd who were in his lot. Far from army training and rations doing him physical harm, he throve on them, and even put on flesh. But because he was really a good sort, was always willing to lend any cash he had, take a fatigue for a friend, joke over hardships and laugh at discomforts, he was on excellent terms with his fellows. He shed a good many, if not all, of his suburbanpeace ways, was a fairly good shot on the ranges, and even acquired considerable skill and agility at bayonet practice. But he never quite shed his “horror of blood.” Even after he had been in action a time or two and had fired many rounds from his rifle, he had a vague hope each time he pulled trigger that his bullet might not kill a man, might at most only wound him enough to put him out of action. The first shell casualty he saw in their own ranks made him literally and actually sick, and even after he had seen many more casualties than he cared to think about he still retained a squeamish feeling at sight of them. And in his battalion’s share of The Push, where there was a good deal of close-quarter work and play with bombs and bayonet, he never had urgent need to use his bayonet, and when a party of Germans in a dug-out refused to surrender, and persisted instead in firing up the steps at anyone who showed at the top, Teddy stood aside and left the others to do the bombing-out.It was ridiculous, of course, that a fightingman who was there for the express purpose of killing should feel any qualms about doing it, but there it was.Then came the day when the Germans made a heavy counter-attack on the positions held by the Australians. The positions were not a complete joined-up defensive line along the outer front. The fighting had been heavy and bitter, and the German trenches which were captured had been so thoroughly pounded by shell fire that they no longer existed as trenches, and the Australians had to be satisfied with the establishment of a line of posts manned as strongly as possible, with plenty of machine-guns.Teddy’s battalion was not in this front fringe when the counter-attack, launched without any warning bombardment, flooded suddenly over the outer defences, surged heavily back, drove in the next lines, and broke and battered them in and down underfoot.Something like a couple of thousand yards in over our lines that first savage rush brought the Germans, and nearly twoscoreguns were in their hands before they checked and hesitated, and the Australian supports flung themselves in on a desperate counter-attack. The first part of the German programme was an undoubted and alarming success. The posts and strong points along our front were simply overwhelmed, or surrounded and cut off, and went under, making the best finish they could with the bayonet, or in some cases—well, Teddy Silsey and a good many other Australians saw just what happened in these other cases, and are not likely ever to forget it. The German attack—as in many historic cases in this war—appeared to fizzle out in the most amazing fashion after it had come with such speed and sweeping success for so far. Our guns, of course, were hard at work, and were doing the most appalling damage to the dense masses that offered as targets; but that would hardly account for the slackening of the rush, because the guns had waked at the first crash of rifle and bomb reports, and the Germans were under just about as severe a fire for the second half of their rush as they wereat the end of it when they checked. There appeared to be a hesitation about their movements, a confusion in their plans, a doubt as to what they ought to do next, that halted them long enough to lose the great advantage of their momentum. The first hurried counter-attack flung in their face was comparatively feeble, and if they had kept going should easily have been brushed aside. Thirty-odd guns were in their hands; and, most dangerous of all, one other short storm forward would have brought them swamping over a whole solid mass of our field guns—which at the moment were about the only thing left to hold back their attack—and within close rifle and machine-gun range of the fringe of our heavies. But at this critical stage, for no good reason, and against every military reason, they, as so often before, hesitated, and were lost. Another Australian counter-attack, this time much better organised and more solidly built, was launched headlong on their confusion. They gave ground a little in some places, tried to push on in others, halted and strove to securepositions and grip the trenches in others. The Australians, savagely angry at being so caught and losing so much ground, drove in on them, bombing, shooting, and bayoneting; while over the heads of the front-rank fighters the guns poured a furious tempest of shrapnel and high explosive on the masses that sifted and eddied behind. The issue hung in doubt for no more than a bare five minutes. The Germans who had tried to push on were shot and cut down; the parties that held portions of trench were killed or driven out; the waverers were rushed, beaten in, and driven back in confusion on the supports that struggled up through the tornado of shell-fire. Then their whole front crumpled, and collapsed, and gave, and the Australians began to recover their ground almost as quickly as they had lost it.Now Teddy Silsey, while all this was going on, had been with his company in a position mid-way across the depth of captured ground. He and about forty others, with two officers, had tried to hold the battered remnant of trench they were occupying, and did actuallycontinue to hold it after the rush of the German front had swept far past them. They were attacked on all sides, shot away their last cartridge, had their machine-guns put out of action by bombs, had about half their number killed, and almost every man of the remainder wounded. They were clearly cut off, with thousands of Germans between them and their supports, could see fresh German forces pressing on past them, could hear the din of fighting receding rapidly farther and farther back. The two officers, both wounded, but able more or less to stand up, conferred hastily, and surrendered.Of this last act Teddy Silsey was unaware, because a splinter of some sort, striking on his steel helmet, had stunned him and dropped him completely insensible. Two dead men fell across him as he lay, and probably accounted for the Germans at the moment overlooking him as they collected their prisoners.Teddy wakened to dim consciousness to find a number of Germans busily and confusedly engaged in setting the bit of trench in a state of defence. They trod on him andthe two dead men on top of him a good deal, but Teddy, slowly taking in his situation, and wondering vaguely what his next move should be, did the wisest possible thing under the circumstances—lay still.A little before this the Australian counter-attack had been sprung, and before Teddy had made up his mind about moving he began to be aware that the battle was flooding back on him. The Germans beside him saw it too, and, without any attempt to defend their position, clambered from the trench and disappeared from Teddy’s immediate view. Teddy crawled up and had a look out. It was difficult to see much at first, because there was a good deal of smoke about from our bursting shells, but as the counter-attack pushed on and the Germans went back, the shells followed them, and presently the air cleared enough for Teddy to see glimpses of khaki and to be certain that every German he saw was getting away from the khaki neighbourhood as rapidly as possible. In another minute a couple of Australians, hugging some machine-guns parts,tumbled into his trench, two or three others arrived panting, and in a moment the machine-gun was in action and streaming fire and bullets into the backs of any parties of Germans that crossed the sights.One of the new-comers, a sergeant, looked round and saw Teddy squatting on the broken edge of the trench and looking very sick and shaken. “Hullo, mate,” said the sergeant, glancing at the patch of coloured cloth on Teddy’s shoulder that told his unit. “Was you with the bunch in this hole when Fritz jumped you?” Teddy gulped and nodded. “You stopped one?” said the sergeant. “Where’d it get you?”“No,” said Teddy; “I—I think I’m all right. Got a bit of a bump on the head.”“’Nother bloke to say ‘Go’ bless the tin-’at makers’ in ’is prayers every night.” He turned from Teddy. “Isn’t it time we humped this shooter a bit on again, boys?” he said.“Looks like the Boche was steadyin’ up a bit,” said a machine-gunner. “An’ our line’s bumped a bit o’ a snag along on the left there.I think we might spray ’em a little down that way.”They slewed the gun in search of fresh targets, while from a broken trench some score yards from their front a gathering volume of rifle-fire began to pelt and tell of the German resistance stiffening.“Strewth,” growled the sergeant, “this is no bon! If we give ’em time to settle in—— Hullo,”—he broke off, and stared out in front over the trench edge—“wot’s that lot? They look like khaki. Prisoners, by cripes!”Every man peered out anxiously. Two to three hundreds yards away they could see emerging from the broken end of a communication trench a single file of men in khaki without arms in their hands, and with half a dozen rifle- and bayonet-armed Germans guarding them. Teddy, who was watching with the others, exclaimed suddenly. “It’s my lot,” he said. “That’s the captain—him with the red hair; and I recognise Big Mick, and Terry—Terry’s wounded—see him limp. That’s my mate Terry.”The firing on both sides had slacked for amoment, and none of the watchers missed one single movement of what followed. It is unpleasant telling, as it was unutterably horrible watching. The prisoners, except the two officers, who were halted above ground, were guided down into a portion of trench into which they disappeared. The guards had also remained above. What followed is best told briefly. The two officers, in full view of the watchers, were shot down as they stood, the rifle muzzles touching their backs. The Germans round the trench edge tossed bombs down on the men penned below. Before the spurting smoke came billowing up out of the trench, Teddy Silsey leaped to his feet with a scream, and flung himself scrambling up the trench wall. But the sergeant, with a gust of bitter oaths, gripped and held him. “Get to it there,” he snarled savagely at the men about the gun. “D’you want a better target?” The gun muzzle twitched and steadied and ripped out a stream of bullets. The Germans about the trench lip turned to run, but the storm caught and cut them down—except one or two whoducked down into the trench on top of their victims. Teddy found them there three minutes after, stayed only long enough to finish them, and ran on with the other Australians who swarmed yelling forward to the attack again. Others had seen the butchery, and those who had not quickly heard of it. Every group of dead Australians discovered as the line surged irresistibly forward was declared, rightly or wrongly, to be another lot of murdered prisoners. The advance went with a fury, with a storming rage that nothing could withstand. The last remnant of organised German defence broke utterly, and the supports coming up found themselves charged into, hustled, mixed up with, and thrown into utter confusion by the mob of fugitives and the line of shooting, bombing, bayoneting Australians that pressed hard on their heels.The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselvespenned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest—and there were anything over two thousand of them—were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting—shooting—shooting. ... Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough tosnatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire.And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message—“Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the —— ——!” with a shot after each sentence.And there was a killing. There were other results—the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their owndead—their murdered-prisoner dead—and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire.And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him——and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.”

SEEING RED

TheMess, having finished reading the letters just brought in, were looking through the home papers. Harvey, who used to be a bank clerk, giggled over a page inPunchand passed it round. “Pretty true, too, isn’t it?” he said. The page was one of those silly jolly little drawings by Bateman of men with curly legs, and the pictures showed typical scenes from the old life of an average City clerk, trotting to business, playing dominoes, and so on, and the last one of a fellow tearing over the trenches in a charge with a real teeth-gritted, blood-in-his-eye look, and the title of the lot was “It’s the Same Man.”

Everyone grinned at it and said “Pretty true,” or something like that. “It reminds me ...” said the Australian.

Now this is the Australian’s story, which he said he had got from one of the fellowsin the show. For the truth or untruth I give no guarantee, but just tell the tale for what it’s worth.

Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of thePunchpicture.

When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be—well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anythingmore dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.

Remembering this, it is easy to understand the consternation in Mrs. Teddy’s mind when, after the War had been running a year, Teddy announced that he was going to enlist. He was firm about it too. He had thought the whole thing out—house to be shut up, she to go stay with her mother, his separation allowance so much, and so much more in the bank to draw on, and so on. Her remonstrances he met so promptly that one can only suppose them anticipated. His health? Never had a day’s sickness, as she knew. His business prospects? The country’s prospectswere more important, and his Country Wanted Him. His “horror of blood”? Teddy twisted uneasily. “I’ve a horror of the whole beastly business,” he said—“of war and guns and shooting, of being killed, and ... of leaving you.” This was diplomacy of the highest, and the resulting interlude gently slid into an acceptance of the fact of his going.

He went, and—to get along with the War—at last came to France, and with his battalion into the trenches. He had not risen above the rank of private, partly because he lacked any ambition to command, and in larger part because his superiors did not detect any ability in him to handle the rather rough-and-ready crowd who were in his lot. Far from army training and rations doing him physical harm, he throve on them, and even put on flesh. But because he was really a good sort, was always willing to lend any cash he had, take a fatigue for a friend, joke over hardships and laugh at discomforts, he was on excellent terms with his fellows. He shed a good many, if not all, of his suburbanpeace ways, was a fairly good shot on the ranges, and even acquired considerable skill and agility at bayonet practice. But he never quite shed his “horror of blood.” Even after he had been in action a time or two and had fired many rounds from his rifle, he had a vague hope each time he pulled trigger that his bullet might not kill a man, might at most only wound him enough to put him out of action. The first shell casualty he saw in their own ranks made him literally and actually sick, and even after he had seen many more casualties than he cared to think about he still retained a squeamish feeling at sight of them. And in his battalion’s share of The Push, where there was a good deal of close-quarter work and play with bombs and bayonet, he never had urgent need to use his bayonet, and when a party of Germans in a dug-out refused to surrender, and persisted instead in firing up the steps at anyone who showed at the top, Teddy stood aside and left the others to do the bombing-out.

It was ridiculous, of course, that a fightingman who was there for the express purpose of killing should feel any qualms about doing it, but there it was.

Then came the day when the Germans made a heavy counter-attack on the positions held by the Australians. The positions were not a complete joined-up defensive line along the outer front. The fighting had been heavy and bitter, and the German trenches which were captured had been so thoroughly pounded by shell fire that they no longer existed as trenches, and the Australians had to be satisfied with the establishment of a line of posts manned as strongly as possible, with plenty of machine-guns.

Teddy’s battalion was not in this front fringe when the counter-attack, launched without any warning bombardment, flooded suddenly over the outer defences, surged heavily back, drove in the next lines, and broke and battered them in and down underfoot.

Something like a couple of thousand yards in over our lines that first savage rush brought the Germans, and nearly twoscoreguns were in their hands before they checked and hesitated, and the Australian supports flung themselves in on a desperate counter-attack. The first part of the German programme was an undoubted and alarming success. The posts and strong points along our front were simply overwhelmed, or surrounded and cut off, and went under, making the best finish they could with the bayonet, or in some cases—well, Teddy Silsey and a good many other Australians saw just what happened in these other cases, and are not likely ever to forget it. The German attack—as in many historic cases in this war—appeared to fizzle out in the most amazing fashion after it had come with such speed and sweeping success for so far. Our guns, of course, were hard at work, and were doing the most appalling damage to the dense masses that offered as targets; but that would hardly account for the slackening of the rush, because the guns had waked at the first crash of rifle and bomb reports, and the Germans were under just about as severe a fire for the second half of their rush as they wereat the end of it when they checked. There appeared to be a hesitation about their movements, a confusion in their plans, a doubt as to what they ought to do next, that halted them long enough to lose the great advantage of their momentum. The first hurried counter-attack flung in their face was comparatively feeble, and if they had kept going should easily have been brushed aside. Thirty-odd guns were in their hands; and, most dangerous of all, one other short storm forward would have brought them swamping over a whole solid mass of our field guns—which at the moment were about the only thing left to hold back their attack—and within close rifle and machine-gun range of the fringe of our heavies. But at this critical stage, for no good reason, and against every military reason, they, as so often before, hesitated, and were lost. Another Australian counter-attack, this time much better organised and more solidly built, was launched headlong on their confusion. They gave ground a little in some places, tried to push on in others, halted and strove to securepositions and grip the trenches in others. The Australians, savagely angry at being so caught and losing so much ground, drove in on them, bombing, shooting, and bayoneting; while over the heads of the front-rank fighters the guns poured a furious tempest of shrapnel and high explosive on the masses that sifted and eddied behind. The issue hung in doubt for no more than a bare five minutes. The Germans who had tried to push on were shot and cut down; the parties that held portions of trench were killed or driven out; the waverers were rushed, beaten in, and driven back in confusion on the supports that struggled up through the tornado of shell-fire. Then their whole front crumpled, and collapsed, and gave, and the Australians began to recover their ground almost as quickly as they had lost it.

Now Teddy Silsey, while all this was going on, had been with his company in a position mid-way across the depth of captured ground. He and about forty others, with two officers, had tried to hold the battered remnant of trench they were occupying, and did actuallycontinue to hold it after the rush of the German front had swept far past them. They were attacked on all sides, shot away their last cartridge, had their machine-guns put out of action by bombs, had about half their number killed, and almost every man of the remainder wounded. They were clearly cut off, with thousands of Germans between them and their supports, could see fresh German forces pressing on past them, could hear the din of fighting receding rapidly farther and farther back. The two officers, both wounded, but able more or less to stand up, conferred hastily, and surrendered.

Of this last act Teddy Silsey was unaware, because a splinter of some sort, striking on his steel helmet, had stunned him and dropped him completely insensible. Two dead men fell across him as he lay, and probably accounted for the Germans at the moment overlooking him as they collected their prisoners.

Teddy wakened to dim consciousness to find a number of Germans busily and confusedly engaged in setting the bit of trench in a state of defence. They trod on him andthe two dead men on top of him a good deal, but Teddy, slowly taking in his situation, and wondering vaguely what his next move should be, did the wisest possible thing under the circumstances—lay still.

A little before this the Australian counter-attack had been sprung, and before Teddy had made up his mind about moving he began to be aware that the battle was flooding back on him. The Germans beside him saw it too, and, without any attempt to defend their position, clambered from the trench and disappeared from Teddy’s immediate view. Teddy crawled up and had a look out. It was difficult to see much at first, because there was a good deal of smoke about from our bursting shells, but as the counter-attack pushed on and the Germans went back, the shells followed them, and presently the air cleared enough for Teddy to see glimpses of khaki and to be certain that every German he saw was getting away from the khaki neighbourhood as rapidly as possible. In another minute a couple of Australians, hugging some machine-guns parts,tumbled into his trench, two or three others arrived panting, and in a moment the machine-gun was in action and streaming fire and bullets into the backs of any parties of Germans that crossed the sights.

One of the new-comers, a sergeant, looked round and saw Teddy squatting on the broken edge of the trench and looking very sick and shaken. “Hullo, mate,” said the sergeant, glancing at the patch of coloured cloth on Teddy’s shoulder that told his unit. “Was you with the bunch in this hole when Fritz jumped you?” Teddy gulped and nodded. “You stopped one?” said the sergeant. “Where’d it get you?”

“No,” said Teddy; “I—I think I’m all right. Got a bit of a bump on the head.”

“’Nother bloke to say ‘Go’ bless the tin-’at makers’ in ’is prayers every night.” He turned from Teddy. “Isn’t it time we humped this shooter a bit on again, boys?” he said.

“Looks like the Boche was steadyin’ up a bit,” said a machine-gunner. “An’ our line’s bumped a bit o’ a snag along on the left there.I think we might spray ’em a little down that way.”

They slewed the gun in search of fresh targets, while from a broken trench some score yards from their front a gathering volume of rifle-fire began to pelt and tell of the German resistance stiffening.

“Strewth,” growled the sergeant, “this is no bon! If we give ’em time to settle in—— Hullo,”—he broke off, and stared out in front over the trench edge—“wot’s that lot? They look like khaki. Prisoners, by cripes!”

Every man peered out anxiously. Two to three hundreds yards away they could see emerging from the broken end of a communication trench a single file of men in khaki without arms in their hands, and with half a dozen rifle- and bayonet-armed Germans guarding them. Teddy, who was watching with the others, exclaimed suddenly. “It’s my lot,” he said. “That’s the captain—him with the red hair; and I recognise Big Mick, and Terry—Terry’s wounded—see him limp. That’s my mate Terry.”

The firing on both sides had slacked for amoment, and none of the watchers missed one single movement of what followed. It is unpleasant telling, as it was unutterably horrible watching. The prisoners, except the two officers, who were halted above ground, were guided down into a portion of trench into which they disappeared. The guards had also remained above. What followed is best told briefly. The two officers, in full view of the watchers, were shot down as they stood, the rifle muzzles touching their backs. The Germans round the trench edge tossed bombs down on the men penned below. Before the spurting smoke came billowing up out of the trench, Teddy Silsey leaped to his feet with a scream, and flung himself scrambling up the trench wall. But the sergeant, with a gust of bitter oaths, gripped and held him. “Get to it there,” he snarled savagely at the men about the gun. “D’you want a better target?” The gun muzzle twitched and steadied and ripped out a stream of bullets. The Germans about the trench lip turned to run, but the storm caught and cut them down—except one or two whoducked down into the trench on top of their victims. Teddy found them there three minutes after, stayed only long enough to finish them, and ran on with the other Australians who swarmed yelling forward to the attack again. Others had seen the butchery, and those who had not quickly heard of it. Every group of dead Australians discovered as the line surged irresistibly forward was declared, rightly or wrongly, to be another lot of murdered prisoners. The advance went with a fury, with a storming rage that nothing could withstand. The last remnant of organised German defence broke utterly, and the supports coming up found themselves charged into, hustled, mixed up with, and thrown into utter confusion by the mob of fugitives and the line of shooting, bombing, bayoneting Australians that pressed hard on their heels.

The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselvespenned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest—and there were anything over two thousand of them—were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting—shooting—shooting. ... Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough tosnatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire.

And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message—“Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the —— ——!” with a shot after each sentence.

And there was a killing. There were other results—the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their owndead—their murdered-prisoner dead—and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire.

And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him——and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.”

VIIAN AIR BARRAGETheGunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work—in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seenin the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.”Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning andan appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up.It sounds crazy, but then, as the Squadron protested, they, Guns especially, were crazy, and that’s all there was to it.But with these notions of theirs about the infallibility of machine-guns, and the range of their usefulness, you will understand how their minds leaped to machine-gun tactics when the Hun night-fliers began to come over and bomb around the ’drome. The first nightthey came Guns nearly broke his neck by falling into a deep hole in his mad rush to get to the anti-aircraft machine-guns on the ‘drome near the sheds, and he alternated between moping and cursing for three days because the Huns had gone before he could get a crack at them. He cheered up a lot when they came the next time and he and the R.O. shot away a few-million rounds, more or less. But as he didn’t fetch a feather out of them, and as the Huns dropped their eggs horribly close to the hangars, the two were not properly satisfied, and began to work out all sorts of protective schemes and sit up as long as the moon was shining in hopes of a bit of shooting.Their hopes were fully satisfied, or anyhow the Squadron’s more than were, because the Huns made a regular mark of the ’drome and strafed it night after night. And for all the rounds they shot, neither Guns nor the R.O. ever got a single bird, although they swore more than once that they were positive they had winged one. As none came down on our side of the lines, this claimwas a washout, and the two got quite worried about it and had to stand an unmerciful amount of chaff from the others on the dud shooting.After a bit they evolved a new plan. Careful investigation and inquiry of different pilots in the Squadron gave them the groundwork for the plan. In answer to questions, some of the pilots said that if they were in the place of the Huns and wanted to find the ‘drome in the dark, they would steer for the unusual-shaped clump of wood which lay behind the ’drome. Some said they would follow the canal, others the road, others various guides, but all agreed that the wood was the object the Huns would steer for. This found, all the pilots again agreed it was a simple matter to coast along the edge of the wood, which would show up a black blot on the ground in the moonlight, find the tongue or spur of trees that ran straight out towards the ’drome, and, keeping that line, must fly exactly over the hangars. One or two nights’ careful listening to the direction of the approaching and departing Hun engines confirmedthe belief that the Huns were working on the lines indicated, and after this was sure the plan progressed rapidly.The two machine-guns on the ’drome were trained and aimed in daylight to shower bullets exactly over the tip of the tongue of wood. A patent gadget invented by Guns allowed the gun-muzzles a certain amount of play up and down, play which careful calculation showed would pour a couple of streams of bullets across the end of the wood up and down a height extending to about a thousand feet, that is, 500 above and 500 below the level at which it was estimated the Huns usually flew on these night raids. It simply meant that as soon as the sound was judged to be near enough the two guns only had to open fire, to keep pouring out bullets to make sure that the Huns had to fly through the stream and “stop one” or more. It was, in fact, a simple air barrage of machine-gun bullets.With the plan perfected, the two enthusiasts waited quite impatiently for the next strafe. Fortunately the moon was up fairlyearly, so that now there was no need to sit up late for the shoot, and the second night after the preparations were complete, to the joy of Guns and the R.O. (and the discomfort of the others), there was a beautiful, still, moonlight night with every inducement for the Huns to come along.The two ate a hurried dinner with ears cocked for the first note of the warning which would sound when the distant noise of engines was first heard. Sure enough they had just reached the sweets when the signal went, and the two were up and off before the lights could be extinguished. They arrived panting at their stations to find the gun-crews all ready and waiting, made a last hasty examination to see everything was in order, and stood straining their ears for the moment when they reckoned the Huns would be approaching the barrage area, and when they judged the moment had arrived opened a long steady stream of fire. The drone of the first engine grew louder, passed through the barrage, and boomed on over the ’drome without missing a beat. There came the oldfamiliar “Phe-e-e-w—BANG! ... e-e-e-ew—BANG!” of a couple of falling bombs, and the first engine droned on and away. Two minutes later another was heard, and Guns and the R.O., no degree disheartened or discouraged by their first failure, let go another stream of lead, keeping the gun-muzzles twitching up and down as rapidly as they could. The second Hun repeated the performance of the first; and a third did likewise. After it was all over Guns and the R.O. held a council and devised fresh and more comprehensive plans, which included the use of some extra guns taken from the machines. For the moment we may leave them, merely mentioning that up to now and even in their newer plans they entirely neglected any consideration of rather an important item in their performance, namely, the ultimate billet of their numerous bullets.From the point of view of the defence it is an important and unpleasant fact that an air barrage eventually returns to the ground. Guns and the R.O. had been pumping out bullets at a rate of some hundreds per minuteeach, and all those bullets after missing their target had to arrive somewhere on the earth. The gunners’ interest in them passed for the moment as soon as the bullets had failed to hit their mark, and afterwards they came to remember with amazement that ever they could have been so idiotically unconsidering.Some distance from the ’drome, and in a line beyond the tip of the wood, there stood a number of Nissen huts which housed a Divisional Staff, and the inevitable consequence was that those up-and-down twitching gun-muzzles sprayed showers of lead in gusts across and across the hutments. The General Commanding the Division was in the middle of his dinner with about five staff officers round the table when the first “aeroplane over” warning went on this particular night of the new air barrage. The lights in the Mess hut were not extinguished, because full precautions had been taken some nights before to have the small window-space fully and closely screened against the possibility of leakage of a single ray of light. One ortwo remarks were made quite casually about the nasty raiding habits of the Huns, but since no bombs had come near in the earlier raids, and the conclusion was therefore reasonable that the Divisional H.Q. had not been located, nobody there worried much over the matter, and dinner proceeded.They all heard the drone of the Hun engine, and, because it was a very still night, they heard it rather louder than usual. Someone had just remarked that they seemed to be coming closer to-night, when the further remarks were violently interrupted by a clashing and clatteringB-bang...br-r-rip-rap,ba-bang-bang, the splintering, ripping sound of smashed wood, the crash, clash tinkle of a bottle burst into a thousand fragments on the table under their startled eyes. The barrage bullets had returned to earth.The group at the table had time for no more than a pause of astonishment, a few exclamations, a hasty pushing back of chairs, whenrip-rap-bang-bang-bangdown came the second spray of bullets from those jerking muzzles over on the ’drome. Now a bullet hittingany solid object makes a nasty and most disconcerting sort of noise; but when it hits the tin roof of a Nissen hut, tears through it and the wood lining inside, passes out again or comes to rest in the hut, the noises become involved and resemble all sorts of queer sounds from kicking a tea-tray to treading on an empty match-box. The huts were solidly sand-bagged up their outside walls to a height of some feet, but had no overhead cover whatever. The third burst from Guns and the R.O. arrived on the hut at exactly the same moment as the General and his Staff arrived on the floor as close as they could get to the wall and the protecting sandbags. They stayed there for some exciting minutes while Guns shot numerous holes in the roof, splintered the furniture, and shot the dinner piecemeal off the table.The shooting and the hum of the enemy engine ceased together, and the General and his Staff gathered themselves off the floor and surveyed the wreckage about them. “I just moved in time,” said the Brigade-Major, and pointed to a ragged hole in the seat ofhis chair. “D’you suppose it was a fluke, or have they got this place spotted?” asked the Captain. “Nasty mess of the roof,” said someone else. The General confined himself to less coherent but much more pungent remarks on all Huns in general, and night-raiders in particular. They seated themselves, and the waiter was just beginning to mop up the smashed bottle of red wine, when the distant hum of another engine was heard. This time the barraged ones reached the floor just a shade ahead of the first tearing burst from Guns and the R.O., and again they held their breath and cowered while the bullets clashed and banged on the tin roof, smacked and cracked on the ground outside, beat another noisy banging tattoo across the next-door huts. The group stayed prone rather longer after the ceasing of fire and engine hum, and had little more than risen to their feet when the third outbreak sent them flinging down into cover again.After another and very much longer pause they very gingerly resumed their places at the table, sitting with chairs turned to positionswhich would allow evacuation with the least possible delay. The conversation for the rest of the dinner was conducted in hushed whispers and with six pair of ears on the alert for the first suspicion of the sound of an approaching engine. It was agreed by all that the Hun must have them spotted, and the only matter for surprise was that some of the bombs heard exploding in the distance had not been dropped on them. It was also agreed very unanimously, not to say emphatically, that the first job for a party in the morning was the digging of a solidly constructed dug-out. “Sand-bags on the roof might be good enough for bullets,” said the General, “but we’ve got to allow for bombs next time, and there’s nothing for that but a good dug-out.”Someone suggested moving the H.Q., but this was rejected since they were busy at the time, and it would mean a good deal of time lost and work dislocated. The General decided to hang on for a bit and see what turned up.Next morning dug-outs were started andthickish weather the next night prevented further raids and allowed satisfactory progress to be made on the shelters. The following night was clear again, but dinner passed without any alarm, and everyone, except the Brigade-Major, who had some urgent work to keep him up, turned in early.At about 11.30 p.m. the first Hun came over, and at the ’drome the waiting and expectant Guns and R.O. set up their new and improved barrage, with four machine-guns all carefully trained and set to sweep over the same end of the same wood.The General was awakened by the first tea-tray bang-banging on adjacent tin roofs, and, without pausing to think, rolled out of bed and bumped on to the floor just as a couple of strays from the outside edge of the barrage banged, ripped, and cracked through his roof and walls. He crawled at top pace to the wall, cursing his hardest, groped round in the dark and found a pair of boots and a British Warm, struggled into these, sitting on the cold floor in his pyjamas, while a tornado of bullets hailed and clashed and bangedacross the Nissen hut roofs of the camp. He took a quick chance offered by a lull in the firing, flung the door open, and set off at a floundering run for the dug-out. As he doubled along the duckboards he heard the droning roar of an engine coming closer and closer, made a desperate spurt, expecting every moment to hear the ominous whistle and resounding crash of a falling and bursting bomb, reached the dug-out entrance, hurled himself through it, and fell in a heap on top of the Brigade-Major cautiously feeling his way down the dark steps. They reached the bottom in a tumbled heap and with a bump, their language rising in a mingled and turgid flow to the delighted ears of a Staff-Lieutenant, shivering at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas with his breeches under his arm and his tunic thrown round his chilly shoulders. But his grins cut off short, and he, too, hurtled down the steps as a bomb burst a few hundred yards off with a resounding and earth-shaking crash.Sitting there in the dark for the next hour the General meditated many things, includingthe mysterious ways of air Huns who so accurately machine-gunned his camp, and yet dropped nine out of ten of their bombs at various distances up to a full mile away from it.This mystery led him next day to diverge from his way and ride across the fields to the ‘drome to make a few inquiries into the ways of night-fliers. Guns was busy making some adjustments to his barrage guns with renewed determination to bring a Hun down some night. The General saw him, and rode over and asked a few questions, and listened with a growing suspicion darkening his brow to Guns’ enthusiastic description of the barrage plan. He cut Guns short with an abrupt question, “Where do your bullets come down?”Guns paused in bewilderment, and stared vacantly a moment at the empty sky. Somehow now in daylight it seemed so very obvious the bullets must come down; whereas shooting up into the dark it had never occurred. The General pulled his horse round and rode straight over to the Squadron office.There he found the Major and a map, had the exact position of the barrage guns pointed out to him, and in turn pointed out where the H.Q. camp lay. The R.O., who was working in the outer office, sat shivering at the wrathful remarks that boiled out of the next room and ended with a demand for the presence of the Gunnery Officer. The R.O. himself departed hurriedly to send him, and then took refuge in the hangar farthest removed from the office. A sense of fair play and sharing the blame drove him reluctantly back to the office in time to hear the effective close of the General’s remarks.“Barrage, sir!—barrage! Splashing thousands of bullets all over a country scattered with camps. Are you mad, sir? Air barrage! Go’ bless your eyes, man, d’you think you’re in London that you must go filling the sky with barrages and bullets and waking me and every other man within miles with your cursed row. Suppose you had shot someone—suppose youhaveshot someone. Blank blank your air barrage. You’d better go back to England, where you’ll be inthe fashion with your air barrages and anti-aircraft. Am I to be driven from my bed on a filthy cold night to ...” he spluttered explosively and stopped short. If the Division heard the details of his share in the incident, had the chance to picture him racing for the dug-out, sitting shivering in scanty night attire, and add to the picture as they’d certainly do, the joke would easily outlive the war and him. “That will do, sir,” he said after a brief pause, “I’ll have a word with your Major and leave him to deal with you.”Guns came out with his head hanging, to join the pale-cheeked R.O. and escape with him.Ten minutes after a message came to him that the General wanted him in the C.O.’s office, and Guns groaned and went back to hear his sentence, estimating it at anything between “shot at dawn” and cashiered, broke, and sent out of the Service.Now, what the C.O. had said in those ten minutes nobody ever knew, but Guns found a totally different kind of General awaiting him.“Come in,” he said, and after a pause a twinkle came in his eye as he looked at the dejected, hangdog air of the culprit. “H-m-m! You can thank your C.O. and the excellent character he gives you, sir, for my agreeing to drop this matter. I think you realise your offence and won’t repeat it. Zeal and keenness is always commendable; but please temper it with discretion. I am glad to know of any officer keen on his work as I hear you are; but I cannot allow the matter to pass entirely without punishment....” (Guns braced himself with a mental “Now for it.”) “... So I order you to parade at my Headquarters at 7.30 to-night, and have dinner with me.” He paused, said, “That’ll do, sir,” very abruptly, and Guns emerged in a somewhat dazed frame of mind.He said, after the dinner, that the punishment was much worse than it sounded. “Roasting! I never had such a dose of chaffing in my life. Those red-tabbed blighters ... and they were all soinfernallypolite with it ... it was just beastly—all except the General. My Lord, he’s a man, a properwhite man, a real brick. And he was as keen to know all about machine-guns as I am myself.”“Well, you taught him something about them—especially about barrages and the result of indirect fire,” said the Mess, and, “Are you going to barrage the next Huns?”But on his next barrage plans, Guns in the first place—the very first and preliminary place—used a map, many diagrams, and endless pages of notebooks in calculations on where his bullets would come down.

AN AIR BARRAGE

TheGunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work—in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seenin the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.”

Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning andan appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up.

It sounds crazy, but then, as the Squadron protested, they, Guns especially, were crazy, and that’s all there was to it.

But with these notions of theirs about the infallibility of machine-guns, and the range of their usefulness, you will understand how their minds leaped to machine-gun tactics when the Hun night-fliers began to come over and bomb around the ’drome. The first nightthey came Guns nearly broke his neck by falling into a deep hole in his mad rush to get to the anti-aircraft machine-guns on the ‘drome near the sheds, and he alternated between moping and cursing for three days because the Huns had gone before he could get a crack at them. He cheered up a lot when they came the next time and he and the R.O. shot away a few-million rounds, more or less. But as he didn’t fetch a feather out of them, and as the Huns dropped their eggs horribly close to the hangars, the two were not properly satisfied, and began to work out all sorts of protective schemes and sit up as long as the moon was shining in hopes of a bit of shooting.

Their hopes were fully satisfied, or anyhow the Squadron’s more than were, because the Huns made a regular mark of the ’drome and strafed it night after night. And for all the rounds they shot, neither Guns nor the R.O. ever got a single bird, although they swore more than once that they were positive they had winged one. As none came down on our side of the lines, this claimwas a washout, and the two got quite worried about it and had to stand an unmerciful amount of chaff from the others on the dud shooting.

After a bit they evolved a new plan. Careful investigation and inquiry of different pilots in the Squadron gave them the groundwork for the plan. In answer to questions, some of the pilots said that if they were in the place of the Huns and wanted to find the ‘drome in the dark, they would steer for the unusual-shaped clump of wood which lay behind the ’drome. Some said they would follow the canal, others the road, others various guides, but all agreed that the wood was the object the Huns would steer for. This found, all the pilots again agreed it was a simple matter to coast along the edge of the wood, which would show up a black blot on the ground in the moonlight, find the tongue or spur of trees that ran straight out towards the ’drome, and, keeping that line, must fly exactly over the hangars. One or two nights’ careful listening to the direction of the approaching and departing Hun engines confirmedthe belief that the Huns were working on the lines indicated, and after this was sure the plan progressed rapidly.

The two machine-guns on the ’drome were trained and aimed in daylight to shower bullets exactly over the tip of the tongue of wood. A patent gadget invented by Guns allowed the gun-muzzles a certain amount of play up and down, play which careful calculation showed would pour a couple of streams of bullets across the end of the wood up and down a height extending to about a thousand feet, that is, 500 above and 500 below the level at which it was estimated the Huns usually flew on these night raids. It simply meant that as soon as the sound was judged to be near enough the two guns only had to open fire, to keep pouring out bullets to make sure that the Huns had to fly through the stream and “stop one” or more. It was, in fact, a simple air barrage of machine-gun bullets.

With the plan perfected, the two enthusiasts waited quite impatiently for the next strafe. Fortunately the moon was up fairlyearly, so that now there was no need to sit up late for the shoot, and the second night after the preparations were complete, to the joy of Guns and the R.O. (and the discomfort of the others), there was a beautiful, still, moonlight night with every inducement for the Huns to come along.

The two ate a hurried dinner with ears cocked for the first note of the warning which would sound when the distant noise of engines was first heard. Sure enough they had just reached the sweets when the signal went, and the two were up and off before the lights could be extinguished. They arrived panting at their stations to find the gun-crews all ready and waiting, made a last hasty examination to see everything was in order, and stood straining their ears for the moment when they reckoned the Huns would be approaching the barrage area, and when they judged the moment had arrived opened a long steady stream of fire. The drone of the first engine grew louder, passed through the barrage, and boomed on over the ’drome without missing a beat. There came the oldfamiliar “Phe-e-e-w—BANG! ... e-e-e-ew—BANG!” of a couple of falling bombs, and the first engine droned on and away. Two minutes later another was heard, and Guns and the R.O., no degree disheartened or discouraged by their first failure, let go another stream of lead, keeping the gun-muzzles twitching up and down as rapidly as they could. The second Hun repeated the performance of the first; and a third did likewise. After it was all over Guns and the R.O. held a council and devised fresh and more comprehensive plans, which included the use of some extra guns taken from the machines. For the moment we may leave them, merely mentioning that up to now and even in their newer plans they entirely neglected any consideration of rather an important item in their performance, namely, the ultimate billet of their numerous bullets.

From the point of view of the defence it is an important and unpleasant fact that an air barrage eventually returns to the ground. Guns and the R.O. had been pumping out bullets at a rate of some hundreds per minuteeach, and all those bullets after missing their target had to arrive somewhere on the earth. The gunners’ interest in them passed for the moment as soon as the bullets had failed to hit their mark, and afterwards they came to remember with amazement that ever they could have been so idiotically unconsidering.

Some distance from the ’drome, and in a line beyond the tip of the wood, there stood a number of Nissen huts which housed a Divisional Staff, and the inevitable consequence was that those up-and-down twitching gun-muzzles sprayed showers of lead in gusts across and across the hutments. The General Commanding the Division was in the middle of his dinner with about five staff officers round the table when the first “aeroplane over” warning went on this particular night of the new air barrage. The lights in the Mess hut were not extinguished, because full precautions had been taken some nights before to have the small window-space fully and closely screened against the possibility of leakage of a single ray of light. One ortwo remarks were made quite casually about the nasty raiding habits of the Huns, but since no bombs had come near in the earlier raids, and the conclusion was therefore reasonable that the Divisional H.Q. had not been located, nobody there worried much over the matter, and dinner proceeded.

They all heard the drone of the Hun engine, and, because it was a very still night, they heard it rather louder than usual. Someone had just remarked that they seemed to be coming closer to-night, when the further remarks were violently interrupted by a clashing and clatteringB-bang...br-r-rip-rap,ba-bang-bang, the splintering, ripping sound of smashed wood, the crash, clash tinkle of a bottle burst into a thousand fragments on the table under their startled eyes. The barrage bullets had returned to earth.

The group at the table had time for no more than a pause of astonishment, a few exclamations, a hasty pushing back of chairs, whenrip-rap-bang-bang-bangdown came the second spray of bullets from those jerking muzzles over on the ’drome. Now a bullet hittingany solid object makes a nasty and most disconcerting sort of noise; but when it hits the tin roof of a Nissen hut, tears through it and the wood lining inside, passes out again or comes to rest in the hut, the noises become involved and resemble all sorts of queer sounds from kicking a tea-tray to treading on an empty match-box. The huts were solidly sand-bagged up their outside walls to a height of some feet, but had no overhead cover whatever. The third burst from Guns and the R.O. arrived on the hut at exactly the same moment as the General and his Staff arrived on the floor as close as they could get to the wall and the protecting sandbags. They stayed there for some exciting minutes while Guns shot numerous holes in the roof, splintered the furniture, and shot the dinner piecemeal off the table.

The shooting and the hum of the enemy engine ceased together, and the General and his Staff gathered themselves off the floor and surveyed the wreckage about them. “I just moved in time,” said the Brigade-Major, and pointed to a ragged hole in the seat ofhis chair. “D’you suppose it was a fluke, or have they got this place spotted?” asked the Captain. “Nasty mess of the roof,” said someone else. The General confined himself to less coherent but much more pungent remarks on all Huns in general, and night-raiders in particular. They seated themselves, and the waiter was just beginning to mop up the smashed bottle of red wine, when the distant hum of another engine was heard. This time the barraged ones reached the floor just a shade ahead of the first tearing burst from Guns and the R.O., and again they held their breath and cowered while the bullets clashed and banged on the tin roof, smacked and cracked on the ground outside, beat another noisy banging tattoo across the next-door huts. The group stayed prone rather longer after the ceasing of fire and engine hum, and had little more than risen to their feet when the third outbreak sent them flinging down into cover again.

After another and very much longer pause they very gingerly resumed their places at the table, sitting with chairs turned to positionswhich would allow evacuation with the least possible delay. The conversation for the rest of the dinner was conducted in hushed whispers and with six pair of ears on the alert for the first suspicion of the sound of an approaching engine. It was agreed by all that the Hun must have them spotted, and the only matter for surprise was that some of the bombs heard exploding in the distance had not been dropped on them. It was also agreed very unanimously, not to say emphatically, that the first job for a party in the morning was the digging of a solidly constructed dug-out. “Sand-bags on the roof might be good enough for bullets,” said the General, “but we’ve got to allow for bombs next time, and there’s nothing for that but a good dug-out.”

Someone suggested moving the H.Q., but this was rejected since they were busy at the time, and it would mean a good deal of time lost and work dislocated. The General decided to hang on for a bit and see what turned up.

Next morning dug-outs were started andthickish weather the next night prevented further raids and allowed satisfactory progress to be made on the shelters. The following night was clear again, but dinner passed without any alarm, and everyone, except the Brigade-Major, who had some urgent work to keep him up, turned in early.

At about 11.30 p.m. the first Hun came over, and at the ’drome the waiting and expectant Guns and R.O. set up their new and improved barrage, with four machine-guns all carefully trained and set to sweep over the same end of the same wood.

The General was awakened by the first tea-tray bang-banging on adjacent tin roofs, and, without pausing to think, rolled out of bed and bumped on to the floor just as a couple of strays from the outside edge of the barrage banged, ripped, and cracked through his roof and walls. He crawled at top pace to the wall, cursing his hardest, groped round in the dark and found a pair of boots and a British Warm, struggled into these, sitting on the cold floor in his pyjamas, while a tornado of bullets hailed and clashed and bangedacross the Nissen hut roofs of the camp. He took a quick chance offered by a lull in the firing, flung the door open, and set off at a floundering run for the dug-out. As he doubled along the duckboards he heard the droning roar of an engine coming closer and closer, made a desperate spurt, expecting every moment to hear the ominous whistle and resounding crash of a falling and bursting bomb, reached the dug-out entrance, hurled himself through it, and fell in a heap on top of the Brigade-Major cautiously feeling his way down the dark steps. They reached the bottom in a tumbled heap and with a bump, their language rising in a mingled and turgid flow to the delighted ears of a Staff-Lieutenant, shivering at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas with his breeches under his arm and his tunic thrown round his chilly shoulders. But his grins cut off short, and he, too, hurtled down the steps as a bomb burst a few hundred yards off with a resounding and earth-shaking crash.

Sitting there in the dark for the next hour the General meditated many things, includingthe mysterious ways of air Huns who so accurately machine-gunned his camp, and yet dropped nine out of ten of their bombs at various distances up to a full mile away from it.

This mystery led him next day to diverge from his way and ride across the fields to the ‘drome to make a few inquiries into the ways of night-fliers. Guns was busy making some adjustments to his barrage guns with renewed determination to bring a Hun down some night. The General saw him, and rode over and asked a few questions, and listened with a growing suspicion darkening his brow to Guns’ enthusiastic description of the barrage plan. He cut Guns short with an abrupt question, “Where do your bullets come down?”

Guns paused in bewilderment, and stared vacantly a moment at the empty sky. Somehow now in daylight it seemed so very obvious the bullets must come down; whereas shooting up into the dark it had never occurred. The General pulled his horse round and rode straight over to the Squadron office.There he found the Major and a map, had the exact position of the barrage guns pointed out to him, and in turn pointed out where the H.Q. camp lay. The R.O., who was working in the outer office, sat shivering at the wrathful remarks that boiled out of the next room and ended with a demand for the presence of the Gunnery Officer. The R.O. himself departed hurriedly to send him, and then took refuge in the hangar farthest removed from the office. A sense of fair play and sharing the blame drove him reluctantly back to the office in time to hear the effective close of the General’s remarks.

“Barrage, sir!—barrage! Splashing thousands of bullets all over a country scattered with camps. Are you mad, sir? Air barrage! Go’ bless your eyes, man, d’you think you’re in London that you must go filling the sky with barrages and bullets and waking me and every other man within miles with your cursed row. Suppose you had shot someone—suppose youhaveshot someone. Blank blank your air barrage. You’d better go back to England, where you’ll be inthe fashion with your air barrages and anti-aircraft. Am I to be driven from my bed on a filthy cold night to ...” he spluttered explosively and stopped short. If the Division heard the details of his share in the incident, had the chance to picture him racing for the dug-out, sitting shivering in scanty night attire, and add to the picture as they’d certainly do, the joke would easily outlive the war and him. “That will do, sir,” he said after a brief pause, “I’ll have a word with your Major and leave him to deal with you.”

Guns came out with his head hanging, to join the pale-cheeked R.O. and escape with him.

Ten minutes after a message came to him that the General wanted him in the C.O.’s office, and Guns groaned and went back to hear his sentence, estimating it at anything between “shot at dawn” and cashiered, broke, and sent out of the Service.

Now, what the C.O. had said in those ten minutes nobody ever knew, but Guns found a totally different kind of General awaiting him.

“Come in,” he said, and after a pause a twinkle came in his eye as he looked at the dejected, hangdog air of the culprit. “H-m-m! You can thank your C.O. and the excellent character he gives you, sir, for my agreeing to drop this matter. I think you realise your offence and won’t repeat it. Zeal and keenness is always commendable; but please temper it with discretion. I am glad to know of any officer keen on his work as I hear you are; but I cannot allow the matter to pass entirely without punishment....” (Guns braced himself with a mental “Now for it.”) “... So I order you to parade at my Headquarters at 7.30 to-night, and have dinner with me.” He paused, said, “That’ll do, sir,” very abruptly, and Guns emerged in a somewhat dazed frame of mind.

He said, after the dinner, that the punishment was much worse than it sounded. “Roasting! I never had such a dose of chaffing in my life. Those red-tabbed blighters ... and they were all soinfernallypolite with it ... it was just beastly—all except the General. My Lord, he’s a man, a properwhite man, a real brick. And he was as keen to know all about machine-guns as I am myself.”

“Well, you taught him something about them—especially about barrages and the result of indirect fire,” said the Mess, and, “Are you going to barrage the next Huns?”

But on his next barrage plans, Guns in the first place—the very first and preliminary place—used a map, many diagrams, and endless pages of notebooks in calculations on where his bullets would come down.

VIIINIGHTMAREJake Hardingfrom early childhood had suffered from a horribly imaginative mind in the night hours, and had endured untold tortures from dreams and nightmares. One of his most frequent night terrors was to find himself fleeing over a dreary waste, struggling desperately to get along quickly and escape Something, while his feet and legs were clogged with dragging weights, and dreadful demons and bogies and bunyips howled in pursuit. This was an odd dream, because having been born and brought up in the bush he had never seen such a dreary waste as he dreamed of, and had never walked on anything worse than dry, springy turf or good firm road. There was one night he remembered for long years when he had a specially intensified edition of the same nightmare. It was when he was laid up as a child with a broken arm, and a touch offever on top of it, and he went through all the usual items of dreary waste, clogged feet trying to run, howling demons in pursuit, and a raging, consuming throat-drying fear. He woke screaming just as he was on the point of being seized and hurled into a yawning furnace filled with flaming red fire, saw a dim light burning by his bedside, felt a cool hand on his brow, heard a soothing voice murmur, “H-sh-sh! There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re quite safe here. Go to sleep again.”“I’m glad, Nursie,” said Jake, “I’m glad I’ve waked up; I’ve had a drefful dream.”All that is a long way back, but it serves to explain, perhaps, why Long Jake, 6 ft. 3 in. in height, thin as a lath, but muscled apparently with whipcord and wire rope, known throughout the regiment as a “hard case,” felt a curious and unaccountable jerk back to childhood in his memory as he lay on the edge of a wet shell-hole peering out into the growing grey light. “I’ve never been up here before,” he thought wonderingly, “and I’ve never seen any bit of front like it. Yet Iseem to know it by heart.” He knew afterwards, though not then, that it was the “dreary waste” of past dreams—a wide spreading welter of flat ground, broken and tumbled and torn and shiny wet, seen dimly through a misty haze, with nothing in sight but a few splintered bare poles of trees.But Long Jake did not get much time to cudgel his memory. It was almost time for the battalion to “go over the top,” although here to be sure there was no top, and the going over merely meant their climbing out of the chain of wet shell-craters they occupied, and advancing across the flat and up the long slope. Both sides were shelling heavily, but the British, as Jake could judge, by far the heavier of the two. The noise was deafening. The thunder of the guns rose roaring and bellowing without an instant’s break. Overhead the shells howled and yelled and shrieked and whistled and rumbled in every conceivable tone and accent from the slow, lumbering moan and roll of a passing electric tram to the sharp rush of a great bird’s wings. The ground quaked to the roll of the guns like jellyin a shaken mould; out in front of them the barrage was dropping into regular line, spouting in vivid flame that rent the twisting smoke veil quick instant after instant, flinging fountains of water and mud and smoke into the air.Jake heard no order given, did not even hear any whistle blown, but was suddenly aware that dim figures were rising out of the shell-holes to either side, and moving slowly forward. He scrambled out of his crater and moved forward in line with the rest. They went close up to the line of our bursting shells, so close that they could see the leaden hail splashing and whipping up the wet ground before them, so close that Jake more than once ducked instinctively at the vicious crack above his head of one of our own shells bursting and flinging its tearing bullets forward and down. But the line pressed on, and Jake kept level with it; and then, just when it seemed that they must come into that belt of leaping, splashing bullets, the barrage lifted forward, dropped again twenty or thirty yards ahead in anotherwall of springing smokeclouds and spurting flame.Jake pushed on. It was terribly heavy going, and he sank ankle deep at every step in the soft, wet ground. It was hard, too, to keep straight on, because the whole surface was pitted and cratered with holes that ran from anything the size of a foot-bath to a chasm big enough to swallow a fair-sized house. Jake skirted the edges of the larger holes, and plunged in and struggled up out of the smaller ones. The going was so heavy, and it was so hard to keep direction, that for a long time he thought of nothing else. Then a man who had been advancing beside him turned to him and yelled something Jake could not hear, and next instant lurched staggering against him. Jake just caught a glimpse of the wild terror in the staring eyes, of the hand clutched about the throat, and the blood spurting and welling out between the clenched fingers, and then the man slid down in a heap at his feet. Jake stooped an instant with wild thoughts racing through his mind. What was he to do for the man? Howdid one handle—couldn’t stop bleeding by a tourniquet or even a tight bandage—choke the man that way—why’n blazes hadn’t the ambulance classes told them how to handle a man with a bullet in his throat? (The answer to that last, perhaps, if Jake had only known, being that usually the man is past handling or helping.)Then before Jake could attempt anything he knew the man was dead. Jake went on, and now he was conscious of vicious little hisses and whutts and sharp slaps and smacks in the wet ground about him, and knew these for bullets passing or striking close.The barrage lifted again, this time before they were well up on it, and the line ploughed on in pursuit of it. That was the third lift. Jake tried to recall how many times the pretended barrage had lifted in the practice attacks behind the lines, how many yards there were there from their own marked position to the taped-out lines representing the German positions.Then through the bellowing of the guns,the unceasing howl of the shells, the running crashes of their bursts Jake heard a sharp tat-tat-tat, another like an echo joining it, another and another until the whole blended in a hurrying clatter and swift running rattle.“Machine-guns,” he gasped. “Now we’re for it,” but plunged on doggedly. He could see something dimly grey looming through the smoke haze, with red jets of fire sparkling and spitting from it ... more spurting jets ... and still more, both these last lots seen before he could make out the loom of the block-house shelters that covered them. Jake knew where he was now. These were the concrete redoubts, emplacements, “pill-boxes.” But they were none of his business. Everyone had been carefully drilled in their own jobs; there were the proper parties told off to deal with the pill-boxes; his business was to push straight on past them, clearing any Germans out of the shell-hole they might be holding, then stop and help dig some sort of linked-up line of holes, and stand by to beat off any counter-attack. So Jake went steadily on, looking sharply about him forany Germans. A rifle flamed suddenly from a couple of yards ahead of him, and he felt the wind of the bullet by his face, thought for a moment he was blinded by the flash. But as he staggered back a bomber thrust past him and threw straight and hard into the shell-hole where the rifle had flashed. Jake saw a jumping sheet of flame, heard the crash of the bomb, felt the shower of dirt and wet flung from off the crater lip in his face, steadied himself, and plunged off after the hurrying bomber.The next bit was rather involved, and Jake was never sure exactly what happened. There were some grey figures in front of him, scurrying to and fro confusedly, some with long coats flapping about their ankles, others with only half bodies or shoulders showing above the shell-hole edges. He thought some were holding their hands up; but others—this was too clear to doubt—were shooting rapidly at him and the rest of the line, the red tongues of flame licking out from the rifles straight at them. Jake dived to a shell hole and began firing back, felt somebody slide andscramble down beside him, turned to find the bomber picking himself up and shaking a blood-dripping left hand. “Come on, Jake,” yelled the bomber. “Rush ’em’s the game,” and went scrambling and floundering out of the hole with Jake close at his heels. There was a minute’s wild shooting and bombing, and the rest of the Germans either ran, or fell, or came crouching forward towards them with their empty hands high and waving over their heads.An officer appeared suddenly from somewhere. “Come along. Push on!” he was shouting. “Bit further before we make a line to hold. Push on,” and he led the way forward at a staggering trot. Jake and the others followed.They reached the wide flattened crest of the slope they were attacking and were pushing on over it when a rapid stutter of machine-gun fire broke out on their left flank, and a stream of bullets came sheeting and whipping along the top of the slope. The line was fairly caught in the bullet-storm, and suffered heavily in the next minute.There was some shooting from shell holes in front, too, but that was nothing to the galling fire that poured on them from the flank. Jake heard suddenly the long, insistent scream of a whistle, looked round and saw an officer signalling to take cover. He dropped promptly into a shell crater, and, hearing presently the bang of rifles round him, peered out over the edge for a mark to shoot at. Out to his left he caught sight of a sparkle of fire, and heard the rapid clatter of the machine-guns. He could just make out the rounded top of a buried concrete emplacement, and the black slit that marked the embrasure, and began to aim and fire steadily and carefully at it. The emplacement held its fire more now, but every now and then delivered a flickering string of flashes and a venomousrat-at-at-at. Jake kept on firing at it, glancing round every little while to be sure that the others were not moving on without him. The noisy banging raps of close-by machine-gunning broke out suddenly, and on Jake looking round from his shell hole he found a gun in action notmore than a dozen yards away; and while he looked another one began to fire steadily from another shell crater fifty or sixty yards farther along. Jake crawled out of his hole, slithered over the rough ground and down into the crater where the nearest machine-gun banged rapidly. A sergeant was with the team, and Jake bawled in his ear, “If you’ll keep pottin’ at him every time he opens fire, I’ll try’n sneak over an’ out him with a bomb in the letter-box.”“Please yerself,” returned the sergeant. “My job’s to keep pumpin’ ’em down ’is throat every time ’e opens ’is mouth.”“Watch you don’t plug me in mistake when I get there,” said Jake, and crawled out of the hole. He ducked hastily into another as he heard the enemy bullets spatter about him, shift and begin to smack and splash about the gun he had just left. That gun ceased fire suddenly, but the one fifty yards farther round kept on furiously. “Got him in the neck, I s’pose,” said Jake, “worse luck.”He had a couple of Mills’ bombs in his pockets, but added to his stock from a half-emptybucket he found lying by a dead bomber in a crater. He advanced cautiously, wriggling hurriedly over the dividing ground between craters, keeping down under cover as much as possible, working out and then sidling in towards the red flashes that kept spurting out at intervals from the emplacement. Once it seemed that the enemy gunners had spotted him as he crawled and wriggled from one hole to another, and a gust of bullets came suddenly ripping and whipping about him as he hurled himself forward and plunged head foremost into a crater with his left side tingling and blood trickling from his left arm. He fingered the rent in his tunic and satisfied himself that the side wound was no more than a graze, the arm one a clean perforation which did not appear to have touched the bone. Twice after that he heard the bullets’swish-ish-ishsweeping over his head, or dropping to spatter the dirt flying from the edge of a hole he had reached. But he worked steadily on all the same, passed the line of the front and side embrasures, and was pondering his next move,when a sudden rapid outburst of fire made him lift his head and peer out. A dozen men had appeared suddenly within twenty yards of the emplacement and were making as rapid a dash for it as the ground allowed. The machine-guns were hailing bullets at them as hard as they could fire, and man after man plunged and fell and rolled and squirmed into holes or lay still in the open.Jake did not wait to see the result of the dash. He was up and out of his cover and running in himself as fast as the wet ground would allow him. He was almost on the emplacement when a gun slewed round and banged a short burst at him. He felt the rush of bullets past his face, a pluck at his sleeve and shoulder strap, a blow on his shrapnel helmet, made a last desperate plunge forward, and scrambled on to the low roof. Hurriedly he pulled a bomb from his pocket and jerked the pin out, when a couple of rifles banged close behind them, a bullet whipped past overhead, and another smacked and ricochetted screaming from the concrete. Jake twisted, saw the head and shoulders oftwo men with rifles levelled over a hole, and quick as a flash hurled his bomb. The men ducked, and Jake drew the pin from another bomb and lobbed it carefully over just as the first bomb burst. The other followed, exploding fairly in the hole and evidently deep down since the report was low and muffled. Jake pulled another pin, and was leaning over to locate an embrasure when the gun flamed out from it. Jake released the spring, counted carefully “One and two and three and——” leaned over and slammed the bomb fairly into the slit. He had another bomb out as it burst—well inside by the sound of it—and this time leaned over and deliberately thrust it in through the opening. He had barely snatched his hand out when it went off with a muffled crash. Jake heard screams inside, and then an instant later loud calls behind him. He jerked round to see half a dozen arms waving from the hole where he had flung the first bomb. This, as he found after, was the underground stair down and up again into the emplacement,and the waving arms were in token of the garrison’s surrender.Jake stood on the roof and waved his arm, while keeping a cautious eye on the surrenderers, saw the mud-daubed khaki figures rise from their holes and come scrambling forward, and sat down suddenly, feeling unpleasantly faint and sickish.His officer’s voice recalled him. “Well done, lad, well done. This cursed thing was fairly holding us up till you scuppered it. We’ve got our objective line now.”Jake staggered to his feet.“You’re wounded,” went on the officer. “Get back out of this, and give a message to anyone that’ll take it, that we’ve got our third objective line, and want supports and ammunition quick as possible. Go on, off with you, now.”“Right, sir!” said Jake with an effort, and started off back across the shell-torn ground again.He felt a bit dizzy still—side hurt a heap—arm getting numb, too—must keep going and get that message through——A high-explosive shrapnel burst directly overhead, and Jake heard several small pieces whip-down and one heavy bit splash thudding into the ground a yard from his feet. And this was only the first shell of many. The Germans had seen that their ground was lost, and were beginning to barrage it. Jake staggered blindly across the broken ground, in and out and round the craters, over sodden mounds that caught at his feet and crumbled wetly under his tread. Huge clods of wet earth clung to his feet and legs and made every step an effort. The shell fire was growing more and more intense, thundering and crashing and hurling cascades of mud and splinters in every direction, passing overhead in long-drawn howls and moans and yellings, or the short savage screams and rush of the nearer passing. The ground was veiled in smoke and drifting haze, and stretched as far as he could see in a dreary perspective of shiny wet earth and ragged holes. He felt that he’d never cover it, never get clear of these cursed—what were they—shells, bogies, demonsscreaming and howling for his life. He plunged into a patch of low-lying ground, sticky swamp that sank him knee deep at every step, that clutched and clung about his feet and held each foot gripped as he dragged it sucking out and swung it forward. He wanted to run—run—run—but his legs were lead—and the bogies were very close—and now there were dead men amongst his feet—horribly mud-bedaubed dead, half-buried in the ooze—and helmets, and scattered packs, and haversacks. A festering stench rose from the slime he waded through. He tried again to run, but could only stagger slowly, dragging one foot clear after the other. Once he trod on something he thought a lump of drier mud, and it squirmed weakly under his foot, and a white face twisted round and up, mouthing feeble curses at him. There were other things, horrible things he turned his eyes from as he tried to hurry past—and red stains on the frothy green scum. He reeled on, stupid and dazed, with the thunderous crashes of a world shattering and dissolving about him, deafened by the demonscreeches and howlings. There were other people with him, some wandering aimlessly, others going direct the one way, meeting still others going the opposite, but all dragging clogged, weighted feet. Some fell and did not rise. Jake knew they had been caught. He saw two men who were carrying something, a stretcher, stop and look up, and lower the stretcher hastily and drop, one flat on his face, the other crouched low and still looking up. A spurt of red flame flung a rolling cloud of black smoke about them, and seconds after a flattened steel helmet whistled down out of the sky and thudded in the mud by Jake. When he came to where they had been there was only a hole with blue and grey reek curling slowly up its black calcined sides. Jake knew the three had been caught, too—as he would be caught, if he didn’t hurry. He struggled, panting.They were still yelling and howling, looking for him. Demons, bogymen—and here was the loudest, and fiercest, the worst of them all—louder and louder to a tremendous chorus of all the noises devils ever made.He was flinging himself down to escape the demon clutch (thereby probably saving his life, since the great shell burst a bare score yards away) when he heard the thunderous clash of the furnace-doors flung back, caught a searing glimpse of the leaping red flames, and was hurled headlong.As he fell he tried to scream. He did scream, but—although he knew nothing of the gap, and thought it was on the instant of his falling—it was days later—a queer choking, strangled cry that brought a cool hand on his hot forehead, a quiet voice hushing and soothing him and saying he was “all right now.”He opened his eyes and closed them again with a sigh of relief and content. A low light was burning by his bed, the shadowy figure of a woman bent over him, and between the opening and closing of his eyes, his mind flicked back to full fifteen years.“I’m glad I waked, Nursie,” he said weakly. “I’ve had a drefful dream; the very dreffulest I’ve ever had.”

NIGHTMARE

Jake Hardingfrom early childhood had suffered from a horribly imaginative mind in the night hours, and had endured untold tortures from dreams and nightmares. One of his most frequent night terrors was to find himself fleeing over a dreary waste, struggling desperately to get along quickly and escape Something, while his feet and legs were clogged with dragging weights, and dreadful demons and bogies and bunyips howled in pursuit. This was an odd dream, because having been born and brought up in the bush he had never seen such a dreary waste as he dreamed of, and had never walked on anything worse than dry, springy turf or good firm road. There was one night he remembered for long years when he had a specially intensified edition of the same nightmare. It was when he was laid up as a child with a broken arm, and a touch offever on top of it, and he went through all the usual items of dreary waste, clogged feet trying to run, howling demons in pursuit, and a raging, consuming throat-drying fear. He woke screaming just as he was on the point of being seized and hurled into a yawning furnace filled with flaming red fire, saw a dim light burning by his bedside, felt a cool hand on his brow, heard a soothing voice murmur, “H-sh-sh! There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re quite safe here. Go to sleep again.”

“I’m glad, Nursie,” said Jake, “I’m glad I’ve waked up; I’ve had a drefful dream.”

All that is a long way back, but it serves to explain, perhaps, why Long Jake, 6 ft. 3 in. in height, thin as a lath, but muscled apparently with whipcord and wire rope, known throughout the regiment as a “hard case,” felt a curious and unaccountable jerk back to childhood in his memory as he lay on the edge of a wet shell-hole peering out into the growing grey light. “I’ve never been up here before,” he thought wonderingly, “and I’ve never seen any bit of front like it. Yet Iseem to know it by heart.” He knew afterwards, though not then, that it was the “dreary waste” of past dreams—a wide spreading welter of flat ground, broken and tumbled and torn and shiny wet, seen dimly through a misty haze, with nothing in sight but a few splintered bare poles of trees.

But Long Jake did not get much time to cudgel his memory. It was almost time for the battalion to “go over the top,” although here to be sure there was no top, and the going over merely meant their climbing out of the chain of wet shell-craters they occupied, and advancing across the flat and up the long slope. Both sides were shelling heavily, but the British, as Jake could judge, by far the heavier of the two. The noise was deafening. The thunder of the guns rose roaring and bellowing without an instant’s break. Overhead the shells howled and yelled and shrieked and whistled and rumbled in every conceivable tone and accent from the slow, lumbering moan and roll of a passing electric tram to the sharp rush of a great bird’s wings. The ground quaked to the roll of the guns like jellyin a shaken mould; out in front of them the barrage was dropping into regular line, spouting in vivid flame that rent the twisting smoke veil quick instant after instant, flinging fountains of water and mud and smoke into the air.

Jake heard no order given, did not even hear any whistle blown, but was suddenly aware that dim figures were rising out of the shell-holes to either side, and moving slowly forward. He scrambled out of his crater and moved forward in line with the rest. They went close up to the line of our bursting shells, so close that they could see the leaden hail splashing and whipping up the wet ground before them, so close that Jake more than once ducked instinctively at the vicious crack above his head of one of our own shells bursting and flinging its tearing bullets forward and down. But the line pressed on, and Jake kept level with it; and then, just when it seemed that they must come into that belt of leaping, splashing bullets, the barrage lifted forward, dropped again twenty or thirty yards ahead in anotherwall of springing smokeclouds and spurting flame.

Jake pushed on. It was terribly heavy going, and he sank ankle deep at every step in the soft, wet ground. It was hard, too, to keep straight on, because the whole surface was pitted and cratered with holes that ran from anything the size of a foot-bath to a chasm big enough to swallow a fair-sized house. Jake skirted the edges of the larger holes, and plunged in and struggled up out of the smaller ones. The going was so heavy, and it was so hard to keep direction, that for a long time he thought of nothing else. Then a man who had been advancing beside him turned to him and yelled something Jake could not hear, and next instant lurched staggering against him. Jake just caught a glimpse of the wild terror in the staring eyes, of the hand clutched about the throat, and the blood spurting and welling out between the clenched fingers, and then the man slid down in a heap at his feet. Jake stooped an instant with wild thoughts racing through his mind. What was he to do for the man? Howdid one handle—couldn’t stop bleeding by a tourniquet or even a tight bandage—choke the man that way—why’n blazes hadn’t the ambulance classes told them how to handle a man with a bullet in his throat? (The answer to that last, perhaps, if Jake had only known, being that usually the man is past handling or helping.)

Then before Jake could attempt anything he knew the man was dead. Jake went on, and now he was conscious of vicious little hisses and whutts and sharp slaps and smacks in the wet ground about him, and knew these for bullets passing or striking close.

The barrage lifted again, this time before they were well up on it, and the line ploughed on in pursuit of it. That was the third lift. Jake tried to recall how many times the pretended barrage had lifted in the practice attacks behind the lines, how many yards there were there from their own marked position to the taped-out lines representing the German positions.

Then through the bellowing of the guns,the unceasing howl of the shells, the running crashes of their bursts Jake heard a sharp tat-tat-tat, another like an echo joining it, another and another until the whole blended in a hurrying clatter and swift running rattle.

“Machine-guns,” he gasped. “Now we’re for it,” but plunged on doggedly. He could see something dimly grey looming through the smoke haze, with red jets of fire sparkling and spitting from it ... more spurting jets ... and still more, both these last lots seen before he could make out the loom of the block-house shelters that covered them. Jake knew where he was now. These were the concrete redoubts, emplacements, “pill-boxes.” But they were none of his business. Everyone had been carefully drilled in their own jobs; there were the proper parties told off to deal with the pill-boxes; his business was to push straight on past them, clearing any Germans out of the shell-hole they might be holding, then stop and help dig some sort of linked-up line of holes, and stand by to beat off any counter-attack. So Jake went steadily on, looking sharply about him forany Germans. A rifle flamed suddenly from a couple of yards ahead of him, and he felt the wind of the bullet by his face, thought for a moment he was blinded by the flash. But as he staggered back a bomber thrust past him and threw straight and hard into the shell-hole where the rifle had flashed. Jake saw a jumping sheet of flame, heard the crash of the bomb, felt the shower of dirt and wet flung from off the crater lip in his face, steadied himself, and plunged off after the hurrying bomber.

The next bit was rather involved, and Jake was never sure exactly what happened. There were some grey figures in front of him, scurrying to and fro confusedly, some with long coats flapping about their ankles, others with only half bodies or shoulders showing above the shell-hole edges. He thought some were holding their hands up; but others—this was too clear to doubt—were shooting rapidly at him and the rest of the line, the red tongues of flame licking out from the rifles straight at them. Jake dived to a shell hole and began firing back, felt somebody slide andscramble down beside him, turned to find the bomber picking himself up and shaking a blood-dripping left hand. “Come on, Jake,” yelled the bomber. “Rush ’em’s the game,” and went scrambling and floundering out of the hole with Jake close at his heels. There was a minute’s wild shooting and bombing, and the rest of the Germans either ran, or fell, or came crouching forward towards them with their empty hands high and waving over their heads.

An officer appeared suddenly from somewhere. “Come along. Push on!” he was shouting. “Bit further before we make a line to hold. Push on,” and he led the way forward at a staggering trot. Jake and the others followed.

They reached the wide flattened crest of the slope they were attacking and were pushing on over it when a rapid stutter of machine-gun fire broke out on their left flank, and a stream of bullets came sheeting and whipping along the top of the slope. The line was fairly caught in the bullet-storm, and suffered heavily in the next minute.There was some shooting from shell holes in front, too, but that was nothing to the galling fire that poured on them from the flank. Jake heard suddenly the long, insistent scream of a whistle, looked round and saw an officer signalling to take cover. He dropped promptly into a shell crater, and, hearing presently the bang of rifles round him, peered out over the edge for a mark to shoot at. Out to his left he caught sight of a sparkle of fire, and heard the rapid clatter of the machine-guns. He could just make out the rounded top of a buried concrete emplacement, and the black slit that marked the embrasure, and began to aim and fire steadily and carefully at it. The emplacement held its fire more now, but every now and then delivered a flickering string of flashes and a venomousrat-at-at-at. Jake kept on firing at it, glancing round every little while to be sure that the others were not moving on without him. The noisy banging raps of close-by machine-gunning broke out suddenly, and on Jake looking round from his shell hole he found a gun in action notmore than a dozen yards away; and while he looked another one began to fire steadily from another shell crater fifty or sixty yards farther along. Jake crawled out of his hole, slithered over the rough ground and down into the crater where the nearest machine-gun banged rapidly. A sergeant was with the team, and Jake bawled in his ear, “If you’ll keep pottin’ at him every time he opens fire, I’ll try’n sneak over an’ out him with a bomb in the letter-box.”

“Please yerself,” returned the sergeant. “My job’s to keep pumpin’ ’em down ’is throat every time ’e opens ’is mouth.”

“Watch you don’t plug me in mistake when I get there,” said Jake, and crawled out of the hole. He ducked hastily into another as he heard the enemy bullets spatter about him, shift and begin to smack and splash about the gun he had just left. That gun ceased fire suddenly, but the one fifty yards farther round kept on furiously. “Got him in the neck, I s’pose,” said Jake, “worse luck.”

He had a couple of Mills’ bombs in his pockets, but added to his stock from a half-emptybucket he found lying by a dead bomber in a crater. He advanced cautiously, wriggling hurriedly over the dividing ground between craters, keeping down under cover as much as possible, working out and then sidling in towards the red flashes that kept spurting out at intervals from the emplacement. Once it seemed that the enemy gunners had spotted him as he crawled and wriggled from one hole to another, and a gust of bullets came suddenly ripping and whipping about him as he hurled himself forward and plunged head foremost into a crater with his left side tingling and blood trickling from his left arm. He fingered the rent in his tunic and satisfied himself that the side wound was no more than a graze, the arm one a clean perforation which did not appear to have touched the bone. Twice after that he heard the bullets’swish-ish-ishsweeping over his head, or dropping to spatter the dirt flying from the edge of a hole he had reached. But he worked steadily on all the same, passed the line of the front and side embrasures, and was pondering his next move,when a sudden rapid outburst of fire made him lift his head and peer out. A dozen men had appeared suddenly within twenty yards of the emplacement and were making as rapid a dash for it as the ground allowed. The machine-guns were hailing bullets at them as hard as they could fire, and man after man plunged and fell and rolled and squirmed into holes or lay still in the open.

Jake did not wait to see the result of the dash. He was up and out of his cover and running in himself as fast as the wet ground would allow him. He was almost on the emplacement when a gun slewed round and banged a short burst at him. He felt the rush of bullets past his face, a pluck at his sleeve and shoulder strap, a blow on his shrapnel helmet, made a last desperate plunge forward, and scrambled on to the low roof. Hurriedly he pulled a bomb from his pocket and jerked the pin out, when a couple of rifles banged close behind them, a bullet whipped past overhead, and another smacked and ricochetted screaming from the concrete. Jake twisted, saw the head and shoulders oftwo men with rifles levelled over a hole, and quick as a flash hurled his bomb. The men ducked, and Jake drew the pin from another bomb and lobbed it carefully over just as the first bomb burst. The other followed, exploding fairly in the hole and evidently deep down since the report was low and muffled. Jake pulled another pin, and was leaning over to locate an embrasure when the gun flamed out from it. Jake released the spring, counted carefully “One and two and three and——” leaned over and slammed the bomb fairly into the slit. He had another bomb out as it burst—well inside by the sound of it—and this time leaned over and deliberately thrust it in through the opening. He had barely snatched his hand out when it went off with a muffled crash. Jake heard screams inside, and then an instant later loud calls behind him. He jerked round to see half a dozen arms waving from the hole where he had flung the first bomb. This, as he found after, was the underground stair down and up again into the emplacement,and the waving arms were in token of the garrison’s surrender.

Jake stood on the roof and waved his arm, while keeping a cautious eye on the surrenderers, saw the mud-daubed khaki figures rise from their holes and come scrambling forward, and sat down suddenly, feeling unpleasantly faint and sickish.

His officer’s voice recalled him. “Well done, lad, well done. This cursed thing was fairly holding us up till you scuppered it. We’ve got our objective line now.”

Jake staggered to his feet.

“You’re wounded,” went on the officer. “Get back out of this, and give a message to anyone that’ll take it, that we’ve got our third objective line, and want supports and ammunition quick as possible. Go on, off with you, now.”

“Right, sir!” said Jake with an effort, and started off back across the shell-torn ground again.

He felt a bit dizzy still—side hurt a heap—arm getting numb, too—must keep going and get that message through——

A high-explosive shrapnel burst directly overhead, and Jake heard several small pieces whip-down and one heavy bit splash thudding into the ground a yard from his feet. And this was only the first shell of many. The Germans had seen that their ground was lost, and were beginning to barrage it. Jake staggered blindly across the broken ground, in and out and round the craters, over sodden mounds that caught at his feet and crumbled wetly under his tread. Huge clods of wet earth clung to his feet and legs and made every step an effort. The shell fire was growing more and more intense, thundering and crashing and hurling cascades of mud and splinters in every direction, passing overhead in long-drawn howls and moans and yellings, or the short savage screams and rush of the nearer passing. The ground was veiled in smoke and drifting haze, and stretched as far as he could see in a dreary perspective of shiny wet earth and ragged holes. He felt that he’d never cover it, never get clear of these cursed—what were they—shells, bogies, demonsscreaming and howling for his life. He plunged into a patch of low-lying ground, sticky swamp that sank him knee deep at every step, that clutched and clung about his feet and held each foot gripped as he dragged it sucking out and swung it forward. He wanted to run—run—run—but his legs were lead—and the bogies were very close—and now there were dead men amongst his feet—horribly mud-bedaubed dead, half-buried in the ooze—and helmets, and scattered packs, and haversacks. A festering stench rose from the slime he waded through. He tried again to run, but could only stagger slowly, dragging one foot clear after the other. Once he trod on something he thought a lump of drier mud, and it squirmed weakly under his foot, and a white face twisted round and up, mouthing feeble curses at him. There were other things, horrible things he turned his eyes from as he tried to hurry past—and red stains on the frothy green scum. He reeled on, stupid and dazed, with the thunderous crashes of a world shattering and dissolving about him, deafened by the demonscreeches and howlings. There were other people with him, some wandering aimlessly, others going direct the one way, meeting still others going the opposite, but all dragging clogged, weighted feet. Some fell and did not rise. Jake knew they had been caught. He saw two men who were carrying something, a stretcher, stop and look up, and lower the stretcher hastily and drop, one flat on his face, the other crouched low and still looking up. A spurt of red flame flung a rolling cloud of black smoke about them, and seconds after a flattened steel helmet whistled down out of the sky and thudded in the mud by Jake. When he came to where they had been there was only a hole with blue and grey reek curling slowly up its black calcined sides. Jake knew the three had been caught, too—as he would be caught, if he didn’t hurry. He struggled, panting.

They were still yelling and howling, looking for him. Demons, bogymen—and here was the loudest, and fiercest, the worst of them all—louder and louder to a tremendous chorus of all the noises devils ever made.He was flinging himself down to escape the demon clutch (thereby probably saving his life, since the great shell burst a bare score yards away) when he heard the thunderous clash of the furnace-doors flung back, caught a searing glimpse of the leaping red flames, and was hurled headlong.

As he fell he tried to scream. He did scream, but—although he knew nothing of the gap, and thought it was on the instant of his falling—it was days later—a queer choking, strangled cry that brought a cool hand on his hot forehead, a quiet voice hushing and soothing him and saying he was “all right now.”

He opened his eyes and closed them again with a sigh of relief and content. A low light was burning by his bed, the shadowy figure of a woman bent over him, and between the opening and closing of his eyes, his mind flicked back to full fifteen years.

“I’m glad I waked, Nursie,” he said weakly. “I’ve had a drefful dream; the very dreffulest I’ve ever had.”

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