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Randall and the River of Time
by C.S. Forester
Chapter One
Randall was asleep on his chicken-wire bed in the company headquarters dugout. He was sleeping dreamlessly and without any jerky movements, for he was young and had not as yet been worn down by war. In sleep he could forget his peril and his fatigue, live unconscious through some hours of his stay in the line, so that when he should awake he would be by that much nearer to the time of his relief. Compared with hundreds of thousands of men in the line he was at this moment supremely fortunate; sleep was more to be desired than gold or diamonds, for its own sake as well as for the oblivion it brought, because in the line it was never possible to sleep enough, and as the days wore by men were more and more beset by lack of sleep, growing more harassed and more weary, yearning for uninterrupted rest as a man cast away in an open boat might yearn for a drink of water. Randall had been on duty until midnight, and now he was permitted to sleep until an hour before dawn; the shell-bursts were far enough away to make the earth of the dugout tremble only faintly, the machine-gun fire was hardly audible, so that he could lie there and renew himself in his nineteen-year-old innocence.
An invisible river was bearing him along, an immense flow of events to which he hardly gave a thought even when awake; the microscopic life carried in a river does not think about being swept along by the water around it. But rivers do not run at the same speed all the way from source to mouth; there are long tranquil reaches where the current is hardly perceptible, and yet, inevitably, the river reaches a cataract, and tumbles wildly down the slope, roaring against the rocks, and whirling in apparently unpredictable eddies. In August 1914 the river had tumbled over just such a cataract, and now in August 1917 Randall was being dashed down it, conscious of the insane confusion about him, conscious of the quickened current, yet far more acutely aware of the tiny minor eddies in which he himself was involved, in which he was whirled about — eddies which meant life or death, danger or discomfort or momentary tranquility. All mankind was hurtling over that cataract, hundreds of millions of struggling protozoa, distributed all across the stream, some flung with the foam against the rocks, some hurried on in quieter, deeper channels. Randall was one single protozoon among those hundreds of millions; the river might continue in its tumultuous course until it emerged again into a placid pool, but whether Randall was still with it would depend on the coincidences of the individual course along which he was being directed.
The orderly woke him and the blessed unconsciousness came to an end. Randall struggled up, breathing the foul air of the dugout; even before he was fully conscious he was automatically checking the items of his equipment, revolver, helmet, gas mask, notebook. The other subaltern, off duty up to now, appeared in the gloomy candlelit shadows — Cross, his name was; among the other shadows the shadow of the chin strap of his helmet gave a queer distortion to his face, and his scrubby little black mustache made him slightly comic. He made a sound which might possibly have been interpreted as 'good morning', and Randall echoed it no more understandably. This was no time for frivolity.
"Captain's at Post 12, sir," said the orderly, putting the mugs of tea on the table. " 'E went out 'alf an hour ago."
Nobody answered him; Cross picked up his mug of tea and drank from it noisily. They had to sip slowly, as the liquid was steaming hot — marvelously grateful at that hour, after that night. It was strong, it was thick with condensed milk and sugar, and its heat was in pleasant contrast to the feel of Randall's damp clothes against his body. Cross held his wrist watch in the light of the candle.
"My God!" he said, and slammed down his mug on the table and started for the dugout steps.
Randall followed him; it was black night outside still, raining heavily, and after the stuffy dugout the air struck chill. It was the gloomiest moment of the day, this period just before stand-to. Cross growled something unintelligible again, and started off along the trench to the right, the duckboards sloshing under his feet. Randall was mildly piqued. He was senior to Cross; in fact at the moment with one officer away on a course and another recently a casualty he was second in command of the company. Cross might have shown him a little deference, might even have waited to hear which way he intended to go. The headquarters dugout was beside the junction of three communication trenches, and Cross had gone off along the trench that led to No. 11 post, and only to there. Battalion orders laid it down that at stand-to an officer should be on duty at No. 11; company orders did not name the officer, and it was Randall's responsibility as second in command to see in the absence of the captain that there was an officer at the post, allotting for the duty any one of the officers available. This morning the choice lay only between Cross and himself, and he might well have chosen to go there, sending Cross to No. 9. No. 11 was desirable, because the communication trench that led there was dry and easy, and because it was out of the usual route of inspecting officers. Cross always had his eye on No. 11, and this morning he could easily plead that he was justified in taking it for granted that he would be detailed to No. 11 as the only officer available besides the second in command. It was just like Cross to take advantage of a loophole like that, and Randall, standing at the junction and hearing Cross's footsteps dying away, toyed for an instant with the notion of calling him back and saying what he thought of such behavior, but he was easygoing enough to let it pass. Cross might as well go up into the comfortable isolation of No. 11, since he wanted to so badly; Randall philosophically set himself to pick his way along to No. 9.
It was still dark, and the rain was falling briskly. A duckboard reared up under his foot so that he slipped into the detestable mud; he recovered himself with a curse and stumbled on to identify himself when challenged as he entered the bay. And then it happened — the appalling noise, the vivid flashes, shouts in the darkness, the sharp crashing explosions of grenades — subsequent ones muffled, indicating that bombs were going off after being pitched into a dugout. Rifleshots; machine guns raving, flares going up all along the line. It was only a matter of seconds before the artillery caught the alarm as the gunners ran to their guns; up and down the line could be heard the din as if a thousand doors were being slammed, and shells were flying overhead and bursting in volcanoes of mud. The Germans had raided No. 11 post. That much was evident instantly. No one could tell at the moment whether it was the beginning of a general attack or not, which was why the flares were going up, and why nervous machine gunners were traversing their fire back and forth along the line. Before the question could be decided Randall and the company commander were gathering men for a counterattack, Randall shaking off his sleepy stupidity as he listened to his captain's orders bellowed through the din; his heart was pounding with excitement as he looked round him in the light of the flares at the mud-daubed men crowding into the bay. Then he started off down the trench, revolver in hand, bayonet man and bomber preceding him, back to the junction, up the other communication trench. The din was still going on up and down the line, shaking the earth; but ahead of them, as they went round one traverse and another, there was silence. Not silence round the next bend; groans. Dead men and wounded men, lying in the bottom of the trench, and fainter groans, a chorus of faint groans, coming up from the mouth of the dugout beyond. A flare which went up near enough to light their path — paler than usual in the growing light — showed them a dead German lying with his face on the firing step, and the raindrops glistened in the flare as they fell. There were only dead and wounded in the post; the garrison had been wiped out.
It had been a well-planned raid; Randall, standing on the firing step and peering through a muddy periscope, could see the path which had been cut through the wire, and with his mind's eye could see the attack in the darkness — the stealthy approach, the cutting of the wire under cover of the rain, the final crawl through the mud, and then the rush, the scaling of the parapet, the bombs hurled from traverse to traverse, the bombs flung into the dugout, the seizure of half a dozen dazed prisoners, and the instant retreat, all neatly carried out in that hour before stand-to when vitality is at its lowest and the senses least alert. Randall had taken part in more than one such raid himself. Jerry knew his business, he told himself, as he busied himself with sending back a runner with the news, and posting fresh sentries, and then seeing what could be done for the wounded.
There was enough light now to see clearly, while the rain still fell remorselessly, and with the coming of light men's fears were stilled so that the firing along the line died away. And there was light, too, to see Cross — lying diagonally across the trench with his arms spread out and his head propped up against the revetment. The position meant that his helmet was rakishly tilted awry; there was abandon in the spread of his arms, as if Cross had been frozen in an attitude of drunken mirth; the idea of drunken merriment was accentuated by the gleam of Cross's teeth. But the teeth were in the side of Cross's face, where his cheek had been torn away, making a large mouth that caused his real mouth to look ridiculously small and out of place, especially with the ridiculous little bristling mustache on the upper lip. Cross's trench coat was dark with mud and rain, but it was darker still in patches over the thighs and belly where the blood had poured from his wounds.
So Cross was dead, he had to be buried, his possessions packed up and a letter written to his mother. But it might not have been Temporary Second Lieutenant Albert Cross's name which appeared in the casualty list. It might have been Temporary First Lieutenant Charles Randall's. It might easily have been, as Randall well understood. The result of a dozen chances had sent Cross up to No. 11 post, and to sudden death.
Randall had the resilience and the carelessness of youth. It was a long time before the incident, and a hundred, a thousand other incidents, began to show evident effect. But in time he began to wonder what would be the result of anything he decided to do, before he did it — that was the point, he began to worry before he did it. Before he turned to the right or to the left there was a moment of wondering whether he would be killed if he made the wrong choice. In certain situations there was some element of calculation in such wonderings; when in a dugout, making up his mind whether he should go out to the latrine now or later, he could make a guess as to the possibility of a sudden German strafe, and as to the moment for such a strafe, but there were also times when he would debate about changing his shirt or his boots — there were pros and cons, but none of them connected with German shells and bullets. And once or twice there were times when he had to force himself to decide which puttee to put on first, when he had to bully himself into admitting that whether he put on the right before the left or the left before the right it would not affect the aim of a German artilleryman three miles away.
