OUR TURN

No. II platoon had had a bad mauling in their advance, and when they reached their “final objective line” there were left out of the ninety-odd men who had started, one sergeant, one corporal, and fourteen men. But, with the rest of the line, they at once set to work to consolidate, to dig in, to fill the sandbags each man carried, and to line the lip of a shell crater with them. Every man there knew that a counter-attack on their position was practically a certainty. They had not a great many bombs or very much ammunition left; they had been struggling through a wilderness of sticky mud and shell-churned mire all day, moving for all the world like flies across a half-dry fly-paper; they had been without food since dawn, when they had consumed the bully and biscuit of their iron “ration”; they were plastered with a casing of chilly mud from head to foot; they were wet to the skin; brain, body, and bone weary.

But they went about the task of consolidating with the greatest vigour they could bring their tired muscles to yield. They worried not at all about the shortage of bombs and ammunition, or lack of food, because they were all by now veterans of the new “planned” warfare, knew that every detail of re-supplying them with all they required had been fully and carefully arranged, that these things were probably even now on the way to them, that reinforcements and working parties would be pushed up to the new line as soon as it was established. So the Sergeant was quite willing to leave all that to work out in its proper sequence, knew that his simple job was to hold the ground they had taken, and, therefore, bent all his mind to that work.

But it suddenly appeared that the ground was not as completely taken as he had supposed. A machine-gun close at hand began to bang out a string of running reports; a stream of bullets hissed and whipped and smacked the ground about him and his party. A spasmodic crackle of rifle-fire started again farther along the line at the same time. The Sergeant paid no heed to that. He and his men had flung down into cover, and dropped spades and trenching tools and sandbags, and whipped up their rifles to return the fire, at the first sound of the machine-gun.

The Sergeant peered over the edge of the hole he was in, locating a bobbing head or two and the spurting flashes of the gun, and ducked down again. “They’re in a shell-hole not more’n twenty, thirty yards away,” he said rapidly. “Looks like only a handful. We’ll rush ’em out. Here——” and he went on into quick detailed orders for the rushing. Three minutes later he and his men swarmed out of their shelter and went forward at a scrambling run, the bombers flinging a shower of grenades ahead of them, the bayonet men floundering over the rough ground with weapons at the ready, the Sergeant well in the lead.

Their sudden and purposeful rush must have upset the group of Germans, because the machine-gun fire for a moment became erratic, the muzzle jerked this way and that, the bullets whistled wide, and during that same vital moment no bombs were thrown by the Germans; and when at last they did begin to come spinning out, most of them went too far, and the runners were well over them before they had time to explode. In another moment the Sergeant leaped down fairly on top of the machine-gun, his bayonet thrusting through the gunner as he jumped. He shot a second and bayoneted a third, had his shoulder-strap blown away by a rifle at no more than muzzle distance, his sleeve and his haversack ripped open by a bayonet thrust.

Then his men swarmed down into the wide crater, and in two minutes the fight was over. There were another few seconds of rapid fire at two or three of the Germans who had jumped out and run for their lives, and that finished the immediate performance. The Sergeant looked round, climbed from the hole, and made a hasty examination of the ground about them.

“’Tisn’t as good a crater as we left,” he said, “an’ it’s ’way out front o’ the line the others is digging, so we’d best get back. Get a hold o’ that machine-gun an’ all the spare ammunition you can lay hands on. We might find it come in useful. Good job we had the way a Fritz gun works shown us once. Come on.”

The men hastily collected all the ammunition they could find and were moving back, when one of them, standing on the edge of the hole, remarked: “We got the top o’ the ridge all right this time. Look at the open flat down there.”

The Sergeant turned and looked, and an exclamation broke from him at sight of the view over the ground beyond the ridge. Up to now that ground had been hidden by a haze of smoke from the bursting shells where our barrage was pounding steadily down. But for a minute the smoke had lifted or blown aside, and the Sergeant found himself looking down the long slope of a valley with gently swelling sides, looking right down on to the plain below the ridge. He scanned the lie of the ground rapidly, and in an instant had made up his mind. “Hold on there,” he ordered abruptly; “we’ll dig in here instead. Sling that machine-gun back in here and point her out that way. You, Lees, get ’er into action, and rip out a few rounds just to see you got the hang o’ it. Heave those dead Boches out; an’, Corporal, you nip back with half a dozen men and fetch along the tools and sandbags we left there. Slippy now.”

The Corporal picked his half-dozen men and vanished, and the Sergeant whipped out a message-book and began to scribble a note. Before he had finished the rifle-fire began to rattle down along the line again, and he thrust the book in his pocket, picked up his rifle, and peered out over the edge of the hole. “There they go, Lees,” he said suddenly. “Way along there on the left front. Pump it into ’em. Don’t waste rounds, though; we may need ’em for our own front in a minute. Come on, Corporal, get down in here. Looks like the start o’ a counter-attack, though I don’t see any of the blighters on our own front. Here, you two, spade out a cut into the next shell-hole there, so’s to link ’em up. Steady that gun, Lees; don’t waste ’em. Get on to your sandbag-fillin’, the others, an’ make a bit o’ a parapet this side.”

“We’re a long ways out in front of the rest o’ the line, ain’t we?” said the Corporal.

“Yes, I know,” said the Sergeant. “I want to send a message back presently. This is the spot to hold, an’ don’t you forget it. Just look down—hullo, here’s our barrage droppin’ again. Well, it blots out the view, but it’ll be blottin’ out any Germs that try to push us; so hit ’er up, the Gunners. But——” He broke off suddenly, and stared out into the writhing haze of smoke in front of them. “Here they come,” he said sharply. “Now, Lees, get to it. Stand by, you bombers. Range three hundred the rest o’ you, an’ fire steady. Pick your marks. We got no rounds to waste. Now, then——”

The rifles began to bang steadily, then at a rapidly increasing rate as the fire failed to stop the advance, and more dim figures after figures came looming up hazily and emerging from the smoke. The machine-gunner held his fire until he could bring his sights on a little group, fired in short bursts with a side-ways twitch that sprayed the bullets out fan-wise as they went. The rifle-fire out to right and left of them, and almost behind them, swelled to a long, rolling beat with the tattoo of machine-guns rapping through it in gusts, the explosions of grenades rising and falling in erratic bursts.

Farther back, the guns were hard at it again, and the shells were screaming and rushing overhead in a ceaseless torrent, the shrapnel to blink a star of flame from the heart of a smoke-cloud springing out in mid-air, the high explosive crashing down in ponderous bellowings, up-flung vivid splashes of fire and spouting torrents of smoke, flying mud and earth clods. There were German shells, too, shrieking over, and adding their share to the indescribable uproar, crashing down along the line, and spraying out in circles of fragments, the smaller bits whistling and whizzing viciously, the larger hurtling and humming like monster bees.

“Them shells of ours is comm’ down a sight too close to us, Sergeant,” yelled the Corporal, glancing up as a shrapnel shell cracked sharply almost overhead and sprayed its bullets, scattering and splashing along the wet ground out in front of them.

“All right—it’s shrap,” the Sergeant yelled back. “Bullets is pitchin’ well forrad.”

The Corporal swore and ducked hastily from the whitt-whitt of a couple of bullets past their ears. “Them was from behind us,” he shouted. “We’re too blazin’ far out in front o’ the line here. Wot’s the good——”

“Here,” said the Sergeant to a man who staggered back from the rough parapet, right hand clutched on a blood-streaming left shoulder, “whip a field dressin’ round that, an’ try an’ crawl back to them behind us. Find an officer, if you can, an’ tell him we’re out in front of ’im. An’ tell ’im I’m going to hang on to the position we have here till my blanky teeth pull out.”

“Wot’s the good——” began the Corporal again, ceasing fire to look round at the Sergeant.

“Never mind the good now,” said the Sergeant shortly, as he recharged his magazine. “You’ll see after—if we live long enough.” He levelled and aimed his rifle. “An’ we won’t do that if you stand there”—(he fired a shot and jerked the breech open)—“jawin’ instead”—(he slammed the breech-bolt home and laid cheek to stock again)—“o’ shootin’”; and he snapped another shot.

On their own immediate front the attack slackened, and died away, but along the line a little the Sergeant’s group could see a swarm of men charging in. The Sergeant immediately ordered the machine-gun and every rifle to take the attackers in enfilade. For the next few minutes every man shot as fast as he could load and pull trigger, and the captured machine-gun banged and spat a steady stream of fire. The Sergeant helped until he saw the attack dying out again, its remnants fading into the smoke haze. Then he pulled his book out, and wrote his message: “Am holding crater position with captured machine-gun and eight men of No. 2 Platoon. Good position, allowing enfilade fire on attack, and with command of farther slopes. Urgently require men, ammunition, and bombs, but will hold out to the finish.”

He sent the note back by a couple of wounded men, and set his party about strengthening their position as far as possible. In ten minutes another attack commenced, and the men took up their rifles and resumed their steady fire. But this time the field-grey figures pressed in, despite the pouring fire and the pounding shells, and, although they were held and checked and driven to taking cover in shell-holes on the Sergeant’s immediate front, they were within grenade-throwing distance there, and the German “potato-masher” bombs and the British Mills’ began to twirl and curve over to and fro, and burst in shattering detonations. Three more of the Sergeant’s party were wounded inside as many minutes, but every man who could stand on his feet, well or wounded, rose at the Sergeant’s warning yell to meet the rush of about a dozen men who swung aside from a large group that had pressed in past their flank. The rush was met by a few quick shots, but the ammunition for the machine-gun had run out, and of bombs even there were only a few left. So, in the main, the rush was met with the bayonet—and killed with it. The Sergeant still held his crater, but now he had only two unwounded men left to help him.

The Corporal, nursing a gashed cheek and spitting mouthfuls of blood, shouted at him again, “Y’ ain’t goin’ to try ’ hold on longer, surely. We’ve near shot the last round away.”

“I’ll hold it,” said the Sergeant grimly, “if I have to do it myself wi’ my bare fists.”

But he cast anxious looks behind, in hope of a sight of reinforcements, and knew that if they did not come before another rush he and his party were done. His tenacity had its due reward. Help did come—men and ammunition and bombs and a couple of machine-guns—and not three minutes before the launching of another attack. An officer was with the party, and took command, but he was killed inside the first minute, and the Sergeant again took hold.

Again the attack was made all along the line, and again, under the ferocious fire of the reinforced line, it was beaten back. The line had at the last minute been hinged outward behind the Sergeant, and so joined up with him that it formed a sharpish angle, with the Sergeant’s crater at its point. The enfilade fire of this forward-swung portion and the two machine-guns in the crater did a good deal to help cut down the main attack.

When it was well over, and the attack had melted away, the Captain of the Sergeant’s Company pushed up into the crater.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked. “You, Sergeant? Your note came back, and we sent you help; but you were taking a long risk out here. Didn’t you know you had pushed out beyond your proper point? And why didn’t you retire when you found yourself in the air?”

The Sergeant turned and pointed out where the thinning smoke gave a view of the wide open flats of the plain beyond the ridge.

“I got a look o’ that, sir,” he said, “and I just thought a commanding position like this was worth sticking a lot to hang to.”

“Jove! and you were right,” said the Captain, looking gloatingly on the flats, and went on to add other and warmer words of praise.

But it was to his corporal, a little later, that the Sergeant really explained his hanging on to the point.

“Look at it!” he said enthusiastically; “look at the view you get!”

The Corporal viewed dispassionately for a moment the dreary expanse below, the shell-churned morass and mud, wandering rivulets and ditches, shell-wrecked fragments of farms and buildings, the broken, bare-stripped poles of trees.

“Bloomin’ great, ain’t it?” he mumbled disgustedly, through his bandaged jaws. “Fair beautiful. Makes you think you’d like to come ’ere after the war an’ build a ’ouse, an’ sit lookin’ out on it always—I don’t think.”

“Exactly what I said the second I saw it,” said the Sergeant, and chuckled happily. “Only my house’d be a nice little trench an’ a neat little dug-out, an’ be for duration o’ war. Think o’ it, man—just think o’ this winter, with us up here along the ridge, an’ Fritz down in his trenches below there, up to the middle in mud. Him cursin’ Creation, and strugglin’ to pump his trenches out; and us sitting nicely up here in the dry, snipin’ down in enfilade along his trench, and pumpin’ the water out of our trenches down on to the flat to drown him out.”

The Sergeant chuckled again, slapped his hands together. “I’ve been havin’ that side of it back in the salient there for best part o’ two years, off and on. Fritz has been up top, keepin’ his feet dry and watchin’ us gettin’ shelled an’ shot up an’ minnie-werfered to glory—squattin’ up here, smokin’ his pipe an’ takin’ a pot-shot at us, and watchin’ us through his field-glasses, just as he felt like. And now it’s our turn. Don’t let me hear anybody talk about drivin’ the Hun back for miles from here. I don’t want him to go back; I want him to sit down there the whole darn winter, freezin’ an’ drownin’ to death ten times a day. Fritz isn’t go in’ to like that—not any. I am, an’ that’s why I hung like grim death to this look-out point. This is where we come in; this is our turn!”