Part 42 (1/2)

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

heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

”Oh no, he isn't,” laughed a voice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

”Dig in--dig in!” shouted somebody.

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

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