THE COMPELLING HAND.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 6, Issue 288, 29 June 1917, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE COMPELLING HAND.

Tho idea had grown upon him steadily since one night, just before he had crossed the Channel, he had awakened from an uneasy dream concerning a game of chess in fhich he was not either of tiie players, but one of the occupants of the board.

The players, whoever they were, remained invisible, but every now and then a hand, on immense, over ihadbwing hand, appeared, and moved them in accordance with the acknowledged rules and he had been conscious of a sensation of extreme suspense c.te, in the progress of tiie tactics, he foresaw his own turn coming. It came. He was to be no longer inert and useless. The hand approached, he itated, touched him — and in the thrill of that touch he woke. But though the vision of the game had gone, the conviction that it was still proceeding, that lie still formed part of it, lingered. Unhindered, unperturbed, he went through his recurrent duties, shared in the very limited round of home-made pleasures behind the firing line, but occasionally wished that he might have been something more important, less restricted, than a mere pawn. Why give the pawn brain? and the power to use them, and keep him blind and bound.

Five time; the waking dream had come and gone, and each time he felt that some decisive .step in his destiny had been proposed, prepared, or arranged for him; then a week passed without any knowledge of the mystic game. At the end of that week he was sent with his battalion from the place where the sound of tho guns seemed a vague rolling thunder to a spot where at first it shocked and jerked every nerve in his body. The war claimed him: henceforth he wag_fLsoldier, under fire, lea'rning the tricks which mean life and the slips when mav mean.' death.

The word came that at last, ono evening soon after twilght, they were to "go over." Halfway across that strip of land he was! one of tho first to fall. Presently the stunned brain woke to consciousno is, and he opened his eyes to a darkness edged with flashing flame. He saw more than that, however, and hoard more than the uproar of the lifting barrage; he slaw, once more, tne great game, and hoard voices calmly argung. He gathered that a discussion was going on, somewhere, about his fate—the fate of the tiny pawn. He was 1 to be " taken"—to be withheld from tho play, to be set aside. Well, if it must be so, he thought, he had done what he could to win.

It seemed that he wa.s raied high above the other pieces poised in midair, so that for a moment the whole game became clear to him, and he thought how poor and email had been his share in it, how it mattered almost nothing that ho should be removed from the board; then, before he could protest, the bofc|rd tilted riowly upward, and the pieces began to slide off . . . to slide off lazily, silently, till they lay in a chaotic heap on muddy earth. He called out in his pain, and lost all knowledge of the game and the world.

"Tho board was up'.et," 'he said gravely to the doctor who bent over him in the base hospital. "I was a pawn —I was no use." "Not you, old chap," retorted the doctor, who had listened to many statements more mysterious than this from patients struggling to free themselves from merciful oblivion. "You ami your friends 'have won the (game—don't make any mistake about that." '"Then —who were the players?" "Ah, my dear fellow," he : aid lightly, " if we only knew who the players are who move us back and forth on this 'checkerboard of night and days,' what shouldn't we know! It might be too much for us. You've played the game, at any rate. Don't worry any more." He went off smiling, to attend to others. And the young man thought of the little pawn who seemed so powerless, of the shadowy hand that moved him onward, and fell asleep, to dream of the empty board and the fine, finished game in which, after all, he wa : > glad to have played his part.