The Yellow Dove/Prelude
THE YELLOW DOVE
PRELUDE
RIFTS of sullen gray in the dirty veil of vapor beyond the reaches of dunes, where the sea in long lines of white, like the ghostly hosts of lost regiments, clamored along the sand.…
A soughing wind, a shrieking of sea-birds, audible in pauses between the faraway crackle of rifle-fire and the deep reverberations of artillery—familiar music to ears trained by long listening. A shrill scream of flying shrapnel, a distant crash and then a tense hush.…
Silence—nearly, but not quite. A sound so small as to be almost lost in the echoes of the clamor, an impact upon the air like the tapping of the wings of an insect against one’s ear-drum, a persistent staccato note which no other noise could still, borne with curious distinctness upon some aërial current of the fog bank.
And yet this tiny sound had a strange effect upon the desolate scene, for in a moment, as if they had been sown with dragon’s teeth, the sand dunes suddenly vomited forth armed men who ran hither and thither, their hands to their ears, peering aloft as though trying to pierce the mystery of the skies.
“The blighter! It’s ’im agayn.”
“’Im! ’Oo’s ’im, I’d like to arsk?”
“Stow yer jaw, cawn’t yer ’ear? Ole Yaller-belly, agayn.”
The sounds were now clearly audible and to the south a series of rapid detonations shivered the air.
“There goes ‘Johnny look in the air.’ Cawn’t get ’im, though. ’Strewth! ’E’s a cool one—’e is!”
A hoarse order rang out from the trenches behind them—and the men ran for cover. The fog lifted a little and a shaft of light touched the leaden gray of the sea like the sheen on a dirty gun-barrel. The nearer high-angle guns were speaking now—fruitlessly, for the sounds seemed to come from directly overhead. The fog lifted again and a shaft of pale sunlight shot across the line of entrenchments.
“There ’e is, not wastin’ no time—’e ayn’t.”
“Yus. But they’re arfter ’im. There comes hyviashun. O ’ell!”
The expletive in a final tone of disgust for the fog had fallen again, completely obliterating the air-craft and its pursuers.
“’Oo’s Yaller-belly?” asked a smooth-faced youth who still wore the sallow of London under his coat of windburn.
“You’re one of the new lot, ayn’t yer? You’ll know by soon ’oo Yaller-belly is, won’t ’e, Bill? Pow! That’s ’im—them sharp ones.”
“Garn!” said the one called Bill. “’E never ’its anythink but the dirt an’ ’e cawn’t ’elp that.”
“’Tayn’t ’cos ’e don’t try. ’Ear ’em? Nice droppin’s fer a dove, ayn’t they?”
“Dove?” said the newcomer.
“Yus. Tubs the swine calls ’em”
“Tawb, yer blighter.”
“Tub, I says. Whenever troops is moving’, ’e’s always abaht—jus’ drops dahn hinformal-like, out o’ nowhere”
“And cawn’t they catch ’im?”
“Catch ’im—? Bly me—not they! A thousand ’orse-power, they say ’e ’as—flies circles round hour hair squad like they was a lot o’ bloomink captivatin’ balloons.”
“But the ’igh-hangles?”
“Moves too fast—’ere an’ gone agayn, afore you can fill yer cutty. They do say ’as ’ow when Yaller-belly comes, there’s sure to be big doin’s along the front.”
“Aye,” said Bill. “When we was dahn at Copenhagen”
“Compayn, gran’pop”
“Aw! Wot’s the hodds? Dahn at Copenhagen, ’e flew abaht same as ’e’s doin’ now.”
Bill paused.
“And what happened?”
“You’ll ’ave to arsk Sir John abaht that, me son,” finished the other dryly.
“We was drillin’ rear-guard actions, wasn’t we, Bill?”
“Aye. We was drilled, right, left, an’ a bit in the middle.” Bill rose and spat down the wind. “Tyke it from me,” he finished, with a glance aloft through the mist, “there’ll be somethin’ happen between ’ere an’ Wipers afore the week is hout”
“Aye—the ’earse, Bill.”
“Wot ’earse?” asked the newcomer again.
“The larst time ’e kyme—down Wipers-way. There was a lull in the firin’ an’ ’tween the lines o’ trenches where the dead Dutchies was, comes a ’earse—a real ’earse with black ’orses, plumes an’ all. We thought ’twas some general they’d come to fetch and hup we stands hout o’ the trenches, comp’ny after comp’ny, caps off, all respec’ful-like. This ’ere ’earse comes along slow an’ mournful, black curt’ins an’ all flappin’ in the wind an’ six of the blighters a-marchin’ heads down behind it. They wheels up abreast of our comp’ny near a mound o’ earth and stops, an’ while we was lookin’—the front side of that there by vee-Hicle drops out an’ a machine-gun begins slippin’ it into us pretty as you please. ’Earse—that’s wot it was—a ’earse! an’ it jolly well made a funeral out o’ B Company.”
“Gawd!” said the newcomer. “And Yaller-belly?”
“I ayn’t sayin’ nothin’ abaht ’im. You wait, that’s all.”
The sounds of firing rose and fell again. The fog thickened and the last crashes of the high-angle guns echoed out to sea, but the rush of the flying planes continued. Three machines there were by the sound of them, but one grew ever more distinct until the sounds of the three were merged into one. Closer it came, until like the blast of a storm down a mountainside, a huge shadow fell across the dunes and was gone amid a scattering of futile shots into the fog which might as well have been aimed at the moon.
Bill, the prescient, straightened and peered through the fog toward the flying plane.
“A ’earse,” he muttered. “That’s wot it was—a ’earse.”