“If he’s wounded … Even if he’s dead one ought to pull him down. … And get the Victoria Cross!”
The figure slid down into the trench. Speedily, with drill-movements, engrossed, it crammed two clips of cartridges into a rifle correctly held at the loading angle. In a rift of the noise, like a crack in the wall of a house, it remarked:
“Can’t reload lying up there, sir. Mud gets into your magazine.” He became again merely the sitting portion of a man, presenting to view the only part of him that was not caked with mud. The Verey light faded. Another reinforced the blinking effect. From just overhead.
Round the next traverse after the mouth of their dugout a rapt face of a tiny subaltern, gazing upwards at a Verey illumination, with an elbow on an inequality of the trench and the forearm pointing upwards suggested—the rapt face suggested The Soul’s Awakening! … In another rift in the sound the voice of the tiny subaltern stated that he had to economise the Verey cartridges. The battalion was very short. At the same time it was difficult to time them so as to keep the lights going. … This seemed fantastic! The Huns were just coming over.
With the finger of his upward pointing hand the tiny subaltern pulled the trigger of his upward pointing pistol. A second later more brilliant illumination descended from above. The subaltern pointed the clumsy pistol to the ground in the considerable physical effort—for such a tiny person!—to reload the large implement. A very gallant child—name of Aranjuez. Maltese, or Portuguese, or Levantine—in origin.
The pointing of the pistol downwards revealed that he had practically coiled around his little feet, a collection of tubular, dead, khaki limbs. It didn’t need any rift in the sound to make you understand that his loader had been killed on him. … By signs and removing his pistol from his grasp Tietjens made the subaltern—he was only two days out from England—understand that he had better go and get a drink and some bearers for the man who might not be dead.
He was, however. When they removed him a little to make room for Tietjen’s immensely larger boots his arms just flopped in the mud, the tin hat that covered the face, to the sky. Like a lay figure, but a little less stiff. Not yet cold.
Tietjens became like a solitary statue of the Bard of Avon, the shelf for his elbow being rather low. Noise increased. The orchestra was bringing in all the brass, all the strings, all the woodwind, all the percussion instruments. The performers threw about biscuit tins filled with horseshoes; they emptied sacks of coal on cracked gongs, they threw down forty-storey iron houses. It was comic to the extent that an operatic orchestra’s crescendo is comic. Crescendo! … Crescendo! Crrrrresc. … The Hero must be coming! He didn’t!
Still like Shakespeare contemplating the creation of, say, Cordelia, Tietjens leaned against his shelf. From time to time he pulled the trigger of the horse-pistol; from time to time he rested the butt on his ledge and rammed a charge home. When one jammed he took another. He found himself keeping up a fairly steady illumination.
The Hero arrived. Naturally, he was a Hun. He came over, all legs and arms going, like a catamount; struck the face of the parados, fell into the trench on the dead body, with his hands to his eyes, sprang up again and danced. With heavy deliberation Tietjens drew his great trench-knife rather than his revolver? Why? The butcher-instinct? Or trying to think himself with the Exmoor staghounds. The man’s shoulders had come heavily on him as he had rebounded from the parados-face. He felt outraged. Watching that performing Hun he held the knife pointed and tried to think of the German for Hands Up. He imagined it to be Hoch die Haende! He looked for a nice spot in the Hun’s side.
His excursion into a foreign tongue proved supererogatory. The German threw his arms abroad, his—considerably mashed!—face to the sky.
Always dramatic, Cousin Fritz! Too dramatic, really.
He fell, crumpling, into his untidy boots. Nasty boots, all crumpled too, up the calves! But he didn’t say Hoch der Kaiser, or Deutschland uber alles, or anything valedictory.
Tietjens fired another light upwards and filled in another charge, then, down on his hams in the mud he squatted over the German’s head, the fingers of both hands under the head. He could feel the great groans thrill his fingers. He let go and felt tentatively for his brandy flask.
But there was a muddy group round the traverse end. The noise reduced itself to half. It was bearers for the corpse. And the absurdly wee Aranjuez and a new loader. … In those days they had not been so short of men! Shouts were coming along the trench. No doubt other Huns were in.
Noise reduced itself to a third. A bumpy diminuendo. Bumpy! Sacks of coal continued to fall down the stairs with a regular cadence; more irregularly, Bloody Mary, who was just behind the trench, or seemed like it, shook the whole house as you might say and there were other naval howitzers or something, somewhere.
Tietjens said to the bearers:
“Take the Hun first. He’s alive. Our man’s dead.” He was quite remarkably dead. He hadn’t, Tietjens had observed, when he bent over the German, really got what you might call a head, though there was something in its place. What had done that?
Aranjuez, taking his place beside the trench-face, said:
“Damn cool you were, sir. Damn cool. I never saw a knife drawn so slow!” They had watched the Hun do the danse du ventre! The poor beggar had had rifles and the young feller’s revolver turned on him all the time. They would probably have shot him some more but for the fear of hitting
