A BUNYAN HERO

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9620, 28 March 1917, Page 6

A BUNYAN HERO

DAY ON THE SOMME REMARKABLE PICTURE OF THE REAL FRONT. The following article has been taken (in part) from a very fine contribution to a recent issue of “Land and Water.’’ I’ho author hides his identity under the pen-name of “Centurion.” The reason is obvious, as it may be gathered from the article that ho is a staff officer. But whoever and whatever he may bo, lie certainly has the gift of picturesque writing. There is nothing laboured about his effort. It is as simple as it is tolling. There is one person to whom it might be possible to attribute the work, and that is “Ole-Luk-Oic,” otherwise Lieutenant-Colonel IC. D. Sivinton, the original “Eye-Witness.” The reader must judge for himself. AT H.Q. I was engaged in studying tho scheme of mural decoration iu my friend's room ,at the H.Q. of the th Corps. Tho furniture of the room was designed for use and not for ornament. It consisted of those ascetic deal tables, chairs, and chit-boxes which are turned out daily by the sappers with no other assistance than a hammer, a saw, and a plane. The south wall was covered by one of those chefs d’oeuvre of the Ist Printing Company, R.E., in wliich the leading article of composition is a. gridiron, and the mind of the artist seems obsessed by an enthusiasm for geometrical design which may bo helpful, but is certainly monotonous. None tho less that map was an unfailing mental stimulant to my friend, Colonel X., and ho returned to its contemplation again and again with tho same feeling of proprietary prido as that with which an art collector might return to the study of an Old Master. And as is the way with all works of art, tho more one looked at it the more one saw in it. Not only did it show tho position of every culvert, well, quarry, and ditch behind our lines, but it also bore upon it certain conventional signs indicating the exact location of our trench railways, supply dumps, and observation posts. FREE NOMENCLATURE.

I was still admiring the bold freedom of its nomenclature and weighing tho uneasy significance of Flea Trench, Acid Drop Copse, and Stink Alley, when my friend the colonel put his forefinger on a point in ono of the rectangles, and said, “That’s Brigade H.Q., Battalion H.Q. will be about .... further on; we’ll leave the car behind the wood.” Tho point may be described with deliberate ambiguity, as A.2.c-b.3 —to use tho masonic language of operation orders. “You can leave that behind,” said X., pointing to my revolver, a Mark Y’l. Webloy, wliich is a pretty heavy weapon. “It isn't as if we were going up by night, and, in any case; wo shall have a guide. Besides, 'it’ll bo heavy going, and we must travel light when wo get beyond that more obscure wood. But you’d better take ono of these.” And ho handed mo a shrapnel helmet. “Also this nose-bag. It’s a new pattern.” X took the canvas bag and slung it over my right shoulder. It contained one of the new masks known colloquially as emus; they give tho wearer the appearance of a passionate attachment to a baby’s feeding bottle. I have heard a blunt soldier describe them as slinging your guts outside; they certainly do suggest that the nearer has only remembered at tho last moment to take his alimentary canal with him. The bag also contained a field-dressing and some morphia tablets. THE TIDE OF WAR.

.As we approached F .we were caught up into the tide of war, an interminable procession of mounted men, limbers, lorries and columns of infantry. One had the impression of some gigantic power-house sending out streams of energy and in that great current of men, horses and guns, wo lost all sense of our own identity. And as we mounted the hill ahead of us where four or five other roads met our own at acute angles, we could' seo four or five processions converging upon our own, the tail of each procession fading away into the distance and the mounted men diminishing into small black objects until it seemed as though all the ant-heaps in the world were in migration. The nearer we approached the larger the figures became until they resolved themselves into thousands upon thousands of mounted men, each man carrying panniers of shells on either side of his saddle, as though the baskets were buge holsters. And before and behind the horsemen came and went batteries in column of route, their teams straining at the traces as the wheels sank into the mud and their drivers raising their short whips to the salute as we passed. And upon the heels of the guns followed huge motor lorries. On the sky-line funnels of black smoke uprose from the earth, expanded into voluminous bouquets, Jind then disappeared. They were German 8-inoh shells. As we turned sharply to the left in their direction wo passed our own heavies each within a stone’s throw of the next (and with not so much as a fig-leaf to hide their nakedness! firing at a few paces over onr heads —we felt the shock as we passed. “They might be firing salutes in Hyde Park,’’ said the Colonel contemplatively, “for all the trouble they take to hide their light under a bushel. The fact is the Hun has given up spotting. His flying men never come over here for a change of air now. Our own fellows drop cards on ’em every day, but they never return the calls. Beastly impolite I call it. There’s the wood ; let’s get out.” BLACK REIN' EVERYWHERE. He pointed to what looked like a row of gibbets on the sky-line about a mile away—things that looked like everything hut a tree; gaunt, twisted and bare, and resembling not so much a wood ns a scaffolding in collapse. To roach it we had to pass on foot through what had once been a village, but was now merely a muddy waste with hero and there a patch of brick and' stone embedded in the mud. There was not so much as a gable-end left standing, and I saw nothing to convince me that the place had ever contained a living thing except a woman’s red flannel petticoat trampled' in the mud, a child’s wax doll, and the log of a dead German projecting from the wall of a rommunication-treuch. Truly our guns grind exceeding small.

Wo entered tho wood, and as wo entered it we seemed to leave all lilo behind us. Whether it. was one of those tricks of acoustics by wliich the configuration of the ground or the relative density of the atmosphere creates a pocket I know not, hut once iu that wood wc seemed as isolated from all auditory intercourse as a signaller whose wires are suddenly cut. Our progress was slow and painful, tor the ground was scooped and moulded into circular pits of a surprising symmetry, so close that one could leap from oue to the other, and so deep that they reached to our shoulders as we stumbled into them. They wore shell-holes, and from each one as wo slid into it there arose an angry hum, swelling into a diapason clouds ot targe black flics rose in agitation. AN IMMENSE LITTERWc groped our way amid an immense litter of broken rifles, bayonets, kits, pickaxes, spades, gas-masks, fielddressings, Lewis gun cylinders, Mills bombs, and cotton-wool, with hero and there a packet of cigarettes. A peculiar sickening smell suffused tho wood.

“Fifty thousand dead here, I should think,” said the Colonel meditatively as we dropped with a splash into a disused communication trench. “Mostly Germans, of course. Don’t lose sight of me whatever you do, or we may never find each other again.” And we wormed our way between the sticky walls of the trench, brushing against ghastly objects and obscene which protruded like the roots of a tree.

Tho soft, porous mud clung to ou; boots like treacle, and wo were glad when tho trench debouched upon tno open ground. Our way to Brigade H.Q. lay across a slope covered with strands of rustry field-telephones and pitted with shell-holes. As we came in view of a low ridge, six feet high, khaki-clad figures gradually detachedl themselves from the brown background, and tho holes of the Brigade dug-out appeared. At about a hundred yards distance from our objective X was surprised to see a khaki-clad figure crouching in one of the shell-holes with his rifle in his hand and gazing fixedly towards the ridge. As wo came up to him 1 turned to ask him what he was doing there, but as 1 opened my lips to speak I saw that his body was strangely rigid, the hair under his helmet thick with flies, and his ears black as ebony. He was dead. The Brigadier greeted us at the entrance to the dug-out, where sat a sapper, under a tarpaulin with the receiver of a telephone at his ear and a kitten beneath his feet. “You want to get on to Battalion H.Q. ? Right, you’ll want ji guide. Here, can you read a map P” ho added, as he turned to a man wearing the blue and white brassard of the signallers.

“No, zur, but I knows the way.” I knew that accent, and I turned to look at the speaker. He was a well-built yputh, with a broad, homely face, honest grey eyes, straw-coloured hair, and a large good-natured mouth. He carried as his only weapon a long staff about five feet iu length. Xou Nan— you could—see mans- such as he keeping sheep in Pewsey Vale. UNDER SHELL FIRE.

We topped the ridge, the signaller doing a pole-jump and stopping to give ipo a hand. A sequence of H.E. shells were falling again and again in a cloud of earth and black smoke upon a corner of a road about four hundred yards to our left, while at something the same distance on our right 5.9 nniversals were bursting into low clouds of snow-white fleece. The ground we were crossing was a perfect snare of wire, and as I studied my steps I noticed that ' the clay in the shell-holes wo skirted was black and the clods nowly turned. It was my first experience of sbell-fire, and I was pondering its significance when the, colonel called over his shoulder, ‘ ‘Watch me, old man, and do as 1 do.” “There’s a girt hig church over there, zur,” our guide remarked to me confidentially, as he pointed with Ids staff at a spire peeping out between the trees on a wooded ridge about four miles to our left. “It be a mortal big——” There was a sibilant hiss in the air ahead of us. The colonel had disappeared. The next moment I saw him lying flat on the earth a few yards in front of mo and pulling his helmet, which hitherto he had carried in his hand like a bucket, over the nape of his nook. I dropped, and as X heard a dull thud and patter of falling stuff all around me I was disagreeably conscious of having the largest spine of ail vertebrae beings. “It be as big as Zaulsbury Cathedral, zur, I do think.” ... I looked up from under my shrapnel helmet as a tortoise looks out from under its shell, and saw the signaller looking down at me. He had remained upright and had never moved. I saw the colonel rising to his feet. The colonel now broke into a quick trot. He has a cool head —incidentally he’s a V.C.—and never runs without a purpose. What is more, he knows the whole octave of shell-music and the compass of all the diabolical instruments that produce its weird harmonies. Wherefore, when he ran I ran. The air overhead was now producing the strangest orchestral effects, in which were blended sounds like the crack of gigantic whips, the pulsations of enormous wings, the screams of frightened birds, and, more often than not, a reptilian hiss. “They do say as Zaulsbury spire bo the girtest spire in Hongland,” continued tbe signaller imperturbably, “parson told I so- . • . It be all right, zur,” ho added after a pause, as he waited for me to rise again, ray attention having been diverted by the colonel again prostrating himself like a Moslem in prayer. The colonel’s posture was sacred, but his language profane. “Ho hev only caught his foot in a wire zur,” my guide added, without the suspicion of a smile, as 1 rose to my feet. “This be the communication trench, it be ’all we ’ave at present.” Si’R ETCHHR-BEAHHI!S AT WORK. It was barely 18 inches wide, it was not more than five feet deep, and it was not traversed. It had been hurriedly thrown up, for we had only just captured the ground. As I looked over it to my left I saw four figures marching in a direction parallel with our own, but towards our rear. They were marching over the open ground, and marching as steadily as if they were doing stretcher drill in a training camp. As they drew rearer I s aw that they bore a stretcher high upon their shoulders, the feet of the patient .were hare, except for the white bandages, the loose ends of which fluttered in the air. “That poor chap’s got it had,” said the signaller as he drew ray attention to the red label. “And ’ere bo the walking eases,” he added, as men in twos and threes with white labels depending from their buttonholes began

to squeeze past us, some of them very pale, uml oue. whose Ups were blue with cyanosis and his face livid, muttering with trance-like repetitions in a kind of soliloquy, “Been buried three times this morning—three limes 1 been buried —it’s me chest. 71 “That fellow looks pretty bad,’ 7 I remarked over ray shoulder to the signaller.' I got no answer. I looked back. The signaller had dropped behind, he was loosing the straps and braces of the man with the blue lips. “They do hinder 'spiratory haction ; it he the lust thing to do, zur,” he said to mo a moment later as he panted after me, lifting his feet in the mud. ■Wo found the Battalion H.Q. in a ciark dug-out. It had no boarding, merely a few pit-props to hold up the roof, the floor and the walls _ were of the earth earthy. The 0.C., with three days 7 growth of beard and a-huge and indecent hole in his breeches, sat on an oil tin studying a trench-map with the aid of a pungent tallow'dip stuck in a bottle. -My friend discussed' with him the strengthening of the position; there was talk of strong posts and .saps and how to consolidate. . “Yes, it 7 s pretty lively just now, said the O.C. to us. “,1 lost ten pei cent, of my .stretcher-bearers yesterday. 11

LAUGHTER IN TRENCHES. I left the O.C. and my friend cngaged over the map in that dark hole like two conspirators, and, dragged my foot along the trench, carrying about three pounds of ochreous mud upon each of them. The men not on lookout duty were sitting down in the mud stolidly eating bully beef as though it were an occupation rather than a meal But as X elbowed my way round a traverse I heard the cheerful sound of animated chatter and loud laughter. The sound is not so common in the trenches as to be uimoticcable. It is only in the music halls thaWife in the trenches appears to bo one uproarious farce. That is a stage convention the imperiousness of which all soldiers cheerfully acknowledge. It would never do to allow the civilian to foci depressed. As I rejoined the Colonel at the entrant;. of the battalion dug-out I hear ! a low droning hunt overhead and instantly every face in the trench was turned skywards. One of our biplanes was returning from her reconnaissance, living straight as a crow. A number of woolly skeins, black as ink, suddenly appeared one after the other around ,her and she changed her course to a senes of giddy spirals like a snipe. Every eye followed her. “Time to get hack,” said the Colonel, “we 1 !! do the whole way back across the open. It f s quicker. That communication trench was a delusion and a snare. It doubles the time without halving the risks. YWro within machine-gun range, of course, hut I doubt if the Hun 1 ]! think it worth while.” And without another word he clambered out of the trench. The signaller and I followed. As we gained the open a small black shell about six inches long fell vertically and without noise about five yards in front of me, as the hunt of the aeroplane grew more distinct. “A dud,” said the Colonel dispassionately, “they 1 11 never hit her,” and we hurried on. EFFECT OF SYMPATHY".

Meanwhile the signaller continued to talk, and the more vigorous the strafing the more animated he became, until I found myself elaborating a theory of sympathetic connection, which 1 am sur<J is totally devoid of scientific support, between brain-waves and shell trajectories. “ . . . It do seem to I as the ancient Britons were God-fearing men in a manner of speaking . . . though parson do call ’em heathens ns woishipped graven images. They did some tidy burying in them barrows up on the downs, which do seem a Christian thing to do—l alters buries a chap if I ’as time and an entrenching tool. . . Do seem to lie easier like,” he added, as we passed a grave in [he open with a wooden cross, “i ain't up in the burial service like fothcr, what can say it backwards, but I do say the Lord’s Prayer as the next best thing. D'you think it matters, zur?” But by this time we had gained the ridge and the comparative security (it is very comparative) of Brigade xt.Q. Our way back was now clear and our guide’s task was done. He abruptly ceased to talk, and his whole hearing changed. He and I were no longer two wayfaring West-countrymen, but private and officer, and ho stood sharply to attention. He was quite incapable of presumption. Had ho divined that I, a youthful “brass hat,” was under fire for the first time ? Hud his friendly inusings been designed to beguile my attention from the danger* which beset us, or were they merely the naive speculations of a mind as simple as it was brave? I shall never know.

The signaller saluted us, and niy superior officer returned his salute. He stood looking after us, holding his stake as though it were a quarterstaff; the sun fell upon his cheerful, homely face and glinted on the brass letters of his shoulder straps. There came into my mind that feeling of perploxed recognition which sometimes attends the casual encounters of .life. Surely, I speculated, I had met him somewhere before. And in a Hash i remembered the first book I ever read. 1 saw once again the Hill Difficulty and the Ground of Enchantment, the thunderbolt that smote Mr Not-nght, and the snares, pits, and traps over which the stout-hearted guide took the pilgrims with fortifying discourse. And then I know that I had met our signaller before. His name was Mr Great Heart.