Front Lines

by Boyd Cable

Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of the Punch picture.

When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be—well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anything more dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.

Remembering this, it is easy to understand the consternation in Mrs. Teddy’s mind when, after the War had been running a year, Teddy announced that he was going to enlist. He was firm about it too. He had thought the whole thing out—house to be shut up, she to go stay with her mother, his separation allowance so much, and so much more in the bank to draw on, and so on. Her remonstrances he met so promptly that one can only suppose them anticipated. His health? Never had a day’s sickness, as she knew. His business prospects? The country’s prospects were more important, and his Country Wanted Him. His “horror of blood”? Teddy twisted uneasily. “I’ve a horror of the whole beastly business,” he said—“of war and guns and shooting, of being killed, and ... of leaving you.” This was diplomacy of the highest, and the resulting interlude gently slid into an acceptance of the fact of his going.

He went, and—to get along with the War—at last came to France, and with his battalion into the trenches. He had not risen above the rank of private, partly because he lacked any ambition to command, and in larger part because his superiors did not detect any ability in him to handle the rather rough-and-ready crowd who were in his lot. Far from army training and rations doing him physical harm, he throve on them, and even put on flesh. But because he was really a good sort, was always willing to lend any cash he had, take a fatigue for a friend, joke over hardships and laugh at discomforts, he was on excellent terms with his fellows. He shed a good many, if not all, of his suburban peace ways, was a fairly good shot on the ranges, and even acquired considerable skill and agility at bayonet practice. But he never quite shed his “horror of blood.” Even after he had been in action a time or two and had fired many rounds from his rifle, he had a vague hope each time he pulled trigger that his bullet might not kill a man, might at most only wound him enough to put him out of action. The first shell casualty he saw in their own ranks made him literally and actually sick, and even after he had seen many more casualties than he cared to think about he still retained a squeamish feeling at sight of them. And in his battalion’s share of The Push, where there was a good deal of close-quarter work and play with bombs and bayonet, he never had urgent need to use his bayonet, and when a party of Germans in a dug-out refused to surrender, and persisted instead in firing up the steps at anyone who showed at the top, Teddy stood aside and left the others to do the bombing-out.

It was ridiculous, of course, that a fighting man who was there for the express purpose of killing should feel any qualms about doing it, but there it was.

Then came the day when the Germans made a heavy counter-attack on the positions held by the Australians. The positions were not a complete joined-up defensive line along the outer front. The fighting had been heavy and bitter, and the German trenches which were captured had been so thoroughly pounded by shell fire that they no longer existed as trenches, and the Australians had to be satisfied with the establishment of a line of posts manned as strongly as possible, with plenty of machine-guns.

Teddy’s battalion was not in this front fringe when the counter-attack, launched without any warning bombardment, flooded suddenly over the outer defences, surged heavily back, drove in the next lines, and broke and battered them in and down underfoot.

Something like a couple of thousand yards in over our lines that first savage rush brought the Germans, and nearly twoscore guns were in their hands before they checked and hesitated, and the Australian supports flung themselves in on a desperate counter-attack. The first part of the German programme was an undoubted and alarming success. The posts and strong points along our front were simply overwhelmed, or surrounded and cut off, and went under, making the best finish they could with the bayonet, or in some cases—well, Teddy Silsey and a good many other Australians saw just what happened in these other cases, and are not likely ever to forget it. The German attack—as in many historic cases in this war—appeared to fizzle out in the most amazing fashion after it had come with such speed and sweeping success for so far. Our guns, of course, were hard at work, and were doing the most appalling damage to the dense masses that offered as targets; but that would hardly account for the slackening of the rush, because the guns had waked at the first crash of rifle and bomb reports, and the Germans were under just about as severe a fire for the second half of their rush as they were at the end of it when they checked. There appeared to be a hesitation about their movements, a confusion in their plans, a doubt as to what they ought to do next, that halted them long enough to lose the great advantage of their momentum. The first hurried counter-attack flung in their face was comparatively feeble, and if they had kept going should easily have been brushed aside. Thirty-odd guns were in their hands; and, most dangerous of all, one other short storm forward would have brought them swamping over a whole solid mass of our field guns—which at the moment were about the only thing left to hold back their attack—and within close rifle and machine-gun range of the fringe of our heavies. But at this critical stage, for no good reason, and against every military reason, they, as so often before, hesitated, and were lost. Another Australian counter-attack, this time much better organised and more solidly built, was launched headlong on their confusion. They gave ground a little in some places, tried to push on in others, halted and strove to secure positions and grip the trenches in others. The Australians, savagely angry at being so caught and losing so much ground, drove in on them, bombing, shooting, and bayoneting; while over the heads of the front-rank fighters the guns poured a furious tempest of shrapnel and high explosive on the masses that sifted and eddied behind. The issue hung in doubt for no more than a bare five minutes. The Germans who had tried to push on were shot and cut down; the parties that held portions of trench were killed or driven out; the waverers were rushed, beaten in, and driven back in confusion on the supports that struggled up through the tornado of shell-fire. Then their whole front crumpled, and collapsed, and gave, and the Australians began to recover their ground almost as quickly as they had lost it.

Now Teddy Silsey, while all this was going on, had been with his company in a position mid-way across the depth of captured ground. He and about forty others, with two officers, had tried to hold the battered remnant of trench they were occupying, and did actually continue to hold it after the rush of the German front had swept far past them. They were attacked on all sides, shot away their last cartridge, had their machine-guns put out of action by bombs, had about half their number killed, and almost every man of the remainder wounded. They were clearly cut off, with thousands of Germans between them and their supports, could see fresh German forces pressing on past them, could hear the din of fighting receding rapidly farther and farther back. The two officers, both wounded, but able more or less to stand up, conferred hastily, and surrendered.

Of this last act Teddy Silsey was unaware, because a splinter of some sort, striking on his steel helmet, had stunned him and dropped him completely insensible. Two dead men fell across him as he lay, and probably accounted for the Germans at the moment overlooking him as they collected their prisoners.