“They got my lorry,” said the A.S.C. man. “Wrecked it and killed the driver.”
“Hard luck,” said Vickers. “Hasn’t blocked the road, I hope?”
“No; spilt the shells all over the place, but didn’t explode any. We cleared the road.”
“Don’t forget,” said Vickers anxiously, “to tell me if there’s any of the load missing. It’ll tie me up in my figures abominably if you deliver any short.” He broke off to shout at the men below, “Get along there. Move out those empty ones. Come along, another six. Pass the word for another six, there.”
The shelling eased off for a couple of hours after that, and by then the last of the lorries had gone, and their place in the road outside and along the dump track had been taken by long lines of ammunition waggons from the batteries and the Divisional Ammunition Column. Every officer or N.C.O. who came in charge of a batch brought in the same imperative orders—to waste no minute, to load up, and to get to the gun line at the earliest possible moment, that action was brisk, and the rounds were wanted urgently. There was no need to report that action was brisk, because the dump was quite near enough to the line for the steady, unbroken roar of gun-fire, to tell its own tale. The sound of the field guns in the advanced positions came beating back in the long, throbbing roll of drum-fire, and closer to the dump, to both sides of it, in front and rear of it, the sharp, ear-splitting reports of the heavies crashed at quick intervals. The dump was the centre of a whirlwind of activity. The ammunition waggons came rumbling and bumping in round the curved track, the drivers steering in their six-horse teams neatly and cleverly, swinging and halting them so that the tail of each waggon was turned partly in to the piled boxes, and the teams edged slanting out across the road. The moment one halted the drivers jumped down from the saddles, the lead driver standing to his horses’ heads, the centre and wheel running to help with the work of wrenching open the ammunition boxes and cramming the shells into the pigeon-hole compartments of the waggons. The instant a waggon was filled the drivers mounted and the team pulled out to make way for another.
The lanterns perched on vantage points on the piles of boxes or swinging to and fro amongst the teams revealed dimly and patchily a scene of apparent confusion, of jerking and swaying shadows, quick glints of light on metal helmets and harness buckles and wheel tyres, the tossing, bobbing heads of animals, the rounded, shadowy bulk of their bodies, the hurriedly moving figures of the men stooping over the boxes, snatching out the gleaming brass and grey steel shells, tossing empty boxes aside, hauling down fresh ones from the pile. Here and there a wet, sweating face or a pair of bared arms caught the light of a lantern, stood out vividly for a moment, and vanished again into the shadowed obscurity, or a pair or two of legs were outlined black against the light, and cast distorted wheeling shadows on the circle of lamp-lit ground. A dim, shifting veil of dust hung over everything, billowing up into thick clouds under the churning hoofs and wheels as the teams moved in and out, settling slowly and hanging heavily as they halted and stood.
The dim white pile of boxes that were walled round the curve was diminishing rapidly under the strenuous labour of the drivers and working party; the string of teams and waggons in the road outside kept moving up steadily, passing into the dump, loading up, moving out again, and away. Vickers, the officer in charge, was here, there, and everywhere, clambering on the boxes to watch the work, shouting directions and orders, down again, and hurrying into the office shanty to grab the telephone and talk hurriedly into it, turning to consult requisition “chits” for different kinds of shells, making hurried calculations and scribbling figures, out again to push in amongst the workers, and urge them to hurry, hurry, hurry.
Once he ran back to the office to find the Colonel standing there. “Hullo, Vickers,” he said cheerfully. “Doing a roaring trade to-night, aren’t you?”
“I just am, sir,” said Vickers, wiping his wet forehead. “I’ll be out of Beer-Ex[4] presently if they keep on rushing me for it at this rate.”