Tommy

by Joseph Hocking

"Isn't it dangerous here?" asked Tom, as another shrieking shell passed over their heads.

"Not just now," replied the other; "their shells are falling on the other side of the town. Of course," he added casually, "they may fall here any moment."

"I asked you just now," said Tom, "whether you hated the Germans?"

"Yes, you did," replied the sergeant, "and I went off on another tack. Hate 'em? Well, it's this way. At the beginning I don't know that I hated 'em so much. Yes, what you call Belgian atrocities were hellish; but 'twasn't that, and as long as they fought fair that was all I cared about. But when they got using that poisonous gas they came it a bit too strong. No, lad, I never hated 'em till then. But when they used that stuff and laughed about it, ay, and laughed to see our poor chaps writhing in agony, I felt I must kill every German I saw. Of course, we've got over it now a bit, and we're all supplied with helmets, but when they used it first we had simply nothing to defend us. Yes, I have done some rough bits of work in my time, but I never met with anything like that. When you see your own pals getting bluer and bluer in the face, and coughing and gasping, oh, I tell you it made us mad! We didn't feel like showing any mercy after that. Besides, they have no sense of fair play, the swipes. I was in a scrap once, and after a hard tussle, and after losing lots of men, a lot of Germans held up their hands and shouted, 'We surrender.' Our officer, a young chap new to the job, and knowing nothing of their tricks, instead of telling them to come to us, told us to go to them, they holding up their hands all the time; but no sooner did we get near them than they up with their pistols and shot two of our chaps. They thought our officer was going to take it lying down, and when they were taken prisoners they laughed and said everything was fair in war; but our young officer saw red, and he said 'No, my lads, you are going to kingdom come.' 'What!' shrieked those German swine, 'will you kill men after they have surrendered?' 'You are not men,' said the lieutenant; 'men don't shoot after they've surrendered—only Germans do that."

"And then?" asked Tom, "then——"

"Ah well," replied the sergeant grimly, "there were no questions asked in the morning."

"Great God!" said Tom, "what a ghastly thing war is!"

"Wait till you have seen it, my lad," replied the sergeant.

For some weeks Tom was in the neighbourhood of Ypres without taking any part in the righting. During that time he got accustomed to the constant booming of the guns, and to the fact that any moment a shell might fall near him and blow him into eternity. On more than one occasion, too, he roamed around the ruins of Ypres; and while he could not be called an imaginative lad he could not help being impressed by the ghastly desolation of this one-time beautiful city. In many of the streets not one stone was left upon another, not one of the inhabitants who had formerly lived there remained; all had fled; it was indeed a city of the dead. To Tom the ruins of the great Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were not the most terrible; what appealed to him most were the empty houses in which things were left by the panic-stricken people. Bedsteads twisted into shapeless masses; clothes half burnt; remnants of pieces of cloth which tradesmen had been in the act of cutting and stitching; children's toys, and thousands of other things which suggested to the boy the life the people had been living. Not a bird sang, not even a street dog roamed amidst the shapeless desolation; the ghastly horror of it all possessed him. Great gaping holes in the old ramparts of the city; trees torn up by their roots and scorched by deadly fire: this was Ypres, not destroyed by the necessities of war, but by pure devilry.

At last Tom's turn came to go up to the front trenches. It was with a strange feeling at heart that he, with others, crept along the pave road towards the communication trench. They had to be very careful, because this road was constantly swept by the German machine guns. Presently, when they came to a house used as a first dressing station close to the beginning of the communication trench, Tom felt his heart grow cold. Still, with set teeth, and a hard look in his eyes, he groped his way along the trench, through Piccadilly, and Haymarket, and Bond Street, and Whitehall (for in this manner do the soldiers name the various parts of the zigzag cuttings through the clay): while all the time he could hear the pep, pep, pep, pep of the machine guns, and the shrieking of the shells.