Chapter II

Captain Gordon Niall of the Uist Highlanders lay flat on his face beside a loophole in the wall. With a subaltern, two men, and a stray sergeant of the Yorkshire Rifles, he occupied the remains of a former farmstead, now a jumbled heap of bricks and mortar. The only portion of this mass of refuse that looked like a house was a right angle formed by the ends of two walls which rose like a skeleton from the shattered piles of rafters, rubbish, stones, lime, and dead bodies of mangled men.

It was one of the supreme moments resultant upon the German break through near Armentières, that grim, bloody month of April, 1918. The British line existed only in the imagination of an exhausted and bewildered Staff, their faculties half paralysed with fatigue and over work. No one knew with anything even approaching certainty what the situation was. Only one thing was certain because it was obvious, and that was that the very existence of our Armies was hanging in the balance. The British front was hopelessly, irretrievably broken; and a disorganised rabble of tattered regiments, half crazy with weariness and strain and hunger, were retreating in mixed, irregular bands back from the river Lys, through a withering hail of bullets and a raging tornado of shrapnel and high explosive; valiantly and uncomplainingly to take up new positions and renew the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds.

Gordon Niall had arrived at the stage when all emotion had been frozen to its depths. He looked phlegmatically out upon a dreary, muddy countryside literally alive with the grey advancing hordes of the enemy. The little group huddled in the shelter of the tottering walls manipulated a Lewis gun with the dull ceaseless energy of men in a dream. Dirty, ragged, verminous, with a week's growth on their smoke-grimed emaciated faces, they were unquestioningly carrying out to the last their final act in the mighty drama of that last awful month which clouded their minds like a nightmare from Hell.

They had been all through the sickening horror of the struggle on the Somme, and after three weeks hard fighting had arrived a week ago at Armentières for a rest, to find themselves swirled into the vortex of the new German offensive. Gordon Niall as he stoically waited for death, knew very little about the facts of it all. He had been told that the Portuguese who held the line on the left had broken; and that out of the welter of shattered, scurrying, disordered units, he had been ordered to take up an advanced position, to stem the rush with a handful of men he had managed to gather round him out of the retreating forces. And there he was, with four others--all that were left--with the German masses two hundred yards ahead, and behind him the river Lys, its muddy waters splashing under the bursting barrage, ironically emphasising the fact that for him there was no retreat.

It was only a matter of minutes, and at last the end came. A confused babel of sounds; a smothering avalanche of men, stamping, yelling, pushing; the collapse of the whole universe about him; a deadly pain in his head; a strange, swift, kaleidoscopic vision of home ... his mother's face ... then darkness.

He didn't know how long afterwards it was that he felt himself jerked roughly to his feet. As his senses slowly returned he realised that a German officer was searching him. He watched the man stupidly as he went through the papers in his pocket-book: then something fell from a letter to the ground, something brown like a dead leaf, and Niall lurched forward with a snarl.

"Give it me!" he said hoarsely.

The officer looked up, surprised, and then down at his feet. He stooped and picked the little fragment from the ground, glanced at it casually, and handed it to Niall with a look of half amused wonder in his eyes. Then he went on reading. Niall thrust the recovered treasure into his tunic pocket--only a faded rose given to him four years ago by a girl at Lucerne, whose memory the passion of war had not succeeded in effacing.

The officer soon finished, and Niall was marched off with a small escort. It all seemed like a bad dream, that scurry over the fire-swept zone, the arrival at the battered hamlet where more prisoners were waiting. Then the long weary march, hour after hour, their numbers constantly swelling, on through the fading twilight and a dark drizzling night. Like drunken men the straggling column reeled along, half delirious with hunger and fatigue, past stores and camps and dumps and villages, while ever past them the reserve masses of horse, foot and artillery incessantly pressed on the heels of the advancing German forces. At last, long after midnight, they reached a smallish town; and, packed into an empty building, they fell on the cold concrete floor and slept the sleep of utter exhaustion.

Early in the morning they were marched to the station, and Niall found himself in a third class compartment with eleven other officers. Some time before the train started a bowl of some sticky, soupy substance was handed in, with a loaf of bread; and on this they subsisted during the twenty-six hours which elapsed before they were detrained at their destination, a dreary, drab little town; and, cramped and weak as children, they marched two miles out into the country to the wire-encircled encampment which awaited their coming.