Part 8

I yelled to the O.C. that I would take observation duty, and Taffy wanted to take it with me. But "the Peacemaker" very properly insisted on his going to ground. We had to shout right in each other's ears. The O.C. told me our telephone wires were cut to ribbons already. "But Headquarters will know as much about this as we could tell 'em by now," he yelled. But he had sent off a chit by runner, just to let the C.O. know that our fellows had all taken cover, and that the heavy stuff seemed to be mostly landing on our front and the communication trenches immediately in rear. The O.C. made a cup of his hands and shouted in my ear as we crouched in the bottom of the trench:

"What you've got to do is to watch for the lifting of the curtain to our rear. Must have every man on the fire-step then. They must surely mean to come across after this."

"I hope so. 'A' Company 'll eat 'em if they do."

"That's if we can keep cover now without too many casualties. Keep as good a look-out as you can. You'll find me here, by the signallers."

So I left him, and made my way along to a little observing shelter we had made near the centre of our bit of firing line. But, when I got there, I found that shelter was just a heap of yeasty mud and rubbish. Fritz was pounding that bit out of all recognition. By this time, you know, one could hardly see six paces ahead anywhere. The smoke hung low, so that every shell in bursting made long sheets of red flame along the smoke. And just then I got my first whiff of gas in the smoke: not a gas cloud, you know, but the burst of gas shells: lachrymatory shells some of 'em were. So I went hurrying along the line then, ordering all gas helmets on. I found most of the men had seen to this without being told.

By the way, I ought to say that, so far as I can tell, bombardment doesn't affect one's mind much. You don't feel the slightest bit afraid. Only a lot more alert than usual, and rather keyed up, as you might be if you were listening to a fine orchestra playing something very stirring. It's rather a pleasant feeling, like the exhilaration you get from drinking champagne, or hearing a great speech on some big occasion when there are thousands of people listening and all pretty well worked up. As I scrambled along the fire trench I laughed once, because I found I was talking away nineteen to the dozen. I listened, as though it were to someone else, and I heard myself saying:

"Let her rip! Let her rip, you blighters! You can't smash us, you sauer-krauters. You're only wasting the ammunition you'll be praying for presently. Wait till our heavies get to work on you, you beauties. You'll wish you hadn't spoken. Let her rip! Another dud! That was a rotten one. Why, you haven't got the range right even now, you rotters!"

Wasn't it queer, jawing away like that, while they were hammering the stuffing out of our line? By the way, though I couldn't tell it then, our artillery was blazing away at them all the time. The fire was so tremendous that we positively had no idea our guns were in it at all. But, as a matter of fact, they were lambasting Old Harry out of the Boche support lines and communications, and the countless shells roaring over our heads were, half of them, our own.

It seemed pretty clear to me that this bombardment was on a very narrow front, much less than our Company front even. It didn't seem to be much more than a platoon front. So I hurried along to the signals and let the O.C. know this. As I had expected, he told me to concentrate all the men, except sentries, on the flanks of the bombardment sector, all with smoke helmets on, rifles fully charged, bayonets fixed, and everything ready for instant action. He had already got our Lewis guns ready in the trench on both flanks. As a fact, "the Peacemaker" was doing as much observing as I was, and I made bold to tell him I thought it wasn't the thing for him to expose himself as much as he did.

"That's all right, old man," he shouted. "I'm looking out. I'll be careful, and you do the same. Here, stick your pipe in your mouth! It helps with the men."

I'd had to tell him that in the centre and on the extreme left we had had a few casualties. The stretcher-bearers were doing their best for them.

Not many minutes afterwards the curtain of fire appeared to be shifting back. The row was just as great, or greater. The smoke was just as dense, and there was a deal more gas in it. But it seemed to me there were very few shells actually landing along our front, and I could see the flashes of them bursting continuously a little in our rear.

As I got to the left flank of the bombarded sector I found Taffy directing the fire of a machine-gun diagonally across the front. The men were all out there, and you could see them itching for the word to get over the parapet. Their faces were quite changed. Upon my word, I'd hardly have known some of 'em. They had the killing look, and nearly every man was fiddling with his bayonet, making sure he had the good steel ready for Fritz. Seeing they were all serene, I made my way along to the other flank. I hardly thought about it, but just went, and that shows there's something shapes our ends, doesn't it? I should have been pretty sick afterwards if I hadn't made that way when I did.

The first thing I saw on that flank was a couple of men lifting poor R----'s body from the bottom of the trench. The Infant had been killed instantaneously. His head was absolutely smashed. He had been the most popular officer in our mess since we came out.

There was no time to think, but the sight of the Infant, lying there dead, sent a kind of sudden heat through me from inside; as I felt it on patrol that night. I hurried on, with Corporal Slade close on my heels. The gassy smoke was very dense. Round the next traverse was the little bay from which the other machine-gun had been firing. It wasn't firing now. Two men were lying dead close beside it, and another badly wounded; and half across the parapet was Sergeant T----, who'd been in charge of the gun, being hauled out by his arms by two Boches, while two other Boches stood by, one holding his rifle with bayonet fixed, in the thrust position, as if inclined to run T---- through. The other Boches were shouting something in German. They wanted to make T---- prisoner. There was blood on one side of his neck. The insolence of the thing made me quite mad for the minute, and I screamed at those Boches like a maniac.

It seems rum, but they turned and bolted into the smoke; I after them as hard as I could pelt. I shot one in the back with my revolver. He fell and, as I came up with him, I snatched his rifle from the ground beside him. I was like a lunatic. Then, just as suddenly, I came to my senses. The other Boches were out of sight in the smoke. I jumped back into the trench and put Corporal Slade on to the machine-gun, telling him to keep traversing that front. I ran farther down the trench to discover what had happened. The fire trench dipped there into a wooded hollow. The pounding of it had levelled the whole place till you could hardly make out the trench line.

Here I found the bulk of my own platoon furiously scrapping with thirty or forty Boches over the parapet. It was splendid. I can't describe the feeling, as one rushed into it. But it was absolutely glorious. And it gave me my first taste of bayonet work in earnest--with a Boche bayonet in my hand, mark you. Made me quite glad of the bayonet practice we had at home with Sergeant W----, after he'd had the course at Aldershot. No. 1 Platoon had never let the beggars get as far as our trench, but met 'em outside. To give them their due, those Boches didn't try any of their "Kamerade" business. They did fight--until they saw half their number stuck and down; and then they turned and bolted for it into the dense smoke over No Man's Land.

They were most of 'em bayoneted in the back before I could get my fellows to turn. I didn't want them to go far in that dense fog of gassy smoke, and there was hardly any daylight left. I didn't want them tumbling into any ambush. On the way back we gathered up a score of Boche knives, a lot of their caps, two or three rifles, and a whole box of their hand grenades, with not one missing.

That was the end of the first bombardment we've seen. It lasted exactly an hour, and our gunners tell us the Boche sent more than 5000 shells over in that time. He has certainly knocked our line about rather badly. All hands are at work now repairing the trench and the wire, with a whole Company of R.E. to help. Our casualties were eighteen wounded and seven killed. We buried thirty-one dead Boches, and they removed a good many dead. We got eleven wounded and nine unwounded Boche prisoners. Of course, they took a lot of their wounded away. They captured no prisoners from us.

I am sorry to say that another of our officers, Tony, is among the wounded, but the M.O. says he'll be back with us in a week. If only we could say that of the Infant! We are all sad about him; such a brave lad! but mighty pleased with the Company. The Brigadier says the Company has done splendidly. He was specially glad to know that the Boche collared no prisoners from us. It was our first taste, really, of bombardment, and of hand-to-hand fighting; and the men are now much keener even than they were before to get the Boche. They swear he shall pay dearly for the Infant and for six of their mates. They mean it, too, believe me. And we mean to help them get their payment. There isn't so much as a scratch on your

"_Temporary Gentleman_."

THE DAY'S WORK

Your letters are a great joy, and I feel that I give mighty little in return for their unfailing regularity. But I am sure you will understand that out here, where there's no writing-table to turn to, one simply cannot write half as much as one would like. It's astonishing how few moments there are in which, without neglect, one can honestly say there is nothing waiting to be done.

In your letter of the fifteenth, at this moment propped up in front of me against a condensed milk tin, you say: "When you can, I wish you'd jot down for me a sort of schedule of the ordinary, average day's work in the trenches when there is nothing special on, so that I can picture the routine of your life." Oh, for more ability as a jotter down! I know by what I used to see in the papers before leaving England there's a general idea at home that the chief characteristic of trench life is its dreary monotony, and that one of our problems is how to pass the time. How the idea ever got abroad I can't imagine. I don't see how there ever could have been a time like that in trenches. Certainly we have never had a hint of it; not the shadow of a hint. If anyone has ever tasted the boredom of idleness in the trenches--which I don't believe, mind you--there must have been something radically wrong with his Battalion; his Company Commander must have been a rotter. And I don't see how _that_ could be.

A trench, especially in such country as this we're in, is not unlike a ship; a rather ancient and leaky wooden ship. If you don't keep busy about her she leaks like a sieve, gets unworkably encrusted and choked by barnacles, and begins to decay. If you don't keep improving her, she jolly soon begins to go to pieces. Only, I imagine the disintegrating process is a great deal quicker in a trench in this part of the world than it could be in the most unseaworthy of ships.

The daily routine? Well, it would be wrong to say there isn't any. There is. But it differs every day and every hour of the day, except in certain stable essentials. Every day brings happenings that didn't come the day before. One fixed characteristic is that it's a twenty-four day, rather than twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. Of course, the overruling factor is strafe. But there's also something pretty bossy about the condition of your trench. Some kind of repairs simply cannot wait. The trench must continue to provide cover from observation, and some sort of cover from fire, or it ceases to be tenable, and one would not be carrying out one's fundamental duty of properly holding the sector of line to which one is detailed; which, obviously, would be unthinkable. Still, as I say, there are some elements of stable routine. Well, here goes. It won't cover the ground. I'm not a competent enough jotter down for that, but such as it is----

We think of every fresh day as beginning with "Stand-to." The main idea behind this function is that dawn is the classic moment for an attack. I'm not quite sure that this or any other classic idea holds good in trench warfare, but "Stand-to" is a pretty sound sort of an institution, anyhow. We Stand-to one hour before daylight. In some Companies the precise hour is laid down overnight or for the week. Our skipper doesn't believe in that. He likes to make a sort of a test of every Stand-to, and so gives no notice beforehand of the time at which he is going to order it. And I think he's right.

You will easily understand that of all things in trench warfare nothing is more important than the ability of your Company to man the fire-step, ready to repel an attack, or to make one, on the shortest possible notice. When the order comes there must be no fiddling about looking for rifles, or appearing on the fire-step with incomplete equipment. See how useless that would be in the event of a surprise attack in the dark, when the enemy could creep very close indeed to your parapet before the best of sentries could give any alarm! Troops in the firing line must be able to turn out, equipped in every detail for fighting--for days on end of fighting--not only quickly, but instantly; without any delay at all. That is why, in the British Army, at all events--and I've no doubt the French are the same--nobody in the firing line is allowed to remove his equipment. Officer and man alike, when we lie down to sleep, we lie down in precisely the same order as we go into action: haversack and water-bottle, ammunition and everything complete. That detail of the filled water-bottle, for instance, may make all the difference between a man who is an asset to his country in a critical action and a man who is useless and a bad example. You never know the moment at which an action that will last forty-eight hours or more is going to begin; and, though a man may keep going a long while without food, he's not much use if he cannot rinse his mouth out after a bit.

But at this rate I shall never get done. It's always so when I set out to write to you about any specific thing.

Well, we Stand-to an hour before dawn. It happens this way: "the Peacemaker" is in the trench doing something, or he comes out of the dug-out. He looks at his watch and at the sky, and he tells his orderly to bring another orderly. Then he says to the pair of them: "Pass the word to Stand-to." One bolts along the trench to the left and one to the right; and as they hurry along they give the word to every sentry and to everyone they see: "Stand-to!" Meanwhile "the Peacemaker" pokes about and observes, and jumps like a hundred of bricks on any man whose bayonet is not fixed, whose belt is unbuckled, or who is slow in getting to the fire-step. All this time he has his watch in his hand.

Pretty soon the first of those two orderlies comes racing back. Very often they see each other approaching the Officer Commanding from opposite directions, and make a real race of it, and report breathlessly: "All correct, sir." To be able to do this, they must have got the word from each Platoon Sergeant. Probably about this time the officer on duty comes along from whatever part of the line he happens to have been patrolling at the time. And he also reports that all was correct in the part of the line he has come from, or that such and such a section was a bit behind this morning, and that Corporal So-and-so wants a little stirring up.

Also, by this time the Company Sergeant-Major will have arrived, with a couple of runners, each carrying under his arm a jar of mixed rum-and-water, half and half. Rum is never served out in any circumstances, save in the presence of an officer. So the officer on duty goes to one end of the line, and "the Peacemaker" to the other, and both work slowly back toward the centre, watching the serving out of the rum, and looking carefully over each man and his equipment. In the centre, the officer on duty probably waits, while the O.C. Company goes right on, so that he may see the whole of his line and every single man in it. So you see, in a way, Stand-to is a parade, as well as an important tactical operation. Because, remember, the sentries are keenly watching all this while, and so are a good many more pairs of eyes than look out at any other time. But, whereas the sentries are steadily gazing into the rapidly greying mysteries of No Man's Land, the other pairs of eyes are only taking occasional sharp glances, and then down again, below the parapet.

There has probably been very little firing from either side during this time. Now, very suddenly, a violent crackling starts along to the left of the line. Instantly, every exposed head ducks. Fritz has started the first verse of his morning Hymn of Hate. He always thinks to catch us, and never does. We enjoy his hymn, because we love to see him waste his ammunition, as he proceeds to do now in handsome style. Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r! The spray of his machine-guns traverses very neatly up and down the length of our parapet. His gunners are clearly convinced that at Stand-to time they are certain to get a few English heads. Then, as suddenly as he began, he stops; and--every head remains ducked. We've been at some pains to teach 'em that. Twenty seconds later--or it may be two minutes--the spray begins again, just where it stopped, or a hundred yards to right or left of that. The Boche is quite smart about this; only he seems to act on the assumption that we never learn anything. That's where he's rather sold.

And, while Fritz sends forth his morning Hymn, our snipers in their carefully-hidden posts have their eyes glued on the neighbourhood of his machine-gun emplacements; and every now and again they get their reward, and the head of a Boche machine-gun observer, or some other Teuton whose curiosity overcomes his discretion, drops never to rise any more.

Before the Hymn began, you understand, the greying mystery has grown considerably less mysterious, and one has been able to see almost as much in the pearly dawn light as one will see at high noon, especially in these misty localities.

When Fritz has got through the last verse of his Hymn he is almost invariably quiet and harmless as a sucking dove for an hour or two. I take it he makes a serious business of his breakfast. And there again he often pays. Our snipers have their brekker later, and devote half an hour now to observation of the neighbourhood of all the little spirals of smoke in the Boche lines which indicate breakfast fires. They generally have some luck then; and sometimes it becomes worth while to turn on a machine-gun or two, where Fritz's appetite has made him careless.

It is now broad daylight, and our ration parties appear, four to each platoon, trailing up the trenches from the rear with the breakfast tea and bacon. Each party dumps its dixey of tea down in the centre of the sector of its platoon, and the Platoon Sergeant dishes out to the section commanders the whack of bacon for their sections, while all hands draw their mugs of tea. The bread and jam and "dry rations" were drawn overnight. And so to breakfast, in the dug-outs or along the fire-step, according to the state of the weather. It's breakfast for all hands, except the sentries, and they are relieved to get theirs directly the men to relieve them have eaten. With the exception of those who are on duty, the officers get along to the Company dug-out for their breakfast, which the batmen have been preparing. They cook it, you know, over a brazier--some old pail or tin with holes punched in it, consuming coke and charcoal mixed, or whatever fuel one has. Fried bacon, tea, and bread-and-jam; that's our usual menu. Sometimes there may be a tin of fruit as well, or some luxury of that sort from home. Always there are good appetites and no need of sauce.

But, look here, I've just got to stop now. And yet I've only reached breakfast in my jotting of the day's routine in trenches. Isn't it maddening? Well, I'll get another chance to-night or to-morrow, and give you some more of it. I really will finish it, and I'm sorry I couldn't have done it in one letter, as it would have been done by a more competent jotter-down of things than your

"_Temporary Gentleman_."

TOMMY DODD AND TRENCH ROUTINE

You'll be grieved to hear that cheery, indomitable little Tommy Dodd was rather badly laid out this morning; four or five nasty wounds from shrapnel. But I think he'll pull through. He has so much of the will to live, and I am sure a soul so uniformly cheerful as his must make its body easier to heal.

I wasn't six paces from him at the time. We were fastening some barbed-wire stays on screw standards we meant to put out to-night. I had just lent him my thick leather gloves after showing him exactly how I wanted these stays fixed, with little stakes bound on at the end of them, so as to save time to-night when we are over the parapet. He was busy as a beaver, as he generally is; a bit nearer to Whizz-bang Corner than was quite wise--I shall always reproach myself for not keeping him farther from that ill-omened spot--when the shell burst low overhead. I got a dozen tiny flicks myself on hands and head, which the M.O. touched up with iodine after he bandaged Tommy Dodd. But Tommy was badly hit in the thigh, one arm, and the left shoulder.

He was parchment-colour by the time I got the stretcher-bearers along, and that was only a matter of seconds. We were close to their little dug-out, as it happened. He'd lost a lot of blood. But he grinned at me, with a kind of twist in his grin, as I helped lift him into the trench stretcher.

"Looks almost like a Blighty for me, sir, don't it? Well, even the Boche must hit something sometimes. It's only an outer this time, an' look at the thousands o' rounds when he don't get on the target at all! Sorry I couldn't 've finished them stays, sir. If you send for Davis, o' Number 5 Section, you'll find him pretty good at it, sir." And then he turned to the stretcher-bearer in front, who had the strap over his shoulder, and was just bracing himself to start off when he'd done talking. "Home, John!" he says, with a little kick up of his head, which I really can't describe. "An' be sure you don't exceed the limit, for I can't abide them nasty low perlice courts an gettin' fined."

And yet, when we got down to Battalion Headquarters, the M.O. told me Tommy Dodd ought by all rights to have been insensible, from the blood he'd lost and the shock of those wounds: not surface wounds, you know. He'll have two or three months of hospital comfort now. I hope to goodness nothing septic will intervene. The Battalion would be the poorer for it if we lost Tommy. The M.O. says he'll pull through. The M.O. cropped little patches of hair off round my head, to rub the iodine in where I was scratched, so I look as if I had ringworm.

But to get back to business. I've got to "jot down" this everyday trench routine for you, haven't I? And I only got as far as breakfast in yesterday's letter. We'll get a move on and run through it now. I'm due on deck directly after lunch to relieve Taffy; and it's past eleven now.