Tales of War, Lord Dunsany [top 50 books to read .txt] 📗
- Author: Lord Dunsany
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Another of the voices of the night is the whine the shell makes in coming; it is not unlike the cry the hyena utters as soon as it’s dark in Africa: “How nice traveller would taste,” the hyena seems to say, and “I want dead White Man.” It is the rising note of the shell as it comes nearer, and its dying away when it has gone over, that make it reminiscent of the hyena’s method of diction. If it is not going over then it has something quite different to say. It begins the same as the other, it comes up, talking of the back areas with the same long whine as the other. I have heard old hands say “That one is going well over.” “Whee-oo,” says the shell; but just where the “oo” should be long drawn out and turn into the hyena’s final syllable, it says something quite different. “Zarp,” it says. That is bad. Those are the shells that are looking for you.
And then of course there is the whizz-bang coming from close, along his flat trajectory: he has little to say, but comes like a sudden wind, and all that he has to do is done and over at once.
And then there is the gas shell, who goes over gurgling gluttonously, probably in big herds, putting down a barrage. It is the liquid inside that gurgles before it is turned to gas by the mild explosion; that is the explanation of it; yet that does not prevent one picturing a tribe of cannibals who have winded some nice juicy men and are smacking their chops and dribbling in anticipation.
And a wonderful thing to see, even in those wonderful nights, is our thermite bursting over the heads of the Germans. The shell breaks into a shower of golden rain; one cannot judge easily at night how high from the ground it breaks, but about as high as the tops of trees seen at a hundred yards. It spreads out evenly all round and rains down slowly; it is a bad shower to be out in, and for a long time after it has fallen, the sodden grass of winter, and the mud and old bones beneath it, burn quietly in a circle. On such a night as this, and in such showers, the flying pigs will go over, which take two men to carry each of them; they go over and root right down to the German dugout, where the German has come in out of the golden rain, and they fling it all up in the air.
These are such nights as Scheherazade with all her versatility never dreamed of; or if such nightmares came she certainly never told of them, or her august master, the Sultan, light of the age, would have had her at once beheaded; and his people would have deemed that he did well. It has been reserved for a modern autocrat to dream such a nightmare, driven to it perhaps by the tales of a white-whiskered Scheherazade, the Lord of the Kiel Canal; and being an autocrat he has made the nightmare a reality for the world. But the nightmare is stronger than its master, and grows mightier every night; and the All-Highest War Lord learns that there are powers in Hell that are easily summoned by the rulers of earth, but that go not easily home.
Two Degrees of Envy
It was night in the front line and no moon, or the moon was hidden. There was a strafe going on. The Tok Emmas were angry. And the artillery on both sides were looking for the Tok Emmas.
Tok Emma, I may explain for the blessed dwellers in whatever far happy island there be that has not heard of these things, is the crude language of Mars. He has not time to speak of a trunk mortar battery, for he is always in a hurry, and so he calls them T. M.‘s. But Bellona might not hear him saying T. M., for all the din that she makes: might think that he said D. N; and so he calls it Tok Emma. Ak, Beer, C, Don: this is the alphabet of Mars.
And the huge minnies were throwing old limbs out of No Man’s Land into the frontline trench, and shells were rasping down through the air that seemed to resist them until it was torn to pieces: they burst and showers of mud came down from heaven. Aimlessly, as it seemed, shells were bursting now and then in the air, with a flash intensely red: the smell of them was drifting down the trenches.
In the middle of all this Bert Butterworth was hit. “Only in the foot,” his pals said. “Only!” said Bert. They put him on a stretcher and carried him down the trench. They passed Bill Britterling, standing in the mud, an old friend of Bert’s. Bert’s face, twisted with pain, looked up to Bill for some sympathy.
“Lucky devil,” said Bill.
Across the way on the other side of No Man’s Land there was mud the same as on Bill’s side: only the mud over there stank; it didn’t seem to have been kept clean somehow. And the parapet was sliding away in places, for working parties had not had much of a chance. They had three Tok Emmas working in that battalion front line, and the British batteries did not quite know where they were, and there were eight of them looking.
Fritz Groedenschasser, standing in that unseemly mud, greatly yearned for them to find soon what they were looking for. Eight batteries searching for something they can’t find, along a trench in which you have to be, leaves the elephant hunter’s most desperate tale a little dull and insipid. Not that Fritz Groedenschasser knew anything about elephant hunting: he hated all things sporting, and cordially approved of the execution of Nurse Cavell. And there was thermite too. Flammenwerfer was all very well, a good German weapon: it could burn a man alive at twenty yards. But this accursed flaming English thermite could catch you at four miles. It wasn’t fair.
The three German trench mortars were all still firing. When would the English batteries find what they were looking for, and this awful thing stop? The night was cold and smelly.
Fritz shifted his feet in the foul mud, but no warmth came to him that way.
A gust of shells was coming along the trench. Still they had not found the minnewerfer! Fritz moved from his place altogether to see if he could find some place where the parapet was not broken. And as he moved along the sewerlike trench he came on a wooden cross that marked the grave of a man he once had known, now buried some days in the parapet, old Ritz Handelscheiner.
“Lucky devil,” said Fritz.
The Master of No Man’s Land
When the last dynasty has fallen and the last empire passed away, when man himself has gone, there will probably still remain the swede. [The rutabaga or Swedish turnip.]
There grew a swede in No Man’s Land by Croisille near the Somme, and it had grown there for a long while free from man.
It grew as you never saw a swede grow before.
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