The Boy Allies with Haig in Flanders; Or, the Fighting Canadians of Vimy Ridge

by Clair W. Hayes

CHAPTER XXIX

DESPERATE WORK

Chester, having crept a hundred yards, hugged down into another hole and waited. The Germans who had been about now approached the glowing heap of the biplane. What they found seemed to satisfy them. At least they raised no alarm. The shells from the far-off trench guns, which had been breaking in the fields both to right and to left, began searching about here now and scattered them. Chester moved forward toward the lines. And, as he moved, the shells which had been bursting in that direction, ceased.

The feel of the far-off hand of Captain O'Neill and of his superiors—the men who had planned this desperate venture—thrilled through him. Until five minutes to 10 o'clock he would be cared for, Captain O'Neill had promised. The French artillery, opening a path through its fire, would throw its shield around him. Simultaneously, it would be opening another path to Hal, advancing off to the right. Where all the Germans, who held that ground, burrowed below in dugouts or crept and ran through the deep defiles of communication trenches, Hal and he could go at will over the ground and so far as the shells from the French batteries were concerned, be perfectly safe.

Chester stole on through the blackness. Shells were breaking a hundred yards before him, behind him, off to both sides, but no shell came closer. Now, if he remembered rightly, the shells would cease in the square ahead and to the left; he moved that way—and they stopped. Over the ground which he had crossed, shells were bursting again now. When he halted once more, the frightful hurricane of high explosives swept before him, on both sides and behind—but not close to him. So for many minutes he advanced.

It was strange, when used to dodging shells behind his own lines and when accustomed to twist and turn and dive and tumble in the air to avoid the burst of anti-aircraft shrapnel, to feel shells falling like a bulwark about him. That was what they were. For the present, at least, the shells gained for him and gave to him the sole use of the surface of the earth there behind the German lines.

Troops were all about, of course; but all were hiding. They could not imagine anyone purposely advancing through the open there; they could not imagine anyone surviving if he tried it. They noticed, undoubtedly, that the fall of the French shells intermitted for a moment in this direction and that; but when any of them went out the shells burst upon them again and annihilated detachments. The cease and the start again of the French fire seemed merely capricious, to tempt them out to destruction. Not having the pattern of the pass by which the two boys advanced, they could not suspect any pattern about it.

And now Chester no longer could trust his own memory of that pattern. He went to the bottom of a deep shell crater, and, lying upon his stomach, he took a scrap of map from under his shirt and spread it below him. He took a tiny electric torch from his pocket and illumined the sheet dimly. A series of squares, into which that sector was divided, marked his path for the front—each square of the series numbered in ink and designated by a time, such as 32, 24, 19, 16, 10 and so, forth. They told the moment before 10 o'clock, at which, upon the square marked, the French fire would cease, not to start again until the fire ceased, at the next lowest minute, upon the next square. Down to five minutes to 10 o'clock they showed the safe path, after that friend and foe alike on this side of the German lines must shift for themselves.

Chester's mind caught the pattern of the next numbered square; he repeated to himself the time intervals. He climbed up out of the shell hole and swiftly passed the next square as the shells began falling behind him. Had Hal, off there to the right four squares away, now, as good luck as he? Or, was the French fire opening a path for no one there now?

By the ceasing of the shells on this square it was 24 minutes to 10 o'clock—the hour when the French forces would stream over the top. And for ten minutes, upon the square, the French fire would cease. That was because it was upon this square that Hal and Chester—if both survived to reach it—would meet. It was under the ground in this numbered ten minutes to 10 o'clock—that the French were hidden, of whom Jean Brosseau had told. And as Brosseau had expected and hoped, Chester and Hal—or whichever of them survived to this square—were ordered to employ those people.