The Angels of Mons | Page 9

thought that there was any danger on
the left; and so the Prussians, writhing on their stomachs over the
ploughed field, were drawing nearer and nearer to the wood. Once there
they could establish themselves comfortably and securely during what
remained of the night; and at dawn the English left would be hopelessly
enfiladed--and there would be another of those movements which
people who really understand military matters call "readjustments of
our line."
The noise made by the men creeping and crawling over the fields was

drowned by the cannonade, from the English side as well as the
German. On the English centre and right things were indeed very brisk;
the big guns were thundering and shrieking and roaring, the
machine-guns were keeping up the very devil's racket; the flares and
illuminating shells were as good as the Crystal Palace in the old days,
as the soldiers said to one another. All this had been thought of and
thought out on the other side. The German force was beautifully
organised. The men who crept nearer and nearer to the wood carried
quite a number of machine guns in bits on their backs; others of them
had small bags full of sand; yet others big bags that were empty. When
the wood was reached the sand from the small bags was to be emptied
into the big bags; the machine-gun parts were to be put together, the
guns mounted behind the sandbag redoubt, and then, as Major Von und
Zu pleasantly observed, "the English pigs shall to gehenna-fire quickly
come."
The major was so well pleased with the way things had gone that he
permitted himself a very low and guttural chuckle; in another ten
minutes success would be assured. He half turned his head round to
whisper a caution about some detail of the sandbag business to the big
sergeant-major, Karl Heinz, who was crawling just behind him. At that
instant Karl Heinz leapt into the air with a scream that rent through the
night and through all the roaring of the artillery. He cried in a terrible
voice, "The Glory of the Lord!" and plunged and pitched forward, stone
dead. They said that his face as he stood up there and cried aloud was
as if it had been seen through a sheet of flame.
"They" were one or two out of the few who got back to the German
lines. Most of the Prussians stayed in the ploughed field. Karl Heinz's
scream had frozen the blood of the English soldiers, but it had also
ruined the major's plans. He and his men, caught all unready, clumsy
with the burdens that they carried, were shot to pieces; hardly a score of
them returned. The rest of the force were attended to by an English
burying party. According to custom the dead men were searched before
they were buried, and some singular relies of the campaign were found
upon them, but nothing so singular as Karl Heinz's diary.

He had been keeping it for some time. It began with entries about bread
and sausage and the ordinary incidents of the trenches; here and there
Karl wrote about an old grandfather, and a big china pipe, and
pinewoods and roast goose. Then the diarist seemed to get fidgety
about his health. Thus:
April 17.--Annoyed for some days by murmuring sounds in my head. I
trust I shall not become deaf, like my departed uncle Christopher.
April 20.--The noise in my head grows worse; it is a humming sound. It
distracts me; twice I have failed to hear the captain and have been
reprimanded.
April 22.--So bad is my head that I go to see the doctor. He speaks of
tinnitus, and gives me an inhaling apparatus that shall reach, he says,
the middle ear.
April 25.--The apparatus is of no use. The sound is now become like
the booming of a great church bell. It reminds me of the bell at St.
Lambart on that terrible day of last August.
April 26.--I could swear that it is the bell of St. Lambart that I hear all
the time. They rang it as the procession came out of the church.
The man's writing, at first firm enough, begins to straggle unevenly
over the page at this point. The entries show that he became convinced
that he heard the bell of St. Lambart's Church ringing, though (as he
knew better than most men) there had been no bell and no church at St.
Lambart's since the summer of 1914. There was no village either--the
whole place was a rubbish-heap.
Then the unfortunate Karl Heinz was beset with other troubles.
May 2.--I fear I am becoming ill. To-day Joseph Kleist, who is next to
me in the trench, asked me why I jerked my head to