Tramp in Armour Read Online Free PDF Page B

the rest of us, and since you've wasted five minutes gassing, your next break period will be ten minutes instead of fifteen. Give Reynolds a hand with that boulder at once.'
    He turned away and went back to sit on the tank hull, checking his watch to see whether his fifteen minutes was nearly up, putting his hands flat on either side of his body as he watched Davis start work again. Beside him Penn grinned and whispered, 'He thinks he can be Bolshie now we're on our own.' But Barnes made no reply and his face was grim. It had been a close run thing. They only needed one rotten apple in the barrel for the infection to spread, and the most contagious infection of all is fear. Outwardly, Barnes remained perfectly confident, his every word and gesture indicating clearly that it was only a matter of some hard slogging before they reached the outside world, but inwardly he didn't like the look of it. They were marooned in the centre of a battlefield and the war could rage backwards and forwards over the front for weeks as it had done a quarter of a century earlier. While that went on there would be a certain shortage of people to go round digging out buried tunnels, even supposing that the idea seemed important to them. There was no real problem of air - the tunnel was long enough for them to breathe inside it for weeks - but their water and food supplies would only last for several days, to say nothing of Bert's batteries. And when the batteries went they would be plunged into darkness, which would make working on the wall face almost impossible. For the first few hours of their entombment Barnes had mainly fretted about being cut off from his troop, but as the hours passed and they entered on a new day he found his mind beginning to think like Davis', and the analogy of the mine disaster was only too apt, which was why he had shut up Davis at the earliest possible moment. He glanced at his watch again, nodded to Penn, and went forward to pick up his shovel.
    Twenty-four hours later, in the evening of Saturday May 18th, they had removed an incredibly large mass of rubble and rock, but still the wall face was intact. They worked now by the light of the oil lamp which Barnes always carried inside the tank, and the reason for this was not only to save Bert's headlights: Barnes foresaw that later, when morale was sagging, switching on the headlights again might just keep them going a while longer, but he kept the real reason for this decision to himself. In the middle of the afternoon there had almost been a fatal accident when part of the wall suddenly came away and slid forward of its own momentum. Only Reynolds' speed and strength had saved Davis when he had grabbed the gunner's arm and hauled him sideways out of the path of the tumbling boulders. It was a measure of their anxiety that even when Davis had just experienced this shock he was the first to recover, running away from Reynolds to gaze up at the centre of the wall in desperate hope, his voice hoarse and strained.
    'Maybe we're through now.'
    'Keep back. I'll see,' snapped Barnes.
    Gingerly, he had climbed up the rubble slope, expecting at any moment a fresh fall, but when he had reached the rock face and pushed it was like leaning against the side of a fortress. So they had started again, Barnes and Penn working furiously with their shovels to remove the fresh rubble so that the other two could reach the rock face with their crowbar. It was just after seven o'clock in the evening when Penn made his remark during their rest period. Barnes sat alongside him on the tank hull, watching Reynolds prising out a fresh boulder while Davis sought to give extra leverage by pulling with his bare hands.
    'It's funny, but ever since we've been in here we haven't heard any sound of the battle.'
    'We've probably driven them back a bit - besides, there wasn't so much going on this side of Etreux.'
    He left it at that, wondering why the obvious and macabre conclusion had not been drawn by