If ever man in a tight corner drew comfort from good work done in the past, it was Weasel Stark as he stood alone that night, and watched this entity of his creating file past him in the darkness.
Very quietly they came, team after toiling team, gun after creaking gun, subaltern after subaltern leading his section to their marked position—O’Grady, Archdale, Pettigrew, Straker, Conway, Merrilees, Hall and Hutchinson. One by one the teams were unhooked, led away; one by one the guns swung round, muzzles across the gaping trench. And about each gun, as it dropped into position, men laboured, men very weary of labour, with pick and shovel and sand-bag, making what cover they might against the dawn.
And till dawn began, up and down among the labouring men,—the orders he had anticipated received at last—strode the Weasel, rasping across the darkness: “Dig! you blight-hawks. For the Lord’s sake, dig!”
PART SIXTEEN
ACTION LEFT!
§ 1
Daylight revealed an irregular line of fifteen field-guns and limbers, weary men piling sandbags round their wheels. Already the sandbags had risen to the gun-axles.
The line of guns lay in the centre of a great shallow saucer of ground, scarred with zig-zag trenches; and as the first blue of dawn cleared to white, the men who laboured could see, straight to their front and on the lip of the saucer, the shattered top of a solitary tree. And looking to the left of the tree, they saw,—first of all—a road, and then a big battered farm-house, beyond which—miles away as it seemed to the weary men—rose over the ultimate edge of the huge saucer a something which Gunner Mucksweat, miner by trade, pronounced to be the wheel of a pithead. Had Gunner Mucksweat been able to read a map, he would have known the pithead wheel for the top of Fosse Eight.
Prolonging the line of guns on the left ran the road they had traversed during the night—at its end, the torn roofs of Vermelles; and behind the guns, bunched together over a square mile of ground, stood horses—hundreds and hundreds of horses. For the fourth Southdown Brigade was not alone in that huge saucer of chalk! And behind the horses, parallel to the guns, lay another road, lined with red brick houses, above which towered the huge slag-cone of Fosse Seven.
§ 2
The toe of a boot woke 2nd Lieutenant Stanley Purves to consciousness of the fact that he was sleeping in the lee of a particularly noisome hay-stack.