side to side – a wound that, thanks to the steel shrapnel helmet lying dinted in deep across the crown, had not split his head open to the teeth.
He felt, as he put it to himself, “done in,” so utterly done in, that for a good hour he was willing to let it go at that, to lie still and wait whatever luck brought him, almost indifferent as to whether it would be another rush that would advance the British line and bring him within reach of his own stretcher-bearers, or his discovery by some of the German soldiers who passed every now and then close to where he lay.
Thirst drove him to fumble for his water-bottle, only to find, when he had twisted it round, that a bullet had punctured it, and that it was dry; and, after fifteen tortured minutes, thirst drove him to the impossible, and brought him crawling and dragging his broken leg to a dead body and its full bottle. An eager, choking swallow and a long breath-stopping, gurgling draught gave him more life than he had ever thought to feel again, a sudden revulsion of feeling against the thought of waiting helpless there to be picked up and carted to a German prison camp or butchered where he lay, a quick hope and a desperate resolve to attempt to escape such a fate. He had managed to crawl to the water-bottle; he would attempt to crawl at least a little nearer to the fighting lines, to where he would have more chance of coming under the hands of his own men. Without waste of time he took hasty stock of his wounds and set about preparing for his attempt. The broken leg was the most seriously crippling, but with puttees, bayonets, and trenching-tool handles he so splinted and bound it about that he felt he could crawl and drag it behind him. He attempted to bandage his head, but his arm and shoulder were so stiff and painful when he lifted his hand to his head that he desisted and satisfied himself with a water-soaked pad placed inside a shrapnel helmet. Then he set out to crawl.
It is hard to convey to anyone who has not seen such a place the horrible difficulty of the task the Corporal had set himself. The wood had been shelled for weeks, until almost every tree in it had been smashed and knocked down and lay in a wild tangle of trunks, tops, and branches on the ground. The ground itself was pitted with big and little shell-holes, seamed with deep trenches, littered with whole and broken arms and equipments, German and British grenades and bombs, scattered thick with British and German dead who had lain there for any time from hours to weeks. And into and over it all the shells were still crashing and roaring. The air palpitated to their savage rushing, the ground trembled to the impact of their fall, and without pause or break the deep roll of the drumming gun-fire bellowed and thundered. But through all the chaos men were still fighting, and would continue to fight, and the Corporal had set his mind doggedly to come somewhere near to where they fought. The penetration of such a jungle might have seemed impossible even to a sound and uninjured man; to one in his plight it appeared mere madness to attempt. And yet to attempt it he was determined, and being without any other idea in his throbbing head but the sole one of overcoming each obstacle as he came to it, had no time to consider the impossibility of the complete task.
Now, two hundred yards is a short distance as measurement goes, but into those two hundred yards through the chaos of wrecked wood the Corporal packed as much suffering, as dragging a passage of time, as many tortures of hope and fear and pain, as would fill an ordinary lifetime. Every yard was a desperate struggle, every fallen tree-trunk, each tangle of fallen branch, was a cruel problem to be solved, a pain-racked and laborious effort to overcome. A score of times he collapsed and lay panting, and resigned himself to abandoning the struggle; and a score of times he roused himself and fought down numbing pain, and raised himself on trembling arms and knees to crawl again, to wriggle through the wreckage, to hoist himself over some obstacle, to fight his way on for another yard or two.
Every conscious thought was busied only and solely with the problems of his passage that presented themselves one by one, but at the back of his mind some self-working reason or instinct held him to his direction, took heed of what went on around him, guided him in action other than that immediately concerned with his passage. When, for instance, he came to a deep trench cutting across his path, he sat long with his whole mind occupied on the question as to whether he should move to right or left, whether the broken place half a dozen yards off the one way or the more completely broken one a dozen yards the other would be the best to make for, scanning this way down and that way up, a litter of barbed wire here and a barrier of broken branches there; and yet, without even lifting his mind from the problem, he was aware of grey coats moving along the trench towards him, had sense enough to drop flat and lie huddled and still until the Germans had passed. And that second mind again advised him against crawling down into the trench and making his easier way along it, because it was too probable it would be in use as a passage for Germans, wounded and unwounded.
He turned and moved slowly along the edge of the trench at last, and held to it for some distance, because the parapet raised along its edge held up many of the fallen trees and branches enough to let him creep under them. That advantage was discounted to some extent by the number of dead bodies that lay heaped on or under the parapet and told of the struggles and the fierce fighting that had passed for possession of the trench, but on the whole the dead men were less difficult to pass than the clutching, wrenching fingers of the dead wood. The pains in his head, shoulder, and side had by now dulled down to a dead numbness, but his broken leg never ceased to burn and stab with red-hot needles of agony; and for all the splints encasing it and despite all the care he took, there was hardly a yard of his passage that was not marked by some wrenching catch on his foot, some jarring shock or grind and grate of the broken bones.
He lost count of time, he lost count of distance, but he kept on crawling. He was utterly indifferent to the turmoil of the guns, to the rush and yell of the near-falling shells, the crash of their bursts, the whirr of the flying splinters. When he had been well and whole these things would have brought his heart to his mouth, would have set him ducking and dodging and shrinking. Now he paid them no fraction of his absorbed attention. But to the distinctive and rising sounds of bursting grenades, to the sharp whip and whistle of rifle bullets about him and through the leaves and twigs, he gave eager attention because they told him he was nearing his goal, was coming at last to somewhere near the fringe of the fighting. His limbs were trembling under him, he was throbbing with pain from head to foot, his head was swimming and his vision was blurred and dim, and at last he was forced to drop and lie still and fight to recover strength to move, and sense to direct his strength. His mind cleared slowly, and he saw at last that he had come to a slightly clearer part of the wood, to a portion nearer its edge where the trees had thinned a little and where the full force of the shell blast had wrecked and re-wrecked and torn fallen trunks and branches to fragments.
But although his mind had recovered, his body had not. He found he could barely raise himself on his shaking arms – had not the strength to crawl another yard. He tried and tried again, moved no more than bare inches, and had to drop motionless again.
And there he lay and watched a fresh attack launched by the British into the wood, heard and saw the tornado of shell-fire that poured crashing and rending and shattering into the trees, watched the khaki figures swarm forward through the smoke, the spitting flames of the rifles, the spurting fire and smoke of the flung grenades. He still lay on the edge of the broken trench along which he had crept, and he could just make out that this ran off at an angle away from him and that it was held by the Germans, and formed probably the point of the British attack. He watched the attack with consuming eagerness, hope flaming high as he saw the khaki line press forward, sinking again to leaden depths as it halted or held or swayed back. To him the attack was an affair much more vital than the taking of the trench, the advance by a few score yards of the British line. To him it meant that a successful advance would bring him again within the British lines, its failure leave him still within the German.
Into the trench below him a knot of Germans scrambled scuffling, and he lay huddled there almost within arm’s length of them while they hoisted a couple of machine-guns to the edge of the trench and manned the parapet and opened a hail of fire down the length of the struggling British line. Under that streaming fire the line wilted and withered; a fresh torrent of fire smote it, and it crumpled and gave and ebbed back. But almost immediately another line swarmed up out of the smoke and swept forward, and this time,
