The Great Push: An Episode of the Great War. Patrick MacGill

"He's the bomber we've heard so much about."

      "I suppose ye'll want to know everythin' about me now, seein' ye've asked me to take a drop of champagne," said Gilhooley, his voice rising. "Damn yer champagne. You think I'm a bloomin' alligator in the Zoo, d'ye? Give me a bun and I'll do anythin' ye want me to."

      "That men should want to speak to you is merely due to your fame," I said. "In the dim recesses of the trenches men speak of your exploits with bated breath——"

      "What the devil are ye talkin' about?" asked Gilhooley.

      "About you," I said.

      He burst out laughing at this and clinked glasses with me when we drank, but he seemed to forget Bill.

      For the rest of the evening he was in high good humour, and before leaving he brought out his bomb and showed that it was only a dummy one, harmless as an egg-shell.

      "But let me get half a dozen sergeants round a rum jar and out comes this bomb!" said Gilhooley. "Then they fly like hell and I get a double tot of rum."

      "It's a damned good idea," I said. "What is he wanting?"

      I pointed at the military policeman who had just poked his head through the café door. He looked round the room, taking stock of the occupants.

      "All men of the London Irish must report to their companies at once," he shouted.

      "There's somethin' on the blurry boards again," said Bill Teake. "I suppose we've got to get up to the trenches to-night. We were up last night diggin'," he said to Gilhooley.

      Gilhooley shrugged his shoulders, took a stump of a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it.

      "Take care of yourselves," he said as he went out.

      At half-past nine we marched out of Nouex-les-Mines bound for the trenches where we had to continue the digging which we had started the night before.

      The brigade holding the firing line told us that the enemy were registering their range during the day, and the objective was the trench which we had dug on the previous night. … Then we knew that the work before us was fraught with danger; we would certainly be shelled when operations started. In single file, with rifles and picks over their shoulders, the boys went out into the perilous space between the lines. The night was grey with rain; not a star was visible in the drab expanse of cloudy sky, and the wet oozed from sandbag and dug-out; the trench itself was sodden, and slush squirted about the boots that shuffled along; it was a miserable night. One of our men returned to the post occupied by the stretcher-bearers; he had become suddenly unwell with a violent pain in his stomach. We took him back to the nearest dressing-station and there he was put into an Engineers' wagon which was returning to the village in which our regiment was quartered.

      Returning, I went out into the open between the lines. Our men were working across the front, little dark, blurred figures in the rainy greyness, picks and shovels were rising and falling, and lumps of earth were being flung out on to the grass. The enemy were already shelling on the left, the white flash of shrapnel and the red, lurid flames of bursting concussion shells lit up the night. So far the missiles were either falling short or overshooting their mark, and nobody had been touched. I just got to our company when the enemy began to shell it. There was a hurried flop to earth in the newly-dug holes, and I was immediately down flat on my face on top of several prostrate figures, a shrapnel burst in front, and a hail of singing bullets dug into the earth all round. A concussion shell raced past overhead and broke into splinters by the fire trench, several of the pieces whizzing back as far as the working party.

      There followed a hail of shells, flash on flash, and explosion after explosion over our heads; the moment was a ticklish one, and I longed for the comparative safety of the fire trench. Why had I come out? I should have stopped with the other stretcher-bearers. But what did it matter. I was in no greater danger than any of my mates; what they had to stick I could stick, for the moment at least.

      The shelling subsided as suddenly as it had begun. I got up again to find my attention directed towards something in front; a dark figure kneeling on the ground. I went forward and found a dead soldier, a Frenchman, a mere skeleton with the flesh eaten away from his face, leaning forward on his entrenching tool over a little hole that he had dug in the ground months before.

      A tragedy was there, one of the sorrowful sights of war. The man, no doubt, had been in a charge—the French made a bayonet attack across this ground in the early part of last winter—and had been wounded. Immediately he was struck he got out his entrenching tool and endeavoured to dig himself in. A few shovelsful of earth were scooped out when a bullet struck him, and he leaned forward on his entrenching tool, dead. Thus I found him; and the picture in the grey night was one of a dead man resting for a moment as he dug his own grave.

      "See that dead man?" I said to one of the digging party.

      "H'm! there are hundreds of them lying here," was the answer, given almost indifferently. "I had to throw four to one side before I could start digging!"

      I went back to the stretcher-bearers again; the men of my own company were standing under a shrapnel-proof bomb store, smoking and humming ragtime in low, monotonous voices. Music-hall melodies are so melancholy at times, so full of pathos, especially on a wet night under shell fire.

      "Where are the other stretcher-bearers?" I asked.

      "They've gone out to the front to their companies," I was told. "Some of their men have been hit."

      "Badly?"

      "No one knows," was the answer. "Are our boys all right?"

      "As far as I could see they're safe; but they're getting shelled in an unhealthy manner."

      "They've left off firing now," said one of my mates. "You should've seen the splinters coming in here a minute ago, pit! pit! plop! on the sandbags. It's beastly out in the open."

      A man came running along the trench, stumbled into our shelter, and sat down on a sandbag.

      "You're the London Irish?" he asked.

      "Stretcher-bearers," I said. "Have you been out?"

      "My God! I have," he answered. "'Tisn't half a do, either. A shell comes over and down I flops in the trench. My mate was standing on the parapet and down he fell atop of me. God! 'twasn't half a squeeze; I thought I was burst like a bubble.

      "'Git off, matey,' I yells, 'I'm squeezed to death!'

      "'Squeezed to death,' them was my words. But he didn't move, and something warm and sloppy ran down my face. It turned me sick. … I wriggled out from under and had a look. … He was dead, with half his head blown away. … Your boys are sticking to the work out there; just going on with the job as if nothing was amiss. When is the whole damned thing to come to a finish?"

      A momentary lull followed, and a million sparks fluttered earthwards from a galaxy of searching star-shells.

      "Why are such beautiful lights used in the killing of men?" I asked myself. Above in the quiet the gods were meditating, then, losing patience, they again burst into irrevocable rage, seeking, as it seemed, some obscure and fierce retribution.

      The shells were loosened again; there was no escape from their frightful vitality, they crushed, burrowed, exterminated; obstacles were broken down, and men's lives were flicked out like flies off a window pane. A dug-out flew skywards, and the roof beams fell in the trench at our feet. We crouched under the bomb-shelter, mute, pale, hesitating. Oh! the terrible anxiety of men who wait passively for something to take place and always fearing the worst!

      "Stretcher-bearers at the double!"

      We met him, crawling in on all fours like a beetle, the first case that came under our care. We dressed a stomach wound in the dug-out, and gave the boy two morphia tablets. … He sank into unconsciousness and never recovered. His grave is out behind the church of Loos-Gohelle, and his cap hangs on the arm of the cross that marks his sleeping place. A man had the calf of his right leg blown away; he died from shock; another got a bullet through his skull, another. … But why enumerate how young lives were hurled