The public room (which in England would be the Public Bar) of the “Cheval Blanc” estaminet, or “Chevvle Blank” as its present-day customers know it, had filled very early in the evening. Those members of the Labour Company who packed the main room had just returned to the blessings of comparative peace after a very unpleasant spell in the line which had culminated in a last few days—and the very last day especially—on a particularly nasty “job o’ work.” Making a corduroy road of planks across an apparently bottomless pit of mud in a pouring rain and biting cold wind cannot be pleasant work at any time. When you stir in to the dish of trouble a succession of five-point-nine high-explosive shells howling up out of the rain and crashing thunderously down on or about the taped-out line of road, it is about as near the limit of unpleasantness as a Labour Company cares to come. The job was rushed, five-nines being a more drastic driver than the hardest hustling foreman, but the German gunners evidently had the old road nicely ranged and had correctly estimated the chance of its being reconstructed, with the result that their shells pounded down with a horrible persistency which might have stopped anything short of the persistency of the Company and the urgency of the road being put through. The men at work there, stripped to open-throated and bare-armed shirts, and yet running rivers of sweat for all their stripping, drove the work at top speed on this last day in a frantic endeavour to complete before dark. They knew nothing of the tactical situation, nothing of what it might mean to the success or failure of “the Push” if the road were not ready to carry the guns and ammunition waggons by that nightfall, knew only that “Roarin’ Bill, The Terrible Turk,” had pledged the Company to finish that night, and that “Roarin’ Bill” must not be let down. It must be explained here that “Roarin’ Bill” was the Captain in command of the Company, and although the men perhaps hardly knew it themselves, or ever stopped to reason it out, the simple and obvious reason for their reluctance to let him down was merely because they knew that under no circumstances on earth would he let them, the Company, down. His nickname was a private jest of the Company’s, since he had the voice and manners of a sucking dove. But for all that his orders, his bare word, or even a hint from him, went farther than any man’s, and this in about as rough and tough a Company as a Captain could well have to handle. “Bill” had said they must finish before dark, walked up and down the plank road himself watching and directing the work, and never as much as looked—that they knew of—at the watch on his wrist to figure whether they’d make out or not. “Th’ Terrible Turk ’as spoke; wot ’e ’as said, ’e blanky well ’as said,” Sergeant Buck remarked once as the Captain passed down the road, “an’ all the shells as Gerry ever pitched ain’t goin’ to alter it. Come on, get at it; that blighter’s a mile over.” The gang, who had paused a moment in their labour to crouch and look up as a shell roared over, “got at it,” slung the log into place, and had the long spike nails that held the transverse planks to “the ribbon” or binding edge log half hammered home before the shell had burst in a cataract of mud and smoke three hundred yards beyond. The shells weren’t always beyond. Man after man was sent hobbling, or carried groaning, back over the road he had helped to build; man after man, until there were six in a row, was lifted to a patch of slightly drier mud near the roadside and left there—because the road needed every hand more than did the dead who were past needing anything.
The job was hard driven at the end, and with all the hard driving was barely done to time. About 4 o’clock an artillery subaltern rode over the planks to where the gang worked at the road-end, his horse slithering and picking its way fearfully over the muddy wet planks.
“Can’t we come through yet?” he asked, and the Captain himself told him no, he was afraid not, because it would interrupt his work.
“But hang it all,” said the Gunner officer, “there’s a couple of miles of guns and waggons waiting back there at the Control. If they’re not through before dark——”
“They won’t be,” said the Captain mildly, “not till my time to finish, and that’s 5 o’clock. You needn’t look at your watch,” he went on, “I know it’s not five yet, because I told my men they must finish by five—and they’re not finished yet.” He said the last words very quietly, but very distinctly, and those of the gang who heard passed it round the rest as an excellent jest which had completed the “’tillery bloke’s” discomfiture. But the Captain’s jest had a double edge. “Start along at five,” he had called to the retiring Gunner, “and she’ll be ready for you. This Company puts its work through on time, always.” And the Company did, cramming a good two hours’ work into the bare one to make good the boast; picking and spading tremendously at the shell-torn earth to level a way for the planks, filling in deep and shallow holes, carrying or dragging or rolling double burdens of logs and planks, flinging them into place, spiking them together with a rapid fusillade of click-clanking hammer-blows. They ceased to take cover or even to stop and crouch from the warning yells of approaching shells; they flung off the gas-masks, hooked at the “Alert” high on their chests, to give freer play to their arms; they wallowed in mud and slime, and cursed and laughed in turn at it, and the road, and the job, and the Army, and the war. But they finished to time, and actually at 5 o’clock they drove the last spikes while the first teams were scrabbling over the last dozen loose planks.
Then the Company wearily gathered up its picks and shovels and dogs and sleds, and its dead, and trudged back single-file along the edge of the road up which the streaming traffic was already pouring to plunge off the end and plough its way to its appointed places.
And now in the “Cheval Blanc” as many of the Company as could find room were crowded, sitting or standing contentedly in a “fug” you could cut with a spade, drinking very weak beer and smoking very strong tobacco, gossiping over the past days, thanking their stars they were behind in rest for a spell.
The door opened and admitted a gust of cold air; and the cheerful babel of voices, shuffling feet, and clinking glasses, died in a silence that spread curiously, inwards circle by circle from the door, as three men came in and the Company realised them. The Captain was one, and the other two were—amazing and unusual vision there, for all that it was so familiar in old days at home—normal, decently dressed in tweeds and serge, cloth-capped, ordinary “civilians,” obviously British, and of working class.
The Captain halted and waved them forward. “These two gentlemen,” he said to the Company, “are—ah—on a tour of the Front. They will—ah—introduce themselves to you. Corporal, please see them back to my Mess when they are ready to come,” and he went out.
The two new-comers were slightly ill at ease and felt a little out of place, although they tried hard to carry it off, and nodded to the nearest men and dropped a “How goes it?” and “Hullo, mates” here and there as they moved slowly through the throng that opened to admit them. Then one of them laughed, still with a slightly embarrassed air, and squared his shoulders, and spoke up loud enough for the room to hear.