Behind the Lines (27 page)

“It must,” said Rawley. “Let's see—how much earth will a bullet penetrate? It's in
Musketry Regs
. What is it now? . . . three feet, I believe. That's if it's loose earth. If you ram it tight the resisting power is less. The earth up there is probably pretty tight, so we'll go through three feet all right. There can't be more than six or seven feet of earth wedged in the pipe, if that. So we have only to keep shooting away, and we must get through. By the by, how much ammunition have we got?”

“There's pretty nearly a full box,” said Alf.

“No trouble on that score then. You see, we must get through—unless—”

“Unless what?”

“Unless—well, unless they've wedged a dud in the chimney. But no, they cannot have done that. There would have been no need of that explosion then. They've either blown in the top of the chimney or exploded a grenade a little way down. It sounded to me like a grenade.” He glanced at the watch. “Another five minutes.”

Alf groaned.

“Look here, how about a drink to put some buck into us?” suggested Rawley. “We can't take those two bottles with us, anyway. Come on.” He took up one of the bottles wrapped it in a sandbag, and neatly knocked off the neck. He filled their two mugs and pushed one towards Alf. He raised his mug and glanced round the dug-out. Then he stood up and bowed towards his rifle that leaned against the wall. “Here's to Mr. Lee-Enfield,” he said. “Short Mr. Lee-Enfield—coupled with the name of that pushing little fellow Mr. Mark Six, or whatever it is, Three-O-Three.”

“'Ear, 'ear!” said Alf with a grin. “Bleedin' well 'ear, 'ear—an' more perishin' power to his push.” They drained the mugs.

“How's that?” said Rawley.

Alf smacked his lips, and pushed his mug forward. “Fill up, chum. It ain't no good keepin' that broken bottle. Another pint of this tack an' I'll push kebs over.”

Rawley glanced at the watch. “Right'o. Just time for another.”

Alf lighted a cigarette and they drank again. Rawley put down his empty mug and rose. “Time, gentlemen, please,” he said. He took his rifle and moved towards the recess. Alf followed. Rawley pushed forward the safety catch and thrust the barrel up the chimney. Then he pulled it down again and turned to Alf. “Is the chimney straight?” he asked.

Alf nodded.

“Sure? I mean, we don't want to shoot into the ground.”

“There's a bit of a slant,” said Alf. “But you can see daylight when you look up.”

Rawley examined the chimney. “I see,” he said. “It slopes this way a bit.” He went down on one knee, rested the butt of the rifle on the other, and held the barrel in the centre of the pipe. “Here goes,” he said. “Stand clear.”

The report was deafening in the confined space, and was followed by a little avalanche of earth down the chimney. Rawley shook the earth from the bolt and sent another round into the breech. “Bring that cigarette here,” he said. He held the cigarette under the chimney, but the smoke displayed no great tendency to rush up it. “Ah, well, can't expect to do the trick first go off. We shall have to peg away at it. I'll empty the magazine and then try it.”

He fired the other nine rounds and stood up. Alf held the cigarette underneath, but with no result.

“We've brought down some earth anyway,” said Rawley. “You have a go now, while I reload.”

He dragged out the box of S.A.A. and took out a handful of clips. The already vitiated air was now heavy with the reek of burnt cordite. There was no longer any need to hold a cigarette beneath the chimney. The fumes hung in wreathes that made breathing difficult. Alf was firing round after round up the chimney.

“Steady!” warned Rawley. “Make sure you're not plugging into the side of the pipe higher up, or you will do more harm than good.”

Alf ejected the last case from the breech and drew his hand across his damp forehead. “It ain't 'arf gettin' stuffy in 'ere,” he said. “Do you think we'll do it, chum?”

“Rather! You load up again while I have a go.” Rawley fired each round deliberately, pausing before each pressure of the trigger to ensure accuracy of aim. And he turned his eyes frequently to the fumes that clung lazily to the low roof of the recess. He thought he detected a slight tendency to float up the chimney. Alf stood ready with his rifle reloaded. Rawley put out his hand for it. “Let me carry on for a bit,” he said. He fired three more rounds deliberately, pausing after each to watch the behaviour of the fumes. After the third round the fumes slid round the edge of the chimney in a small continuous stream like an inverted water-fall. He fired several more rounds before his rifle and hands were deluged with a small avalanche of earth. Then he stood up. The fumes in the neighbourhood of the chimney were gravitating towards it, moving faster and with more decision as they neared it, till finally they whisked round the edge and up out of sight.

Rawley leaned his rifle against the wall and sat down rather wearily on his bunk. “All clear!” he said, and felt for his pipe.

Alf mopped his face with a dirty rag. “I don't mind sayin',” he confessed, “that put the wind up me proper.”

“Me, too,” agreed Rawley. “Anyway, it's all right now.”

“Now we got to dig ourselves out.”

“Not now. Personally, I'm pretty nearly all in. The best thing we can do is to turn in for a bit; and then we'll go at it like navvies when we wake up.”

Alf demurred. He did not like the feeling of being buried like a corpse even though there was now plenty of air. Why not start digging at once.

“What, for half an hour—and then be too tired to move for hours after?” objected Rawley. “No. Turn in and have a good sleep. We shall get through twice the amount of work in half the time when we are fresh. After all, that blessed landslide won't run away.” And so they crawled into their bunks and were soon asleep.

CHAPTER XVIII

I

Rawley was first awake, and he lay for some minutes in the intense darkness going over in his mind the events of the previous hours. He was reassured to find that the air was comparatively fresh, for he had been unable to rid himself entirely of the fear that Kelly's gang might have heard the noise of the firing and returned to re-block the chimney. At last he put out his hand and felt for the matches on the shelf above the bunk. He struck one cautiously and lighted the candle stump on the table. He propped up a tattered magazine to shield the light from Alf who lay snoring in the other bunk.

Their stores, with the exception of the ham, still lay on the floor. He surveyed them thoughtfully. Where was the ham? Why, yes, he had put it on the table to flick the dirt from it just before that first bomb came down the chimney. And then the candle had gone out, and—oh yes—he had upset the table so as to form some sort of protection against further bombs. The ham must be on the floor somewhere then.

He found it almost buried under loose earth, and he replaced it on the table after removing as much of the dirt as possible. The long French loaf was more easily freed from its covering of earth, and the butter was cleanly wrapped in paper. Tea was the difficulty. They needed something hot to warm them for the long task that lay
ahead, but he dared not light a fire. One of Kelly's gang might see the smoke. There was one bottle of wine left, but wine at breakfast was not very enticing. He looked through the articles which Alf had looted from the canteen and found what he needed, two slabs of solidified alcohol, refills for a Tommy's cooker. With one of these he boiled enough water for a mug of tea each, and then he awakened Alf.

They ate an excellent breakfast. Rawley insisted upon it; and Alf needed little encouragement. They had ample supplies. More, perhaps, than they would be able to carry away, and they would work the better for a full meal.

After breakfast they piled their stores in the corner farthest from the shaft, and set to work. Their only implement was an entrenching-tool, and they arranged that one should dig in the shaft whilst the other, armed with a board, shovelled the loose earth from the step and piled it in a corner of the dug-out. With such a small implement progress was necessarily slow, and other difficulties soon presented themselves.

Rawley had taken first turn with the entrenching-tool, and after twenty minutes hard digging, when he had made a tunnel some two feet in diameter and three feet in length, the roof came in and not only covered the two steps he had cleared but the third as well. Alf then took a turn at digging, but no sooner had he made a tunnel a few feet in length than a like catastrophe occurred.

Rawley suspended operations and lighted his pipe. “If we go on like this,” he said, “the roof will keep coming in
and we shall have to go on digging till we've dug out all the earth on top—and that's a good thirty feet. The only other thing to do is to revet the tunnel with timber. And the question is, where is the timber coming from?” He looked round the dug-out. “We can break up those boxes, and those few floor boards will have to come up. And we may be able to take a plank here and there from the walls. We'll make the tunnel as small as possible—just big enough to crawl through and if we put the planks like an inverted V, that will save one bit of wood each time on the roof. Come on, let's get to work. Where is that saw?”

By experiment they found that when two planks about two and a half feet in length were propped against each other with their bases some two feet apart, it was just possible to crawl under them. Alf set to work with the saw, and Rawley resumed digging, but he found, as soon as the first two revetments were in position, that although it was not difficult to crawl under them it was no easy matter to dig. The confined space made it impossible to swing the entrenchment tool, and he had to remove the handle and use the blade as a scoop. Also it was very tiring to dig while lying flat on the chest; and the only way of getting rid of the loose earth was to push it down one's side with one hand, and then by bending the knee as far as possible, scrape it out behind to Alf with one foot. However they persevered, and when the tunnel was nearly seven feet in length, knocked off and ate another meal.

But the work became harder and more difficult as they progressed. The confined space made breathing so difficult
that ten minutes or a quarter of an hour was as long as one could dig without a rest, and there was the ever present fear that a pair of the planks would slip and block the tunnel behind one. It took several minutes to crawl up the tunnel to the point of working, and more than double that time to worm one's way out backwards.

Rawley indeed did have an accident. While scraping the earth back behind him his foot displaced a board and brought down a small avalanche of earth that blocked the tunnel behind him. Fortunately Alf was in the tunnel at the moment and was able to scrape away enough earth with his hands to allow him to replace the revetment.

When the tunnel reached the top of the steps Rawley wormed his way out backwards into the dug-out and announced his intention of knocking off for the night. They were both utterly worn out, and it was obviously unwise to continue. They ate a meal in a depressed silence which the last bottle of wine was unable to relieve. Though tired out, Rawley found it impossible to sleep. He tossed from side to side on his narrow wire-netting bunk, and when at times he did doze, it was only to dream that he was still working on the tunnel, or to awaken with the horror of entombment upon him. The prospect of the morrow appalled him. The thought of again entering the tunnel terrified him. His thoughts revolved in an endless circle; sleep would not come.

At last he abandoned the pretence. He cautiously lighted the candle and shielded the light from Alf, whose regular breathing came from the opposite bunk. He filled
his pipe, that one soothing companion of all his troubles, and with the first few fragrant puffs his mind ceased to revolve futilely in a circle: it began to work constructively.

He rummaged in his box of odds and ends for a pencil. He opened the half-used field message book and began to draw a sectional plan of the dug-out, the shaft, and the gallery that led up to the trench. He drew it roughly to scale, using one side of the little squares into which the paper was divided to represent one foot. There were ten steps in the shaft that led immediately from the dug-out, then followed a gallery some sixteen feet in length, sloping upwards and ending in three steps up into the trench. They had dug the tunnel to the top of the shaft; there remained the gallery and the three steps to be traversed. Looking at the diagram, he saw clearly now what he had realized subconsciously for some time; they would never be able to complete the tunnel. Apart from the doubtful possibility of their being able to endure the strain of working in and digging so long and small a tunnel, there was not enough timber left to revet it. They had already taken from the walls of the dug-out nearly all the timber that could be removed with safety.

The realization of this, however, did not depress him. His feeling was rather of relief at the knowledge that he would not have to work again in that detestable tunnel. But some other way out must be found, and he set to work to tackle the problem.

He started, as it were, from first causes. The passage to the upper air was blocked by a fall of earth caused by
the explosion, presumably of a shell. This had no doubt caused the roof to collapse in the neighbourhood of the explosion, but surely not the whole length of that gallery and shaft. For at least half the distance that separated the dug-out from the trench the timber roof must still be in position, although the passage itself was blocked with earth. Therefore, theoretically, that cramped and terrifying tunnel should be necessary only to traverse the actual place where the roof timbers had collapsed. But where was that place?

He turned again to his diagram. About half way down the sloping gallery there had been a fall of earth, round which he and Alf had always had to squeeze when entering or leaving the dug-out, and it was at this bottle-neck that they had erected the baulk of timber wedged with a pit-prop that they called their door. Kelly's men had not forced this; therefore the explosion had taken place on the far side of it. Almost certainly they had placed the shell on the other side of the “door,” and exploded it there. If that were so, it was probable that only a section of the roof timbers in the middle of the gallery were shattered, and those in the shaft were almost certainly intact. The earth that blocked the steps was due merely to the steepness of the shaft. If they could clear this out, the actual tunnel would be needed only in that collapsed section in the middle of the gallery. The plan would be not to dig along the floor as they had done up to now, but to dig along the top just under the roof timbers, and to start the tunnel only when they ceased.