So the three commenced to fire steadily and in turn, each waiting after the other’s shot to see if a man fell, each calling to the others in triumph if a man went down after their shot, growling angrily if the shot missed. They made good shooting amongst them, the man in the middle of the road an unmistakable best and the Canadian second. Their shooting in fact was so good that it broke the attack down the road, and presently the remainder of this force ran crouching to the ditches, jumped into them, and stayed there.
But because the ammunition of the three was almost gone the affair was almost over, and now there appeared a new factor that looked like ending it even before their cartridges gave out. Back in the ranks of the main body three or four men grouped about a machine-gun opened a rapid fire, and the hailing bullets clashed on the walls of the estaminet, swept down on to the stones of the pavé, found their range and began drumming and banging on the barrel. The soldier beside it quietly laid down his empty rifle and looked towards the Canadian. ‘I’m done in,’ he called. ‘Punctured ’arf a dozen places.... You two better keep down ... let ’em come close, then finish it ... wi’ the bayonet.’
That struck the Canadian as the last word in lunacy; but before he could speak, he saw the barrel dissolved in splintering wreckage about the figure lying on the road. Tommy raised his head a little and called once more, but faintly. ‘Good fight. We did all we could ... to stop ’em. We did stop ’em all a good time ... an’ we stopped a lot for good.’ A gust of bullets swept lower, clattered on the stones, set the broken barrel staves dancing, hailed drumming and thudding on the prone figure in the road.
Both the Canadian and the Frenchman were wounded severely, but they still had the strength to crawl back along the ditch, and the luck to emerge from it amongst the houses in time to be hidden away by the villagers before the Germans arrived. And that night after they had passed through and gone, the Canadian went back and found the body of the soldier where it had been flung in the ditch—a body riddled and rent to pieces with innumerable bullet wounds.
The Canadian had the villagers bury the body there close outside the village, and wrote on a smooth board the number and name he took from the identity disc about the dead man’s neck. And underneath it he wrote in indelible pencil ‘A good fighting man,’ and the last words he had heard the fighter gasp—‘We did all we could to stop them; stopped them all a good time, and stopped a lot for good.’
And as the Canadian said afterwards, ‘That same, if you remember their record and their fate, being a fairly close fitting epitaph for the old Contemptible Little Army.’
FOOTNOTES
[3] ‘Jildi’—quick.