Part 11 (1/2)
”Yes, you did,” replied the sergeant, ”and I went off on another tack.
Hate 'em? Well, it's this way. At the beginning I don't know that I hated 'em so much. Yes, what you call Belgian atrocities were h.e.l.lish; but 'twasn't that, and as long as they fought fair that was all I cared about. But when they got using that poisonous gas they came it a bit too strong. No, lad, I never hated 'em till then. But when they used that stuff and laughed about it, ay, and laughed to see our poor chaps writhing in agony, I felt I must kill every German I saw. Of course, we've got over it now a bit, and we're all supplied with helmets, but when they used it first we had simply nothing to defend us. Yes, I have done some rough bits of work in my time, but I never met with anything like that. When you see your own pals getting bluer and bluer in the face, and coughing and gasping, oh, I tell you it made us mad!
We didn't feel like showing any mercy after that. Besides, they have no sense of fair play, the swipes. I was in a sc.r.a.p once, and after a hard tussle, and after losing lots of men, a lot of Germans held up their hands and shouted, 'We surrender.' Our officer, a young chap new to the job, and knowing nothing of their tricks, instead of telling them to come to us, told us to go to them, they holding up their hands all the time; but no sooner did we get near them than they up with their pistols and shot two of our chaps. They thought our officer was going to take it lying down, and when they were taken prisoners they laughed and said everything was fair in war; but our young officer saw red, and he said 'No, my lads, you are going to kingdom come.' 'What!'
shrieked those German swine, 'will you kill men after they have surrendered?' 'You are not men,' said the lieutenant; 'men don't shoot after they've surrendered--only Germans do that.”
”And then?” asked Tom, ”then----”
”Ah well,” replied the sergeant grimly, ”there were no questions asked in the morning.”
”Great G.o.d!” said Tom, ”what a ghastly thing war is!”
”Wait till you have seen it, my lad,” replied the sergeant.
For some weeks Tom was in the neighbourhood of Ypres without taking any part in the righting. During that time he got accustomed to the constant booming of the guns, and to the fact that any moment a sh.e.l.l might fall near him and blow him into eternity. On more than one occasion, too, he roamed around the ruins of Ypres; and while he could not be called an imaginative lad he could not help being impressed by the ghastly desolation of this one-time beautiful city. In many of the streets not one stone was left upon another, not one of the inhabitants who had formerly lived there remained; all had fled; it was indeed a city of the dead. To Tom the ruins of the great Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were not the most terrible; what appealed to him most were the empty houses in which things were left by the panic-stricken people. Bedsteads twisted into shapeless ma.s.ses; clothes half burnt; remnants of pieces of cloth which tradesmen had been in the act of cutting and st.i.tching; children's toys, and thousands of other things which suggested to the boy the life the people had been living. Not a bird sang, not even a street dog roamed amidst the shapeless desolation; the ghastly horror of it all possessed him. Great gaping holes in the old ramparts of the city; trees torn up by their roots and scorched by deadly fire: this was Ypres, not destroyed by the necessities of war, but by pure devilry.
At last Tom's turn came to go up to the front trenches. It was with a strange feeling at heart that he, with others, crept along the pave road towards the communication trench. They had to be very careful, because this road was constantly swept by the German machine guns.
Presently, when they came to a house used as a first dressing station close to the beginning of the communication trench, Tom felt his heart grow cold. Still, with set teeth, and a hard look in his eyes, he groped his way along the trench, through Piccadilly, and Haymarket, and Bond Street, and Whitehall (for in this manner do the soldiers name the various parts of the zigzag cuttings through the clay): while all the time he could hear the pep, pep, pep, pep of the machine guns, and the shrieking of the sh.e.l.ls.
There was no romance in war now, it was a grim, ghastly reality. After following the lines of the trenches for well-nigh an hour he was informed that he had now reached the front line and was within a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards of the Huns. For the moment there was a comparative quiet, only occasionally did he hear the sound of a gun, while the shrieking of the sh.e.l.ls was less frequent. Danger seemed very far away; he was in a deep hole in the ground, and above the earthworks were great heaps of sand-bags. How could he be hurt?
The men whom his company was sent to relieve seemed in high good spirits too, they laughed and talked and bandied jokes. ”There seems no danger here,” thought Tom. An hour pa.s.sed and still all was comparatively quiet.
”I would like to see those blooming German trenches,” said a Lancas.h.i.+re lad, ”and I will too.”
He lifted his head above the sand-bags and looked towards the brown heaps of earth perhaps a hundred yards away.
”Dost'a see any Germans?” some one asked.
”I'm not sure,” replied the lad, ”but I believe I see the top of a German helmet.”
”Duck down quickly,” said another, ”thou'st been holding thy head there too long.”
”Nay, there's no danger,” replied the lad, ”it's all as quiet as----”
But he did not finish the sentence; at that moment there was a crack of a rifle and a bullet pa.s.sed through the poor boy's brain.
”That will be a warning for you fellows,” said an officer who came up just then. ”You must play no tricks; there have been hundreds of lads killed here who would never have been touched if they hadn't been careless and foolish. Let's have no more of your Hampstead Heath Bank Holiday skylarking.”
Tom did duty at the front trench on several occasions, but nothing of importance took place. The Huns seemed comparatively quiet, and while there was severe artillery work on both sides, Tom did not receive a scratch.
The fourth time he went to the front lines, however, he felt that there was a change in the atmosphere, and he saw by the strained looks and the compressed lips of the men that something desperate was expected.
The officers gave their orders with more sternness than usual; every one was alert.
Tom thought he knew what intense artillery work meant, but he realised that day that hitherto he had seen and heard nothing. Such a tornado of sh.e.l.ls burst around him that it was like h.e.l.l let loose. Hour after hour the Germans bombarded our trenches, tearing great holes in the ground, and undoing the work of months. It seemed to Tom that no man could escape.
”Oh,” cried the boy, ”if they would be quiet for only a minute! If one could only stop to take breath!”
But there was no cessation; it seemed as though the Germans were determined to make a final and overwhelming attack; as though all the explosives in the world were concentrated on those few miles.
The sights were horrible; he saw sh.e.l.ls falling on groups of men, tearing them to pieces, while all around him were the shrieks and cries of the wounded. Some of the men who were yet untouched yelled as though they were mad, others laughed, but their laughter was not natural; it was frenzied, wild, just as though they were madmen.
”We can't stand it! We can't stand it!” cried the boy. ”We shall all be blown into eternity. Why do we stay here like this?”