The Penguin Book of First World War Stories (6 page)

I must have been sucking that confidence in for a good twenty minutes before I turned with a start. I had to, I did not know why. It seemed as if some sense, which I did not know I had got, told me that someone was stealing up behind me. No one there; nothing but Arras, the vacuous city, indistinct among her motionless trees. She always seemed to be listening and frightened. It was as if the haggard creature had stirred.

I looked to my front again, rather ashamed. Was I losing hold too, I wondered, as I gazed level out into the Seam and watched the mist deepening? Each evening that autumn, a quilt of very white mist would come out of the soaked soil of The Garden, lay itself out, flat and dense, but shallow at first, over the grass, and then deepen upward as twilight advanced, first submerging the tips of the grass and the purple snake-headed flowers; and then thickening steadily up till the whole Six-foot Seam was packed with milky opaqueness.

Sixty yards out from our front a heron was standing, immobilized, in the stream, staring down – for a last bit of fishing no doubt. As I watched him, his long head came suddenly round and half up. He listened. He stood like that, warily, for a minute, then seemed to decide it was no place for him, hoisted himself off the ground, and winged slowly away with great
flaps. I felt cold, and thought, ‘What a time I've been loafing round here!' But I found it was four o'clock only. I thought I would go on and visit my sentries, the three-o'clock men who would come off duty at five. It would warm me; and one or two of the young ones were apt to be creepy about sundown.

Schofield, the lad in one of our most advanced posts, was waist-deep in the mist when I reached him.

‘Owt, boy?' I whispered. He was a North-country man.

‘Nowt, Sergeant,' he answered, ‘barrin'–' He checked. He was one of the stout ones you couldn't trust to yell out for help if the Devil were at them.

‘What's wrong?' I asked pretty sharply.

‘Nobbut t'way,' he said slowly, ‘they deucks doan't seem t'be gettin' down to it to-neet.' My eye followed his through the boughs to the pallid sky. A flight of wild-duck were whirling and counter-whirling aloft in some odd
pas d'inquiétude
.
⁷
Yes; no doubt our own ducks that had come during the war, with the herons and snipe, to live in The Garden, the untrodden marsh where, between the two lines of rifles never unloaded, no shot was ever heard and snipe were safe from all snipers. A good lad, Schofield; he took a lot of notice of things. But what possessed the creatures? What terror infested their quarters to-night?

I looked Schofield over. He was as near to dead white as a tanned man can come – that is, a bad yellow. But he could be left. A man that keeps on taking notice of things he can see, instead of imagining ones that he can't, is a match for the terror that walketh by twilight. I stole on to our most advanced post of all. There I was not so sure of my man. He was Mynns. We called him Billy Wisdom, because he was a schoolmaster in civil life – some council school at Hoggerston. ‘What cheer, Billy?' I whispered. ‘Anything to report?'

The mist was armpit deep on him now, but the air quite clear above that; so that from three feet off I saw his head and shoulders well, and his bayonet; nothing else at all. He did not turn when I spoke, nor unfix his eyes from the point he had got them set on, in front of his post and a little below their own level. ‘All – quiet – and – correct – Sergeant,' he said, as if each
word were a full load and had to be hauled by itself. I had once seen a man drop his rifle and bolt back overland from his post, to trial and execution and anything rather than that ever-lasting wait for a bayonet's point to come lunging up out of thick mist in front and a little below him, into the gullet, under the chin. Billy was near bolting-point, I could tell by more senses than one. He was losing hold on one bodily function after another, but still hanging on hard to something, some grip of the spirit that held from second to second, after muscle had mutinied and nerve was gone.

He had hardly spoken before a new torment wrung him. The whole landscape suddenly gave a quick shiver. The single poplar, down the stream, just perceptibly shuddered and rustled, and then was dead still again. A bed of rushes, nearer us, swayed for an instant, and stood taut again. Absurd, you will say. And, of course, it was only a faint breath of wind, the only stir in the air all that day. But you were not there. So you cannot feel how the cursed place had tried to shake itself free of its curse, and had failed and fallen rigid again, dreeing its weird, and poor Billy with it. His hold on his tongue was what he lost now. He began to wail under his breath, ‘Christ, pity me! Oh, suffering Christ, pity me!' He was still staring hard to his front, but I had got a hand ready to grab at his belt when, from somewhere out in the mist before us, there came, short and crisp, the crack of a dead branch heavily trodden upon.

Billy was better that instant. Better an audible enemy, one with a body, one that could trample on twigs, than that vague infestation of life with impalpable sinisterness. Billy turned with a grin – ghastly enough, but a grin.

‘Hold your fire,' I said in his ear, ‘till I order.' I made certain dispositions of bombs on a little shelf. Then we waited, listening, second by second. I think both our ears must have flicked like a mule's. But the marvel came in at the eye. We both saw the vision at just the same instant. It was some fifty yards from us, straight to our front. It sat on the top of the mist as though mist were ice and would bear. It was a dog, of the very same breed as the Hellhound, sitting upright like one of the beasts that support coats-of-arms; all proper, too, as the heralds would
say, with the black and tan hues as in life. The image gazed at us fixedly. How long? Say, twenty seconds. Then it about-turned without any visible use of its limbs, and receded some ten or twelve yards, still sitting up and now rhythmically rising and falling as though the mist it rode upon were undulating. Then it clean vanished. I thought it sank, as if the mist had ceased to bear. Billy thought the beast just melted into the air radially, all round, as rings made of smoke do.

You know the crazy coolness, a sort of false presence of mind, that will come in and fool you a little bit further at these moments of staggering dislocation of cause and effect. One of these waves of mad rationalism broke on me now. I turned quickly round to detect the cinema lantern behind us which must have projected the dog's moving figure upon the white sheet of mist. None there, of course. Only the terrified city, still there, aghast, with held breath.

Then all my anchors gave together. I was adrift; there was nothing left certain. I thought, ‘What if all we are sure of be just a mistake, and our sureness about it conceit, and we no better than puppies ourselves to wonder that dogs should be taking their ease in mid-air and an empty orchard be shrieking?' While I was drifting, I happened to notice the sleepy old grumble of guns from the rest of the front, and I envied those places. Sane, normal places; happy all who were there; only their earthworks were crumbling, not the last few certainties that we men think we have got hold of.

All this, of course, had to go on in my own mind behind a shut face. For Billy was one of the nerve specialists; he might get a VC, or be shot in a walled yard at dawn, according to how he was handled. So I was pulling my wits together a little, to dish out some patter fit for his case – you know: the ‘bright, breezy, brotherly' bilge – when the next marvel came. A sound this time – a voice, too; no shriek, not even loud, but tranquil, articulate, slow, and so distant that only the deathly stillness which gave high relief to every bubble that burst with a plop, out in the marsh, could bring the words to us at all. ‘Has annywan here lost a dog? Annywan lost a good dog?
Hoond
?
Goot Hoond
? Annywan lost a
goot Hoond
?'

You never can tell how things will take you. I swear I was right out of that hellish place for a minute or more, alive and free and back at home among the lost delights of Epsom Downs, between the races; the dear old smelly crowd all over the course, and the merchant who carries a tray crying, ‘Oo'll 'ave a good cigar, gents? Twopence! 'Oo wants a good cigar? Twopence! 'Oo says a good smoke?' And the sun shining good on all the bookies and crooks by the rails, the just and the unjust, all jolly and natural. Better than Lear's blasted heath and your mind running down!

You could see the relief settle on Mynns like oil going on to a burn on your hand. Have you seen an easy death in bed? – the yielding sigh of peace and the sinking inwards, the weary job over? It was like that. He breathed, ‘That Irish swine!' in a voice that made it a blessing. I felt the same, but more uneasily. One of my best was out there in the wide world, having God knew what truck with the enemy. Any Brass Hat that came loafing round might think, in his blinded soul, that Toomey was fraternizing; whereas Toomey was dead or prisoner by now, or as good, unless delivered by some miracle of gumption surpassing all his previous practices against the brute creation. We could do nothing, could not even guess where he was in the fog. It had risen right up to the boughs; the whole Seam was packed with it, tight. No one but he who had put his head into the mouth of the tiger could pull it out now.

We listened on, with pricked ears. Voices we certainly heard; yes, more than one; but not a word clear. And voices were not what I harked for – it was for the shot that would be the finish of Toomey. I remembered during the next twenty minutes quite a lot of good points about Toomey. I found that I had never had a sulky word from him, for one. At the end of the twenty minutes the voices finally stopped. But no shot came. A prisoner, then?

The next ten minutes were bad. Towards the end of the two hours for which they lasted I could have fancied the spook symptoms were starting again. For out of the mist before us there came something that was not seen, or heard, or felt; no one sense could fasten upon it; only a mystic consciousness
came of some approaching displacement of the fog. The blind, I believe, feel the same when they come near a lamp-post. Slowly this undefined source of impressions drew near, from out the uncharted spaces beyond, to the frontiers of hearing and sight, slipped across them and took form, at first as the queerest tangle of two sets of limbs, and then as Toomey, bearing on one shoulder a large corpse, already stiff, clothed in field-grey.

‘May I come in, Sergeant?' said Toomey, ‘an' bring me sheaves wid me?' The pride of 'cuteness shone from his eyes like a lamp through the fog; his voice had the urbanely affected humility of the consciously great.

‘You may,' said I, ‘if you've given nothing away.'

‘I have not,' said he. ‘I'm an importer entirely. Me exports are nil.' He rounded the flank of the breastwork and laid the body tenderly down, as a collector would handle a Strad. ‘There wasn't the means of an identification about me. Me shoulder titles, me badge, me pay-book, me small-book, me disc, an' me howl correspondence – I left all beyant in the cellar. They'd not have got value that tuk me.' Toomey's face was all one wink. To value himself on his courage would never enter his head. It was the sense of the giant intellect within that filled him with triumph.

I inspected the bulging eyes of the dead. ‘Did you strangle him sitting?' I asked.

‘Not at all. Amn't I just after tradin' the dog for him?' Then, in the proper whisper, Toomey made his report:

‘Ye'll remember the whillabalooin' there was at meself in the cellar. Leppin' they were, at the loss of the tea. The end of it was that “I'm goin' out now,” said I, “to speak to a man,” said I, “about a dog,” an' I quitted the place, an' the dog with me, knockin' his nose against every lift of me heel. I'd a grand thought in me head, to make them whisht thinkin' bad of me. Very near where the lad Schofiel' is, I set out for Germ'ny, stoopin' low to get all the use of the fog. Did you notus me, Sergeant?'

‘Breaking the firewood?' I said.

‘Aye, I med sure that ye would. So I signalled.'

Now I perceived. Toomey went on. ‘I knew, when I held up
the dog on the palm of me hand, ye'd see where I was, an' where goin'. Then I wint on, deep into th' East. Their wire is nothin' at all; it's the very spit of our own. I halted among ut, and gev out a notus, in English an' German, keepin' well down in the fog to rejuce me losses. They didn't fire – ye'll have heard that. They sint for the man with the English. An', be the will o' God, he was the same man that belonged to the dog.'

‘“Hans,” says I, courcheous but firm, “the dog is well off where he is. Will you come to him quietly?”

‘I can't jus' give ye his words, but the sinse of them only. “What are ye doin' at all,” he says, “askin' a man to desert?”

‘There was serious trouble in that fellow's voice. It med me ashamed. But I wint on, an' only put double strength in me temptin's. “Me colonel,” I told him, “is offerin'five pounds for a prisoner. Come back with me now and ye'll have fifty francs for yourself when I get the reward. Think over ut well. Fifty francs down. There's a grand lot of spendin' in that. An' ye'll be wi' the dog.” As I offered him each injucement, I lifted th' an'mal clear of the fog for two seconds or three, to keep the man famished wid longin'. You have to be crool in a war. Each time that I lowered the dog I lep' two paces north, under the fog, to be-divvil their aim if they fired.

‘“Ach, to hell wi' your francs an' your pounds,” says he in his ag'ny. “Give me the dog or I'll shoot. I see where you are.”

‘“I'm not there at all,” says I, “an' the dog's in front of me bosom.”

‘Ye'll understan', Sergeant,' Toomey said to me gravely, ‘that last was a ruse. I'd not do the like o' that to a dog, anny more than yourself.