The Tenth Man

The Century Magazine

January 1919

By "CENTURION

 

 

Six officers, each of them young in years, but incredibly old in experience, sat over their port one summer night in the

mess of the The hospitality of the Downshires has been famous; a silver loving-cup, a tribute from the Green Jackets, was

there, in the middle of the table-cloth, to remind us of guest nights that are gone never to return, festive nights when,

after the mess-sergeant had withdrawn and the cloth wasas removed, the mess president solemnly locked the door and threw the

key out of the window. That solemnity had been part of the ritual of the Downshires for two hundred years; in these days,

when all things have passed away, it is forgotten, for there is no one left to remember it. Except one. He sat apart in a

morose silence. His eyelids twitched incessantly, his pupils were dilated, and when he passed the decanter his hand shook,

which is a way shell-shock often takes one. Letcher's restless eyes roved from the leopard on the right of the entrance-

door to the buck and ibex on the left until they finally came to rest in a fixed stare on the loving-cup in front of him.

Of the other five of us, four were honorary members of the mess, temporary officers of other units posted to the depot for

an army "cure." These four had endured more service in the field in three years than the regular officers of the old army

were accustomed to see in a lifetime, and it had left its mark upon them all. One had a pallor like anemia, the skin of

another was as yellow as a piece of chamois leather, a third had cardiac trouble and that hint of premature asthma which

betrays the effects of gas. The fourth had been "knocked out" by a H. E. shell on the Somme. He was under thirty, but his

hair at the temples and behind the ears was already white. But the mind has its wounds as well as the body, and the

stigmata that they leave behind them, though less visible to the eye, are indelible. These men's minds were seared with

memories, and the wounds of the soul never heal.

"Damn that bugler! He does it every night." Letcher uttered that same malediction at the same hour every evening; the

others let it pass like an expiration. The night was too hot for protest. A moist heat hung over the barrack-square
as though the earth were perspiring with fever; the candles drooped in the silver sconces like the stalks of dying lilies,

with an efflorescence of melting wax; the sweat ran down our faces, and each man exhaled into an atmosphere that was as
close and stifling as that of a gas-mask. The corners of the room were dark; the electric light had been switched off, for

Rutherford's eyes were still sore from the sun and a sharp touch of dengue fever in the East African gubha. Silence fell'
upon the room like sleep as the notes of the "Last Post" died away upon the barrack-square. The buzz of an infatuated moth,

as it danced round the candles, was as distinct as the ticking of a clock. Suddenly it "crashed" to the table-cloth, and
lay there with a convulsive movement. "His number 's up," said Tracy as he gazed at the dying insect. "Some scientific

Johnny calls them the minor horrors of war. Flies, I mean. He hadn't been in Gallipoli. The Turk slew his thousands,
but the fly his tens of thousands. Dysentery. My bully-beef was black with them."

"Wait till you meet the jigger," said Rutherford. "It burrows under your toenails; lays its eggs there. After its

accouchement you get twinges like the gout, only worse."

"The most loathy thing in Mess-pot was the water," interjected Penruddocke.

"It was a case of Water, water, everywhere. Nor any drop to drink. Every drop of it was rank poison. And no wonder. I

remember when I was evacuated down the Tigris after Ctesiphon, our dhow passed scores of swollen corpses. They were chucked

into the river, and on the third day they rose again, inflated with gas like a balloon. A swollen body 's a beastly thing.

It looks like a man who 's died first and got blind drunk afterward. Look at that ruddy candle."

A taper was drooping into a note of interrogation, and the hot grease dripped on to the table-cloth. He stretched out a

hand to straighten it.

"The Wiltshire rustics call that a winding- sheet," remarked Tracy, languidly.

"They say it always means a death in the village. They 're a superstitious lot."

"It 's a curious thing," said Penruddocke "that though we 've all seen hundreds of dead men, we 've never seen a ghost. Out

there, I mean. At least I have n't. And I never met any fellow who had. All the spooks of these spiritualist cranks seem to

be on homeleave."

"There 's nothing curious about that," snapped Letcher. "The trenches are about the last place a dead man would want to

return to. He wouldn't be such a bloody fool."

"Well, you won't believe what I 'm going to tell you—" began Meredith, a quiet, imperturbable fellow who never spoke except

to some purpose.

"No, I shan't," interjected Letcher; "I never do. Damn this heat! Pass the syphon."

"But it 's true, all the same," continued Meredith, quietly. "I 've never told this story before—"

"Which is more than you can say of any other story of yours," snarled Letcher.

"Dicky, Dicky, dry up," said Tracy.

"Don't be so cross. If you don't behave yourself, I shall put you to bed. It 's time little boys went to by-by." Letcher

was six feet two, and topped Tracy, who was a welterweight, by eight inches. Which may have accounted for the fact that

Tracy was the only man who could do anything with him.

"And I hope it won't go outside this room," pursued Meredith, dispassionately.

"My C. O. didn't want it talked about. You know a C.O. doesn't exactly like people jawing about his battalion having got

the wind-up. One never hears the end of it."

The others nodded, and lit their cigarettes.

"Well, it was near Fromelles, in March of last year. We had just taken over a new bit of the line, and half the battalion

were new drafts. We were a Welsh regiment. There'd been nothing doing in that part of the line except a strafing with

'Minnies,' and the fire-trench had been thinly held. My company had only one platoon on a front of eight hundred yards,

distributed over four posts; I kept the other three platoons in support. On the first night I sent these three platoons up

over the top in workingparties. It was their first experience of noman's-land, and they were curious. Not windy, but just

curious. The night was black as a hat. The Boche suddenly sent up a star-shell, and the men stood still as statues, which,

as you know, is the only thing to do. All except one or two, who moved. They never moved again. Then night descended once

more like a drop-curtain. But that peep had been quite enough for the drafts. They 'd seen hundreds of bodies lying out

there in the rank grass. They'd been there for months, their uniforms bleached by sun and rain, loose and shrunken on their

bones like the clothes of an old man. They were Australians, eight hundred of them. They 'd attacked, and been caught in

no-man's-land by machine-guns, and no stretcher-bearers or burying-party had ever been able to get near them. So
they had lain there till they died and rotted.

The rats had done the rest. The new drafts did n't quite like it. I heard one of the platoon-sergeants next morning talking

to them like a father and explaining
to them gently, but firmly, that war was quite a bloody business and the sooner they accepted the fact the better. They

hadn't exactly got the wind-up,-^they were a tough lot; Welsh miners in fact, and they were afraid of nothing alive,—but

they had the civilian's unfamiliarity with the dead, and, as you know, one does n't get
over that all at once."

"The words of the wise are as goads," said Penruddocke. "You 're right, my son. It all depends on whether you 're used to

the point of view. I 've got accustomed to
seeing scores of dead men at the front without turning a hair, but when I came home on leave and saw my old uncle laid out

in his coffin with a face like wax and
not the trace of a wound, it gave me quite a shiver. It seems so unnatural to die in your bed."

"Well, that 's the converse of my proposition," resumed Meredith. "It seemed so unnatural to my fellows to die anywhere

else, and especially in such a multitude.
However, the mood soon passed, and they slept like dormice the next day, after the night's shift. On the second night I

went my rounds of the front-line trench, visiting each post in turn with my runner and my batman, and found everything O.

K. I 'd better explain the contfiguration of that trench, as it has a good deal to do with my story. It was traversed at

intervals, but the intervening sectors were not straight in places; they curved so that you could not see the whole length

of them. Each post was in charge of a corporal and a section; the intervening stretches of trench were not manned, but were

visited irregularly during the night by a 'duck-board patrol.' At one point the trench crossed a shallow stream that ran at

an angle to it, and this gap in the parapet was filled up with 'gooseberries'— big balls of barbed-wire; you know what I

mean. Just before 'standto,' a ration-party of ten men used to come up the fire-trench carrying 'dixies' of hot
tea and so on for the men at the posts. Well, just before dawn, as I was visiting
Number 2 Post, the corporal in charge said to me:

"'Have you seen the Australian, sir?'
And then, seeing my look of astonishment, he added, 'Some of the men say they saw an Australian walking up the duckboards.'

"'Then some of the men have been talking through their hat,' I replied. 'There 's no Australian within ten miles of here.'

No more there was, except the
eight hundred dead ones on the other side of the parapet, who did n't count. "'That's what I tells them, sir,' replied the

corporal. "Half an hour later I encountered four men carrying a man on a stretcher down the communication-trench.
'"What's this?' I said.
"'Number ten of the ration-party, sir,' they answered. 'We found him lying on
his face on the duck-boards. I think he must have had a fit.'
"They took him to the battalion aidpost. The M. O. took one glance at him.
" 'He 's dead,' he said; 'but the body 's still warm.'

"He examined it, but could find no trace of a wound, not even a bruise.
There was no froth on the lips, but the face was very white.

" 'Hum!' said the M. O., 'if he's had a fit, I don't know the name of it. Heart disease, I suppose.'

"A battalion M. O. hasn't much time for post-mortem work, as you know, and the coroner's writ does n't run in the trenches;

a M. O. 's too busy with the
living to think of the dead. The body was handed over to a burying-party, after the man's identity disk and pay-book had

been removed, and we thought no more
about it.

"The third night passed oS as usual, though it was, if anything, blacker than before. You could have cut the darkness with

a knife. The men of Number i platoon
were posted, visited, and relieved— the usual routine. When dawn broke, the rum ration was served out. I had seen the

ration-party go up about half an hour
before, ten in all; the tenth man's place had been taken by another, and he was already forgotten. You 've no time to

remember out there. Is it not so ? As I was
passing Number i Post, I heard the corporal arguing with the men.

'I tell you there ain't no blinking Australian,' he was saying. 'They 're as dead as Australian
mutton.' The men must have have been 'seeing things' again, and I felt a bit shifty about it. I was about to intervene and

tell them not to make fools of themselves when the platoon commander, a chap named Wrottesley, came up to me with his

platoon sergeant. He asked me to follow him along the trench, and when we were out of
hearing of the men, he said to me in a low voice

'I've just found something, sir,' and as we turned the corner of a traverse he pointed to the duck-boards ahead of us. A

man lay face downward. His helmet had
slipped, and covered the back of his head like a great toadstool; his hands were convulsed, and his legs spread out; an

overturned
dixie lay by his side. I went up to him and turned him over. He was dead.

" 'He's Number 1O of the ration-party, sir,' said the platoon-sergeant, 'and he ain't got a scratch.'

"I had the body sent down to the Aid- Post and I paraded the ration-party. None of them had heard or seen anything. They

were pretty scared, especially the ninth
man. I then ordered Wrottesley to muster his platoon. I questioned them closely, but none of them could tell m.e anything

except one man, who said he 'd seen 'the
Australian.'

"'I seen him, sir,' he said, 'but I never heard him; his feet never made a sound.'
"I turned on him pretty sharply and asked him what the hell he meant by talking like that. It was a mistake, for after that

I could n't get a word out of them.

"I went to the Aid-Post. The M. O. seemed puzzled. He had stripped the body naked. It lay there in the dug-out, gleaming in

the cold, gray dawn.
"'He may have died of shock,' he said, 'but it looks to me more like a case of internal hemorrhage.'

"I couldn't make it out. One's heard of murder in the trenches, of course, a private with a grudge against a sergeant,a

quarrel of two men about a girl in billets, a homicidal objection to another man's voice or his laugh or his squint. It 's

very easy to lose one's sense of proportion out there. But this case was too
damned impersonal to admit of that sort of explanation. A fellow may have a grievance against a particular man, but it 's

difficult to conceive of a grievance against a mere figure. No one knew beforehand who would be Number lO in the ration-

party, and it was the tenth man who had been'outed' each time. I guessed there would n't be much competition in that

ration-party the next night for tenth place, and that Number 10 would tread pretty close on the heels of Number 9. Of

course
they were generally strung over about a hundred yards, each man ten yards behind the other, to distribute
the risks from a 'Minnie.'

"'D' you know the symptoms of an epidermic of cold feet? I mean when your company 's got the wind-up. Unpleasant, is n't

it? And very catching. The men, instead of sleeping in their dug-outs, hung about all day in little clusters, talking to
one another, and suddenly drying up as I came along. I knew what they were talking about. They eyed me furtively as though

they 'd been suddenly caught in some conspiracy. I knew how they felt. You see, I 'm half a Welshman myself, enough of one

to understand their temperament, but not enough of one to share it, for which I 'm not sorry. If there 's an explosion in

the pit, Welsh miners will tumble over one another when the call comes for a rescue-party, and face the firedamp
without a moment's hesitation. Butif one of 'em dreams a dream of a fall of stone from the roof of the seam, or sees a
'corpse candle' overnight, nothing will induce him to go down the shaft the next
day. They 've got superstition in the marrow of their bones. Their very hymns
are enough to make your flesh creep; they are all in the minor key. They
used to sing them in the trenches, weird dirges like '0 fryniau Caersalem, ceir
gweled' or something like that. But there was mighty little singing that day.
I did n't like the look of things at all.

"As the day drew to its close, came a change in the weather. The wind died down, the sky turned to the color of dirty wool,

and the air grew very cold. It looked as if it might snow. I gave Wrottesley orders to double the patrols, and determined

to keep a sharp lookout myself. After I had made these dispositions, I went to Battalion H. Q. to report them to the C. O.

As I was coming away, the M. O., a quizzical devil with a bullethead and hard as iron,—he 'd been a
famous Welsh three-quarter in his day,— said to me:
" 'I say, Meredith, do any of your men hat-pins?'
" 'Lord, no,' I replied; 'nor powderpuffs. What are you getting at?'
" 'I '11 tell you to-morrow,' he said;'but it 's my opinion there 's something in the Australian theory, after all.' I

looked at him.

" 'Have you got the wind-up, too, Doctor?' I said. 'I did n't know you believed
in ghosts.'

" 'I don't,' he retorted, 'but I do believe in devils.' And with that he turned away.

I thought him a damned fool, and said so '"As the night wore on, I went round the whole front of eight hundred yards twice,

but saw nothing. I carried my revolver in my hand, ready to fire 'double action,' and I had my runner and my batman with

me. The men were very jumpy, and I was challenged every time by every man I met, let alone the sentries. I made up my mind

to go round a third time a few minutes before the ration-party came up. I had already posted a man at the head of the

communication-trench with strict orders that they were to be stopped and to halt there to await further instructions. It

was now about six o'clock in the morning, within half an hour or so of dawn. As I pulled aside the vermorel the sky,

something soft as lamb's wool, but very cold, gently touched my cheek. It was a snowflake. In a few seconds it was followed

by others. Soon everything in front of one was veiled by a speckled curtain like a moving screen of muslin. The incessant

weaving of this great white curtain, a warp without a woof, woven upon a loom without a shuttle, affected me strangely.

Motion without sound is always uncanny, and the snowflakes fell like shadows and not less noiselessly. You know how snow

seems to numb one's brain? It 's like an anesthetic. "I purposed to vary my itinerary for my third round, deliberately and

of malice aforethought. Hitherto I had always gone my rounds from right to left, beginning with Number i Post. This time I
determined to reverse the order. I had visited Number 4 and Number 3 and had just reached Number 2 and been challenged,

when the corporal in charge let his rifle fall with a clatter. His teeth were chattering, and his hands shook as though he

were going to have a fit.

" 'My God!' he stuttered, looking down trench, 'it 's the Australian!'

"I could see nothing, but at that very moment I felt the duck-boards, which were continuous and covered with resilient
wire-netting, give under my feet as though a movement some way off was being communicated along them. It was a stealthy

tremor, motion without noise. I could hear no footfalls. Then I heard a slight clink like the sound of side-arms.

The next moment I saw the figure of a tall Australian coming noiselessly round the bend of the trench. I can't deny that an

unpleasantly cold feeling ran down my spine, and for a moment I stood absolutely inert, with my revolver hanging loose in
my hand. Before I had time to raise it, my batman, a stout little chap, was down on one knee and had the butt of his rifle

up to his shoulder. There was a loud report and a smell of burnt cordite. The 'Australian' stopped, did a kind of halfturn,
and suddenly fell forward on his face. I rushed up, with my batman at my heels, and flashing my torch on to the body,—for

it was a body, and damnably material,—I turned it over. The man had his hand clutched over his heart; it was a fair

bull's-eye. Even as I looked at him, it struck me that his face was not that of an Australian at all. There was nothing

aquiline about it; it was broad and flat. He seemed to have a lot of clothes on him. I tore open his tunic. Underneath
was the field-gray uniform of a Prussian officer. 'Dot and carry one,' I said to myself, and I went through his pockets,

tail-pockets first. The Hun always carries his papers there. As I was looking through the contents, my batman suddenly

said, 'Lord! look at his wrist, sir!'

And then I saw that he had a long piece of steel, thin as a knitting-needle, but sharply pointed, strapped to his wrist.

And on his feet he wore a pair of rubber shoes. With those shoes a man could pad along like a cat.

"It didn't take much more to work it all out. We followed his tracks in the snow with some difficulty, and traced them to

the place where the trench crossed the stream. He must have entered by that gap despite the gooseberries. No doubt he
then concealed himself in a disused sap and waited for the ration-party to pass until he sprang out on the last man and,

putting his hand over his mouth, stabbed him through the heart from behind. As a matter of fact, his second victim had not

yet been buried, and the M. O. afterward showed me a tiny puncture just to the left of the spinal cord, so small that it

looked more like the bite of a flea than a wound. That Hun was a dirty thug, but I must
say he had a nerve."
"Yes," said Tracy after a pause, "but I don't quite see the point of it all." "I know what you mean," said Meredith. "Why

should a Boche officer take all those risks merely to stab one poor devil of a ration-carrier in the back? I'11 tell
you why, my friend. You 've been fighting the Turk in Gallipoli, and the Turk's a gentleman more or less. He's a clean

fighter. But the Hun doesn't confine himself to carnal weapons, and he 's not exactly a perfect, gentle knight. Do you

remember that passage in their War Book where their general staff says that to down
the other fellow you must smash him 'spiritually' as well as physically? 'Terrorisms'
I think they call it in their ugly lingo. I 've often thought of it. Well,
that Boche was trying to put- the wind-up among our fellows. He knew we had
only just taken over, he knew the Welsh temperament, and he knew we were full
of new drafts. How did he know? You 've not served in France, or you wouldn't
ask that. But I admit it used to puzzle us ourselves in the early days till we discovered
their telephonic tricks of eavesdropping—amplifiers, buried cables, and all the rest of it. The whole forward
area 's a perfect whispering-gallery. Our signaling companies have countered all
that now. But just think of it all—every psychological detail worked out like a plan
of operations! Yes, the Hun 's a devil. Isn't it hot? Pass the soda-water, please."

There was a long pause.

"All the same," said Letcher at length, subdued by the palliative of Meredith's quiet recital, "your story does n't refute

my proposition; it confirms it. The dead do not return. They don't want to." And he stared at the empty chairs in the
mess.