A Soldier's Place Read online

  “Everyone at the billet has been saying you were losing your mind,” gasped Suhren, wrestling the rifle from him, “and now I know they are right. You fool—you would have killed me.”

  He jerked back the rifle bolt and peered, but the chamber and magazine were empty. “On a scouting patrol without loading your rifle,” he jeered. “That is proof that you are crazy.”

  Otto put all his strength into a desperate lunge, and again he caught Suhren off guard. His shoulder struck the fellow in the middle and threw him down. Then they rolled in the snow and Otto beat at the fellow’s face and drove his knee into Suhren’s groin. Their heavy clothing hampered them but they struggled and fought with surprising fury until Otto weakened and was beaten down under a rain of heavy blows.

  He never knew when Suhren left him, and when he had recovered sufficiently to sit up the fire had burned low. He groped for sticks but his sluggish stirring failed to rouse him until he discovered that there was no more fuel. He flung the brush they had used for seats onto the embers and as they blazed tried to push the fire to the fallen tree. A terrific fit of coughing seized him and there were buzzing sounds in his ears. But he finally got the fire licking into the windfall. Then he broke frozen branches from the nearest trees and flung them into the flames.

  They blazed with gusto and smoke clouds billowed aloft.

  When he had imbibed some warmth Otto stood and gazed about him. A little whispering wind struck at his exposed cheeks like needlepoints and a whirl of driven snow came among the trees. A shudder ran through his aching body, then he squatted by the fire and spoke aloud.

  “They are all against me,” he complained. “They know I am sick and that this coat of mine is like paper, but who is there to care? The sergeant has not helped me. I will report to the officer myself. I will tell him….”

  His voice trailed off as stupor possessed him. He stirred drowsily, knowing he should attend the fire. Then someone was shouting at him…commands. Dazedly he put his hands up in surrender. Figures were all about him, men dressed in greatcoats such as Suhren was wearing.

  He was dimly aware of some words in awkward German and then a flask was held to his lips and he drank eagerly. A fiery liquor rushed the blood in his veins and before he could be sure of anything he was being hustled along the ravine to where the snow was packed like a road. Then he entered a tunnel leading into the ravine bank and was pushed and guided into a chamber where such heat met him that he became dizzy.

  An hour later he sat and stared at the strange faces about him, and wondered if he were dreaming. But the food in his stomach and the heart-warming liquids he had drunk assured him that everything was real. These men about him were Russians all right, and they looked like seasoned soldiers. They had their place fitted up like a barracks, too, and everything in order.

  It amazed him that they were so kind to him. The sergeant had said that the Russians killed every man they captured, that they tortured their prisoners. It was all lies. He could not wish for better treatment. They had spared no pains to get him warmed. They had given him great helpings of a meaty broth, and cheese and black bread, and then, when he could eat no more, they had given him cigarettes.

  “I cannot understand,” he said to the one who acted as interpreter. “We were told you killed prisoners.”

  “Of course your officers would tell you that,” the Russian agreed. “They do not want you to surrender. Have another drink and tell us about this place and where your platoon is billeted. We are newly arrived at this post.”

  Otto blinked, tried to concentrate his thinking. “How did you arrive?” he blurted.

  “By plane,” said the Russian, as one comrade to another. “Our supplies were dropped with us. We have been here a week. How many men are at your billets?”

  “Too many, for the rations we have. And no mail has reached us for two weeks.” Otto let loose all the bitterness he had felt through the long shivering nights. He told them about the officer from Berlin who had sent him on a fool’s errand. Talking of the errand made him remember Suhresn and although his mind was becoming confused he told them of the unfairness he had experienced over the Russian coat.

  “Feel my coat,” he insisted. “It is thin as paper, and his was warm. Yet they let him take this other one. Is that fair?”

  “You are a little drunk,” the Russian said.

  “Not too drunk,” returned Otto. “I wish you had arrived sooner so that you could have caught Suhren as well. There is a matter I want to settle with him.”

  “Later will do,” soothed the Russian.

  The room had become hazy and Otto wanted to sleep. He felt that he should not have talked so loosely but Suhren had hurt him, and no one had sided with him at the billets. Let them stew in their own juice.

  When he awoke there was only one man with him, an older fellow who had served the food. “Where are the others?” Otto asked. “Is it morning?”

  “Not yet.” The fellow’s German was difficult to understand and he appeared very sleepy. “The others have gone to visit your comrades.”

  “To visit them!” Otto’s head was aching but his mind had cleared and a vast uneasiness possessed him. He had babbled too much. “When did they go?”

  “They will be there at daybreak,” said the Russian, “and it is snowing. It will be an easy matter.”

  Otto visualized what would happen, and was jabbed by a thousand accusations. He pretended to doze again until he heard the Russian snoring.

  Then he glanced about him. His equipment and greatcoat were piled in a corner back of the Russian but his cap and gloves were near him. He arose softly, snatched up the blanket that had covered him and, after some moments of anxious groping, found the exit.

  The air that met him was razor-edged but he threw the blanket over his head and shoulders and rushed into the darkness. Twice he tripped and fell, and each time he found it more difficult to get up. A frightful fit of coughing seized him so that he had to pause to get his breath. The cold numbed him, made him leaden in his movements. He should have had his greatcoat. The blanket was like nothing.

  Thinking of the greatcoat drove his slowing mind to remember Suhren. He stopped, and turned. “He is so smart, that one,” he mumbled, “and the sergeant would not speak to the officer. Let them all be surprised.”

  He kept on mumbling about the officer from Berlin, and the fool’s errand he had been sent on…a warm coat was what a man needed…he would get that one from Suhren…there was no hurry….

  There was a moment when he knew he was lying in the snow but the Russians would be coming that way and they would give him a coat, one of those warm Russian greatcoats. It was the last thought he had. The snow sifted over him and the breath of the storm hardened him like iron.

  The Finer Instincts

  Sergeant John Keene watched the prisoners file by; men in field grey, shuffling down the dusty road, plodding in dully apathy, indifferent as tired cattle. He turned to the man beside him.

  “Those,” he said, “are the real German type. They’re stolid, unimaginative, coarse-minded animals, beasts with women, beasts in war, and bovine in peace.”

  Corporal Ashley’s dreamy eyes filled with protest. “You’re too wholesale,” he objected. “You’ve swallowed too much propaganda. I’ve got no use for their professional soldiers, but the rest of them are not much different from us.”

  Keene’s eyes flashed impatience as he moved away. “You’ve been soft-hearted about them ever since you saw their Red Cross men bring one of our boys out of the shelling at Vimy,” he retorted. “What they did to Belgium, and with gas at Ypres, and what they’re doing with their zeppelins and submarines, doesn’t count with you.”

  “You don’t get me right, Keene.” Ashley looked back at him and smiled. “Their leaders have different ideas of warfare, that’s all. In Canada we’re all British but don’t we have different religi
ons and politics?”

  It was Ashley’s same line of argument. Keene flung his final retort. “They’re Huns, Boche, killers, brutes, raiders, and always have been. They’re mechanically clever and systematic, but they’re totally devoid of the finer instincts of the white race.”

  He hurried away to his hut. Every time he argued with Ashley he got hot, his blood boiled; the man was so infernally narrow-minded. He had seen Red Cross Germans do one kind deed and he has made it a halo for the rest, an excuse for clinging to exasperating asinine viewpoints.

  Their company marched over the Ridge at dusk, back to the line again, to do another routine tour in front of Avion. Keene, at the rear of his platoon, watched the wide arc of Very lights rising and falling over the plain, the red flicker of distant gun flashes, and felt unutterably miserable.

  Back to the front again, more war, more casualties, more shelling by the Hun; how he hated it!

  Down in the long communication trench leading forward their progress was painfully slow. Enemy whizz bangs had broken down the walls, smashed bath mats, tangled wires, and a litany of monotonous warning travelled along the column. “Hole under foot…wire overhead…step up…step down.” Reliefs were just as tedious, for the shelling had not spared the front. The out-going men carried wounded comrades, and the stretcher parties had strenuous times getting around wrecked bay and traverse. It was midnight before Keene’s unit, the “Prairie Wolves,” was completely established.

  “We’ve got a good dugout this time.” Corporal Ashley’s soft drawl reached him from the shadows. “It’s a Heinie one but they’ve changed the entrance so it’s Jake for us. There’s pictures on the walls, a real bed and stove and chairs.”

  “Stuff they’ve taken from French houses,” said Keene bitterly. “They steal whatever their shells don’t smash up.”

  He went down the new stairway into a dark underground, pushed aside a heavy gas curtain and entered a board-walled chamber. A bedstead heaped with dirty linen faced him. To one side were chairs, a table, and a pot-bellied French stove. A wire strung with stick bombs stretched beside the entrance. A German greatcoat still hung from a nail in one corner. On the wall were newspaper pictures of Hindenburg and the Kaiser. Everything exuded the faint inexplicable characteristic odour of German occupation.

  Keene sniffed the close atmosphere. “Phew!” he said disgustedly. “The smell is too much for me. I’d sooner sleep in the trench.”

  “You’ll change your mind after a few ‘Minnies’ come over,” said the corporal. “I’ll take the gas blanket down and let some fresh air in.”

  The sergeant went back up the steps and visited the machine-gun post, a sandbagged emplacement in the corner of a stone wall. He inhaled the night air. Despite the aroma of chloride of lime and rotting handbags it seemed heavy with the scent of roses. The guns were quiet for a moment and overhead stars sprinkled a velvet sky. Around the jagged rib-like ruins of Avion soft flares shot up and unfolded like flowers from a world of ghosts.

  Crack-crack-crack. The weirdness of the scene was dispelled by the bark of a machine gun. Bullets snapped over them and jerked Keene back to grim realities.

  “Smells like there’s flowers somewhere handy,” grunted the Lewis gunner. “Roses, I’d say.”

  “That’s what they are,” said Keene. “It’s a wonder the Hun missed them.” He spoke ironically.

  He was restless until morning. The perfume-laden night air had wafted him back to a June that seemed to belong to a remote past. If only the gaunt skeleton-like trees between the lines could take on greenery, if only those palpitating glows that rose and fell so intermittently could become fixtures among the trees…Years and years ago there had been soft perfumed evenings with smooth lawns, jewelled flower beds, gay lights, happy voices…The rose scent brought it back, set his whole being seething with longing.

  He slept fitfully on the tumbled bed and went up to the trench at stand-to. Birds were chirping in a remnant of hedge near the garden wall. The sentries were huddled on the fire steps. Others paced the hard-packed trench floor. The east was shot with crimson. Over on the Somme the guns were grumbling throatily. Elsewhere it was quiet. A light mist hung over the hollows near Lens, making the slag heap dank islands in a woolly sea. All at once sun rays glittered through them, gave a glisten to the dew-wet wire and weeds in front of the parapet. Men moved about briskly, looking expectant. An officer came along with the rum issue. After he had gone there were odours of tea and bacon from the dugouts. Another day had begun.

  It was an hour later that Keene heard the sharp spiteful crack of a sniper’s rifle, and a choking cry. He hurried along the trench. What new deviltry was afoot? Scared-looking men were grouped about the Lewis gun post. “It’s Jim, Sarge,” they said. He pulled away some of the bags and crawled out under the wire to get some of them roses. Some dirty sniper plugged him.”

  Jim sniped! Jim, the best gunner in the company, out since ’15, sniped because he tried to pick a rose! Keene’s veins swelled and pounded. Hot rage and grief welled tears to his eyes. The dirty, despicable cattle. Sniping a man because….

  “I told him not to try to get them when he talked about it at stand-to.” It was Ashley’s quiet voice. “Fritz wouldn’t know what he was after.”

  Crash! A rifle grenade exploded just outside the bags and scattered chalk fragments over them, causing each man to duck and crouch.

  “Damn them!” Keene bellowed curses as he took cover. “The dirty dogs. Send word to our Stokes men. They’re trying to batter Jim, to blow him to pieces.” He glared at Ashley.

  Crash! Another grenade. Two more after that, and then all was still again. Keene raised his periscope carefully. Jim’s body lay sprawled half under the wire, his head rolled back, his dark hair matted with blood. He had reached the roses, had plucked one and fastened it to his tunic, but it had wilted, looked crushed, smothered.

  The sun grew hot. The Stokes crashed their hate in the Hun lines, and quieted again. A few planes droned overhead and circled amid the resulting puffs of white smoke, the “Archie’s” protests. The Hun shelled ground he had lost near the Triangle. Every now and then there would come a great rushing sound, and the brick-strewn earth would erupt in geysers of black smoke and debris. Keene looked in the periscope again. Big blue flies were buzzing about the dead man. They sickened him, and he went along the trench.

  When he returned a limp form, covered by a ground sheet, lie on the fire step. He looked at the sentry enquiringly. “The Corp got him in,” said the fellow. “He stuck up a white rag on a stick, left it up five minutes and then stepped right out to the wire and pulled Jim in. It was takin’ chances all right.”

  A white rag! Keene hadn’t thought of trying that, and, anyway, he wouldn’t. Then he started. The sentry was a big-mouthed, coarse-looking man, unshaved and unwashed, and—he was wearing a wilted rose in a buttonhole.

  “Where did you get that?” Keene pointed a finger. “It’s the one Jim had,” the fellow mumbled.

  “Take it off. Blast it, man, haven’t you got any sense of decency at all.” Keene was furious. He stamped down the dugout steps. Ashley was sleeping. On the table were rations, rifle rag, and a letter—his.

  He tore it open and his hands trembled slightly. “My dearest John,” it began. “I think of you more than ever now that everything is in blossom again….”

  Three times he re-read the close-written pages, and then he looked at the sleeping man. He’d like to talk to him, tell him about his letter, picture the gardens and field and orchards in Canada, but he couldn’t. Ashley was not the right type. He had been a clerk in some big shipping firm and, probably, a careful methodical fellow, a decent chap, clean-living, but, queer, narrow-minded on some points, especially thick-headed about the Germans; he hadn’t discrimination, a sensitive intellect.

  Keene could not rest. He went back to the trench and with his binoculars scanned the Ridge an
d its surroundings. He had had the feeling that they had made a mighty advance into the enemy territory, but now as he gazed it came to him that it had been a paltry step, futile towards hastening the end of the war.

  He adjusted the range of the field glasses. Currents of heated air from debris vibrated in tremors that confused his vision. Scars of old trenches on the distant slope showed raw white. A black puff of smoke dislodged two crows from some putrid feast on hidden ground. Far back, huge sausage balloons rode lazily in the blue, like question marks against the horizon. All peaceful, yet ghastly, mocking. He loathed the landscape, hated it with an intensity that startled him; it was as if he were struggling against it, and did not know how to escape it.

  The heat was sickening in the narrow confines of the trench. The sentry at the periscope was chewing tobacco. Now and then he pursed his lips and expectorated into the corner of the bay. His partner on duty was slumped on the fire step with his tunic and shirt open, searching for vermin. The stale, saline smell of his sweat-dried clothing added to the conglomeration of sun-roused trench odours. Keene felt a nausea stir his stomach. He went below again and flung himself down, determined to rest.

  Sleep would not come to him. He had a nagging, gnawing, sense of futility. Heat, smells, horror, death, clamour, shelling, marching, the soldier’s existence was all a torture, and yet he felt that there lay within his reach some quality, some tangible, obtainable magic, some knowledge, that, could he but attain it, would reveal new vistas of hope, provide a merciful anodyne for shattered nerves.

  The greens and balmy breath of June had not brought it. Slush-filled and rain-swept trenches had seemed an agony that made warm sunshine a manna from heaven, but heat brought stench and dust, fine powdery dust that clung to their khaki and skin and tormented their nostrils. Rest billets in war-battered villages meant sleeping in stables, noisy evenings over beer in sloppy estaminets, wearisome drill and routine details. And always there were rumours; another attack was to be made; a thousand tanks were to break through; the division was going to Egypt; the airships would bomb Berlin.