"Contemptible", by "Casualty"

by Unknown

A Taube, like some huge insect with a buzz of whirring wings, flew overhead, dropping multi-coloured stars from its tail. Then our guns "opened the ball."

There was something blatant and repulsive about that first burst of sound. The ferns of the forest shivered, as if awakened from a sunny dream to face terrible calamities. The trees seemed to shake with a delicate fear of what was in store for them. The enemy's fire burst upon them with a startling intensity.

There was no point in holding the advanced edge of the wood under such a bombardment until the actual appearance of the enemy infantry made it necessary, so the whole line was retired some fifty yards into the wood. By this manoeuvre the Colonel lost no advantage, and must have saved many lives.

Although artillery fire had been a pretty frequent occurrence, this was the heaviest the men had yet experienced. The noise was ear-splitting; the explosions filled the quivering air; the ground seemed to shudder beneath them. Branches fell crashing to the ground; it seemed as if a god was flogging the tree-tops with a huge scourge. The din was awful, petrifying, numbing.

And in the middle of all this inferno, with the sight of men with ashen faces limping, crawling, or being dragged to the rear, with the leaves on the ground smoking from the hot, jagged shell-casings buried among them, the Subaltern suddenly discovered that he was not afraid. The discovery struck him as curious. He argued with himself that he had every right to feel afraid, that he ought to feel "queer." He said to himself, "Here you are, as nervous and temperamental a youth as ever stepped, with a mental laziness that amounts to moral cowardice, in the deuce of a hole that I don't expect you'll ever get out of. You ought to be in an awful state. Your cheeks ought to be white, and there they are looking like two raw beef-steaks. Your tongue ought to cleave to the roof of your mouth; and it isn't. You ought to feel pains in the pit of your stomach, and you're not. Devil a bit! You know, you're missing all the sensations that the writers told you about. You're not playing the game. Come, buck up, fall down and grovel on the ground!" But he did not. He did not want to. He felt absolutely normal.

A man sheltering behind the same tree suddenly spun round, and, grasping his left arm, fell with a thud to the ground. He reeled over, with knees raised and rounded back, and staggered immediately to his feet. "Oh, my arm, my arm!" he moaned plaintively, and turned away towards the rear, whimpering a little as he went, and tenderly holding the wet, dark-stained sleeve as he went. The Subaltern felt that he ought to have winced with horror at the mutilation of the poor stricken thing, but beyond a slight sinking sensation between the lungs and the stomach, the incident left him with no emotion. He picked up the man's rifle, leant it against the tree, and continued to scan the skyline with his glasses, feeling all the while a bit of a brute.

At the same time he experienced a sensation of pleasure at the immunity from mental sufferings that are generally supposed to afflict men under these conditions. He felt like a man who unexpectedly finds a five-pound note, the very existence of which he had forgotten, hidden away in some unusual pocket. It was something of the same sensation that he used to have at school, when by chance he saw other boys working at impositions which he had himself escaped.

The time came when it was no longer expedient to remain in the wood, so they advanced, flitting from tree to tree, back to the edge of the forest. The view was rather restricted from where the Subaltern was, apparently on the right of where the full force of the attack was breaking.

"Plop-plop-plop," the machine-gun spluttered with an amazing air of detached insistence. The machine-guns strike in battle quite a note of their own. Shells, screeching and roaring in their frenzy, give an impression of passion, of untameable wrath. Rifle-fire is as inconstant in volume as piano music; there is something of human effort to be heard in the "tap ... tap ... tap ... tap-tap-trrrrapp" of its crescendos and diminuendoes. But the machine-gun is different from these. It strikes a higher note, and can be heard above the roar of the bursting shells. It is mechanical, there is nothing about it of human passion; it is a machine, and a most deadly one at that.

The Colonel dashed out into the open and dragged a wounded gunner into the comparative shelter of the wood. Many more acts scarcely less heroic were performed.