Hicks had not recovered from his despondency. His stomach felt as if he had swallowed a stone every time reference was made to the attack. He had done about enough in this war, he thought, wondering vaguely whether there were no chance of escape. The thought of the sound of the guns depressed him, their monotonous tom-tom beating in memory on his skull like water dripping slowly on a stone. Disgusting! And no letters from home, no change of scene, no clean clothing, nothing but the hopelessness of routine, the bullying of petty officers, the prospect of the front.
He was still brooding when the platoon reached its billets in the town to which it had come from the last drive. Instead of the unsavory food steaming under a fire in the field kitchen, there was an issue of corned beef, and slabs of black bread to be eaten. The field kitchens were packed, the supply wagons were loaded. The persevering little mules that hauled the machine-gun carts stood waiting. Orders were passed for the men to pack up their equipment and be ready to fall into line on the company street in half an hour. “Shake it up, you men,” the officers called, walking back and forth past the buildings. “We haven’t got all night.” Somebody asked where the platoon was going. “To the front,” an officer answered. “Make it snappy.”
XIII
For two days now the bombardment had continued, heaving over the live, huge shells that broke in the distance with a dull, sullen fury. Lightly it had begun, and with an exchange of salutes from the six-inch rifles. Then a number of batteries in the centre of the sector started ferociously to bark. Along the left the heavy detonation of the exploding shells was taken up, later to be joined by the smaller pieces of artillery, which went off with mad, snapping sounds. The guns on the right brought the entire line into action.
Artillerymen, their blouses off, their sleeves rolled, sweated in torrents as they wrestled with shells, throwing them into the breeches of their guns. Each gun was fired, and as it recoiled from the charge another shell was waiting to be thrown into the breech. The officers of the gunners, their muscles tense, their lineaments screwed up so that their faces looked like white walnuts, made quick mathematical calculations, directing the shells unerringly to strike their targets. Orderlies hurried from gun-pit to gun-pit, carrying messages from a higher officer which, when delivered to the battery commanders and passed to the gunners, would strike or spare a hundred men, an old church, or a hospital.
Wagons and heavy motor-trucks rumbled over the roads leading to the forests where the long-range guns were hidden, bringing always more food for the black, extended throats of the guns. The batteries in the centre had been drawn up in a thick woods a few miles from the present front line. There, from the height of a steady swell in the earth, they were able better to watch the effects of their pounding.
Between the inky mass of forest which concealed the guns and the jagged front line were the crumbling ruins of a village of which not a building now stood. The ruins were at the edge of the front line, which zigzagged unendingly in either direction. Barbed wire, rusted and ragged, was strung from posts before the trench. Chevaux-de-frise, inspiring confidence in their ability to withstand penetration, were placed at intervals, wherever gaps had been blown in the barbed wire.
The space between the front line and the German listening posts was a yellowish gray. Its face was pockmarked and scabbed with tin cans, helmets, pieces of equipment. Bones, grayed in the sun and rain, were perceptible occasionally. A leather boot stuck grotesquely out of one of the unhealthy indentations in the lifeless ground. The flat chrome earth lay for several hundreds of yards and then was split by a strip of shadowy black woods.