Chapter XXVIII: The Exciting Adventures of "Carl Heft"

The strain of lying there hour after hour had become unbearable. The idea had also struck him that now was his opportunity to glean some information, if possible, about the lie of the land. There would be warm work, he knew, and that before long, for the French "75's" were barking in the distance, and shells were falling about Biaches and upon the hill away to the left.

Field wagons from Peronne had clattered past his hiding-place, carrying reels of barbed wire, and if he were fortunate he might be able to slip through the advanced German trench before it was hedged in by that difficult barricade. Bodies were lying thickly strewn among the brick heaps, and one little alley down which he tried to pass was piled up six deep with corpses.

"I wish I could get on a listening post," he thought to himself. "That would give me a fine chance." And just then he collided with somebody, who shook him by the shoulder and swore lustily; and he recognised the voice of the good-natured sergeant.

"You should look where you are going, Kamerad," said the man. "And, by the way, where _are_ you going?"

"To the front trench, sergeant," replied Dennis, speaking at a venture. "I have just secured a fresh supply of racket bombs."

"What, you are Carl Heft, surely! Good lad, I did not see you in the melee, but I have no doubt you acquitted yourself well. I also am going to the front trench, to our company's sector. We will go together."

Dennis clenched his teeth, but he knew that he must put a good face on the matter.

"With pleasure, sergeant," he made answer. And the pair walked along side by side. "Have we lost many?" he inquired.

"Yes, a good few, and I believe it was their own fault. To tell you the truth, Heft, the battalion is not in a good state; they were left too long over there in the front line without being relieved. Our company in particular is very homesick, and can you wonder when you look at the captain they have?"

"True, he is a great brute. You will let me say that to you, sergeant?" replied Dennis, anxious to draw the man out.

"Have no fear; I shall not report you," said his companion, with a friendly squeeze of the arm. "He is not only a great brute, but he is an arrant coward into the bargain. The men do not mind being cuffed and bullied, because they are used to it; but when they see their officer never expose himself, and always shouting from the rear 'Get on, you pigs!' they don't like it. But, Himmel!"--and he chuckled--"our engineers have surpassed themselves to-night. I have never seen wire so strong during the war. Our whole front is covered with it; not so much as a rat could get through."

"That is good," assented his listener, mentally feeling how bad it was for himself, and that, short of a miracle, he must stay where he was until daylight.

"I have just been making a report to Colonel Schlutz," went on the sergeant. "Now you and I will go to a snug little dug-out I have taken possession of. I have a nice piece of sausage which we will share, and what do you think?--four bottles of lager beer! What do you think of that?"

"I say that you are a good comrade, sergeant--the best I have met for many a long day," said Dennis, with a warmth he really felt. This man was evidently a good fellow at heart, an exception to the general run of German non-commissioned officers. And yet it might come about that he would have to kill him, in spite of that nice piece of sausage and those four bottles!

The sergeant had called it a snug little dug-out, that square hole in the chalk, with earth piled on a piece of corrugated iron by way of roof, and great rats peering at them as they sat with their knees touching by the light of a piece of candle.

But to Dennis it was a palace, hiding him, as it did, from inquisitive eyes.

"Surely it is written that I shall win through," he thought to himself. "Everything seems to point to it."

A shell burst close to them and rattled the corrugated iron, bringing a shower of earth down in front of the dug-out door.

"I will go and see if that has done any damage," said the sergeant. "You may stay here until the alarm is given. Your post will be in that bay in front of us. Why don't you go to sleep? I should if I were not an _Unteroffizier_."

He came back again in a few minutes, to find that Dennis had taken him at his word, and was watching the rats fearlessly searching for crumbs between his very feet.

"A corporal and five men," said the sergeant laconically. "And a splinter has broken the Herr Captain's glasses. Oh, he is in a rare fury!"

Another shell burst farther away behind the dug-out, and Dennis wondered whether the French gunners were lengthening their fuses preparatory to the counter-attack.

Mist still hung about the ground, and the moon gave it a very ghostly effect.

Peeping through the door from the dark dug-out--for a rat had suddenly pounced upon the lighted candle and made off with it--he saw the look-out motionless and alert behind the sandbagged parapet, and, sitting on the fire-step, the men of No. 6 Company huddled up. Some of them were asleep with their heads on their comrades' shoulders. The man who had been five times wounded bent forward, grasping one wrist with the other hand, and staring into vacancy; perhaps he was thinking of his dead wife!

Without warning a terrific fire suddenly opened on the village; and Dennis, used as he was to the British bombardment, sat dazed in his cubby-hole as shell after shell burst in such quick succession that the explosions seemed like the continuous fire of some giant machine-gun. He put his hands to his ears and crouched there, bowed, like one awaiting inevitable doom, wondering how it fared with the company outside in the trench and with the rest of the battalion.

For a quarter of an hour the inferno continued, and then ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and in the lull that followed he rose to his feet, knowing that the dug-out would not be a safe place in which to await the counter-attack which would come on the heels of that terrible devastation.

In the doorway he stumbled over something soft, and recognised the upturned face of the good-natured sergeant! The lower part of him from the waist downwards had been blown away; and, stooping down, Dennis gently disengaged the Iron Cross from the breast of his tunic.

"Poor chap!" he muttered. "This will be something for dear little Billy." And then he looked round.

The trench existed no longer as a trench, and terrified, trembling men crawled from among the tumbled sandbags, and out of nooks and corners where they had lain.

The barbed wire looked like a parrot's cage that had been run over by a motor-car, and everyone saw that the position was untenable.

So No. 6 Company, or all that was left of it, hurried towards a wood between Biaches and the hill of La Maisonette, and no sooner had they cleared the broken trench than the first wave of the French poured over it.

The ferret-faced German captain had made his way back to headquarters just before the bombardment began. He had a cousin on the staff, from whom he hoped to borrow a spare pair of spectacles to replace his own.

He secured the glasses, and found that he could not have arrived at a better moment, for a message had just been received from the Divisional General!

"You are the very man we want," said Colonel Schlutz. "There is a spy in No. 6 Company masquerading under the name of Carl Heft. It is very serious and altogether extraordinary. The real Carl Heft was wounded by a shell splinter, and has turned up again over there. The spy actually took down the general's order for our move, and he must be discovered at once. He is young, and he wears brown boots."

"Himmel! I know the fellow!" exclaimed the captain. "He shall be arrested within the next twenty minutes!"

But the French fire began, and it was impossible to move; and they cowered in their temporary shelter, expecting death.

"Where is the company?" demanded its captain when the 75's ceased, and he encountered a wounded man dragging himself to the rear.

"The survivors have retired into yonder wood, Herr Captain. May I beg a draught of water from your bottle?"

"You will get some farther back; I have no time now," was the brutal response. And, grinning with secret satisfaction, he ran in the direction of the tree-tops, hugely elated as every stride carried him farther away from the ruined village, against which he knew the counter-attack would be delivered.

As soon as he judged himself to be out of danger he skulked among the trees for more than an hour. He was in no hurry to find his men; besides, the sky was lightening, and he preferred to wait until daylight.

During that hour the fury of combat raged among the brick heaps of Biaches and upon the hill of La Maisonette, and when morning came the French had recovered both positions.

He could hear them cheering, and was hoping that all was over, when the crackle of rifle fire commenced from the western edge of the wood, and he knew that he could delay no longer. His smile gave place to the blustering frown that No. 6 Company knew so well, and, striding forward, he became aware from the hoarse roar of voices that something serious was taking place.

The growing daylight had revealed to the French that the enemy was holding the wood in some strength; and Dennis, who had spied a long line of blue-painted helmets in the distance, was stealthily working his way forward from tree to tree, intent on making a bolt towards them, when that same roar fell upon his ear.

Looking round, he saw a double company of the battalion that had entrained with them forming up for an advance with the bayonet. In sixty seconds they would go charging across the open strip of ground which he had decided upon as his own line of escape, and their right flank would pass within a dozen yards of a white-walled cottage that had been unroofed by a French shell.

He looked at the solid, desperate mass, and then at the thin, struggling French line feeling its way cautiously forward; and a daring resolve came to him as the drums began to roll and he heard the command "Vorwaerts!"

Safe from observation in the ruined hovel, he unslung the festoon of racket bombs, and with all the power of his strong young arm hurled them one after another over the top of the wall among the advancing Germans.

Through the aperture where the window had been he marked the effect of the explosions.

Officers brandished their swords, but the unexpectedness of the bomb attack produced panic in the broken ranks, which lost their formation and retired precipitately into the cover of the trees.

But something closer at hand gave Dennis furiously to think!

Led by an officer, half a dozen men ran pluckily forward towards the hovel, but Dennis did not wait for their arrival. Already he was bolting for his life for the shelter of a big shell crater, where he meant to strip off his hated disguise and let the uniform of a British officer act as a passport to the rapidly advancing French.

As he reached the lip of the huge hole his laugh of triumph died away, for before he could check himself he had slid down among the remnants of No. 6 Company, huddled together, leaderless, demoralised.

At the same moment a shell burst on the other side of the crater, flinging an iron rain into the already terrified mob, and half burying a man who had been descending into the pit.

It was the ferret-faced captain who picked himself up, white as a sheet of paper, and then gave a guttural cry of surprise. Drawing his revolver he strode forward and stopped in front of Dennis, covering him with the weapon.

"I am looking for you, Carl Heft," he laughed hoarsely. "Possibly you know why they want you at headquarters!"

No one knew exactly how it came about, but there was a sharp report, the captain staggered back and fell, shot through the heart; and "Carl Heft" stood like some avenging spirit, looking down at him, with the smoking Webley in his hand.

"Kamerads!" he cried to the throng, "there lies the cause of half our troubles! That beast would have driven us on again while he slunk in the rear. Look at this!" And he pointed to the man who had already been wounded five times. A fragment of the shell had just carried away his right hand. "The game is up; we have the right to choose whether we die like sheep, or live to rejoin our families. You can do as you like, but I am going to surrender. I have had enough!"

Very erect, he swung round and began to walk up the side of the crater in the direction of the French, and fifty voices cried: "He is right; we have all had enough!" And they sprang forward in his wake, every man with his hands raised above his head.

Dennis had planted one foot on the firm ground when a skewer-like bayonet passed within an inch of his ear; and with a disappointed roar its owner flung a pair of terrible arms about him, and the two rolled backwards into the hole again.

"Now you had better say your prayers, Boche!" growled his assailant, as a hairy hand closed on his throat; "I am going to kill you!"