John Walters Page 3

  Twenty minutes afterwards the sergeant, crawling warily on his belly, approached a saphead and after a brief word or two dropped in.

  “ ’Ave you seen Mr Brinton, sir?” he asked anxiously of an officer, whom he found in the sap, pessimistically smoking a cigarette – saps are pessimistic places.

  “No.” The officer looked up quickly. “He was out with you, wasn’t he, Sergeant Dawson?”

  “Yes, sir – on patrol. We’d just a-got to that there chalk ’ummock, when we ran into some of ’em. ’E said to me – ‘Get back,’ ’e said, ‘your own way,’ and then they put up a flare. I couldn’t see ’im as I was lying doggo in a ’ole, but I ’eard a revolver shot about ten yards away. I looked round when the flare was out, but couldn’t see him, nor ’ear him. So I thought ’e might ’ave got back.”

  “Pass the word along for Mr Brinton.” The officer went out of the sap into the fire trench. “And get a move on with it.” He stood for a few moments, looking thoughtful. “I hope,” he muttered to himself, “I hope the old boy hasn’t been scuppered.”

  But – the old boy had been scuppered. A runner failed to discover him in the trench; two strong patrols scoured the ground around the chalk ’ummock and drew blank. And so, in the fullness of time there appeared in the Roll of Honour the name of Lieut. John Brinton, of the Royal Loamshires, under the laconic heading of Missing, believed Prisoner of War, which is the prologue of this tale of the coalfields of France.

  The part of the line in which the Royal Loamshires found themselves at the time of the unfortunate matter of John Brinton, MC, was somewhere south of La Bassée and somewhere north of Loos – closer identification is undesirable. It is not a pleasant part of the line, though there are many worse. The principal bugbears of one’s existence are the tunnelling companies, who without cessation practise their nefarious trade, thereby causing alarm and despondency to all concerned. Doubtless they mean well, but their habit of exploding large quantities of ammonal at uncertain hours and places does not endear them to the frenzied onlookers, who spend the next hour plucking boulders from their eyes. In addition, there is the matter of sandbags. The proximity of a mine shaft is invariably indicated by a young mountain of these useful and hygienic articles, which tower and spread and expand in every direction where they are most inconvenient. I admit that, having placed half the interior of France in bags, the disposal of the same on arriving in the light of day presents difficulties. I admit that the fault lies entirely with the harassed and long-suffering gentleman who boasts the proud title of “spoils officer.” I admit – But I grow warm, in addition to digressing unpardonably. The trouble is that I always do grow warm, and digress at the mention of sandbags.

  In part of the Loamshires’ front line, mining activity was great. A continuous group of craters stretched along No Man’s Land, separating them from the wily Hun, for half the battalion front – a group which we will call Outpost. The name is wrong, but it will serve. To the near lips of each crater a sap ran out from the front line, so that merely the great yawning hole lay between the saphead and the corresponding abode of the Germans on the other lip. Each night these sapheads were held by a small group of men armed with Verey lights, bombs, bowie knives, and other impedimenta of destruction; while between the saps the trench was held but lightly – in some cases not at all. The idea of concentrating men in the front line has long been given up by both sides.

  If, therefore, one strolls along the firing line – a tedious amusement at all times – it is more than likely that one will find long stretches completely deserted. The scene is desolate; the walk is strangely eerie. Walls of sandbags tower on each side, in some cases two or three feet above one’s head; the clouds go scudding by, while the shadows of a traverse dance fantastically as a flare comes hissing down. The Hun is thirty yards away; the silence is absolute; the place is ghostly with the phantoms of forgotten men. And sometimes, as one walks, strange fancies creep into one’s brain. Relics of childish fears, memories of the bogey man who waited round the end of the dark passage at home, come faintly from the past. And, foolish though it be, one wonders sometimes with a sharp, clutching pang of nervous fear – What is round the next corner?

  Nothing – of course not. What should there be? The night is quiet; the trench is English. The next party is forty yards farther on; the voices of the last still come softly through the air. And yet – and yet – ! But I digress again.

  Now not one of the least of all the crimes of those responsible for the disposal of the underworld of France, when it comes to the surface in sandbags, is the following. (Lest any one may think that I am writing a textbook, I would crave patience.) Be it known, then, that to keep out a bullet some four feet of earth are necessary. Less than that and the bullet will come through and impinge with great violence on the warrior behind. This fact is well known to all whose path in life leads them to the trenches; but for all that Tommy is a feckless lad. In some ways he bears a marked resemblance to that sagacious bird, the ostrich; and because of that resemblance, I have remarked on this question of disposing sandbags in terms of grief and pain. The easiest thing to do with a sandbag in a trench, if you don’t want it, is to chuck it out. Human nature being what it is, the distance chucked is reduced to a minimum – in other words, it is placed on the edge of the parapet. More follow – and they are placed beside it on the edge of the parapet; which causes the inside of the parapet to increase in height, but not in thickness. In other words, after a while the top two or three layers of bags, though looking perfectly safe from the inside, are not bullet proof. Which Tommy knows – but…well, I have mentioned the ostrich.

  Now this state of affairs existed in one or two places behind Outpost craters. There were spots where the top of the parapet was not of sufficient thickness to keep out a rifle bullet. And it was just by one of these spots that the Company Commander, going round one night, suddenly stumbled on something that lay sprawling at the bottom of the trench – an unmistakable something. It lay half on the fire step and half off, midway between two saps, and the head sagged back helplessly. He switched on his torch, and having looked at the huddled form, cursed softly under his breath. For it was his senior subaltern, and a bullet had entered his head from behind just above the neck. It had come out at his forehead, and we will not specify further.

  “Stretcher bearers at once.” He went back to the group he had just left. “Mr Dixon has been shot through the parapet, farther up.”

  “Killed, sir?” The NCO in charge was in Dixon’s platoon.

  “Yes.” The Company Officer was laconic. “Brains blown out. It’s that damned parapet – one sandbag thick. What the hell’s the use of my speaking?”

  He had had a trying day, and his tone may be excused. “You sit here and you do nothing. The whole company are a set of cursed lazy loafers.”

  Seeing that the men were getting an average of six hours’ sleep the remark was hardly fair, but, as I said, the day had been a trying one and this had been the last straw. He strode back again to the dead subaltern, muttering angrily.

  “Poor old man,” he whispered gently, lifting the legs on to the fire step and bending over the still form. “Poor old man; you’ve solved the Big Mystery by now, anyway.” The light of his torch fell on the dead man’s face, and he shuddered slightly: a bullet can do a lot of damage. Then he climbed on the fire step and looked over the parapet. It was a place where the spoils party had been particularly busy; and though the Company Officer was full six foot, he could only just see over the top; as a fire step it was useless to anyone but a giant from a freak show.

  “Hallo! what’s happened?” A voice behind him made him turn round.

  “That you, Dick? Poor little Jerry Dixon been shot through the parapet – that’s what’s happened.” He got down and stood at the bottom of the trench beside the second-in-command. “The three top layers there are only one bag thick.” Once again his language became heated.

  “Steady, old man,” Dick Staunton
puffed steadily at his pipe, and looked at the body lying beside them. “Were you with him when he was hit?”

  “No. Came round visiting the sentries and found him lying there dead.”

  “Oh!” He switched on his torch and continued smoking in silence. Suddenly he bent forward and peered closely at the shattered head. “Give me a hand for a minute. I want to turn the boy over.”

  Faintly surprised, he did as he was bid.

  In silence they turned the body over, and again there was silence while Staunton carefully examined the spot where the bullet had entered.

  “Strange,” he muttered to himself after a few moments, “very strange. Tell me, Joe” – his voice was normal again – “exactly how did you find him? What position was he in?”

  “He was half sitting on the fire step, with his head in the corner and his legs sprawling in the bottom of the trench.”

  “Sitting? Then his face was towards you.”

  “Why, yes. Is there anything peculiar in the fact? He’d probably just been having a look over the top, and as he turned away to get down he was hit through the sandbags in the back of the neck. His head was a bit forward as he was getting down, so the bullet passed through his head and out of his forehead.”

  In silence they turned the boy over again and covered his face with a pocket-handkerchief.

  “You’re too much of a blooming detective, you know, old man. Much police work has made thee mad,” laughed the Company Commander. “What else can have happened?”

  “I’m no detective, Joe.” The other man smiled slightly. “But there are one or two small points of detail which strike me, though I can make nothing out of them, I admit. First – his height. He’s six inches shorter than you, and yet you could barely see over the top. Therefore, what was he doing trying to look over the parapet here of all places? Secondly, the way he fell. A man killed instantaneously, and shot through the back of his head, would in all probability pitch forward on his face. You say his face was towards you, and that he was sitting in the corner of the traverse.” He paused to fill his pipe.

  “Go on,” said the Company Commander curiously. “You interest me.”

  “The third point is one on which I admit that I am doubtful. The bullet wound is clean. Now I am inclined to think – though I don’t know – that a bullet passing through a chalk bag would become jagged, and would not be travelling straight when it continued its flight. However, I don’t attach much importance to that. And the fourth and last point is almost too trifling to mention. Do you notice anything peculiar about his uniform?”

  The listener flashed his torch over the dead officer. “No,” he said at length. “I can’t say that I do. Except that one of his regimental badges is missing. I suppose you don’t mean that, do you?” The Company Officer laughed irritably.

  “I do,” returned the other quietly. “It’s a point of detail, even if a little one.” He looked thoughtfully at the man in front of him. “Do I strike you as a callous sort of devil, old man?”

  “You seem to be treating the boy rather on the line of a specimen for improving your deductive powers.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” Staunton turned away. “But I didn’t mean it that way – quite. Sorry, Joe; the boy was a pal of yours?”

  “He was.”

  “God rest his soul!” The second-in-command spoke low. Then, with a final salute to the youngster whose soul had gone to the haven of fighting men, he turned away and vanished into the night.

  The next day the Company Commander came round to Battalion Headquarters.

  “My two best subalterns,” grunted the Colonel in disgust, “within two days. Very annoying. Good boys – toppers both of them. You’d go quite a way, Dick, before you bettered Brinton and Dixon.”

  “You would,” affirmed the second-in-command. “Quite a way.”

  “And with all your theorising last night, old man,” remarked the Captain slyly, “we both forgot the obvious solution. He got on the fire step, found he couldn’t see over – so he clambered up on top. Then, when he was getting down, he was hit, and slithered into the position I found him in.”

  Staunton regarded the speaker through a haze of tobacco smoke. “I wonder,” he murmured at length. “I wonder.”

  He did not state that during the morning he had made a point of interrogating Jerry Dixon’s servant. And that worthy – an old and trusted soldier – had very positively denied that either of the Pelicans Rampant, which formed the regimental badge, had been missing from his master’s coat the previous evening.

  “Now Mr Brinton’s coat, sir,” he remarked thoughtfully, “that did ’ave a badge off, that did. But ’is servant!” He snorted, and dismissed the subject scornfully.

  As I say, the Major did not mention this fact. After all, it was such a very small point of detail.

  To the frivolous-minded, Dick Staunton was at times the cause of a certain amount of amusement. Originally in the Army, he had left it when a junior captain, and had settled down to the normal life of a country gentleman. By nature of a silent disposition, he abominated social functions of all sorts. He hunted, he fished, and he shot, and spent the rest of his time studying the habits of the wild. And as always happens to a man who lives much with nature, his mind gradually got skilled in the noticing of little things. Small signs, invisible to the casual observer, he noticed automatically; and without being in any sense a Sherlock Holmes, he had acquired the habit of putting two and two together in a manner that was, at times, disconcertingly correct.

  “Points of detail,” he remarked one evening in the dug-out after dinner, “are very easy to see if you have eyes to see them with. One is nothing; two are a coincidence; three are a moral certainty. A really trained man can see a molehill; I can see a mountain; most of you fellows couldn’t see the Himalayas.” With which sage remark he thoughtfully lit his pipe and relapsed into silence. And silence being his usual characteristic he came into the Battalion Headquarters dug-out one evening and dropped quietly into a seat, almost unnoticed by the somewhat noisy group around the table.

  “Afternoon, Dickie.” The Sapper officer looked up and saw him. “D’you hear we’re pinching your last recruit? Jesson – this is Major Staunton.” He turned to a second lieutenant in the Royal Loamshires beside him as he made the introduction.

  “How d’you do, sir.” Jesson got up and saluted. “I’ve only just got over from England; and now apparently they’re attaching me to the RE, as I’m a miner.”

  He sat down again, and once more turned his attention to that excellent French illustrated weekly without which no officers’ mess in France is complete. Lest I be run in for libel, I will refrain from further information as to its title and general effect on officers concerned.

  For a few moments Staunton sat watching the group and listening with some amusement to the criticisms on those lovely members of the fair sex so ably portrayed in its pages, and then his attention centred on the revolver he was cleaning. Jesson, a good-looking, clean-cut man of about twenty-nine or thirty, was holding forth on an experience he had had in Alaska, which concerned a woman, a team of dogs, and a gentleman known as One-eyed Pete, and as he spoke Staunton watched him idly. It struck him that he seemed a promising type, and that it was a pity the Tunnellers were getting him.

  “Haven’t you got enough disturbers of the peace already,” he remarked to the Tunnelling officer, “without snatching our ewe lamb?”

  “We are at full strength as a matter of fact, Major,” answered an officer covered with chalk; “but they do some funny things in the palaces of the great. We often get odd birds blowing in. I’ve been initiating him all this morning into the joys of Outpost.”

  “And how is jolly old Blighty?” remarked the Adjutant. “Thank Heaven! leave approaches.”

  “About the same.” Jesson helped himself to a whisky-and-soda. “Darker than ever, and taxis an impossibility. Still I dare say I shall be glad enough to go back when my first leave comes due,” he added wit
h a laugh.

  “Is this your first time out?” asked Staunton.

  “Yes.” Jesson unbuttoned his burberry and took out a cigarette case. Outside the dusk was falling, and he bent forward to get a light from the candle flickering on the table in front of him. “The very first time. I’ve been on Government work up to now.”

  It was at that moment that a very close observer might have noticed that Dick Staunton’s pipe ceased to draw with monotonous regularity: he might even have heard a quick intake of breath. But he would have had to be a very close one – very close indeed; for the next instant he was again speaking and his voice was normal.

  “I suppose you’ve been at the depot,” he hazarded. “Who are there now?”

  “Oh, the usual old crowd,” answered Jesson. “I don’t expect you know many of them though, do you, Major? Ginger Stretton in the 14th Battalion – do you know him by any chance?”

  “No, I don’t think I do.” His face was in the shadow, but had it been visible a slightly puzzled frown might have been seen on his forehead. “I suppose they still make all you fellows on joining go to the regimental tailor, don’t they?”

  Jesson looked a trifle surprised at the question. “I don’t think they are as particular as they were,” he returned after a moment. “Personally I went to Jones & Jones.” He casually buttoned up his mackintosh and turned to the Tunneller. “If you’re ready I think we might be going. I want to see about my kit.” He got up as he spoke and turned towards the entrance, while at the same moment the Sapper rose too. “I’d like to drop in again, sir, sometimes, if I may.” He spoke to the shadow where Staunton had been sitting.