STRETCHER-BEARERS

Lieutenant Drew was wounded within four or five hundred yards of the line from which his battalion started to attack. He caught three bullets in as many seconds—one in the arm, one in the shoulder, and one in the side—and went down under them as if he had been pole-axed. The shock stunned him for a little, and he came to hazily to find a couple of the battalion stretcher-bearers trying to lift him from the soft mud in which he was half sunk.

Drew was rather annoyed with them for wanting to disturb him. He was quite comfortable, he told them, and all he wanted was to be left alone there. The bearers refused to listen to this, and insisted in the first place in slicing away some of his clothing—which still further annoyed Drew because the weather was too cold to dispense with clothes—and putting some sort of first field dressing on the wounds.

“D’you think he can walk, Bill?” one asked the other. “No,” said Bill. “I fancy he’s got one packet through the lung, an’ if he walks he’ll wash out. It’s a carryin’ job.”

“Come on, then,” said the first. “Sooner we start the sooner we’re there.”

Quite disregarding Drew’s confused grumbles, they lifted and laid him on a stretcher and started to carry him back to the aid post.

If that last sentence conveys to you any picture of two men lifting a stretcher nicely and smoothly and walking off at a gentle and even walk, you must alter the picture in all its details. The ground where the lieutenant had fallen, the ground for many acres round him, was a half-liquefied mass of mud churned up into lumps and hummocks pitted and cratered with shell-holes intersected with rivulets and pools of water. When Drew was lifted on to the stretcher, it sank until the mud oozed out and up from either side and began to slop in over the edges. When the bearers had lifted him on, they moved each to his own end, and they moved one step at a time, floundering and splashing and dragging one foot clear after the other. When they took hold of the stretcher ends and lifted, both staggered to keep their balance on the slippery foothold; and to move forward each had to steady himself on one foot, wrench the other up out of the mud, plunge it forward and into the mud again, grope a minute for secure footing, balance, and proceed to repeat the performance with the other foot. The stretcher lurched and jolted and swayed side to side, backward and forward. The movement at first gave Drew severe stabs of pain, but after a little the pain dulled down into a steady throbbing ache.

The bearers had some 400 or 500 yards to go over the ground covered by the advance. After this they would find certain sketchy forms of duck-board walks—if the German shells had not wiped them out—and, farther back, still better and easier methods of progress to the aid post. But first there was this shell-ploughed wilderness to cross. Drew remembered vaguely what a struggle it had been to him to advance that distance on his own feet, and carrying nothing but his own weight and his equipment. It was little wonder the bearers found the same journey a desperate effort with his weight sagging and jolting between them and pressing them down in the mud.

In the first five yards the leading bearer slipped, failed to recover his balance, and fell, letting his end down with a jolt and a splash. He rose smothered in a fresh coat of wet mud, full of mingled curses on the mud and apologies to the wounded man. Drew slid off into a half-faint. He woke again slowly, as the bearers worked through a particularly soft patch. The mud was nearly thigh deep, and they were forced to take a step forward, half-lift, half-drag the stretcher on, lay it down while they struggled on another foot or two, turn and haul their load after them. It took them a full hour to move a fair 60 paces.

The work was not performed, either, without distractions other than the mud and its circumventing, and the trouble of picking the best course. An attack was in full progress, and streams of shells were screaming and howling overhead, with odd ones hurtling down and bursting on the ground they were traversing, flinging up gigantic geysers of spouting mud, clods of earth, and black smoke, erupting a whirlwind of shrieking splinters and fragments. Several times the bearers laid the stretcher down and crouched low in the mud from the warning roar of an approaching shell, waited the muffled crash of its burst, the passing of the flying fragments. From the nearer explosions a shower of dirt and clods rained down about them, splashing and thudding on the wet ground; from the farther ones an occasional piece of metal would drop whistling or droning angrily and “whutt” into the mud. Then the bearers lifted their burden and resumed their struggling advance. Fortunately the waves of attacking infantry had passed beyond them, and most of the German guns were busy flogging the front lines and trying to hold or destroy them; but there were still shells enough being flung back on the ground they had to cover to make matters unpleasantly risky. To add to the risk there was a constant whistle and whine of passing bullets, and every now and then a regular shower of them whipping and smacking into the mud about them, bullets not aimed at them, but probably just the chance showers aimed a little too high to catch the advancing attack, passing over and coming to earth a few hundred yards back.

The little party was not alone, although the ground was strangely empty and deserted to what it had been when the attack went over. There were odd wounded men, walking wounded struggling back alone, others more seriously hurt toiling through the mud with the assistance of a supporting arm, others lying waiting their turn to be carried in, placed for the time being in such cover as could be found, the cover usually of a deep shell-crater with soft, wet sides, and a deep pool at the bottom. There were odd bunches of men moving up, men carrying bombs, or ammunition, or supplies of some sort for the firing line, all ploughing slowly and heavily through the sticky mud.

Drew lost all count of time. He seemed to have been on that stretcher, to have been swaying and swinging, bumping down and heaving up, for half a lifetime—no, more, for all his life, because he had no thought for, no interest in anything that had happened in the world before this stretcher period, still less any interest in what might happen after it ended—if ever it did end. Several times he sank into stupor or semi-unconsciousness, through which he was still dimly sensible only of the motions of the stretcher, without any connected thought as to what they meant or how they were caused. Once he awoke from this state to find himself laid on the ground, one of his bearers lying in a huddled heap, the other stooping over him, lifting and hauling at him. Everything faded out again, and in the next conscious period he was moving on jerkily once more, this time with two men in the lead with a stretcher-arm apiece, and one man at the rear end. His first stretcher-bearer they left there, flat and still, sinking gradually in the soft ooze.

Again everything faded, and this time he only recovered as he was being lifted out of the stretcher and packed on a flat sideless truck affair with four upright corner posts. Somewhere near, a battery of field guns was banging out a running series of ear-splitting reports—and it was raining softly again—and he was sitting instead of lying. He groped painfully for understanding of it all.

“Where am I?” he asked faintly.

“You’re all right now, sir,” someone answered him. “You’ll have to sit up a bit, ‘cos we’ve a lot o’ men an’ not much room. But you’re on the light railway, an’ the truck’ll run you the half-mile to the Post in a matter o’ minutes.”

“What time is it?” asked Drew. “How’s the show going?”

“It’s near two o’clock, sir. An’ we hear all the objectives is taken.”

“Near two,” said Drew, and as the truck moved off, “Near two,” he kept repeating and struggling to understand what had happened to time—had started at six ... and it was “near two” ... “near two” ... two o’clock, that was. He couldn’t piece it together, and he gave it up at last and devoted himself to fitting words and music to the rhythm of the grinding, murmuring truck wheels. Six o’clock ... two o’clock.

It was little wonder he was puzzled. The attack had started at six. But it had taken the stretcher-bearers five hours to carry him some 400 yards.