Well, for a wonder, I didn’t get drawn for this one, and I breathed one long, deep sigh of relief, put my hand inside my tunic and patted Dinky on the back. Dinky is my mascot. I’ll tell you about him later.
On top of that another bit of luck came along, though it didn’t seem like it at the moment. It was the custom for a ration party to go out each night and get up the grub. This party had to go over the duck walk and was under fire both going and coming. One of the corporals who had been out on rations two nights in succession began to “grouse.”
Of course Sergeant Page spotted me and detailed me to the “wangler’s” duty. I “groused” too, like a good fellow, but had to go.
“Garn,” says Wellsie. “Wot’s the diff if yer gets it ’ere or there. If ye clicks, I’ll draw yer fags from Blighty and say a prayer for yer soul. On yer way.”
Cheerful beggar, Wellsie. He was doing me a favor and didn’t know it.
I did the three miles along the duck walk with the ration party, and there wasn’t a shell came our way. Queer! Nor on the way back. Queerer! When we were nearly back and were about five hundred yards from the base of the Pimple, a dead silence fell on the German side of the line. There wasn’t a gun nor a mortar nor even a rifle in action for a mile in either direction. There was, too, a kind of sympathetic letup on our side. There weren’t any lights going up. There was an electric tension in the very air. You could tell by the feel that something big was going to happen.
I halted the ration party at the end of the duck walk and waited. But not for long. Suddenly the “Very” lights went up from the German side, literally in hundreds, illuminating the top of the ridge and the sky behind with a thin greenish white flare. Then came a deep rumble that shook the ground, and a dull boom. A spurt of blood-red flame squirted up from the near side of the hill, and a rolling column of gray smoke.
Then another rumble, and another, and then the whole side of the ridge seemed to open up and move slowly skyward with a world-wrecking, soul-paralyzing crash. A murky red glare lit up the smoke screen, and against it a mass of tossed-up debris, and for an instant I caught the black silhouette of a whole human body spreadeagled and spinning like a pinwheel.
Most of our party, even at the distance, were knocked down by the gigantic impact of the explosion. A shower of earth and rock chunks, some as big as a barrel, fell around us.
Then we heard a faraway cheering, and in the light of the flares we saw a newly made hill and our men swarming up it to the crater. Two mines had exploded, and the whole side of the Pimple had been torn away. Half of our rushing party were killed and we had sixty casualties from shock and wounds among men who were supposed to be at a safe distance from the mining operation. But we took and held the new crater positions.
The corporal whose place I had taken on the ration party was killed by falling stones. Inasmuch as he was where I would have been, I considered that I had had a narrow escape from “going west!” More luck!
VIII
On the Go
Marching, marching, marching,
Always ruddy well marching.
Marching all the morning,
And marching all the night.
Marching, marching, marching,
Always ruddy well marching,
Roll on till my time is up
And I shall march no more.
We sung it to the tune of “Holy, Holy, Holy,” the whole blooming battalion. As we swung down the Boulevard Alsace-Lorraine in Amiens and passed the great cathedral up there to the left, on its little rise of ground, the chant lifted and lilted and throbbed up from near a thousand throats, much as the unisoned devotions of the olden monks must have done in other days.
Ours was a holy cause, but despite the association of the tune the song was far from being a holy song. It was, rather, a chanted remonstrance against all hiking and against this one in particular.
After our service at Vimy Ridge someone in authority somewhere decided that the 22nd Battalion and two others were not quite good enough for really smart work. We were, indeed, hard. But not hard enough. So some superior intellect squatting somewhere in the safety of the rear, with a finger on the pulse of the army, decreed that we were to get not only hard but tough; and to that end we were to hike. Hike we did.
For more than three weeks we went from place to place with no apparent destination, wandering aimlessly up and down the countryside of Northern France, imposing ourselves upon the people of little villages, shamming battle over their cultivated fields, and sleeping in their hen coops.
I kept a diary on that hike. It was a thing forbidden, but I managed it. One manages many things out there. I have just read over that diary. There isn’t much to it but a succession of town names—Villiers du Bois, Maisincourt, Barly, Oneaux, Canchy, Amiens, Bourdon, Villiers Bocage, Agenvilliers, Behencourt,
