



Produced by William McClain






TALES OF WAR

By Lord Dunsany


1918




The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood


He said: "There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you
would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills.

"When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between
sixteen and forty-five. They all went.

"They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like
that in Daleswood. Used to call the hop pickers foreigners, the ones
that come from London. They used to go past Daleswood, some of them,
every year, on their way down to the hop fields. Foreigners they used
to call them. Kept very much to themselves, did the Daleswood people.
Big woods all round them.

"Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They'd lost no more than
five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was
back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big
offensive started.

"It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok
Emmas going off all together and lifting the front trench clean out of
it; then a barrage behind, and the Boche pouring over in thousands.
'Our luck is holding good,' the Daleswood men said, for their trench
wasn't getting it at all. But the platoon on their right got it. And
it sounded bad too a long way beyond that. No one could be quite sure.
But the platoon on their right was getting it: that was sure enough.

"And then the Boche got through them altogether. A message came to
say so. 'How are things on the right?' they said to the runner. 'Bad,'
said the runner, and he went back, though Lord knows what he went back
to. The Boche was through right enough. 'We'll have to make a
defensive flank,' said the platoon commander. He was a Daleswood man
too. Came from the big farm. He slipped down a communication trench
with a few men, mostly bombers. And they reckoned they wouldn't see
any of them any more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
starlings.

"The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the
Boche went on, on the right: machine guns, of course. The barrage was
screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still
all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
There was the left platoon of the battalion. One doesn't bother,
somehow, so much about another battalion as one's own. One's own gets
sort of homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer
was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn't last long, as if it
would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn't notice the left.
Nothing to speak of.

"Then a runner came from the left. 'Hullo!' they said, 'How are
things over there?'

"'The Boche is through,' he said. 'Where's the officer?' 'Through!'
they said. It didn't seem possible. However did he do that? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.

"And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.

"They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.

"The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.

"The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant
they began to