ELBOW-ROOM.

Otago Witness, Issue 3312, 5 September 1917, Page 61

ELBOW-ROOM.

By Patrick MacGilx., Author of "The Great Push," etc

The ruined houses stand clear cut against the moon, and in the pale, misty light the ragged walls take on strange fantastic shapes. Here a chimney stands, but the house from which it once rose is practically gone; near it a door swings idly, shaken by the reverberations of bursting shells, and the solitary door, with its posts, is all that remains of a cottage. The village of Bullecourt is a ruin, ugly as a cinder-heap, unclean as a lrvzar-house, and with all uniformity of outline gone. The streets are littered with wreckage and pitted with shell-holes. Transport waggons, water-carts, guns, stretchers, coils of barbed wire, ammunition boxes, rifles, bayonets, entrenching tools, and the hundred and one other implements of modern war are flung broadcast over the whole place. And lighting is still proceeding. It has been going on for many days, and is not yet at an end. Men, weary and worn, are still struggling persistently, full of that dogged endeavour which makes the British soldier so great in war. In the dark corners of the village men walk warily as cats lest they trip over the dead Avhich lie at every corner. Well-eet-up Guardsmen from the Kaiser's training school at Potsdam occupy the open street, where their bodies are piled high in grim heaps that make the night sickly with the odour of decay. Even thicker are these soldiers bunched at the cellar entrances. 'When the British attacked, the Germans were discovered hiding, like weasels, in the shelters. As they cowered down in their holes they were' bombed, killed, and dragged out into the barren streets. The British are now in possession of the cellars. Little candles gleam in the basements where gaunt, unshaven men are sitting down, their gas-helmets off, eating a hasty meal of biscuits and bully beef. For many it is the first meal since dawn.

Above, in the street, war is still .being waged with deadly intensity. The men come to grips with the enemy. Bayonets that have lost their glitter are in play in the winding alleys, the gloomy corners, and the ruined houses. Bombs are flung into dark dugouts and wired ditches. Here a pocket, in which the enemy is hiding, is attacked with the bomb and cleared with the bayonet. Even the dead have no peace; they are lashed unmercifully with German shrapnel, flogged to ribbons with furious shells.

At the rear of the village, in a roofless ruin, where lathes, beams, and tiles lie on the floor, where the deadly fumes of gas-shells crawl sluggishly across the floor, a mad array of ghouls strive to throttle one another in the darkness. The fighters, their faces covered with gas-masks, look like goblins, fit subjects for the pen of Pos or the pencil of Dore. Gasping, choking, slipping, they struggle in the cloud of gas. Now and again a white face is seen as a furious hand wrenches a helmet free; a figure with a torn mask drops limply into the poisoned smoke and shrieks fitfully as the boots of those above tramp him down. Outside, the fallen belfry of Bullecourt Church lies on the street, bridging half a dozen yawning shell-craters, and around it are the dead in khaki and field-grey, their faces grinning at the moon. A wounded man groans in pain, his twisted fingers beating the cobbles, his legs quivering. "Kamerad! Kamerad Ingleese ! Hilfe ! Hilfe!" he howls incessantly. "Ach ! Ach ! Kamerad !" A man detaches himself from the ruins near at hand, pulls his gas-helmet down over his eyes, and rushes up to the wounded man. A second figure follows. Both bend down, looking like eerie shades in the moonlit street. " Poor, bloomin' beggar," one says. "We'll take him into the cellar." They lift the man up between them and carry him to the nearest doorway, and while they trudge along with their load the bullets sing around their legs and strike sparks from the cobbles. But, indifferent to the perils of the hideous night, they perform their task. An enemy is being tended. And this is as it should be, for to the British soldier a wounded man is never a foe. He is a stricken creature crying out for help. "Come on, ye swine! Out into the street ! Out where there's elbow-room and thin, be jabers! I'll show ye what fightin' is !"

A man wearing a gas-mask reels out into the street, pulling two men with similar head-dresses after him.

"Ye big, dhirty pigs!" he yells. " Wantin' to fight like rats in a hole and me chokin' with gas." He carries no arms, but his strength is superhuman. He pulls one of the men towards him, butts him on the chin with his head and knocks him prostrate. Then he fells the other nwn with his fist.

" Open fightiu' and elbow room's the thing for me," he shouts, addressing the two fallen Girmins. " Stickin' in there like rats whjn ye could get God's good air to settle yer quar-els in." He lifts up his mask. dr<tws in a couple of deep breaths, then he pulls down his mask again. "I'll take out another couple of the swine now," he says, moving; towards the ruin which he had left a few moments before. " There' i nothin' like gettiii' them out where there's plenty av elbow room." And so the night passes in Bulleoourt— ■&, niiiht of travail and trial and pathos and pain.—Per favour of the Secretary, Colonial Institute.