The Cross of Carl Read online

  Then the man upon whose heels he trod burst like a puff-ball. He seemed to blow out and go, burst into a whirl of shattered bone and flying blubber, and where he had been his cut-off shriek hung. Carl’s mask was torn from his face, the left ear strap taking with it half the ear, and now Carl too, conscious of that cruel pang, screamed. Something hit his bare face, something warm, that squelched and fell at his feet, leaving his eyelids heavy. Dazed, as one does such things, he stooped, saw it red and twitching under his hand and screamed again. Then he turned, and with the goad of that horror deep in his soul, leapt into the mist whence he had come.

  But now no more does he know where to go nor how to guide his heavy feet. The air is an inferno of flying fragments, dust and flame; everywhere those murderous devils leap, and where they strike chaos thuds to being, and being in her turn to chaos. And, through all, the screaming soars, a high-pitched continuous ululation like the lamentation of damned souls.

  He takes a step, and before him hell opens a new mouth; his next leap is sideways, and a gaunt corpse, from which the uniform streams in crimson tatters, whirls spread-eagled at him, swooping like a great strange bird from a cloud of smoke. He avoids its flight and is off like a harried rabbit at an angle, when his foot twirls in a hole and he is down. As he rises, a man, or what has been a man, comes down on top of him and crushes him in the mud. A weight presses his chest and through his tunic a warm moisture soaks his skin….

  Again he struggles up, pushing that nameless thing from him, his mouth atwist; and, when once more he stands, his tunic from collar to waist is no longer grey but red. Down his neck his torn ear, too, pours its quota, his helmet hangs backward, the tatters of his gas mask are twisted about his throat. Around him, as far as he can see on either side beneath the pall of vapour, to front and rear, the plain is like a pot of mud that has been stirred, and in which great bubbles, bursting, have left their pits. And over all that tumbled plain lies the harvest that the guns have gathered, the crops of flesh that are man’s toll to the Beast that he has made.

  Here, like a sheaf, three bodies stand leaned together, planted to the knees in mud, one headless, one with a jagged fragment of steel projecting from its back, the other unmarked save for a trickle at the lips. Near these a carcass, without legs or arms and caked with clay, lies like a grey valise. Further is a leg naked and blackened; a boot protrudes; a rifle with a hand and forearm hanging from it sticks butt upward. There is a huddle of bodies in one place piled one upon the other, and away from that heap something drags itself upon its hands, something like a maimed dog that lifts a blackened head and howls…

  Hill 50 has spat her spit for this time, but her chosen children, the snipers, cuddle their rifle-butts in her ditches yonder and peer steady-eyed into the mist. And at the moving thing they see they aim, and where they aim they hit. As Carl stands, a bullet rips the flesh of his shoulder. He is hurt, but not to death; a numbness runs down his arm, and again that warm flow that he knows spreads under his clothes.

  But the touch of the foe’s bullet wakes him from the daze of that first battle-terror that all warriors know. Fear passes from him. He sinks, crawls behind the body lying there and rests his rifle across it. There is a glint on the hill and Carl’s first bullet wings. His is a kill.

  A dozen empty cartridge cases lie in the shelter of his bulwark, when he is conscious of a confused noise behind. It grows and disintegrates into the chug-chug of many feet that plough the mud. It is the attack, reformed and reinforced, coming back upon its dreadful tracks to batter at Hill 50’s gates.

  Far to the right and left behind him he sees the forefront of the attackers breaking through the mist, and beyond that fringe the mass of the wave looms hugely through the fume. Abruptly the dribble of shots from Hill 50 stops, and it, too, looms, glowering and still, like a crouched monster at bay that shakes the slaver from its chin and braces itself to meet the onslaught of the hounds. Between, time tenses and the air holds its breath.

  The first man shuffles past Carl some twenty yards to his right, then three together pass close to him. As Carl rises, one of them brings his rifle halfway to the shoulder, but at Carl’s shout drops it, waves his hand forward and is off. Carl now brings his rifle to the carry and, after the man, he too goes, plugging the mud.

  He feels no pain now, nor again can panic take him, but he goes deliberate and wrathful. It is as though there are in him two Carls, one above, calm, resolute, unshaken, and an under-Carl which is a creature of passion and hot anger and red frenzy, like an elemental born from the torture of a slaughterhouse. And the upper-Carl, which is master, stoic and Spartan, callous as pure reason and pitiless as arithmetic and Euclid, observes, directs and prompts the Carl its creature, whispering, “Carl, do this,” or “Carl, go there,” or “Quick, Carl,” and that under-Carl obeys.

  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 far-seeing 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 atwitch. 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. But 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 débris, 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 a!l 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 ov
ermuch 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.