Chapter 7

The men eat mightily, then light their pipes and cigarettes and loll at their ease. The trees are masses of clustering pink and white blossom, the grass is carpeted thick with the white of fallen petals and splashed with sunlight and shade. A few slow-moving clouds drift lazily across the blue sky, the big, fat bees drone their sleepy song amongst the blossoms, the birds rustle and twitter amongst the leaves and flit from bough to bough. It would be hard to find a more peaceful picture in any country steeped in the most profound peace. There is not one jarring note--until the 'honk, honk' of a motor is followed by the breathless, panting whirr of the engine, and a big car flashes down the road and past, travelling at the topmost of its top speed. There is just time to glimpse the khaki hood and the thick scarlet cross blazing on a white circle, and the car is gone. Empty as it is, it is moving fast, and with luck and a clear road it will be well inside the danger zone at the back door of the trenches in less than twenty minutes. In half an hour perhaps it will have picked up its full load, and be sliding back smoothly and gently down the cobbled road, swinging carefully now to this side to avoid some scattered bricks, now to that to dodge a shell-hole patched with gravel, driven down as tenderly and gently as it was driven up fiercely and recklessly.

Presently there are a few quiet orders, a few minutes' stir and movement, a shifting to and fro of khaki against the green and pink and white . . . and the companies have fallen in and stand in straight rulered ranks. A pause, a sharp order or two, and the quick staccato of 'numbering off' ripples swiftly down the lines; another pause, another order, the long ranks blur and melt, harden and halt instantly in a new shape; and evenly and steadily the ranked fours swing off, turn out into the road, and go tramping down between the poplars. There has been no flurry, no hustle, no confusion. The whole thing has moved with the smoothness and precision and effortless ease of a properly adjusted, well-oiled machine--which, after all, is just what the regiment is. The pace is apparently leisurely, or even lazy, but it eats up the miles amazingly, and it can be kept up with the shortest of halts from dawn to dusk.

As the miles unwind behind the regiment the character of the country begins to change. There are fewer women and children to be seen now; there are more roofless buildings, more house-fronts gaping doorless and windowless, more walls with ragged rents, and tumbled heaps of brick lying under the yawning black holes. But the grass is still green, and the trees thick with foliage, the fields neatly ploughed and tilled and cultivated, with here and there a staring notice planted on the edge of a field, where the long, straight drills are sprinkled with budding green--'Crops sown. Do not walk here.' Altogether there is little sign of the heavy hand of war upon the country, and such signs as there are remain unobtrusive and wrapped up in springing verdure and bloom and blossom. Even the trapping of war, the fighting machine itself, wears a holiday or--at most--an Easter-peace-manoeuvre appearance. A heavy battery has its guns so carefully concealed, so bowered in green, that it is only the presence of the lounging gunners and close, searching looks that reveal a few inches of muzzle peering out towards the hill crest in front. Scattered about behind the guns, covered with beautiful green turf, shadowed by growing trees, are the dwelling-places of the gunners, deep 'dug-outs,' with no visible sign of their existence except the square, black hole of the doorway. Out in the open a man sits with a pair of field-glasses, sweeping the sky. He is the aeroplane look-out, and at the first sign of a distant speck in the sky or the drone of an engine he blows shrilly on his whistle; every man dives to earth or under cover, and remains motionless until the whistle signals all clear again. An enemy aeroplane might drop to within pistol shot and search for an hour without finding a sign of the battery.

When the regiment swerves off the main road and moves down a winding side-track over open fields, past tree-encircled farms, and along by thick-leaved hedges, it passes more of these Jack-in-the-Green concealed batteries. All wear the same look of happy and indolent ease. Near one is a stream, and the gunners are bathing in an artificially made pool, plunging and splashing in showers of glistening drops. They are like school boys at a picnic. It seems utterly ridiculous to think that they are grim fighting men whose business in life for months past and for months to come is to kill and kill, and to be killed themselves if such is the fortune of war. Another battery of field artillery passes on the road. But even here, shorn of their concealing greenery, in all the bare working-and-ready-for-business apparel of 'marching order,' there is little to suggest real war. Drivers and gunners are spruce and neat and clean, the horses are sleek and well fed and groomed till their skins shine like satin in the sun, the harness is polished and speckless, bits and stirrup-irons and chains and all the scraps of steel and brass twinkle and wink in bright and shining splendour. The ropes of the traces--the last touch of pride in perfection this, surely--are scrubbed and whitened. The whole battery is as spick and span, as complete and immaculate, as if it were waiting to walk into the arena at the Naval and Military Tournament. Such scrupulous perfection on active service sounds perhaps unnecessary or even extravagant. But the teams, remember, have been for weeks past luxuriating in comfortable ease miles back in their 'wagon-line' billets, where the horses have done nothing for days on end but feed and grow fat, and the drivers nothing but clean up and look after their teams and harness. If the guns up in the firing line had to shift position it has meant no more to the teams than a break of the monotony for a day or two, a night or two's marching, and a return to the rear.

It is afternoon now, and the regiment is drawing near to the trenches. The slanting sun begins to throw long shadows from the poplars. The open fields are covered with tall grass and hay that moves in long, slow, undulating waves under the gentle breeze that is rising. The sloping light falling on them gives the waves an extraordinary resemblance to the lazy swell on a summer sea. Here and there the fields are splashed with broad bands of vivid colour--the blazing scarlet of poppies, the glowing cloth-of-gold of yellow mustard, the rich, deep, splendid blue of corn-flowers.

For one or two miles past the track has been plainly marked by sign-posts bearing directions to the various trenches and their entrances. Now, at a parting of the main track, a group of 'guides'--men from the regiment being relieved from the trenches--wait the incoming regiment. Company by company, platoon by platoon, the regiment moves off to the appointed places, and by company and platoon the outcoming regiment gathers up its belongings and moves out. In most parts of the firing line these changes would only be made after dark. But this section bears the reputation of being a 'peaceful' one, the Germans opposite of being 'tame,' so the reliefs are made in daytime, more or less in safety. There has been no serious fighting here for months. Constant sniping and bickering between the forward firing trenches has, of course, always gone on, but there has been no attack one way or the other, little shell-fire, and few aeroplanes over.

The companies that 'take over' the support trenches get varied instructions and advice about tending the plants and flowers round the dugouts, and watering the mustard-and-cress box. They absorb the advice, strip their accoutrements and tunics, roll up their shirt-sleeves, and open the throats, fish out soap and towels from their packs, and proceed to the pump to lather and wash copiously. The companies for the forward trench march down interminable communication trenches, distribute themselves along the parapet, and also absorb advice from the outgoing tenants--advice of the positions of enemy snipers, the hours when activity and when peace may be expected, the specially 'unhealthy' spots where a sniper's bullet or a bomb must be watched for, the angles and loopholes that give the best look-out. The trenches are deep and well-made, the parapets solidly constructed. For four days or six, or as many as the regiment remains 'in,' the range of the men's vision will be the walls of the trench, the piled sandbags, the inside of their dug-outs, and a view (taken in peeps through a loophole or reflected in a periscope mirror) of about fifty to a hundred yards of 'neutral ground' and the German parapet beyond. The neutral ground is covered with a jungle of coarse grass, edged on both sides with a tangle of barbed wire.

Close to the German parapet are a few black, huddled heaps--dead Germans, shot down while out in a working party on the wire at night, and left there to rot, and some killed in their own trench, and tumbled out over the parapet by their own comrades. The drowsy silence is broken at long intervals by a rifle shot; a lark pours out a stream of joyful thrilling song.

* * * * *

A mile or two back from the firing line a couple of big motor-cars swing over the crest of a gentle rise, swoop down into the dip, and halt suddenly. A little group of men with scarlet staff-bands on their caps and tabs on their collars climb out of the cars and move off the track into the grass of the hollow. They prod sticks at the ground, stamp on it, dig a heel in, to test its hardness and dryness.

The General looks round. 'This is about as low-lying a spot as we have on this part of front,' he says to his Chief of Staff. 'If it is dry enough here it must be dry enough everywhere else.'

The Chief assents, and for a space the group stands looking round the sunlit fields and up at the clear sky. But their thoughts are not of the beauties of the peaceful landscape. The words of the General are the key to all their thoughts. For them the promise of spring is a grim and a sinister thing; to them the springy green turf carpet on the fields means ground fit to bear the weight of teams and guns, dry enough to give firm foothold to the ranks of infantry charging across the death-trap of the neutral ground, where clogging, wet, slippery mud adds to the minutes under the hail of fire and every minute there in the open means hundreds of lives lost. The hard, dry road underfoot means merely that roads are passable for heavy guns and transport. The thick green foliage of the trees is so much cover for guns and the moving of troops and transport under concealment from air observation; the clear, blue sky promises the continuance of fine weather, the final release from the inactivity of the trenches. To these men the 'Promise of Spring' is the promise of the crescendo of battle and slaughter.

The General and his Staff are standing in the middle of a wide patch of poppies, spread out in a bright scarlet that matches exactly the red splashes on the brows and throats of the group. They move slowly back towards the cars, and as they walk the red ripples and swirls against their boots and about their knees.

One might imagine them wading knee-deep in a river of blood.

THE ADVANCE

'_The attack has resulted in our line being advanced from one to two hundred yards along a front of over one thousand yards._'--OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

Down to the rawest hand in the latest-joined drafts, everyone knew for a week before the attack commenced that 'something was on,' and for twenty-four hours before that the 'something' was a move of some importance, no mere affair of a battalion or two, or even of brigades, but of divisions and corps and armies. There had been vague stirrings in the regiments far behind the firing line 'in rest,' refittings and completings of kits, reissuing of worn equipments, and a most ominous anxiety that each man was duly equipped with an 'identity disc,' the tell-tale little badge that hangs always round the neck of a man on active service and that bears the word of who he is when he is brought in wounded--who he was when brought in dead. The old hands judged all the signs correctly and summed them up in a sentence, 'Being fattened for the slaughter,' and were in no degree surprised when the sudden order came to move. Those farthest back moved up the first stages by daylight, but when they came within reach of the rumbling guns they were halted and bivouacked to wait for night to cloak their movements from the prying eyes of the enemy 'planes. The enemy might have--probably had--an inkling of the coming attack; but they might not know exactly the portion of front selected for the heaviest pressure, and this must be kept secret till the last possible moment. So the final filing up into the forward and support trenches was done by night, and was so complete by daylight that no sign of unwonted movement could be discerned from the enemy trenches and observing stations when day broke.

It was a beautiful morning--soft and mildly warm and sunny, with just a slight haze hanging low to tone the growing light, and, incidentally, to delay the opening of fire from the guns. Anyone standing midway between the forward firing trenches might have looked in vain for living sign of the massed hordes waiting the word to be at each other's throats. Looking forward from behind the British lines, it could be seen that the trenches and parapets were packed with men; but no man showed head over parapet, and, seen from the enemy's side, the parapets presented blank, lifeless walls, the trenches gave no glimpse of life. All the bustle and movement of the night before was finished. At midnight every road and track leading to the forward trenches had been brimming with men, with regiments tramping slowly or squatting stolidly by the roadside, smoking much and talking little, had been crawling with transport, with ammunition carts, and ambulances and stretcher-parties, and sappers heavily laden with sandbags and rolls of barbed wire. The trenches--support, communication, and firing--had trickled with creeping rivulets of khaki caps and been a-bristle with bobbing rifle-barrels. Further back amongst the lines of guns the last loads of ammunition were rumbling up to the batteries, the last shells required to 'complete establishment'--and over-complete it--were being stowed in safe proximity to the guns. At midnight there were scores of thousands of men and animals busily at work with preparations for the slaughter-pen of the morrow. Before midnight came again the bustle would be renewed, and the circling ripples of activity would be spreading and widening from the central splash of the battle front till the last waves washed back to Berlin and London, brimming the hospitals and swirling through the munition factories. But now at daybreak the battle-field was steeped in brooding calm. Across the open space of the neutral ground a few trench periscopes peered anxiously for any sign of movement, and saw none; the batteries' 'forward observing officers,' tucked away in carefully chosen and hidden look-outs, fidgeted with wrist-watches and field-glasses, and passed back by telephone continual messages about the strength of the growing light and the lifting haze. An aeroplane droned high overhead, and an 'Archibald' (anti-aircraft gun) or two began to pattern the sky about it with a trail of fleecy white smoke-puffs. The 'plane sailed on and out of sight, the smoke-puffs and the wheezy barks of 'Archibald' receding after it. Another period of silence followed. It was broken by a faint report like the sound of a far-off door being slammed, and almost at the same instant there came to the ear the faint thin whistle of an approaching shell. The whistle rose to a rush and a roar that cut off abruptly in a thunderous bang. The shell pitched harmlessly on the open ground between the forward and support trenches. Again came that faint 'slam,' this time repeated by four, and the 'bouquet' of four shells crumped down almost on top of the support line. The four crashes might have been a signal to the British guns. About a dozen reports thudded out quickly and separately, and then in one terrific blast of sound the whole line broke out in heavy fire. The infantry in the trenches could distinguish the quick-following bangs of the guns directly in line behind them, could separate the vicious swish and rush of the shells passing immediately over their heads. Apart from these, the reports blent in one long throbbing pulse of noise, an indescribable medley of moanings, shrieks, and whistling in the air rent by the passing shells. So ear-filling and confused was the clamour that the first sharp, sudden bursts of the enemy shells over our trenches were taken by the infantry for their own artillery's shells falling short; but a very few moments proved plainly enough that the enemy were replying vigorously to our fire. They had the ranges well marked, too, and huge rents began to show in our parapets, strings of casualties began to trickle back to the dressing stations in a stream that was to flow steady and unbroken for many days and nights. But the enemy defences showed more and quicker signs of damage, especially at the main points, where the massed guns were busy breaching the selected spots. Here the lighter guns were pouring a hurricane of shrapnel on the dense thickets of barbed-wire entanglements piled in loose loops and coils, strung in a criss-cross network between pegs and stakes along the edge of the neutral ground; the howitzers and heavies were pounding and hammering at the parapets and the communication trenches beyond.

For half an hour the appalling uproar continued, the solid earth shook to the roar of the guns and the crashing of the shells. By the end of that time both fronts to a depth of hundreds of yards were shrouded in a slow-drifting haze of smoke and dust, through which the flashes of the bursting shell blazed in quick glares of vivid light, and the spots of their falling were marked by gushes of smoke and upflung billowing clouds of thick dust. So far the noise was only and all of guns and shell fire, but now from far out on one of the flanks a new note began to weave itself into the uproar--the sharper crackle and clatter of rifle and machine-gun fire.

Along the line of front marked for the main assault the guns suddenly lifted their fire and commenced to pour it down further back, although a number of the lighter guns continued to sweep the front parapet with gusts of shrapnel. And then suddenly it could be seen that the front British trench was alive and astir. The infantry, who had been crouched and prone in the shelter of their trenches, rose suddenly and began to clamber over the parapets into the open and make their way out through the maze of their own entanglements. Instantly the parapet opposite began to crackle with rifle fire and to beat out a steady tattoo from the hammering machine-guns. The bullets hissed and spat across the open and hailed upon the opposite parapet. Scores, hundreds of men fell before they could clear the entanglements to form up in the open, dropped as they climbed the parapet, or even as they stood up and raised a head above it. But the mass poured out, shook itself roughly into line, and began to run across the open. They ran for the most part with shoulders hunched and heads stooped, as men would run through a heavy rainstorm to a near shelter And as they ran they stumbled and fell and picked themselves up and ran again--or crumpled up and lay still or squirming feebly. As the line swept on doggedly it thinned and shredded into broken groups. The men dropped under the rifle bullets, singly or in twos and threes; the bursting shells tore great gaps in the line, snatching a dozen men at a mouthful; here and there, where it ran into the effective sweep of a maxim, the line simply withered and dropped and stayed still in a string of huddled heaps amongst and on which the bullets continued to drum and thud. The open ground was a full hundred yards across at the widest point where the main attack was delivering. Fifty yards across, the battalion assaulting was no longer a line, but a scattered series of groups like beads on a broken string; sixty yards across and the groups had dwindled to single men and couples with desperately long intervals between; seventy yards, and there were no more than odd occasional men, with one little bunch near the centre that had by some extraordinary chance escaped the sleet of bullets; at eighty yards a sudden swirl of lead caught this last group--and the line at last was gone, wiped out, the open was swept clear of those dogged runners. The open ground was dotted thick with men, men lying prone and still, men crawling on hands and knees, men dragging themselves slowly and painfully with trailing, useless legs, men limping, hobbling, staggering, in a desperate endeavour to get back to their parapet and escape the bullets and shrapnel that still stormed down upon them. The British gunners dropped their ranges again, and a deluge of shells and shrapnel burst crashing and whistling upon the enemy's front parapet. The rifle fire slackened and almost died, and the last survivors of the charge had such chance as was left by the enemy's shells to reach the shelter of their trench. Groups of stretcher-bearers leaped out over the parapet and ran to pick up the wounded, and hard on their heels another line of infantry swarmed out and formed up for another attack. As they went forward at a run the roar of rifles and machine-guns swelled again, and the hail of bullets began to sweep across to meet them. Into the forward trench they had vacated, the stream of another battalion poured, and had commenced to climb out in their turn before the advancing line was much more than half-way across. This time the casualties, although appallingly heavy, were not so hopelessly severe as in the first charge, probably because a salient of the enemy trench to a flank had been reached by a battalion farther along, and the devastating enfilading fire of rifles and machine-guns cut off. This time the broken remnants of the line reached the barbed wires, gathered in little knots as the individual men ran up and down along the face of the entanglements looking for the lanes cut clearest by the sweeping shrapnel, streamed through with men still falling at every step, reached the parapet and leaped over and down. The guns had held their fire on the trench till the last possible moment, and now they lifted again and sought to drop across the further lines and the communication trenches a shrapnel 'curtain' through which no reinforcements could pass and live. The following battalion came surging across, losing heavily, but still bearing weight enough to tell when at last they poured in over the parapet.

The neutral ground, the deadly open and exposed space, was won. It had been crossed at other points, and now it only remained to see if the hold could be maintained and strengthened and extended.