he was actually proceeding to fumble for his paybook, and Rabbie eagerly doing the same, when Shirty again intervened, cursing savagely, and ordering Rabbie back.
“I’m his senior, Shirty, an’ he should go,” said Rabbie. “Lat him show you his book.”
“Book be blistered,” yelled Shirty. “Go for them Mills’ or I’ll have you crimed for refusin’ an order.”
Rabbie slid down from his place. “I suppose yer in chairge here, Shirty,” he said. “But mind this – I’ll bring the Mills’, but as sure’s death I’ll hammer the heid aff ye when I get ye back yonder again. Mind that now,” and he scrambled off back along the trench.
He carried a couple of empty buckets with him, and as he went he heard the renewed crash of explosions behind him, and hastened his pace, knowing the desperate straits the two would be in without bombs to beat off the attack. The trench was badly wrecked, and there were many dead of both sides in it, so that for all his haste he found the going desperately slow.
The guns were firing heavily on both sides, but presently above the roar of their fire and the wailing rush of the passing shells Rabbie heard a long booming drone from overhead, glanced up and saw the plunging shape of an aeroplane swooping down and over his head towards the point he had left the others. It was past in a flash and out of sight beyond the trench wall that shut him in. But next instant Rabbie heard the sharp rattle of her machine-gun, a pause, and then another long rattle. Rabbie grunted his satisfaction, and resumed his toilsome clambering over the debris. “That’ll gie the Fritzez something tae think about,” he murmured, and then pounced joyfully on a full bucket of Mills’ grenades lying beside a dead bomber. Many more grenades were scattered round, and Rabbie hastily filled one of his own buckets and grabbed up a sandbag he found partially filled with German grenades.
He turned to hurry back, hearing as he did so another crackle of overhead machine-gun fire. Next moment the plane swept overhead with a rush, and was gone back towards the lines before Rabbie could well look up. Half-way back to where he had left the others he heard the crash of detonating bombs, and next moment came on Lauchie crouching at a corner of the trench, the blood streaming down his face, his last grenade in his hand, and his fingers on the pin ready to pull it. Rabbie plumped a bucket down beside him, and without words the two began plucking out the pins and hurling the grenades round the corner.
“Where’s the ithers?” shouted Rabbie when the shattering roar of their exploding grenades had died down.
“Dead,” said Lauchie tersely. “Except Shirty, an’ he’s sair wounded. I left him hidin’ in a bit broken dug-out half-a-dizen turns o’ the trench back.”
“Come on,” said Rabbie, rising abruptly. “We’ll awa’ back an’ get him.”
“He said I was t’ retire slow, an’ haud them back as well’s I could,” said Lauchie.
“I’m awa’ back for him,” said Rabbie. “Ye needna come unless ye like.”
He flung a couple of grenades round the corner; Lauchie followed suit, and the instant they heard the boom of the explosions both pushed round and up the next stretch through the eddying smoke and reek, pulling the pins as they ran, and tossing the bombs ahead of them into the next section of trench. And so, in spite of the German bombers’ resistance, they bombed their way back to where Shirty had been left. Several times they trod over or past the bodies of men killed by their bombs, once they encountered a wounded officer kneeling with his shoulder against the trench wall and snapping a couple of shots from a magazine pistol at them as they plunged through the smoke. Rabbie stunned him with a straight and hard-flung bomb, leapt, dragging Lauchie with him, back into cover until the bomb exploded, and then ran forward again. He stooped in passing and picked up the pistol from beside the shattered body. “Might be useful,” he said, “an’ it’s a good sooveneer onyway. I promised a sooveneer tae yon French lassie back in Poppyring.”
They found Shirty crouched back and hidden in the mouth of a broken-down dug-out, and helped him out despite his protests. “I was all right there,” he said. “You two get back as slow as you can, and keep them back all – ”
“See here, Shirty,” Rabbie broke in, “yer no in charge o’ the pairty now. Yer a casualty an’ I’m the senior – I’ve ma paybook here t’ prove it if ye want, so just haud your wheesh an’ come on.”
He hoisted the wounded man – Shirty’s leg was broken and he had many other minor wounds – to his shoulder, and began to move back while Lauchie followed close behind, halting at each corner to cover the retreat with a short bombing encounter.
Half-way back they met a strong support party which had been dispatched immediately after the receipt by the H.Q. signallers of a scribbled note dropped by a low-flying aeroplane. The party promptly blocked the trench, and prepared to hold it strongly until the time came again to advance, and the three bombers were all passed back to make their way to the dressing station.
There Shirty was placed on a stretcher and made ready for the ambulance, and the other two, after their splinter cuts and several slight wounds had been bandaged, prepared to walk back.
“So long, Shirty,” said Rabbie. “See ye again when ye come up an’ rejine.”
“So long, chum,” said Shirty, “an’ I’m – er – I – ”. And he stammered some halting phrase of thanks to them for coming back to fetch him out.
“Havers,” said Rabbie, “I wisna goin’ t’ leave ye there tae feenish the war in a Fritz jail. An’ yer forgettin’ whit I promised ye back there when ye ordered me for they bombs – that I’d hammer yer heid aff when we came oot. I’ll just mind ye o’ that when ye jine up again.”
“Right-o,” said Shirty happily. “I won’t let you forget it.”
“I wunner,” said Rabbie reflectively, lighting a cigarette after Shirty had gone – “I wunner if he’ll ever be fit t’ jine again. I’d fair like t’ hae anither bit scrap wi’ him, for I never was richt satisfied wi’ yon decesion against me.”
“He’s like t’ be Corporal or Sairgint time he comes oot again,” said Lauchie. “Promotion’s quick in they Reserve an’ Trainin’ Brigades at hame.”
“If we’re no killed we’re like t’ be Corporals or Sairgints oorselves,” said Rabbie. “When we’re in action I’m thinkin’ promotions are quick enought oot here in the Suicide Club.”
III
IN THE WOOD
The attack on the wood had begun soon after dawn, and it was no more than 8 a.m. when the Corporal was dropped badly wounded in the advance line of the attack where it had penetrated about four hundred yards into the wood. But it was well into afternoon before he sufficiently woke to his surroundings to understand where he was or what had happened, and when he did so he found the realisation sufficiently unpleasant. It was plain from several indications – the direction from which the shells bursting in his vicinity were coming, a glimpse of some wounded Germans retiring, the echoing rattle of rifle fire and crash of bombs behind him – that the battalion had been driven back, as half a dozen other battalions had been driven back in the course of the ebb-and-flow fighting through the wood for a couple of weeks past, that he was lying badly wounded and helpless to defend himself where the Germans could pick him up as a prisoner or finish him off with a saw-backed bayonet as the mood of his discoverers turned. His left leg was broken below the knee, his right shoulder and ribs ached intolerably, a scalp wound six inches long ran across
