Part 9 (2/2)

Horses, too, seemed to have been slaughtered by the score. They looked like toy horses, nursery things of wood. Their faces were so unreal, their expressions so gla.s.sy. They lay in such odd postures, with their hoofs sticking so stiffly in the air. It seemed as if they were toys, and were lying just as children had upset them. Even their dimensions seemed absurd. Their bodies had swollen to tremendous sizes, destroying the symmetry of life, confirming the illusion of unreality.

The sight of these carcases burning in the sun, with buzzing myriads of flies scintillating duskily over their unshod hides, excited a pity that was almost as deep as his pity for slain human beings. After all, men came to the war with few illusions, and a very complete knowledge of the price to be paid. They knew why they were there, what they were doing, and what they might expect. They could be buoyed up by victory, downcast by defeat. Above all, they had a Cause, something to fight for, and if Fate should so decree, something to die for. But these horses were different; they could neither know nor understand these things. Poor, dumb animals, a few weeks ago they had been drawing their carts, eating their oats, and grazing contentedly in their fields. And then suddenly they were seized by masters they did not know, raced away to places foreign to them, made to draw loads too great for them, tended irregularly, or not at all, and when their strength failed, and they could no longer do their work, a bullet through the brain ended their misery. Their lot was almost worse than the soldiers'!

To the Subaltern it seemed an added indictment of war that these wretched animals should be flung into that vortex of slaughter. He pitied them intensely, the sight of them hurt him; and the smell of them nauseated him. Every memory of the whole advance is saturated with that odour. It was pungent, vigorous, demoralising. It filled the air, and one's lungs shrank before it. Once, when a man drove his pick through the crisp, inflated side, a gas spurted out that was positively asphyxiating and intolerable.

However much transport the Germans abandoned, however severe the losses they sustained, they always found time to break open every estaminet they pa.s.sed, and drain it dry. Wretched inns and broken bottles proved to be just as reliable a clue to their pa.s.sing as the smell of them.

CHAPTER XXI

THE DEFENCE OF THE BRANDY

The next morning two companies were detached from the Battalion as escort to a brigade of artillery. The other two companies, who had returned during the night, did not seem to be greatly upset by their gruesome task of burying the dead.

They did not come in contact with the enemy, and no outstanding incident impressed itself upon the Subaltern's mind. The heat had abated with dramatic swiftness. A wind that was almost chilly swept the plains, driving grey clouds continually across the sun. The summer was over.

That day they joined battle with the outposts of a foe that was to prove more hateful and persistent than the German winter.

The name of a village known as Suchy-le-Chateau figured on many of the signposts that they pa.s.sed, but they never arrived there, and, branching off east of Braisne, they came upon the remainder of the Battalion, drawn up in a stubble field.

A driving rain had begun to fall early in the afternoon, and when at length the march was finished their condition was deplorable. Though tired out with a long day's march, they dared not rest, because to lie down in the sodden straw was to court sickness. Their boots, worn and unsoled, offered no resistance whatever to the damp. Very soon they could hear their sodden socks squelching with water as they walked. A night of veritable horror lay in front of them; they were appalled with the prospect of it. The rain seemed to mock at the completeness of their misery.

However, the Fates were kind, for the General, happening to pa.s.s, took pity on them and allowed them to be billeted in the outhouses of a farm near by. The sense of relief which this move gave to the Subaltern was too huge to describe. Contentment took possession of him utterly. The tension of his nerves and muscles relaxed: he thought that the worries and hards.h.i.+ps of that day, at least, were over.

But he was wrong.

No sooner had his Platoon wearily thrown their rifles and equipment into the musty barn that was allotted to them, than the Colonel told him that he would have to sleep with his men, the reason being that the owner of the farm, on the approach of the Germans, had hidden a large stock of brandy beneath the straw in the very barn that his men had entered. The farmer had asked the Colonel to save his liquor from the troops, and the Colonel, with horrible visions of a regiment unmanageable and madly intoxicated before his eyes, replied that most a.s.suredly he would see that the men did not get hold of the brandy. The Subaltern told his sergeant, but otherwise the proximity of bliss was kept a strict secret from the men.

Throughout the whole of that long day the Subaltern had been looking forward to, longing for, and idealising the rest which was to follow after the labours of the day. And now that it had at last been achieved, it proved to be a very poor imitation of the ideal rest and slumber that he had been yearning for. To begin with, the delays before quarters were settled upon were interminable. And then this news about the brandy. The evening meal was delayed almost a couple of hours, and every minute of the delay annoyed him, because it was so much precious time for sleep lost. Even when the meal arrived, it proved to be insufficient, and he was still hungry, cold and damp, when at last he hobbled across the yard to the barn.

The place had no ventilation. The air was foul with the smell of damp grain, and men, and wet boots. He hesitated at the door; he would rather have slept in the open air, but the yard was inches deep in mud and manure. He groped forward, and at every inch that he penetrated further into the place, the air seemed to become thicker, more humid, more foul.

In the thick darkness his foot stumbled on the sleeping form of a man, who rolled over and swore drowsily. At last, after interminable feeling in the darkness, and balancing himself on sacks of grain, he attained the corner where the bottles lay buried, and threw himself down to sleep.

But sleep was impossible. In spite of the insupportable atmosphere he remained cold. Every second some one was moving! One instant a man would shuffle and cough in one corner, then some one would grunt and groan as he turned restlessly in his sleep, and the happier few who had achieved slumber would snore laboriously. Now and then a man would rise shakily to his feet and thread his way unsteadily to the door, kicking up against rec.u.mbent forms as he went, and evoking language as murky as the atmosphere. The Subaltern felt a savage joy in the recriminations and expletives that filled the air. Like lightning, they relieved the thunder-pressure of the air.

CHAPTER XXII

STRATEGY AS YOU LIKE IT

Dawn found them already paraded in the farmyard, s.h.i.+vering, and not much better rested than when they had entered the barn of dreadful memory the night before. Each day the acc.u.mulation of fatigue and nerve-strain became greater; each day it grew harder to drag the weary body to its feet, and trudge onwards. Though the tide of victory had turned, though every yard they covered was precious ground re-won, they longed very intensely for a lull. The Subaltern felt in a dim way that the point beyond which flesh and blood could not endure was not very far ahead. As it was, he marvelled at himself.

During the course of the morning the Captain returned to the Company, with a little map, and a great deal of information concerning the strategy of the war, about which everybody knew so little.

To begin at the beginning, he said that the Allies had begun the campaign under two great disadvantages. The first was their very serious numerical inferiority in forces that could be immediately used. If numbers alone counted, the Germans were bound to win until the French were fully mobilised.

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