"Send 'em back on their own, Sergeant," suggested M'Turk. "They'll go quietly, you bet. We want to get on. Look where our barrage is."
Already the line of bursting shells was a couple of hundred yards away. The advancing infantry-men were almost invisible in the drifting smoke and rain.
"Off you go!" ordered Fortescue, pointing in the direction of the New Zealand advance posts.
Like a flock of sheep the Huns, with hands still upraised, shuffled on the first of their long trek to captivity--to some delectable spot in England, where, far from the sound of the guns, there is food in plenty for Hun prisoners of war, German U-boats notwithstanding.
At the double the New Zealanders hastened to overtake the rest of C Company. Away on the left sharp rifle and machine-gun fire, punctuated by the crash of exploding bombs, showed that there were other block-houses where a strenuous resistance was being maintained. Men, too, were already returning wounded, cheerful in spite of pain; others, lying in the mud, would never rise again, for machine-guns were busy beyond the Hannebeke stream.
Ordinarily a quiet, well-conducted brook, the Hannebeke stream had been rudely disturbed by the terrific bombardment of the British heavies. Where a shell had fallen in the bed of the stream the lip of the upheaved crater had formed a dam--and there was not one but many such. Over the low-lying banks the water had flowed, until for nearly a hundred yards in width there was water everywhere, hiding the tenacious mud, and acting as a camouflage to thousands of deep craters.
Into the morass the New Zealanders plunged boldly, only to find that they were quickly up to their belts in mud and water. When a man stumbled into a shell-hole, he simply disappeared, until, rising to the surface, he managed to scramble out with the aid of a more fortunate chum. Here and there huge spurts of mud and water leapt towards the rainy sky as German shells burst indiscriminately in the swollen stream; while everywhere the slowly-flowing water was flecked with little spurts of spray as the machine-gun bullets ricochetted from the surface. When a man was hit when crossing that forbidding morass it generally meant death to him--death by suffocation in the pestilent mud of Flanders.
Looking like muddy replicas of Lot's wife, Malcolm and Selwyn at last emerged from the morass, Fortescue was ahead, Corporal Preston too, while M'Turk, with his chum M'Kane hanging on to his back, was just extricating himself from a deep crater.
"Thanks!" he exclaimed, as Malcolm gave him a hand. He was too breathless to say more. Setting his burden down in the shelter of a ruined pill-box, M'Turk bound up his chum's wound--a machine-gun bullet through the calf of his right leg.
"Now you stop there till I come back," he admonished the "buckshied" M'Kane, "unless the bearers pick you up. Just the silly thing you would do, to try and crawl through that muck. S'long. See you presently."