Part 14

There was the loud, hissing, nerve-paralysing rush of a shell at arrival. Simultaneously with the shattering crash that leaped from the fountain of black smoke, Oberleutnant Schwarz put his hand to his breast, performed a sharp half-turn and fell--dead.

The reverberation yet rang when a second rush and crash followed the first. A third and fourth shook the air almost too quickly for distinction. The battery commander's brain worked with the timeless speed of a great crisis or a dream. In an incomputable fraction of a second he saw the heavy barrage which preceded the slowly crawling monster, was conscious of an aeroplane overhead, saw his opportunity and his plan. He ran towards the guns, shouting: "Lie down! Lie down!" The crews obeyed. Standing among the strewn corpses the guns seemed manned only by the dead. He flung himself prone on the flank of the battery.

Shell after shell swooped and burst on the stretch of ground in front of him. Fed by the constantly spouting black geysers, an ever-thickening dark mist drifted across, blotted out the distance. Through it he saw the freshly thrown edges, brown and white, of unfamiliar shell-craters pocking the undulating ground. The worn, smooth greensward that he had known was being churned into loose clay and chalk, mingled haphazard in their fall from the fierce upward gush. The reiterated crash upon crash of near explosions all but obliterated the far-flung din of the general battle, but through them he caught waves of an appalling uproar welling out of Flers. Slowly, riving, crashing, upspouting its black fountains of smoke and earth, the barrage marched onward, passing across the battery front. Now? Through the mist he saw the directing aeroplane sweep down in front of him, absurdly low, rattling its machine-gun. A group of grey figures sprang up beneath it, both arms high above the head, tumbling among the shell-holes as they ran. A temptation flitted across his mind. One round gun-fire and that aeroplane was blown to fragments. His lips tightened. He did not move. The battery seemed abandoned by all its dead.

Age-long seconds passed as he watched, peering through the thinning mist. Save for one little group of hasty, self-obliterating men, his immediate front was a deserted waste of churned earth, sloping gently upwards away from him. Once, over the low near skyline seen from his prone position, he thought he saw the spurt of a bomb. But he could not be sure. And a bomb did not necessarily betoken the presence of the--Thing. Yes! What was that?

Something was lifting itself, slowly and with jerks, beyond that near skyline. Ponderously, with the efforts of a limbless living thing, it drew its bulk up, seemed to stop--nosing the air with its blind snout. Now? Not yet! He had only one chance--certainty. The monster moved on again, downward now, lurching and wallowing among the shell-holes like a ship in a heavy sea. He saw the gun swinging in the side-turret as it rolled, the bright-splashed colouring of its flank. It was passing diagonally across his front. It must climb to escape. _Now!_

He sprang to his feet, shouting with all his lungs.

"To the guns!" The crews leaped up, resuscitated. "Point blank! At the devil! With percussion! All guns! Fire!"

But quick as he and his men had been, the monster was quicker. At his first movement, with a mighty jerk it had slued itself nose-on to the battery. Ere a hand could clutch a firing lever, a storm of small violently exploding shells burst right in among the guns, a hail of whip-cracking machine-gun bullets smote on men and metal. Von Waldhofer looked towards the monster lurching heavily towards him, keyed to a frenzy of suspense. To his horror he heard--not four--but one detonation. The Thing dipped. He saw the shell burst--_over_! He glanced towards the guns in speechless agony. The last gunner was in the act of falling lifeless across the trail.

High-nosed, seeming to smell its enemies rather than see them, like an uncouth blind monster of the rudimentary past, the Thing crept on, its speed as surprising as a reptile's. Viciously, with unallayed suspicions, it spat its missiles at the dead battery. Von Waldhofer stood alone, erect, praying that one might strike him.

Suddenly its fire ceased. He heard the loud clatter of its machinery as it approached, saw the rolling bands on which it moved. He felt that it was coming to mark its triumph over his beloved guns, felt its disdain for him their helpless master. An insane hatred for it gushed up in him, swept away his conscious self. He whipped out his pistol, ran like a madman towards it. He fired again and again, desperately seeking the eye, the brain, like a hunter at bay with a crocodile. But eyeless, featureless, the great snout slanted upwards above him, impenetrable steel plates, on which his bullets flattened.

Blindly the Thing rolled on, ponderous, invulnerable. It bulked huge above him. He heard a shriek. It was his own.

In the bright sunshine of a September morning the strange new monsters crawled over that bare countryside racked with noise and tortured with the leaping, eddying smoke of countless explosions. Behind them crowds of khaki-clad men, hatted with inverted bowls like Samurai, followed cheering and laughing like boys behind a circus-car. They waved newspaper posters, obtained Heaven knows whence, that proclaimed in fat bold type: "Great British Victory!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: 6.45 German Summer Time, 5.45 English Summer Time, 4.45 Greenwich Time. The Summer Time was used in all the Armies.]

[Footnote 4: The well-known 4·2" gun.]

[Footnote 5: Known to the British Army as High Wood and Devil's Wood respectively.]

[Footnote 6: Telephone and Command Dug-out.]

[Footnote 7: 6 a.m. English summer time.]

[Footnote 8: German Heavy Artillery is organised in "Bataillons" of four batteries.]

[Footnote 9: The Germans had apparently heard rumours of the coming of the "Tanks." It was asserted in the Army on the 16th September, that a motor-cyclist carrying a definite warning had been killed by one of our shells in the early morning of the 15th, on his way from H.Q. to the front line.]

[Footnote 10: Panzerkraftwagen, lit. "armoured power wagons," was and is the official German designation of the "Tanks." The word is also applied to armoured cars.]

NACH VERDUN!

In the long luxuriously furnished saloon car of the special train an officer clad in the field-service uniform of a South-Eastern Power sat in conversation with a colonel of the German General Staff. The deference shown to him made it immediately obvious that he was a distinguished personage representing a neutral whose friendliness was important. His dark, clever eyes rested thoughtfully upon the groups of officers with whom the car was overcrowded. All round was a buzz of talk, of suppressed excitement. The air was thick with cigar smoke.

"_Ja, Excellenz_," said the German colonel, podgy little fingers drumming the table between them. "The secret is out. You have rightly guessed our objective." His eyes were those of a rather clumsy and not too scrupulous diplomat. His smile was deliberate flattery. "Allow me to congratulate you upon your good fortune. You will see the machinery of our _Kriegswirtschaftlichkeit_,"[11] he throated the word impressively, "at the moment when it works at its highest power to shape for Germany her final victory."

The distinguished neutral smiled also, perfectly courteous. He spoke with a faint Austrian accent.

"I can understand your desire for the final," he underlined the word ever so lightly, "victory, Herr Oberst."

The German stared at him, suspicious of the nimbler brain.

"Who would not desire it, Excellenz? This awful slaughter," he waved a deprecating hand. "It is terrible that our adversaries do not recognise they are already beaten."

The neutral nodded.

"Bar-le-Duc and the Upper Marne, I suppose--Paris!"

The German colonel's eyes went dead.

"Excellenz, I believe the supreme command reserves to itself the honour of enlightening you on its plans."

The conversation languished. The train rolled on, heavily comfortable. The staff officers talked earnestly among themselves, the word "Majestät" oft repeated. Orderlies, garbed as soldiers but obviously royal _Kammerdiener_, stole noiselessly in and out of the car, went frequently into the car beyond. On those occasions the distinguished neutral had a glimpse of a world-familiar figure, upturned moustaches on a tired face, a uniform of grey hung with many decorations.

The train rolled into a station, stopped. The blare of a military band started on the precise instant of its arrival. The platform was thronged with officers, bright with the red of the General Staff.

The distinguished neutral took little interest in the ceremony outside. He busied himself with collecting the small articles of his kit. Through the large windows he glimpsed the salutes of the rigidly-erect officers. Above the noise of the band he heard the repeated "_Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!_" of soldiers who cheered as they drilled, exactly synchronous.

He stepped on to the platform, followed by the Colonel appointed to be his conductor. "Majestät" had already departed. Officers were thronging to the exit, laughing and talking, much excited, revealing, despite the grey and red of the staff uniform, the essential childishness of the crowd-mind. "_Nach Verdun!_" said one of them, very close to the distinguished neutral, nudging another in the ribs. "_Nach Verdun!_" He repeated the just given watchword of victory as a schoolboy repeats the latest smart expression. The officers around him laughed. The crowd buzzed with high spirits.

Outside the station the roadway was choked with waiting motor-cars, lined with soldiers readjusting their helmets after tumultuous "_Hochs!_" Some cars--those containing the highest personages--had already departed. One after the other those remaining were filled, swerved out and sped away. The distinguished neutral and his companion found a vehicle reserved for them. The colonel led him to it with an air that suggested: "See how the smallest details are thought out!" They, too, sped away through the walls of infantry.

Behind the soldiers were a few listless French inhabitants; from the windows of that French town hung German flags, but no French faces looked out. The shops were open but their owners stood not at the doors. The neutral noted these things. The complete apathy of the population was in contrast to stories his companion had related in the train. In many of the side-streets long convoys of ammunition and ration wagons were halted to allow them passage. On one of those foremost wagons was scrawled in big chalk letters: "Nach Verdun!"

"_Nach Verdun!_" that was the Leitmotiv underlying all the intense military activity that filled the town and, as they shot out beyond the houses, the countryside also. Every road was choked with columns of marching infantry, with endless trains of wagons, of limbers, of ambulances. Even cavalry was in evidence, riding with tall lances and saddle-hung rifles on wretched-looking horses. "_Nach Verdun!_" The German colonel, though he warily gave no information, could talk of nothing else. Under that grey February sky pulsed and boomed the distant detonations of artillery. The neutral listened to it with a professional ear, was puzzled. It was persistent enough, but it was certainly not the prolonged roar of a preparatory bombardment.

The car swung into the drive of a park. A tunnel of winter-stripped trees, brown above, green streaking the bark, and then a large château drew itself across the vista. Thither the other cars had preceded them. They stood now ranked in a mass. There was a throng of officers round the great doors, the buzz awakened by the recent passage of the All-Highest. The neutral was shown to his room, the German colonel volubly regretting that exigencies of space forced him to share it.

Some hours later the neutral was ushered into a vast, lofty apartment whose tapestried walls were almost completely rehung with the huge maps pinned upon them. On easels stood other maps, strange diagrams in curves and slants of red, green and black ink. On a large table was a horizontal relief model of hills and woods, a river with tributary streams, a splash of red in the valley, thin lines of red converging upon it, passing through, opening out again. On all these maps, on the splash of red in the relief model, the name "Verdun" was repeated again and again.

All these things the neutral officer noticed with the corner of his eye--the large writing-tables behind which sat officers of high rank, other officers grouped in a corner. His direct gaze was held by the figure he saluted. Spare, of medium height, in the grey field-service uniform of a general, gold cord looping across his right breast, a star upon the left above the Iron Cross, gilt epaulettes, gilt leaves upon the red gorgets of his collar, the would-be conqueror of the world stood stiffly erect, graciously acknowledged his salute. The brushed-up moustache was still dark, though the short hair on the head was grey, almost white. The face was deeply furrowed with endless anxieties, but the blue eyes--pouched though were their under lids--gleamed with excitement. He spoke in a jerky but distinct manner that betrayed a temperament of long ill-controlled impulses.

"_Guten Abend, Herr General!_ Welcome to Germany's greatest hour! You shall see our sun mount triumphantly to its zenith, breaking through the dark clouds of foes who cluster over against us in vain!" The tone was that of a rhetoric practised until it has become a habit. The right hand gesticulated with quick motions, the left arm was conspicuously still. "General!" he turned to one of the officers sitting at the tables, "be so good as to explain everything to our friend here."

It was to be clearly understood that the All-Highest was flatteringly gracious.

The neutral officer bowed, expressed his thanks courteously, ventured a request: "That I may be allowed to admire your War-Machine in all its work, Majestät--go where I will."

"By all means, General. We have nothing to hide. You will find much to interest you, much to relate to our well-wishers in your country. General! see that a pass is given to our friend that will give him the fullest freedom." The All-Highest answered the neutral's salute in a manner that terminated the conversation.

Seated at the huge, carved writing-table with the officer to whom he had been addressed, the neutral found himself looking at a pair of keen grey eyes that peered through pince-nez under bushy white eyebrows. The German spread out maps, indicated positions. He drew notice to the fact that all roads squeezed through a bottle-neck over the river at Verdun, spread out in a fan on the east bank to a long line of positions that climbed from the river over the Heights of the Meuse and fell into the plain of the Woevre across which they bent southward.

"_Die Sache ist äusserst einfach!_"[12] he said with the air of a man explaining a chess-problem. "The French have three divisions of Territorials in front of us to hold the entire sector. That force is not strong enough to defend it and certainly too weak to have kept the trench-systems in good repair. In fact we know that they have been allowed to fall into ruin.[13] We have fifteen divisions in front line, fifteen divisions in reserve. We do not intend to fling those divisions away. No. Step by step our artillery will blast a passage for them--see, here are our artillery positions," he showed concentric lines one within the other on the map, round the doomed sector. "It is the greatest artillery concentration the world has ever seen. Even our concentration on the Donajetz last year is surpassed. We shall obliterate the positions in front of us--other batteries will drench the only avenues of supplies with shells, they must all go through the town--our infantry will merely march into the devastated position, wait for the clearance of the next step. I may tell you that the French have only one small branch railway line which is safe from our fire. We have built fourteen new lines, besides those already existing. In the great problem of supply we have an overwhelming superiority. We believe we have the advantage of surprise. Certainly the French have no concentration within easy reach. In four days we shall be in Verdun. The Western Front will have been broken."

"In four days?" The neutral officer looked at the map as a chess-player looks at the board. "And--if I might ask the question--supposing you do not take Verdun in four days? There is said to be an enormous Allied force somewhere in France."

"We have yet another day," said the German a little wearily, as though resenting the effort to explain the unnecessary. "We have five clear days before any reinforcements can be brought up against us--all the chances have been calculated, you see. If we are not in Verdun by the evening of the fifth day--well, the battle will continue. But, I repeat, we shall be in Verdun within four days. The thing is certain!"

"Of course it is, General," said another voice above their heads. Both officers looked up, rose to their feet. "In four days we shall be in Verdun. In a fortnight--Paris!"

The speaker was a youngish man, with a long nose in a long face, somewhat bald upon the brow, a clipped moustache above a long thin mouth. There was something in his manner which suggested not too reputable finance doubled with Monte Carlo and the _coulisses_. He repeated, smacking his hand familiarly upon the back of the distinguished neutral: "In a fortnight--Paris!" He named the famous city with a smack of the lips.

"Undoubtedly, Highness," said the German general, his professional manner replaced by the obsequiousness of the courtier. "The army led by Your Highness cannot fail to conquer."

"Verdun--Paris! This time it will not fail, General." He walked across the room, smacking a riding-switch on his tall, patent-leather hussar boots, and chanting: "_Nach Verdun! Nach Verdun--Paris!_"[14]

* * * * *

The morning of the 21st February, 1916, opened damp and bleak. Over the heavy clay fields of the Woevre plain the mist hung persistently, enclosing all vision in a few hundred yards. Through the obscurity the poplars lining the roads loomed up like ghosts, dripping moisture from each bare twig. In the copses and the larger stretch of woodland known as the Forêt de Spincourt the conglobulated mist fell like rain. From either of the high knolls known as the Twins of Ornes, just south-west of the Forêt de Spincourt, the wooded slopes of the Heights of the Meuse--Merbebois and the Bois de Wavrille--rose dark and indefinite, discernible only when a little puff of the raw east wind, coming up the valley of the Orne, broke a rift in the fog.

The neutral and the German Oberst who was his inseparable companion stood on the more southerly of the twin heights. About them was a group of artillery officers. In their immediate front was the deep dug-out, sod-roofed, where telephonists sat and waited. It was an artillery observation post. The light was yet dim though the wet fog was white. It had been quite dark when the two spectators had made their way over roads deep in mud to this position of vantage.

The journey had been long, for their car had had to squeeze, lurching and slithering, past endless columns of infantry plodding over the atrocious roads. In the darkness those thousands of men had been scarcely more visible than phantoms who sang continuously as they marched, chorusing to the tune set by picked singers at the head of each company. Those who were merely the chorus broke off frequently to shout witticisms at the labouring motor-car. In high spirits, they wagered that they would be the first, after all, to arrive in Verdun.

On the hill-top of the Twin of Ornes, where the officers clustered, was tense expectation. The fog did not lift. Only at rare intervals was there a faint glimpse of the wooded heights towards which all gazed with thrilling foreknowledge. As yet all was a quiet broken only by an occasional isolated detonation that rolled heavily down the Orne valley. It echoed in a dull repercussion from the mist-filled woods upon the great scarp that was the far-flung rampart of the doomed city. An officer looked at his watch. The example was infectious. The seconds, the minutes passed slowly. It was like waiting for the curtain to go up. The watches marked 8.13 (German time)--8.14--8.15!

There was one simultaneous vast roar that leaped from an arc stretching from far in the north-west and passing round behind them to the south. It did not cease. Minute after minute it continued, unabated, prolonged. In the first sudden shock it appeared one colossal bellow of sound, evenly maintained. But as the ear became accustomed to it, instinctively analysed it, it was possible to distinguish spasms of even fiercer sound than the general welter: the ponderous concussion of especially heavy ordnance; the frenzied hammering of the quickfiring field-guns. The sense of hearing was overwrought, but the view changed not. The mist still hung over the landscape, was a curtain before the straining eye. Only down below them to the right a howitzer battery, adventurously pushed forward, rent the fog with stabs of orange-red flame.

It seemed, in the overpowering blast of the German guns, that the French artillery was making no general reply. From time to time a shell came whining over towards them, finished in an ugly rush and a crash somewhere upon the knoll. They scarcely noticed these occasional djinns of death, so ineffective were they by contrast to the whirlwind of destruction that swept the other way. The habituated ear could now pick out the rumbling tramcar-like progress of the heavy shells overhead, the fierce rushing drone of the missiles from lighter guns, mingling interwoven with the uninterrupted sheet of sound.

What was happening over there among the dank, wooded hills? Nothing could be seen, but the experienced imagination sketched, conscious that it fell below the reality, fearful havoc distant in the fog. Trees suddenly blasted, toppling; parapets leaping into the air--horrors among the spout of earth that had been a sheltered dug-out; trenches whose walls fell in; men who cowered, fear-paralysed, in a shambles; overhead a ceaseless cracking that rained down death; shock upon shock; chaos--such flitted through the minds of those who strained their eyes at the fog. An artillery observation officer turned to the neutral.

"Five hours of this, Excellenz," he said with a smile, "and then, the first step to Verdun!"

The Oberst expatiated on the wonderful German system for supplying all these batteries indefinitely at this intensity of fire. "Who can resist us?" was the implied corollary to his dissertation. The neutral was duly impressed, his dark clever eyes serious.

The bombardment continued, became monotonous. The fog thinned somewhat but permitted no clear vision. The batteries were firing by the map, according to a prearranged programme. The Oberst suggested to his distinguished guest that further stay was useless.

"I would like to see your guns at work, Herr Oberst," said the neutral, and the colonel saw himself forced to put aside his hopes of returning to Corps Headquarters for _Mittagessen_. He speculated on the Divisional Messes in their vicinity as he replied:

"By all means, Excellenz."

They scrambled down the rough path of the knoll, through a thin growth of birch, passed into the denser mist below.