Part 9 (1/2)

Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the mist--you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory--not ours.

For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines. It came very slowly--the steady, even pace of a funeral. The leader was a man--a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman--who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.

They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly--sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely--the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced sh.e.l.l-holes, the little procession with the flag pa.s.sed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.

We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days, had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I have of it still--that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one recognised that it _was_ a road, because the banks of it ran straight.

It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin--it took you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.

There was a shrapnel sh.e.l.l regularly spitting across that country. We knew we should have to pa.s.s it, and one was naturally anxious to be under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business which needed care when the expected sh.e.l.l whizzed over the hill and burst. I ducked.

The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen sh.e.l.ls in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed--ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big sh.e.l.l; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 sh.e.l.ls flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on until the shelter petered out and the shorter sh.e.l.ls were already bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into when you heard them singing towards you--and then we decided to give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea.

A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them.

They were stretcher-bearers--Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke of a barrage on the skyline. And coming straight from it were two little parties each headed by a flag.

We hurried to the place--and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry sh.e.l.ls behind them.

I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the sh.e.l.l-bursts how the Germans treated them.

”They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag,” one of them said.

”You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery,” he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a line of black sh.e.l.l-bursts was fringing the hill. ”That's not meant for us.”

That understanding, if you can maintain it honourably and trust the enemy to do the same, means everything--everything--to the wounded of both sides. The commander who, sitting safely at his table, condemns his wounded and the enemy's in No Man's Land to death by slow torture without grounds for suspecting trickery, would incur a responsibility such as few men would face the thought of.

Load after load, day and night, mile upon mile in and out of craters across the open and back again--a.s.suredly the Australian stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious amongst his fellow soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.

CHAPTER XXII

OUR NEIGHBOUR

_France, October 10th._

There are next to us at present some Scotsmen.

Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian Mountain Batteries and Infantry were their outstanding friends in Gallipoli. In France--the artillery of a certain famous regular division. And the Scotsmen.

It is quite remarkable how the Australian seems to forgather with the Scotsman wherever in France he meets him. You will see them sharing each other's canteens at the base, yarning round each other's camp fires at the front. Wherever the pipers are, there will the Australians be gathered together.

I asked an Australian the other day how it was that he and his mates had struck up such a remarkable friends.h.i.+p with some of these Highland regiments now camped near them. ”Well, I think it's their sense of humour,” he said.

We looked at him rather hard.