Front Lines

by Boyd Cable

VIII

NIGHTMARE

Jake Harding from early childhood had suffered from a horribly imaginative mind in the night hours, and had endured untold tortures from dreams and nightmares. One of his most frequent night terrors was to find himself fleeing over a dreary waste, struggling desperately to get along quickly and escape Something, while his feet and legs were clogged with dragging weights, and dreadful demons and bogies and bunyips howled in pursuit. This was an odd dream, because having been born and brought up in the bush he had never seen such a dreary waste as he dreamed of, and had never walked on anything worse than dry, springy turf or good firm road. There was one night he remembered for long years when he had a specially intensified edition of the same nightmare. It was when he was laid up as a child with a broken arm, and a touch of fever on top of it, and he went through all the usual items of dreary waste, clogged feet trying to run, howling demons in pursuit, and a raging, consuming throat-drying fear. He woke screaming just as he was on the point of being seized and hurled into a yawning furnace filled with flaming red fire, saw a dim light burning by his bedside, felt a cool hand on his brow, heard a soothing voice murmur, “H-sh-sh! There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re quite safe here. Go to sleep again.”

“I’m glad, Nursie,” said Jake, “I’m glad I’ve waked up; I’ve had a drefful dream.”

All that is a long way back, but it serves to explain, perhaps, why Long Jake, 6 ft. 3 in. in height, thin as a lath, but muscled apparently with whipcord and wire rope, known throughout the regiment as a “hard case,” felt a curious and unaccountable jerk back to childhood in his memory as he lay on the edge of a wet shell-hole peering out into the growing grey light. “I’ve never been up here before,” he thought wonderingly, “and I’ve never seen any bit of front like it. Yet I seem to know it by heart.” He knew afterwards, though not then, that it was the “dreary waste” of past dreams—a wide spreading welter of flat ground, broken and tumbled and torn and shiny wet, seen dimly through a misty haze, with nothing in sight but a few splintered bare poles of trees.

But Long Jake did not get much time to cudgel his memory. It was almost time for the battalion to “go over the top,” although here to be sure there was no top, and the going over merely meant their climbing out of the chain of wet shell-craters they occupied, and advancing across the flat and up the long slope. Both sides were shelling heavily, but the British, as Jake could judge, by far the heavier of the two. The noise was deafening. The thunder of the guns rose roaring and bellowing without an instant’s break. Overhead the shells howled and yelled and shrieked and whistled and rumbled in every conceivable tone and accent from the slow, lumbering moan and roll of a passing electric tram to the sharp rush of a great bird’s wings. The ground quaked to the roll of the guns like jelly in a shaken mould; out in front of them the barrage was dropping into regular line, spouting in vivid flame that rent the twisting smoke veil quick instant after instant, flinging fountains of water and mud and smoke into the air.

Jake heard no order given, did not even hear any whistle blown, but was suddenly aware that dim figures were rising out of the shell-holes to either side, and moving slowly forward. He scrambled out of his crater and moved forward in line with the rest. They went close up to the line of our bursting shells, so close that they could see the leaden hail splashing and whipping up the wet ground before them, so close that Jake more than once ducked instinctively at the vicious crack above his head of one of our own shells bursting and flinging its tearing bullets forward and down. But the line pressed on, and Jake kept level with it; and then, just when it seemed that they must come into that belt of leaping, splashing bullets, the barrage lifted forward, dropped again twenty or thirty yards ahead in another wall of springing smokeclouds and spurting flame.

Jake pushed on. It was terribly heavy going, and he sank ankle deep at every step in the soft, wet ground. It was hard, too, to keep straight on, because the whole surface was pitted and cratered with holes that ran from anything the size of a foot-bath to a chasm big enough to swallow a fair-sized house. Jake skirted the edges of the larger holes, and plunged in and struggled up out of the smaller ones. The going was so heavy, and it was so hard to keep direction, that for a long time he thought of nothing else. Then a man who had been advancing beside him turned to him and yelled something Jake could not hear, and next instant lurched staggering against him. Jake just caught a glimpse of the wild terror in the staring eyes, of the hand clutched about the throat, and the blood spurting and welling out between the clenched fingers, and then the man slid down in a heap at his feet. Jake stooped an instant with wild thoughts racing through his mind. What was he to do for the man? How did one handle—couldn’t stop bleeding by a tourniquet or even a tight bandage—choke the man that way—why’n blazes hadn’t the ambulance classes told them how to handle a man with a bullet in his throat? (The answer to that last, perhaps, if Jake had only known, being that usually the man is past handling or helping.)

Then before Jake could attempt anything he knew the man was dead. Jake went on, and now he was conscious of vicious little hisses and whutts and sharp slaps and smacks in the wet ground about him, and knew these for bullets passing or striking close.