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And the Assistant-Adjutant met a similar fate: Gratton was, first of all, wounded and he lay in a shell-hole; and while he was in the shell-hole another shell came right into the hole and took his head clean off. Joye remained with Colonel Best-Dunkley until quite late in the day, when he got the 'Blighty' in the leg which was to send him to join me at Worsley Hall.
Padre Monty had not been wounded, it seemed, but only buried alive. "The doctor and I had been taking cover in a shell-hole," he explained, between the sweet and the dessert, "when a high-explosive hurled the whole of our shelter on top of us, leaving only our heads free. We were two heads sticking out of the ground like two turnips.
When they stopped at a shell-hole and washed the mud from their faces, the English boy, with his helmet off and the weather stains removed, showed a countenance of adolescent freshness, almost girlish; cheeks like pink apples, yellow curls above his forehead, long, soft lashes. "You haven't been over very long, have you?" Claude asked in a fatherly tone, as they took the road again.
Major 'Pat' told me he was wonderful.... Lay in a shell-hole with his leg smashed they poured blood out of his boots and commanded his battery from there, blowing his whistle and all that, until they made him let himself be taken away."
The Lewis-gunners, who arrived last, found only a ruined bit of trench next to my "headquarters," while they deposited their guns and equipment in a shell-hole behind. It was somewhere about four or half-past when I made my last inspection. I clambered over the back of the trench and stood still for a moment or so. Everything was uncannily silent.
Sergeant Hicks and his chum, Dell Able, had hunted through half the blazing hot morning to find a hole not too scummy, conveniently, and even picturesquely situated, and had reported it to the Lieutenants. Captain Maxey, Hicks said, could send his own orderly to find his own shell-hole, and could take his bath in private. "He'd never wash himself with anybody else," the Sergeant added.
Bruce was still further aided by the shell-plowed condition of the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some shell-hole. Often he had to encircle such holes. More than once he bounded headlong down into a gaping crater and scrambled up its far side. Mahan's gaze followed the dog's every step. Bruce had cleared more than three-fourths of the slope.
To say that he was badly wounded hardly describes the case; an R.A.M.C. orderly afterwards described his appearance with painful picturesqueness as "raw meat on a butcher's block," and indeed it is doubtful if the stretcher-bearers who lifted him from the shell-hole would not rather have left him lying there and given their brief time and badly needed services to a casualty more promising of recovery, if they had seen at first Private Ruthven's serious condition.
One of them brings the news that D., one of the two officers who crossed over from England with me and wandered through France with me in search of our Division, is already dead. He was a corking fellow, and I'm very sorry. He was caught by a shell in the head and legs. I am still living in a sand-bagged shell-hole eight feet beneath the level of the ground.
The marvellous story that my friend, the French chaplain, tells of being marooned in a shell-hole at Verdun for several days with a Catholic priest, and of their discussion of religion and life there under shell-fire, and the tenderness with which the Catholic priest kissed the hand of the Protestant French chaplain when the two had agreed that, after all, there was one common God for a common, suffering nation of people, and that this war would break all church barriers down, and that out of it would come a new spirit in the Catholic church, a new brotherhood for all.
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