The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselves penned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest—and there were anything over two thousand of them—were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting—shooting—shooting. ... Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough to snatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire.
And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message—“Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the —— ——!” with a shot after each sentence.
And there was a killing. There were other results—the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their own dead—their murdered-prisoner dead—and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire.
And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him——and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.”
VII
AN AIR BARRAGE
The Gunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work—in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seen in the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.”
Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning and an appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up.