“Near time to begin,” said the sergeant, glancing at his watch. “Busy time goin’ to be runnin’ this next day or two. You’ll be hard at it, too, I s’pose.”
“Busy time! beginning!” retorted the artilleryman. “I’m about fed up o’ busy times. This battery hasn’t been out of the line or out of action for over three months, an’ been more or less under fire all that time. We haven’t stopped shootin’ night or day for a week, and this last 24 hours we been at it full stretch, hammer an’ tongs. Beginnin’—Good Lord! I’m that hoarse, I can hardly croak, an’ every man here is deaf, dumb, and paralysed. I’m gettin’ to hate this job, an’ I never want to hear another gun or see another shell in my blanky life.”
The infantryman laughed, and hitched his rifle up to move. “I s’pose so,” he said. “An’ I shouldn’t wonder if them Fritzes in the line you’ve been strafin’ are feelin’ same way as you about guns an’ shells—only more so.”
“That’s so,” agreed the Number One, and turned to the fuse-setters, urging them hoarsely to get a stack of rounds ready for the barrage. “We’re just goin’ to begin,” he said, “an’ if this blanky gun don’t hump herself in the next hour or two....”
XX
STRETCHER-BEARERS
Lieutenant Drew was wounded within four or five hundred yards of the line from which his battalion started to attack. He caught three bullets in as many seconds—one in the arm, one in the shoulder, and one in the side—and went down under them as if he had been pole-axed. The shock stunned him for a little, and he came to hazily to find a couple of the battalion stretcher-bearers trying to lift him from the soft mud in which he was half sunk.
Drew was rather annoyed with them for wanting to disturb him. He was quite comfortable, he told them, and all he wanted was to be left alone there. The bearers refused to listen to this, and insisted in the first place in slicing away some of his clothing—which still further annoyed Drew because the weather was too cold to dispense with clothes—and putting some sort of first field dressing on the wounds.