With Haig on the Somme

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

Private Harry Hawke, of the 2/12th Battalion Royal Reedshire Regiment (T.F.), sat on the step of the fire trench, his back against the parapet, busy with the bolt of his rifle.

There were two things he loved more than anything else in life, and that rifle was one of them. The other was his platoon commander, Captain Bob Dashwood, who chanced to be coming along the communication at the moment, and the Cockney private's eyes lit up as he saw him.

"Hallo, Hawke! All quiet?" said Captain Dashwood with a jerk of his head in the direction of the German lines, only one hundred and twenty yards across the mangled strip of Dead Man's Land that intervened.

"Quiet as the bloomin' grave, sir," replied Harry Hawke with a grin, though he had almost to shout to make himself heard.

A howitzer battery was shelling the enemy from the wood on the left, and the Germans were replying with "crumps," which luckily all went wide.

"Seen anything more of that sniper that picked Marshall and Brown off last night?" questioned the captain.

"Not likely, sir. I got 'im 'arf an hour after we took over the relief," grinned the marksman of A Company, pointing with an oily finger to a fresh notch cut on the rifle stock. "He tumbled out of the willer tree flat, same as if you chucked a kipper from the top of a bus."

Dashwood smiled, and the smile was reflected with interest in the wizened, mahogany-coloured face that looked up at his own from under the rim of the steel helmet.

"You're a terrible chap, Hawke," he said. "How many does that make?"

"Seventeen with the rifle, sir, but I've kept no tally of all I've done in wiv the bayonet," and he caressed his beloved weapon.

"Don't get up, Hawke," said his officer, moving along the trench. "I'm only going to take a squint at the beggars," and as the private dropped back into his seat again, Bob Dashwood put his foot on the fire step and raised his head above the parapet.

He looked across a broken waste, full of shell holes and mine craters, with a line of barbed wire fencing that followed the curve of the white enemy trench capped by sandbags.

The marksman, having got rid of an imaginary speck of rust that had troubled his soul, replaced the bolt, and was putting away the oil rag, when there was a sharp stifled gasp, followed by a slithering fall, and Captain Dashwood lay in a heap among the white wet mud at the bottom of the trench. His cap had spun round and dropped into a sump, and the blood was pouring down his face and neck as Hawke reached him.

"'Strewth, he's dead, and it's my fault!" he moaned, as a sergeant and several other men ran up.

"It was nobody's fault but his own," said the sergeant savagely. "I've warned him a dozen times—and he's not dead, either. Pass the word there. We must get him down to the aid post sharp."

While Hawke supported the battered head upon his knee the sergeant hastily applied a field dressing, and when a couple of bearers came running along the communication trench they laid the wounded man carefully on the stretcher, Hawke watching the receding figures with a dazed look until the angle hid them from view....