Tales of War | Page 9

hills and woods and squirrel. It made for a moment a lane in the mist over No Man's Land. Dick Cheeser peered down it, but it closed again. ``No,'' Night seemed to say, ``you don't guess my secret.'' And the awful hush intensified. ``What would they do?'' thought the sentry. ``What were they planning in all those miles of silence?'' Even the Verys were few. When one went up, far hills seemed to sit and brood over the valley: their black shapes seemed to know what would happen in the mist and seemed sworn not to say. The rocket faded, and the hills went back into mystery again, and Dick Cheeser peered level again over the ominous valley.
All the dangers and sinister shapes and evil destinies, lurking between the armies in that mist, that the sentry faced that night cannot be told until the history of the war is written by a historian who can see the mind of the soldier. Not a shell fell all night, no German stirred; Dick Cheeser was relieved at ``Stand to'' and his comrades stood to beside him, and soon it was wide, golden, welcome dawn.
And for all the threats of night the thing that happened was one that the lonely sentry had never foreseen: in the hour of his watching Dick Cheeser, though scarcely eighteen, became a full-grown man.
Standing To
One cannot say that one time in the trenches is any more tense than another. One cannot take any one particular hour and call it, in modern nonsensical talk, ``typical hour in the trenches.'' The routine of the trenches has gone on too long for that. The tensest hour ought to be half an hour before dawn, the hour when attacks are expected and men stand to. It is an old convention of war that that is the dangerous hour, the hour when defenders are weakest and attack most to be feared. For darkness favours the attackers then as night favours the lion, and then dawn comes and they can hold their gains in the light. Therefore in every trench in every war the garrison is prepared in that menacing hour, watching in greater numbers than they do the whole night through. As the first lark lifts from meadows they stand there in the dark. Whenever there is any war in any part of the world you may be sure that at that hour men crowd to their parapets: when sleep is deepest in cities they are watching there.
When the dawn shimmers a little, and a grey light comes, and widens, and all of a sudden figures become distinct, and the hour of the attack that is always expected is gone, then perhaps some faint feeling of gladness stirs the newest of the recruits; but chiefly the hour passes like all the other hours there, an unnoticed fragment of the long, long routine that is taken with resignation mingled with jokes.
Dawn comes shy with a wind scarce felt, dawn faint and strangely perceptible, feeble and faint in the east while men still watch the darkness. When did the darkness go? When did the dawn grow golden? It happened as in a moment, a moment you did not see. Guns flash no longer: the sky is gold and serene; dawn stands there like Victory that will shine, on one of these years when the Kaiser goes the way of the older curses of earth. Dawn, and the men unfix bayonets as they step down from the fire-step and clean their rifles with pull-throughs. Not all together, but section by section, for it would not do for a whole company to be caught cleaning their rifles at dawn, or at any other time.
They rub off the mud or the rain that has come at night on their rifles, they detach the magazine and see that its spring is working, they take out the breechblock and oil it, and put back everything clean: and another night is gone; it is one day nearer victory.
The Splendid Traveller
A traveller threw his cloak over his shoulder and came down slopes of gold in El Dorado. From incredible heights he came. He came from where the peaks of the pure gold mountain shone a little red with the sunset; from crag to crag of gold he stepped down slowly. Sheer out of romance he came through the golden evening.
It was only an incident of every day; the sun had set or was setting, the air turned chill, and a battalion's bugles were playing ``Retreat'' when this knightly stranger, a British a?roplane, dipped, and went homeward over the infantry. That beautiful evening call, and the golden cloud bank towering, and that adventurer coming home in the cold, happening all together, revealed in a flash the fact (which hours of thinking sometimes will