Boyd Cable

“ Over this the four clambered and scuffled hastily, to find the trench beyond it wrecked out of semblance to a trench, a tossed and tumbled shallow gutter, with sides fallen in or blown completely out, with huge craters pitting the ground to either side of it, with the black reek and thick dust still curling and writhing and slowly drifting clear from the last explosion. And in that broken welter were the fragments of more than earth or stone; a half-buried patch of khaki, a broken rifle, a protruding boot, were significant of the other and more dreadful fragments buried there. ”

“ So much Bunthrop saw, and then with a hideous screeching roar a high explosive fell and burst in a shattering crash, a spouting hurricane of noise and smoke and flung earth and fragments. Bunthrop found himself half buried in a landslide of crumbling trench, struggled desperately clear, gasping and choking in the black cloud of smoke and fumes, saw presently, as the smoke thinned and dissolved, a chaos of broken earth and sandbags where the machine-guns had stood; saw one man and an officer dragging their gun from the débris, setting it up again on the broken edge of the trench. ”

“ More cold-bloodedly unpleasant work it would be hard to imagine. The men had none of the thrill and heat of combat to help them; they had not the hope that a man has in a charge across the open—that a minute or two gets the worst of it over; they had not even the chance the fighting man has where at least his hand may save his head. Their business was to stand in the one spot, open and unprotected, and without hope of cover or protection for a good hour or more on end. They must pay no heed to the singing bullets, to the crash of a bursting shell, to the rising and falling glow of the flares. ”

“ He would wait the most frenzied charge as still as if carved in stone, till the last possible moment, then the great haunches would sink, and with a bound and a rush he would avoid the sweeping horns and whirl round and lay Steve cleverly alongside at just the right distance for the long whip to get in its work. The lightest touch on the rein would bring him round in his own length as if spun on a pivot; the slightest pressure of the knees would send him hurling forward from an easy canter into his hardest gallop. ”

“ She made no attempt to dodge or evade it, struck a bee-line for the row of Hun machines, droned straightly and steadily in and along the line, her bombs crashing amongst them, a sputter of flashes at her bows telling of the machine-gun hard at work putting the finishing touches to the destruction. The light followed her and held her all the way, and through its beam the streaking smoke of the tracer bullets poured incessantly, the shell-bursts flamed and flung billowing clouds of black smoke, the rocket fires reached and clutched at her. ”

“ The Pepper-pots—a second one had lumbered into sight from the center of the horseshoe curve—were drawing a tearing hurricane of machine-gun bullets that beat and rattled on their armored sides like hail on a window-pane. They waddled indifferently through the storm and Here We Are, crawling carefully across a trench, halted half-way over and sprinkled bullets up and down its length to port and starboard for a minute, hitched itself over, steered straight for a fire-streaming machine-gun embrasure. ”

“ A furnace-door slams open, and a burst of glaring light glows fiercely over the shop; long irons plunge into the flaming gap, and poke and prod and hook hastily about the fire; a lump of glowing steel rolls out, tips over, and thumps down on the inclined floor in front of the furnace.54 There is a babel of yells, the rush of flying feet, the clatter of a truck-barrow, and the red-hot billet of metal is pounced upon, snatched, and twisted on to the hand truck, rushed to where men wait its coming grouped about a lumbering press whose massive bulk towers aloft into the misty gloom. ”

“ Private Copple was busy one morning helping to carry back some of the casualties. A hot “strafe” was on, the way back led through lines and clumped batches of batteries all in hot action, the roar of gun-fire rose long and unbroken and deafeningly, and every now and then through the roar of their reports and the diminishing wails of their departing shells there came the rising shriek and rush of a German shell, the crump and crash of its burst, the whistle and hum of flying splinters. ”

“ It is a full dozen miles to the firing line, and to eye or ear, unless one knows where and how to look and listen, there is no sign of anything but peace and pleasant life in the surroundings. But these black-clad women do know—know that the cool green clump of trees over on the hill-side hides a roofless ruin with fire-blackened walls; that the church spire that for all their lives they had seen out there over the sky-line is no longer visible because it lies shell-smitten to a tumbled heap of brick and stone and mortar ”

“ In the trenches our men cowered at first, listening in awe to the rushing whirlwinds of the shells' passage over their heads, the roar of the cannonade behind them, the crash and boom of the bursting shells in front, the shriek and whirr of flying splinters, the splintering crash of the shattering trees.
The German artillery strove to pick up the plan of the attack, to beat down the torrent of our batteries' fire, to smash in the forward trenches, shake the defense, open the way for the massed attack. ”

“ The rider slowly approached the mob, the brutes flinching and crowding back from him. Suddenly the whip flickered out a few swift cuts, swung back and snapped out a string of reverberating cracks, the horse leaped forward and crowded into the opening the yielding bodies gave him, and horse and rider and cattle grew dim and indistinct in the dust that churned up and hung about them. Out of the haze the cattle broke with terrified bawlings, and scattered galloping over the valley and the slope. ”

“ Ailie, hardly daring to believe that he was actually clear and safe and free, steered for home. He skimmed his bullet-torn machine over the trenches, a machine holed and ripped and torn and cut with armour-piercing and explosive bullets, his guns jammed, his ammunition expended, his petrol at its last pints, he himself at almost the last point of exhaustion, dizzy from excitement, weak and faint from sheer strain. ”

“ They lay there laughing and joking and watching the uncouth antics of the monster waddling across the shell-riddled, ground, cheering when it appeared to trip and recover itself, cheering when it floundered sideways into a hole and crawled out again, cheering most wildly of all when it reached the barbed-wire entanglements, waddled through, bursting them apart and trailing them in long tangles behind it, or trampling them calmly under its churning caterpillar-wheel-bands. ”

“ They have seen and heard the red wrath of war, not in the pictures of the illustrated papers, not in the cinema shows, not even by the word-of-mouth tales of chance men who have been in it; but at first-hand, with their own eyes and ears, in the leaping flames of burning homes, in the puffing white clouds of the shrapnel, the black spouting smoke of the high-explosive, in the deafening thunder of the guns, the yelling shells, the crash of falling walls, the groans of wounded men, the screams of frightened children. ”

“ As a gun fired there flamed out in front of the battery a blinding sheet of light that threw up every detail of men and guns and patch of wet ground in glaring hot light or hard black silhouette. On the instant, the light vanished and darkness clapped down on the tired eyes, to lift and leap again on the following instant from the next gun’s spurt of vivid sheeting flame. ”

“ Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching shells, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments—the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop's nerve. ”

“ The British Army doesn’t want anything more than a fair show, and only the British workers can give it them. The Army is quite and cheerfully ready and willing to hunger and thirst, to perish from cold and bitter soaking wet, to wallow in the mud and misery of the trenches, to endure bodily discomfort and aching fatigue, long marches and longer outpost watchings, and lack of sleep and rest, to suffer frost-bite and disease, loss of limbs and sight, dreadful wounds and death, so that we may win the War. ”

“ The shells rained, deluged down on every trench, every road and communication way within range, searched every thicket and patch of cover, blasted the dead woods to splintered wreckage, smashed in dug-out and emplacement, broke down the trenches to tumbled smoking gutters, gashed and seamed and pitted the bare earth into a honeycombed belt of death and destruction. The high-explosive broke in, tore open, wrenched apart and destroyed the covering trenches and dug-outs ”

“ With a deep sullen roar like prisoned waters bursting their barriers and pouring into the valley, with a shaking thunder of hoofs that set the solid ground quivering, the mob broke in mad stampede.
They were coming straight for the camp, and every man there knew what it meant if they burst on it before they could mount and gallop clear. There were no orders given and none were needed. Each man simply dropped everything and leaped for his horse, and flung himself to the saddle. Steve had been in the act of rolling in his blanket when the first warning came. ”

“ Close to the German parapet are a few black, huddled heaps—dead Germans, shot down while out in a working party on the wire at night, and left there to rot, and some killed in their own trench, and tumbled out over the parapet by their own comrades. The drowsy silence is broken at long intervals by a rifle shot; a lark pours out a stream of joyful thrilling song. ”

“ My ambition was the much lesser one of describing as well as I could what a Big Push is like from the point of view of an ordinary average infantry private, of showing how much he sees and knows and suffers in a great battle, of giving a glimpse perhaps of the spirit that animates the New Armies, the endurance that has made them more than a match for the Germans, the acceptance of appalling and impossible horrors as the work-a-day business and routine of battle, the discipline and training that has fused such a mixture of material into tempered fighting metal. ”

“ Reddie had to chance everything, and yet throw away no shadow of a chance. He opened the throttle wide, felt the machine gather speed, bumping and jolting horribly over the rough field, tried to peer down at the ground to see how fast they moved, could see nothing, utterly black nothing, almost panicked for one heart-stilling instant as he looked ahead again and thought he saw the blacker shadow of something solid in front of him, clenched his teeth and held straight on until he felt by the rush of wind on his face he had way enough, and pulled the joy-stick in to him. ”

“ For civilized man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beasts of the field and birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing wing.
But this time some movement in the trenches, some delay in halting a regiment, some neglect to keep men under cover, some transport too suspiciously close-spaced on the roads, betrayed the movement. ”

“ Up in the trenches the infantry heard the separate thuds and thumps quicken and close and run into one long tremendous roar, heard the shells whistle and shriek and howl and moan over their heads, saw the ground far out in front of them veil in twisting smoke wreaths, spout and leap in volcanoes of smoke, earth, and fire. Battery by battery, gun by gun, the artillery picked up and swelled the chorus. The enemy machines did little gun-spotting over our positions. ”