The colonel of the Here-We-Comes drew his breath sharply between his teeth. He did not regret the sending of the collie. It had been a move of stark military necessity. And there was an off chance that it might mean the saving of his whole command.
But the colonel was fond of Bruce, and it angered him to hear the frantic effort of the boche marksmen to down so magnificent a creature.
The bullets were spraying all about the galloping dog, kicking up tiny swirls of dust at his heels and in front of him and to either side.
Mahan, watching, with streaming eyes and blaspheming lips, recalled the French sergeant"s theory that Bruce bore a charmed life. And he prayed that Vivier might be right. But in his prayer was very little faith.
For under such a fusillade it seemed impossible that at least one highpower bullet should not reach the collie before the slope could be traversed. A fast-running dog is not an easy mark for a bullet--especially if the dog be a collie, with a trace of wolf--ancestry in his gait. A dog, at best, does not gallop straight ahead as does a horse. There is almost always a sidewise lilt to his run.
Bruce was still further aided by the sh.e.l.l-plowed condition of the hillside. Again and again he had to break his stride, to leap some sh.e.l.l-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. These erratic moves, and the nine-hundred-yard distance (a distance that was widening at every second) made the sharpshooters"
task anything but an exact science.
Mahan"s gaze followed the dog"s every step. Bruce had cleared more than three-fourths of the slope. The top-sergeant permitted himself the luxury of a broad grin.
"I"ll buy Vivier all the red-ink wine he can gargle, next pay-day!" he vowed. "He was dead right about the dog. No bullet was ever molded that can get--"
Mahan broke off in his exultation, with an explosive oath, as a new note in the firing smote upon his trained hearing.
"The swine!" he roared. "The filthy, unsportsmanly, dog-eating Prussian swine! They"re turning MACHINE-GUNS on him!"
In place of the intermittent rattle of rifleshots now came the purring cough of rapidfire guns. The bullets. .h.i.t the upper hillside in swathes, beginning a few yards behind the flying collie and moving upward toward him like a sweeping of an unseen scythe.
"That"s the wind-up!" groaned Mahan. "Lord, send me an even break against one of those Hun machinegunners some day! If--"
Again Mahan failed to finish his train of thought. He stared open-mouthed up the hill. Almost at the very summit, within a rod or two of the point where the crest would intervene between him and his foes, Bruce whirled in mid-air and fell p.r.o.ne.
The fast-following swaths of machine-gun bullets had not reached him.
But another German enemy had. From behind a heap of offal, on the crest, a yellow-gray dog had sprung, and had launched himself bodily upon Bruce"s flank as the unnoticing collie had flashed past him.
The a.s.sailant was an enormous and hyena-like German police-dog. He was one of the many of his breed that were employed (for work or food) in the German camps, and which used to sneak away from their hard-kicking soldier-owners to ply a more congenial trade as scavengers, and as seekers for the dead. For, in traits as well as in looks, the police-dog often emulates the ghoulish hyena.
Seeing the approaching collie (always inveterate foe of his kind), the police-dog had gauged the distance and had launched his surprise attack with true Teuton sportsmanship and efficiency. Down went Bruce under the fierce weight that crashed against his shoulder. But before the other could gain his coveted throat-grip, Bruce was up again. Like a furry whirlwind he was at the police-dog, fighting more like a wolf than a civilized collie--tearing into his opponent with a maniac rage, snapping, slashing; his glittering white fangs driving at a dozen vulnerable points in a single second.
It was as though Bruce knew he had no time to waste from his life-and-death mission. He could not elude this enemy, so he must finish him as quickly as possible.
"Give me your rifle!" sputtered Mahan to the soldier nearest him. "I"ll take one potshot at that Prussian cur, before the machine-guns get the two of "em. Even if I hit Bruce by mistake, he"d rather die by a Christian Yankee-made bullet than--"
Just then the scythelike machine-gun fire reached the hillcrest combatants. And in the same instant a sh.e.l.l smote the ground, apparently between them. Up went a geyser of smoke and dirt and rocks.
When the cloud settled, there was a deep gully in the ground where a moment earlier Bruce and the police-dog had waged their death-battle.
"That settles it!" muttered the colonel.
And he went to make ready for such puny defense as his men might hope to put up against the German rush.
While these futile preparations were still under way, terrific artillery fire burst from the Allied batteries behind the hill, shielding the Here-We-Come trenches with a curtain of fire whose lower folds draped themselves right unlovingly around the German lines. Under cover of this barrage, down the hill swarmed the Allied reserves!
"How did you get word?" demanded the astonished colonel of the Here-We-Comes, later in the day.
"From your note, of course," replied the general he had questioned.
"The collie--old Bruce."
"Bruce?" babbled the colonel foolishly.
"Of course," answered the general. "Who else? But I"m afraid it"s the last message he"ll ever deliver. He came rolling and staggering up to headquarters--one ma.s.s of blood, and three inches thick with caked dirt. His right side was torn open from a sh.e.l.l-wound, and he had two machine-gun bullets in his shoulder. He"s deaf as a post, too, from sh.e.l.l-shock. He tumbled over in a heap on the steps of headquarters.
But he GOT there. That"s Bruce, all over. That"s the best type of collie, all over. Some of us were for putting him out of his misery with a shot through the head. We"d have done it, too, if it had been any other dog. But the surgeon-general waded in and took a hand in the game--carried Bruce to his own quarters. We left him working over the dog himself. And he swears Bruce will pull through!"
CHAPTER IV. When Eyes Were No Use
"Yes, it"s an easy enough trade to pick up," lectured Top-Sergeant Mahan, formerly of the regular army. "You"ve just got to remember a few things. But you"ve got to keep on remembering those few, all the time.
If you forget one of "em, it"s the last bit of forgetting you"re ever likely to do."
Top-Sergeant Mahan, of the mixed French-and-American regiment known as "Here-We-Come," was squatting at ease on the trench firing-step. From that professorial seat he was dispensing useful knowledge to a group of fellow-countrymen-newly arrived from the base, to pad the "Here-We-Come" ranks, which had been thinned at the Rache attack.
"What sort of things have we got to remember, Sergeant?" jauntily asked a lanky Missourian. "We"ve got the drill pretty pat; and the trench instructions and--"
"Gee!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mahan. "I had no idea of that! Then why don"t you walk straight ahead into Berlin? If you know all you say you do, about war, there"s nothing more for you to learn. I"ll drop a line to General Foch and suggest to him that you rookies be detailed to teach the game to us oldsters."
"I didn"t mean to be fresh," apologized the jaunty one. "Won"t you go ahead and tell us the things we need to remember?"
"Well," exhorted Mahan, appeased by the newcomer"s humility, "there aren"t so many of them, after all. Learn to duck, when you hear a Minnie grunt or a whizzbang cut loose; or a five-nine begin to whimper.
Learn not to bother to duck when the rifles get to jabbering--for you"ll never hear the bullet that gets you. Study the nocturnal habits of machine-guns and the ways of snipers and the right time not to play the fool. And keep saying to yourself: "The bullet ain"t molded that can get ME!" Mean it when you say it. When you"ve learned those few things, the rest of the war-game is dead easy."
"Except," timidly amended old Sergeant Vivier, the gray little Frenchman, "except when eyes are--are what you call it, no use."
"That"s right," a.s.sented Mahan. "In the times when eyes are no use, all rules fail. And then the only thing you can do is to trust to your Yankee luck. I remember--"
""When eyes are no use"?" repeated the recruit. "If you mean after dark, at night--haven"t we got the searchlights and the starsh.e.l.ls and all that?"
"Son," replied Mahan, "we have. Though I don"t see how you ever guessed such an important secret. But since you know everything, maybe you"ll just kindly tell us what good all the lights in the world are going to do us when the filthy yellow-gray fog begins to ooze up out of the mud and the sh.e.l.l-holes, and the filthy gray mist oozes down from the clouds to meet it. Fog is the one thing that all the war-science won"t overcome. A fogpenetrator hasn"t been invented yet. If it had been, there"d be many a husky lad living today, who has gone West, this past few years, on account of the fogs. Fog is the boche"s pet. It gives Fritzy a lovely chance to creep up or, us. It--"
"It is the helper of US, too," suggested old Vivier. "More than one time, it has kept me safe when I was on patrol. And did it not help to save us at Rache, when--"
"The fog may have helped us, one per cent, at Rache," admitted Mahan.
"But Bruce did ninety-nine per cent of the saving."
"A Scotch general?" asked the recruit, as Vivier nodded cordial affirmation of Mahan"s words, and as others of the old-timers muttered approval.
"No," contradicted Mahan. "A Scotch collie. If you were dry behind the ears, in this life, you wouldn"t have to ask who Bruce is."
"I don"t understand," faltered the rookie, suspicious of a possible joke.
"You will soon," Mahan told him. "Bruce will be here to-day. I heard the K.O. saying the big dog is going to be sent down with some dispatches or something, from headquarters. It"s his first trip since he was cut up so."
"I am saving him--this!" proclaimed Vivier, disgorging from the flotsam of his pocket a lump of once-white sugar. "My wife, she smuggle three of these to me in her last paquet. One I eat in my cafe noir; one I present to mon cher vieux, ce bon Mahan; one I keep for the grand dog what save us all that day."
"What"s the idea?" queried the mystified rookie. "I don"t--"
"We were stuck in the front line of the Rache salient," explained Mahan, eager to recount his dog-friend"s prowess. "On both sides our supports got word to fall back. We couldn"t get the word, because our telephone connection was knocked galley-west. There we were, waiting for a Hun attack to wipe us out. We couldn"t fall back, for they were peppering the hillslope behind us. We were at the bottom. They"d have cut us to ribbons if we"d shown our carca.s.ses in the open. Bruce was here, with a message he"d brought. The K.O. sent him back to headquarters for the reserves. The boche heavies and snipers and machine-guns all cut loose to stop him as he scooted up the hill. And a measly giant of a German police dog tried to kill him, too. Bruce got through the lot of them; and he reached headquarters with the SOS call that saved us. The poor chap was cut and gouged and torn by bullets and sh.e.l.l-sc.r.a.ps, and he was nearly dead from sh.e.l.l-shock, too. But the surgeon general worked over him, himself, and pulled him back to life.
He--"