Behind the Lines Read Free Page A

turned sharply and gave a curt order as a large car with a little red and black flag fluttering above the radiator bore down upon them. The men straightened caps and sat more stiffly in the saddle. Heads and eyes turned sharply to the left, and drivers’ arms and short-handled whips slanted rigidly across the riderless horses as the car slowed to pass the column. Only the black kitten on top of the high-piled G.S. wagon in the rear forgot her manners and yawned.
    â€œArmy!” exclaimed Rawley when Cane’s hand had dropped from the salute. “Who was it?”
    â€œHorne, I fancy,” answered Cane. “And he’s a gunner and knows what’s what.” And he glanced back again with a critical eye at his battery.
    Rawley hummed a little tune. He was enjoying the sunlight and the wide-spreading landscape. The green fields were very pleasant after the bare, tortured earth and rubble heaps from which he had come. This was France as he had imagined it; for although he had been nearly a month in the country, with the exception of a glimpse of the streets of Havre in the grey light of a rainy dawn and what can be seen from the window of a railway carriage at night, his knowledge of French landscapes was limited to that straight, pot-holed road, bordered by riven tree stumps, that led to the saucer-shaped depression covered with rank jungle grass, which was the battery position.
    But he had enjoyed it all—the night journey through unknown country to the unknown of the battle line, the ride up to the battery at dusk, across that desert country, where heaps of rubble with a riven, up-jutting gable marked the site of a village and ragged poles, black against the evening sky, were woods that once had been green.
    It had interested him. It was experience—life. It was all so different from the quiet East Anglian town in which he had been born and bred, and from which till now he had never been more than a hundred miles. Life was just an accumulation of experiences, he had decided in his youthful philosophy, and the wider and more varied the experiences, the fuller the life.
    In that quiet provincial town he had welcomed the war as a new phenomenon—he had been too young to theorise about the Boer War—and the call for men andhis answering that call was the gateway to an experience, a great and wonderful man-making or man-breaking experience such as had never before crossed his horizon.
    And so he was interested in France and avid of experience. He could still recall the thrill of that ride at dusk across the devastated area when suddenly the pearly sky above seemed to have been ripped like calico and the tiles of a derelict farmhouse nearby had lifted in the air before his eyes and bellied out into a red balloon-shaped cloud, whilst his ears had been smitten with a furious crack of sound. His first shell. And his first casualty too he could remember with an equal though different thrill.
    It had been at night—one of those curiously quiet nights when the forward area seemed remote from the civilized world, like some distant uninhabited and unexplored country. He was walking from No. 2 gun-pit to the mess. The ragged wall of the ruined estaminet ahead showed fitfully against pale flickerings on the northern horizon—soundless flashes from distant guns. He was sucking contentedly at his pipe and contemplating the seven stars of the Great Bear, when suddenly out of the night came that whistle of a giant whip lash-crack and the flower-like bloom of orange light in the darkness near him. Then silence. And then again that vicious lash-crack. And then silence, broken by a long drawn “Oh-e-e-e-e” that made his scalp tingle.
    He picked himself up from where he had flung himself prone and groped towards the sound. A dark form that moved once convulsively lay on the edge of the corduroyroad. He overcame a strong feeling of shrinking and went down on one knee beside it. He pressed the