Part 10 (2/2)

The whistle shrilled loudly, and, jumping to his feet, the commandant shouted, ”Forward with the bayonet! _Vive la patrie!_”

Instantly the sandbags in front of them bristled with heads wearing flat caps, and the volley from the mausers mingled with the murderous tac-tac of machine-guns.

It floated dimly through the boy's mind that he had no right to be hazarding life and limb in that place, but the joy of that mad rush with a fight at the end of it banished the thought on the spot, and, scarcely conscious of those few remaining yards which they traversed at top speed, he found himself scaling the sandbags.

Above him was the commandant, sword in one hand and revolver in the other, but as the active little man poised for an instant on the top of the parapet and fired into the trench at his feet, he threw up his arms and pitched backward, Dennis dropping his weapon to dangle at his wrist, and catching him as he fell at the foot of the obstacle.

”It is nothing,” gasped the French officer, clutching at his throat, but the blood was pouring between the fingers of his hand.

”He is wrong,” said Dennis, as the Alsatian corporal knelt beside him.

”We must get him back under cover at once. It is only a surgeon who can stop this haemorrhage.”

”And I haven't thrown a bomb yet!” growled the corporal, tossing the racket he held in his hand over the top of the sandbags.

Its explosion seemed to satisfy him for the moment, and pa.s.sing his powerful arms under the commandant's shoulders, while Dennis lifted his legs, they walked carefully backwards down the slope again beneath a whistling hail of bullets.

CHAPTER VIII

In the Enemy Trenches

By great good fortune, when they reached the crumpled ruins of the cottage, they found two stretcher-bearers kneeling among the nettles, on the look-out for casualties. They had seen them coming, and the stretcher was already unrolled, and as they laid him upon it the wounded man motioned with his hand.

”Stand round me,” he said in a husky whisper, speaking with difficulty.

”Do not let them see who it is that is. .h.i.t.”

One of the brancardiers placed a pad under the commandant's ear, and pa.s.sed a bandage round his neck.

”Tighter, tighter!” motioned the sufferer. ”How is it going? For me, I do not mind if you pull my head off, provided we take the trench.”

Dennis peeped through a crack in the wall and bent over him.

”The attack has been completely successful,” he said. ”The supports are swarming in now.”

”_Vive la patrie!_” cried the wounded man, whose grey-blue tunic was stained crimson with his own blood. ”I thank you from the bottom of my heart, lieutenant. Again you heap the coals of fire upon me.”

Then he fainted.

”Come along, Alphonse,” said one of the stretcher-bearers to his companion. ”We must get him to the surgeon at once.”

”And we,” said the Alsatian corporal, touching Dennis on the arm. ”Shall we return up yonder?”

The commandant's revolver lay among the nettles, Dennis picked it up, and the pair raced side by side again up the trampled slope.

Lithe and active as Dennis was, his new friend, loaded with his pack and hung about with bulging wallets and strings of racket bombs, was over the parapet before him, and the boy's after-recollection of the ten minutes that followed was a chaotic jumble of mad slaughter.

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