The Grey Wave

by A. Hamilton Gibbs

After a bit I climbed down from the roof. The road had cleared of traffic and there was a subaltern of the Scot’s battery at the corner with the neck of a bottle of champagne sticking out of his pocket. A thoughtful fellow.

So was I! A little later one of the Brigade Headquarters officers came staggering along on a horse, done to the world, staying in the saddle more by the grace of God than his own efforts. Poor old thing, he was all in, mentally and physically. We talked for a while but that didn’t improve matters and then I remembered that bottle of fizz. In the name of humanity and necessity I commandeered it from the reluctant subaltern and handed it up to the man in the saddle. Most of it went down his unshaven chin and inside his collar, but it did the trick all right.

What was left was mine by right of conquest, and I lapped it down, a good half bottle of it. There were dry biscuits forthcoming too, just as if one were in town, and I was able to cap it with a fat cigar. Happy days!

Then the Scot arrived upon his stout little mare followed by his battery, which came into position on the same crossroads a hundred yards away, shooting at right angles to me, due east, back into Cugny from where we had come. Infantry were going up, rumours of cavalry were about and the bloodstained Tommies who came back were not very numerous. There seemed to be a number of batteries tucked away behind all the hedges and things looked much more hopeful. Apart from giving pin-points of the far distant enemy there was nothing to be done except talk to all and sundry and try and get news. Some French machine-gunner officers appeared who told us that the entire French army was moving by forced marches to assist in stopping the advance and were due to arrive about six o’clock that night. They were late.

Then too, we found that the cellar of the O.P. house was stored with apples. There weren’t many left by the time the two batteries had helped themselves. As many horses as the farmyard would hold were cleared off the position and put under cover. The remainder and the guns were forced to remain slap in the open. It was bad luck because the Hun sent out about a dozen low-flying machines that morning and instead of going over Ham, which would have been far more interesting for them, they spotted us and opened with machine guns.

The feeling of helplessness with a dozen great roaring machines spitting at you just overhead is perfectly exasperating. You can’t cock an eighteen-pounder up like an Archie and have a bang at them, and usually, as happened then, your own machine gun jams. It was a comic twenty minutes but trying for the nerves. The gunners dived under the gun shields and fired rifles through the wheels. The drivers stood very close to the horses and hoped for the best. The signallers struggled with the machine gun, uttering a stream of blasphemies. And all the time the Hun circled and emptied drum after drum from a height of about a hundred feet. I joined in the barrage with my revolver.

Two horses went down with a crash and a scream. A man toppled over in the road. Bullets spat on the ground like little puffs of smoke. Two went through my map, spread out at my feet, and at last away they roared,—presumably under the impression that they had put us out of action. The horses were dead!

The man was my servant, who had run away on the first morning. Three through his left leg. Better than being shot at dawn, anyhow.

Curiously enough, the mess cook had already become a casualty. He was another of the faint-hearted and had fallen under a wagon in the fog and been run over. A rib or two went. Poetic justice was rampant that morning. It left me two to deal with. I decided to let it go for the time and see if fate would relieve me of the job. As a matter of fact it didn’t, and many many lifetimes later, when we were out of action, I had the two of them up in a room with a ceiling and a cloth on the table, and the Babe stood at my elbow as a witness.

One was a man of about thirty-eight or forty, a long-nosed, lazy, unintelligent blighter. The other was a short, scrubby, Dago-looking, bullet-headed person,—poor devils, both cannon fodder. My face may have looked like a bit of rock but I was immensely sorry for them. Given a moment of awful panic, what kind of intelligence could they summon to fight it, what sort of breeding and heredity was at the back of them? None. You might as well shoot two horses for stampeding at a bursting shell. They were gripped by blind fear and ran for it. They didn’t want to. It was not a reasoned thing. It was a momentary lack of control.