In the grip of terror, p.15
In The Grip of Terror, page 15
For thus does battle divide man within himself:—against himself, since the body, as the state in which such rule is, though it endure a little, passes; yet again for himself in the end and long run of the aeons, since from the unconscious oneness first must come division before the conscious wedding that is peace.
And man is then as it were god and devil—god in the austere farseeing plan, and devil in that blind and brutal hacking that the mandate launches; yet false god and false devil, since not these either may endure in the end and long run of the aeons, any more than the God of pure man-righteousness and the Devil of pure man-sin that man’s heart has set in his mind’s temple; but must ultimately meet, they too, and mate and have their bridal sweets.
And man, although as yet but half awake and still slumber-eyed, dimly even now perceives this; and in that temple a whisper stirs that the priests cannot wholly keep from the ears of their sheep…“For God without the Devil cannot be human, now, nor our Father surely; and your Devil, too, he must be God, not to be divorced from Him—yea, Him vehemently by pitiless Euclid and urgently by arithmetic, since the Whole must contain the part, and He is all that is…”
And now that atom that is Carl runs there at Hill 50, doing his bit in the long wooing; and the Hill glowers at him over the gloom, biding its time for the bit that is its to do. • • •
He has fallen back somewhat, for he limps, his ankle swollen so that he has had to cut open his right boot, and he is in the midmost of the wave of those grey figures that move forward like beaters shooing unseen game.
No man falls as yet, no yelp or growl sounds from hounds or quarry. The foremost men come to the remnants of smashed and tangled wire and posts splintered and askew, on which a few dark bundles of rags hang sagging woefully, like scarecrows propped amid the crops of murder. They pick their way through the mass, and now at that tangled barrier’s nearer edge little crowds begin to gather, waiting to pass, for parts are impassable and the fords narrow. In a moment the crowd grows, and those behind still come on, men with teeth set and lips a’twitch. An officer yells and flings up his hand in front there. A man beside Carl turns to him. “The fools!” he shouts. “The fools!— They should have seen if it was clear. Look at them. It’s murder!” He flings himself into a shell pit, Carl beside him. A confused noise comes from ahead. He can see a man in front, facing round, beat the air downwards with his palms as a conductor stills an orchestra. Hill 50 opens.
For the second time Carl feels that tornado batter at his brain and his sanity swims—the giggle and tee-hee of madness not far from his lips then—but the upper-Carl, with a wrench, masters, and as those thunders leap about him and discharge their wrath heart-shatteringly, he croons bemused above his racking flesh, murmuring, “This one”— and, as it passes, “No, the next”—and again, “This one”— and as that too goes whooping its whaup, he looks upward to its uproar and grins, wagging his hand in a gleeful ta-ta. Then he raises his head above the shelter of the shell-hole’s rim and looks, and the next moment is out and running to the wire.
The attack this time has wilted but not broken, for it is deep, and where one wave halts and tumbles its grey froth, another, roaring in, tumbles its grey froth in turn farther, throwing out, as it frays, streams that reach out like feelers ever nearer to the Hill. The solid foam of bodies leaves a ridge where the wire stretched its tangle, and behind that slight shelter the billows of the charge gather, then, mounting, pass ceaselessly to break and seethe and cease. Ranks are cut as by scythe blades, invisible flails leap laughing here and there, monstrous devils of iron, soaring slowly, swoop through the smoke and, bursting, smash islands in the tight-packed crowd, throwing up eruptions of earth and shattered flesh. Rut ever the grey waves mount and spread and the grey froth rolls nearer, nearer, yearning shorewards to the Hill.
From all that mass of shattered man a myriad screams and moans that the ear weaves weakly to one fabric rise like a steam of pain. Something else rises too, intangible and supersensual, but hypnotic, soul-compelling, too rare for eye’s dark glass or ear’s dull drum to gather, airy as a babe’s dream, yet stark as a crown of thorns biting at the brow—as it were the brush of wings innumerable, woven to a presence tender and terrible at once, that rises sheathed in splendours and crowned with sacrifice above the agonies of earth. The herd in their bloody quagmire feel it move among them as a wave, and for a space in that choked communing-place of life and death, where the carnate and the discarnate mingle, the iron bands of the body and its terrors drop and the carnate act as the discarnate, are lifted, masters, above themselves, become gods and devils, know themselves immortal and divine…Pain sends up to them no message, weariness drops like a husk, death—there is no Death…
The packed mass slides forward roaring, mounts in front there, thrusting forward its breasts thirstily upon that edge of reaping steel, indomitable, not to be denied its Hill. It is horrible, it is dreadful, but it is sacramental. • . • Look down, O God!—here in the shambles man vindicates again his claim and the faith by which he lives; here, as in a figure of things spiritual, Adam turns again to the guardian of the Garden, his breast against that flaming blade, and in his mouth the shout: “Make way!…Thou canst slay, but not destroy!”
The attackers now reach to fifty metres from the first trench upon the Hill. A minute passes and the gap is twenty metres. A new spout of flame roars from the Hill’s volcano and the gap widens to thirty, then closes with a rush to ten.
Carl is now mounting the ridge where the wire was, packed tight among a hustle of figures that bear him onward in their rush. He is treading on*bodies on which his feet slip and blunder. It is like walking on bolsters full of stones. Bones pop underfoot. He looks down and sees a face give under his boot, then slides and comes down. A gnashing mouth closes on his leg; he frees himself and is up again. A lane crashes through the crowd, missing him narrowly, and a welter of fragments whirls round him. A man in front goes down on his knees and, shrieking, grabbles blindly at a stringy mass that pours downward from the lower part of his body, trying madly to mend that cruel hurt that is past all mending. Carl leaps over the man and goes on. He is nearing that dreadful edge where the crowd frays into a fringe of death. Hill 50, slavering at him with flaming breath, looms above.
The first of those three trenches is now not more than ten metres in front. He finds suddenly only one man in front covering him and they run together with a spurt. Two metres they cover thus—three. The trench is five metres off, when the man goes down, and Carl, springing over his body, drives on, his bayonet forward, all the lump of him lumbering ponderously, his knees now at last feeling again their weariness, but the upper-Carl still master, the lower still obeying.
A face in a helmet appears at the level of the ground, a hand grenade whizzes past his head. Here are Hill 50’s children. He lunges forward at the head and the bayonet, entering at an eye, bites with a rasp upon bone and sticks fast. At the same instant he receives the thrust of a bayonet in turn. Aimed at his belly, it is a fraction too high; the steel grates on the sternum and rips upwards its pitiless gash till, deflected by his left hand that now leaves his own rifle to seize that other, it sticks under his right clavicle, but owing to its direction from below upward, does not enter far, although it lacerates the top of the lung. Also a bullet goes through the flesh of his left calf, touching the bone, but not breaking it.
But Carl, though pain stabs dully, shifts the grip on his rifle, gets the trigger and pulls, at which the impaled head drops away from the bayonet. He now has the other’s rifle firmly held in his left, and though the man pulls, Carl is no weakling, and his weight is firmly anchored.
Suddenly the other man lets go the rifle, and as he grabs a hand grenade Carl’s bullet brings him night. Carl stumbles into the battered trench, and as he crumples on its floor sees all along the wave of the attack sweeping in and a tumble of leaping figures and clubs that rise and fall. There is no surrender. Hill 50, too, has her vision and her faith, and her firm-lipped children that fight like devils, die like gods.
But Carl is in a bad way now. Things are slipping from him. He feels the trench swing like a ship beneath him and as in a dream hears a voice murmur at his ear. With the palsy of swoon creeping on him, he puts his hand to the wound in his breast and, sipping deliciously the poppy-boon of sleep, his tired mind sinks into the plush of dreams…
Far back, on the other side of Hill 50, an officer in a dim dugout, with a telephone clipped to his head, reaches out his hand to a button and presses it. The set of mines had been well laid as a counter for the possible loss of that first line, a backward gnash of the hill as she withdraws a little and hunches herself farther in her ambush • . • and that gnash now crunches.
Five mine chambers set deep at intervals of a hundred yards, each well gorged with deadly food, with cunningly knuckled tunnelling to absorb the backblast and heavy tampions of cement and sandbags, burst upwards as with one shock beneath the battered trench, their voices blending in one terrible roulade at which the Hill rocks; and five separate mushrooms of soil sprout monstrously and spread and burst, throwing far and wide fountains of debris, battered guns, riven cement blocks, beams and wire, rifles, smashed ammunition boxes and remains of men.
Late that day, in a far-off town, in the garret that she had crept to with her children, Ann, the wife of Carl, sat at the tiny window through which the gloaming darkled, a boding in her heart not to be banished, for she had had no word from him since he went, though he had promised; and she remembered that at that promise she had winced in her woman’s wisdom, knowing, as all women know, that for every man’s promise a bow is strung whose shaft will some day wound a woman’s heart. And when the postman came his round she raised her head eagerly, yet feared to go to the door; and when she heard his footfall fade and die, suddenly she bowed her brows there on her arms upon the table and her shoulders shook; for all her woman’s home was reft of its man that night, and the hearth of her heart cheerless, like the cabin where the fisher’s wife waits lonely with her light and sadly watches, knowing only that her Jo is on the ocean, but where, in all its desolation and tramp of billows, she knows not…And in the gathering shadows, presently, she slept.
But Carl lay that night on Aceldama; and a gentle rain fell upon his upturned face and upon all who lay there with him, God as it were sweating in His heaven with pity, while below man groaned in the Gethsemane of his flesh; and his sweat was blood.
But Carl was not dead; for him wait deeper depths than these, aye, and greater heights. His grave is not yet dug and in three days he must dig it with his hands.
II. Golgotha
One hundred miles from Hill 50, as the kite flies up a tainted wind, a group of buildings stands upon a moor. Between it and the hill stretches a rolling country, dotted here and there with villages, mottled with a dark rash of forests and wealed lividly with rivers that gurgle slowly to the sea.
It is a dark land and desolate, for over the larger part of it war’s juggernaut has crashed, and though many months have passed since that time of terror, man has been too busy feeding its wheels yonder where it has stuck in its ruts, to trouble overmuch to mend the scars and tramplings of its track. In the villages grass grows its green beard around the cobbles, save in those through whose shuddering streets food is dragged daily to the Beast. Forests have been felled in acres to make room for road and railway; groups of ruins stand gaping gloomily amid lopped and riven trees. People are scarce save in the arteries that yield that ceaseless tribute whose drain the land now begins to feel sorely.
Through the forests, wild winds, for it is winter, throat their low note of moaning. Sometimes church bells toll, but weakly and appealingly, a wail which the people hear indeed but heed no more than the elfin bells that sleepy shepherds hear along the evening hills, though sometimes they go in and move their lips dully in that House that might be Rimmon’s house to them. For the priests have mostly been smitten dumb by the blast of Baal’s passing and the voices of those that still speak are a sound in which small comfort is. But the soul knows, as indeed she knows all, that by that road, though on it night gathers, dawn comes; and wearily still the mind plods to her urge, though no star beams now. And the flame burns always, though deep, and the earth, knowing, makes her attack to smother; but though not yet is the fire’s victory, the day comes when the clay shall be riven and the sky kindled with the fire’s begotten…
Southward on the moor the land rolls flatly and bare, save for low bushes for many a mile; northward, some two miles from the group of buildings, a river sweeps in a curve, and on the other side is a small town, north of which again the land goes more pleasantly, fruitful with the crops whereby man’s body lives. Eastward, far away, a low range of hills tumble the horizon lazily.
Over these hills at dawn the sun views the moor always sullenly, for every night a night-sweat falls there, no sweet dew, but the clammy moisture of marshes, such as in great part the moor is; and like an evil thing that has settled to a work unholy this, at the first hint of day, rises in a thick vapour through which the sun, when he comes, glares redly.
The buildings stand far out on the moor. There are three main structures, a central large one, oblong, about fifty yards long by twenty wide, and on either side of this narrower sheds of almost equal length, evidently accessory to the main buildings, like covered platforms for loading and discharging. A cluster of outhouses completes the group, all hideously constructed of galvanised sheeting and raw girders, liberally daubed with whitewash.
Round all a light railway runs, with sidings to the two platforms, a gimcrack, uneven way with small pretence at ballasting, even on that bad soil, as if its maker too felt guilty, and the *un, peering over the hill some morning, might find him gone with all his traps. The buildings are completely circled by a double fence of barbed wire, eight feet high, curved inwards at the top. Inside this an inner fence, a few wires high, edges the railway line.
Along the edge of the wood to the westward runs a road, cut at a level crossing by the railroad, which disappears into the wood there.
At six every morning there is a bustle among the hutches out yonder. Men come and go between the shed and the platforms. The railway creaks and rattles under the rumble of closed trucks; an engine puffs. From a chimney in the main shed smoke pours and in the air an acrid odour spreads.
At five in the afternoon the noises and the smoke cease. Gradually the figures that now move again around the hutches grow fewer, a light gleams for a little hour or two like an eye watching, and then another night shuts down and the mist settles.
Only one or two men pass and return through the single gate in the fence, where constantly a sentry watches in a box. Through this gate, which is a heavy iron frame, backed by wire netting and surmounted by barbed wire, the single track of the railway passes, the gate being just wide enough to admit a truck. It is secured by a massive, old-fashioned lock, the key of which hangs in the sentry’s box.
The men who pass in and out are three; always the same three, each taking a salute from the sentry as he goes, and going silently with grim looks. No others of the workers ever go out, but live in the hutches yonder. The only others who have passage to and from the world outside the high barbed fence are the guard and driver of the train that puffs fussily through the gate in the daytime; and they are always the same men.
Over all this place a silence broods, heavy as the stillness of sodden grass through which the wind’s feet no longer stir, with something malignant and guilty mixed into its stillness, as if the grass concealed a corpse. A nameless suspicion filters to the soul through the eye that looks upon it, and a fear such as the traveller feels when on the heath at night he passes a pool, fringed with long grass, from which the moon’s floating pupil watches.
A mesmeric influence seems to draw the gaze that surveys the moor to those buildings that show white against its dark face, like a tumble of bleached bones over which a savour of decay still hangs. The soul says that this is an evil place, though the mind may scoff; and the soul, as always when she speaks, is right.
These buildings are the Utilization Factory of the Tenth Army Section and to them the bodies of the slain in battle are dragged over that ramshackle railroad, sometimes almost before the blood’s warmth is quite chilled, and while some grosser streamers from the departing guest still linger in the brain’s grey maze, hearing dully the summons from without.
The bodies arrive in covered trucks drawn by a fussy engine, with pantings and shrieks that seem deliberately devilish. The bodies come packed in bundles of four, naked, save for a rag of underclothing tied around their middles, and secured together by three ties of thick wire, tightly drawn, one in the middle and one at each end. At each end of the bale protrude two heads and two pairs of feet, the heads ghastly in their expressions of agony in all its moods, though now and then a face where peace has rested looks out and gives its blessing undismayed.
The feet are pitiful; they that have come so far and now must go this farther, even when all their walks are taken.
To every train that draws up at the right-hand siding, looking towards the hills, there is added an open truck with a dark-coloured tarpaulin drawn tight down over its top, an iron tank like a big kitchen sink on wheels. In this have been loaded the fragments that it was not possible to bundle, for bags are scarce and their cost would make an inroad on the Factory’s dividends; and the Factory, though under military organization, is run at a profit, must so run, or the shareholders will be angry.
