The Battery were pleased. The Gunners don’t often have the chance to take prisoners, and this one enjoyed all the popularity of a complete novelty. He was taken to the men’s dug-out, and fed with a full assignment of rations, from bacon and tea to jam and cheese, while the men in turn cross-questioned him by the aid of an English-French-German phrase-book unearthed by some studious gunner.
And when he departed under escort to be handed over and join the other prisoners, the Battery watched him go with complete regret.
“To tell the truth, sir,” the Sergeant-Major remarked to the Lieutenant, “the men would like to have kept him as a sort of Battery Souvenir—kind of a cross between a mascot and a maid-of-all-work. Y’see, it’s not often—in fact, I don’t know that we’re not the first Field Battery in this war to bring in a prisoner wi’ arms, kit, and equipment complete.”
“The first battery,” said the Lieutenant fervently, “and when I think of that minute down a deep hole in pitch dark, hearing someone breathe, and not knowing—well, we may be the first battery, and, as far as I’m concerned, we’ll jolly well be the last.”
XV
OUR TURN
No. II platoon had had a bad mauling in their advance, and when they reached their “final objective line” there were left out of the ninety-odd men who had started, one sergeant, one corporal, and fourteen men. But, with the rest of the line, they at once set to work to consolidate, to dig in, to fill the sandbags each man carried, and to line the lip of a shell crater with them. Every man there knew that a counter-attack on their position was practically a certainty. They had not a great many bombs or very much ammunition left; they had been struggling through a wilderness of sticky mud and shell-churned mire all day, moving for all the world like flies across a half-dry fly-paper; they had been without food since dawn, when they had consumed the bully and biscuit of their iron “ration”; they were plastered with a casing of chilly mud from head to foot; they were wet to the skin; brain, body, and bone weary.
But they went about the task of consolidating with the greatest vigour they could bring their tired muscles to yield. They worried not at all about the shortage of bombs and ammunition, or lack of food, because they were all by now veterans of the new “planned” warfare, knew that every detail of re-supplying them with all they required had been fully and carefully arranged, that these things were probably even now on the way to them, that reinforcements and working parties would be pushed up to the new line as soon as it was established. So the Sergeant was quite willing to leave all that to work out in its proper sequence, knew that his simple job was to hold the ground they had taken, and, therefore, bent all his mind to that work.