“Oh, no, Sergeant,’’ said the other, “you go on. You do bring it all back so.’’
“I used to bring her home,’’ the Sergeant said, “to her father’s house. Her father was keeper there, and they had a house in the wood. A fine house with queer old tiles on it, and a lot of large friendly dogs. I knew them all by name, same as they knew me. I used to walk home then along the side of the wood. The owls would be about; you could hear them yelling. They’d float out of the wood like, sometimes: all large and white.’’
“I knows them,’’ said the Private.
“I saw a fox once so close I could nearly touch him, walking like he was on velvet. He just slipped out of the wood.’’
“Cunning old brute,’’ said the Private.
“That’s the time to be out,’’ said the Sergeant. “Ten o’clock on a summer’s night, and the night full of noises, not many of them, but what there is, strange, and coming from a great way off, through the quiet, with nothing to stop them. Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old cart; and then just once a sound that you couldn’t account for at all, not anyhow. I’ve heard sounds on nights like that that nobody ’ud think you’d heard, nothing like the flute that young Booker had, nothing like anything on earth.’’
“I know,’’ said the Private.
“I never told any one before, because they wouldn’t believe you. But it doesn’t matter now. There’d be a light in the window to guide me when I got home. I’d walk up through the flowers of our garden. We had a lovely garden. Wonderful white and strange the flowers looked of a nighttime.’’
“You bring it all back wonderful,’’ said the Private.
“It’s a great thing to have lived,’’ said the Sergeant.
“Yes, Sergeant,’’ said the other, “I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything.’’
For five days the barrage had rained down behind them: they were utterly cut off and had no hope of rescue: their food was done, and they did not know where they were.
Shells
When the aëroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not know which it is.
It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills. It is as though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then let them drop rather slowly. It is exactly like hills falling. You see the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what it had taken so long to make. That is heavy stuff bursting, a little way off.
If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it a curious metallic ring. That applies to the shells of either side, provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one distinguishes them. It is curious, after such a colossal event as this explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for ages.
Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it’s dark in Africa: “How nice traveller would taste,’’ the hyena seems to say, and “I want dead White Man.’’ It is the rising note of the shell as it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make it reminiscent of the hyena’s method of diction. If it is not going over then it has something quite different to say. It begins the same as the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same long whine as the other. I have heard old hands say “That one is going well over.’’ “Whee-oo,’’ says the shell; but just where the “oo’’ should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena’s final syllable, it says something quite different. “Zarp,’’ it says. That is bad. Those are the shells that are looking for you.
And then of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.
And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously, probably in big herds, putting down a barrage. It is the liquid inside that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking their chops and dribbling in anticipation.
And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans. The shell breaks into a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen at a hundred yards. It spreads out evenly all round and rains down slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones beneath it, burn quietly in a circle. On such a night as this, and in such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they fling it all up in the air.
These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in Hell that are easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.
Two Degrees of Envy
It was night in the front line and no moon, or the moon was hidden. There was a strafe going on. The Tok Emmas were angry. And the artillery on both sides were looking for the Tok Emmas.
Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed dwellers in whatever far happy island there be that has not heard of these things, is the crude language of Mars. He has not time to speak of a trunk mortar battery, for he is always in a hurry, and so he calls them T. M.’s. But Bellona might not hear him saying T. M., for all the din that she makes: might think that he said D. N; and so he calls it Tok Emma. Ak, Beer, C, Don: this is the alphabet of Mars.
And the huge minnies were throwing old limbs out of No Man’s Land into the frontline trench, and shells were rasping down through the air that seemed to resist them until it was torn to pieces: they burst and showers of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly, as it seemed, shells were bursting now and then in the air, with a flash intensely red: the smell of them was drifting down the trenches.
In the middle of all this Bert Butterworth was hit. “Only in the foot,’’ his pals said. “Only!’’ said Bert. They put him on a stretcher and carried him down the trench. They passed Bill Britterling, standing in the mud, an old friend of Bert’s. Bert’s face, twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some sympathy.
“Lucky devil,’’ said Bill.
Across the way on the other side of No Man’s Land there was mud the same as on Bill’s side: only the mud over there stank; it didn’t seem to have been kept clean somehow. And the parapet was sliding away in places, for working parties had not had much of a chance. They had three Tok Emmas working in that battalion front line, and the British batteries did not quite know where they were, and there were eight of them looking.