Part 17

And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.

“Will you have a shot, sir?” one of the sentries asked me.

“At what?”

“Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see moving,” he said.

But I did not think that it was an invitation for a non-combatant to accept. If the bullet went over the top of the trench it had still two thousand yards and more to go, and it might find a target before it died. So, in view of the law of probabilities, no bullet is quite waste.

“Now, which is my house?” asked Captain P----. “I really can’t find my own home in the dark.”

Behind the breastwork were many little houses three or four feet in height, all of the same pattern, and made of boards and mud. The mud is put on top to keep out shrapnel bullets.

“Here you are, sir!” said a soldier.

Asking me to wait until he made a light, the captain bent over as if he were about to crawl under the top rail of a fence and his head disappeared. After he had put a match to a candle and stuck it on a stick thrust into the wall, I could see the interior of his habitation. A rubber sheet spread on the moist earth served as floor, carpet, mattress, and bed. At a squeeze there was room for two others besides himself. They did not need any doormat, for when they lay down their feet would be at the door.

“Quite cosy, don’t you think?” remarked the captain. He seemed to feel that he had a royal chamber. But, then, he was the kind of man who might sleep in a muddy field under a wagon and regard the shelter of the wagon body as a luxury. “Leave your knapsack here,” he continued, “and we’ll go and see what is doing along the line.”

In other words, after you had left your bag in the host’s hall, he suggested a stroll in the village or across the fields. But only to see war would he have asked you to walk in such mud.

“Not quite so loud!” he warned a soldier who was bringing up boards from the rear under cover of darkness. “If the Germans hear they may start firing.”

Two other men were piling mud on top of a section of breastwork at an angle to the main line.

“What is that for?” the captain asked.

“They get an enfilade on us here, sir, and Mr. ---- (the lieutenant) told me to make this higher.”

“That’s no good. A bullet will go right through,” said the captain. “We’ll have to wait until we get more sandbags.”

A little farther on we came to an open space, with no protection between us and the Germans. Half a dozen men were piling earth against a staked chicken wire to extend the breastworks. Rather, they were piling mud, and they were besmirched from head to foot. They looked like reeking Neptunes rising from a slough. In the same position in daylight, standing full height before German rifles at three hundred yards, they would have been shot dead before they could leap to cover.

“How does it go?” asked the captain.

“Very well, sir; though what we need is sandbags.”

“We’ll have some up to-morrow.”

At the moment there was no firing in the vicinity. Faintly I heard the Germans pounding stakes, at work improving their own breastworks.

A British soldier appeared out of the darkness in front.

“We’ve found two of our men out there with their heads blown off by shells,” he said. “Have we permission to go out and bury them, sir?”

“Yes.”

They would be as safe as the fellows piling mud against the chicken wire, unless the Germans opened fire. If they did, we could fire on their working party, or in the direction of the sound. For that matter, we knew through our glasses by day the location of any weak places in their breastworks and they knew where ours were. A sort of “after-you-gentlemen-if-you-fire-we-shall” understanding sometimes exists between the foes up to a certain point. Each side understands instinctively the limitation of that point. Too much noise in working; a number of men going out to bury dead or making enough noise to be heard, and the ball begins. A deep, broad ditch filled with water made a break in our line. No doubt a German machine gun was trained on it.

“A little bridging is required here,” said the captain. “We’ll have it done to-morrow night. The break is no disadvantage if they attack; in fact, we’d rather like to have them try for it. But it makes movement along the line difficult by day.”

When we were across and once more behind the breastworks, he called my attention to some high ground in the rear.

“One of our officers took a short cut across there in daylight,” he said. “He was quite exposed and they drew a bead on him from the German trench and got him through the arm. Not a serious hit. It wasn’t cricket for any one to go out to bring him in. He realised this and called out to leave him to himself, and crawled to cover on his hands and knees.”

I was getting the commonplaces of trench life. Thus far it had been a quiet night and was to remain so. Reddish, flickering swaths of light were thrown across the fields between the trenches by the enemy’s Roman candle flares. One tried to estimate how many flares the Germans must use every night from Switzerland to the North Sea.

On our side, the only light was from our braziers. Thomas Atkins has become a patron of braziers made by punching holes in buckets; and so have the Germans. Punch holes in a bucket, start a fire inside, and you have cheer and warmth and light through the long night vigils. Two or three days before we had located a sniper between the lines by seeing him swing his fire pot to make a draft against the embers.

If you have ever sat around a campfire in the forest or on the plains you need be told nothing further. One of the old, glamourous features of war survives in these glowing braziers, spreading their genial rays among the little houses and lighting the faces of the men who stand or squat in encircling groups around the coals, which dry wet clothes, slake the moisture of a section of earth, make the bayonets against the walls glisten, and reveal the position of a machine gun with its tape ready for firing.

Values are relative, and a brazier in the trenches makes the satisfaction of a steam-heated room in winter very superficial and artificial. You are at home there with Tommy Atkins, regular of an old line English regiment, in his heavy khaki overcoat and solid boots and wool puttees, a sturdy, hardened man of a terrific war. He, the regular, the shilling-a-day policeman of the empire, was still doing the fighting at the front. The new army, which embraces all classes, was not yet in action.

This man and that one were at Mons. This one and that one had been through the whole campaign without once seeing Mother England for whom they were fighting. The affection in which Captain P---- was held extended through his regiment, for we had left his own company behind. At every turn he was asked about his arm.

“You’ve made a mistake, sir. This isn’t a hospital,” as one man expressed it. Oh, but the captain was bored with hearing about that arm! If he is wounded again I am sure that he will try to keep the fact a secret.

These veterans could “grouse,” as the British call it. Grousing is one of Tommy’s privileges. When they got to grousing worst on the retreat from Mons, their officers knew that what they really wanted was to make another stand. They were tired of falling back; they meant to take a rest and fight a while. Their language was yours, the language in which our own laws and schoolbooks are written. They made the old blood call. For months they had been taking bitter medicine; very bitter for a British soldier. The way they took it will, perhaps, remain a greater tribute than any part they play in future victories.

“How do they feel in the States?” I was asked. “Against us?”

“No. By no means.”

“I don’t see how they could be!” Tommy exclaimed.

Tommy may not be much on argument as it is developed by the controversial spirit of college professors, but he had said about all there was to say. How can we be? Hardly, after you come to know T. Atkins and his officers and talk English with them around their campfires.

“The Germans are always sending up flares,” I remarked. “You send up none. How about it?”

“It cheers them. They’re downhearted!” said one of the group. “You wouldn’t deny them their fireworks, would you, sir?”

“That shows who is top dog,” said another. “They’re the ones that are worried.”

I had heard of trench exhaustion, trench despair, but there was no sign of it in a regiment that had been through all the hell and mire that the British army had known since the war began. To no one had Neuve Chapelle meant so much as to these common soldiers. It was their first real victory. They were standing on soil won from the Germans.

“We’re going to Berlin!” said a big fellow who was standing, palms downward to the fire. “It’s settled. We’re going to Berlin.”

A smaller man with his back against the sandbags disagreed. There was a trench argument.

“No, we’re going to the Rhine,” he said. “The Russians are going to Berlin.” (This was in March, 1915, remember.)

“How can they when they ain’t over the Balkans yet?”

“The Carpathians, you mean.”

“Well, they’re both mountains and the Russians have got to cross them. And there’s a place called Cracow in that region. What’s the matter of a pair of mountain ranges between you and me, Bill? You’re strong on geography, but you fail to follow the campaign.”

“The Rhine, I say!”

“It’s the Rhine first, but Berlin is what you want to keep your mind on.”

Then I asked if they had ever had any doubt that they would reach the Rhine.

“How could we, sir?”

“And how about the Germans. Do you hate them?”

“Hate!” exclaimed the big man. “What good would it do to hate them? No, we don’t hate. We get our blood up when we’re fighting and when they don’t play the game. But hate! Don’t you think that’s kind of ridiculous, sir?”

“How do they fight?”

“They take a bit of beating, do the _Boches_!”

“So you call them _Boches_!”

“Yes. They don’t like that. But sometimes we call them Allemands, which is Germans in French. Oh, we’re getting quite French scholars!”

“They’re good soldiers. Not many tricks they’re not up to. But in my opinion they’re overdoing the hate. You can’t keep up to your work on hate, sir. I should think it would be weakening to the mind, too.”

“Still, you would like the war over? You’d like to go home?”

They certainly would. Back to the barracks, out of the trenches. They certainly would.

“And call it a draw?”

“Call it a draw, now! Call it a draw, after all we’ve been through--”

“Spring is coming. The ground will dry up and it will be warm.”

“And the going will be good to Berlin, as it was back from Paris in August, we tell the _Boches_.”

“Good for the Russians going over the Carpathians, or the Pyrenees, or whatever those mountains are, too. I read they’re all covered with snow in winter.”

It was good, regular soldier talk, very “homey” to me. As you will observe, I have not elided the h’s. Indeed, Tommy has a way of prefixing his h’s to the right vowels more frequently than a generation ago. The “Soldiers Three” type has passed. Popular education will have its way and induce better habits. Believing in the old remedy for exhaustion and exposure to cold, the army served out a tot of rum every day to the men. But many of them are teetotalers, these hardy regulars, and not even Mulvaney will think them effeminate when they have seen fighting which makes anything Mulvaney ever saw child’s play. So they asked for candy and chocolate, instead of rum.

Some people have said that Tommy has no patriotism. He fights because he is paid and it is his business. That is an insinuation. Tommy doesn’t care for the “hero stuff,” or for waving flags and speech-making. Possibly he knows how few Germans that sort of thing kills. His weapons are bullets. To put it cogently, he is fighting because he doesn’t want any Kaiser in his.

Is not that what all the speeches in Parliament are about and all the editorials and the recruiting campaign? Is not that what England and France are fighting for? It seems to me that Tommy’s is a very practical patriotism, free from cant; and the way that he refuses to hate or to get excited, but sticks to it, must be very irritating to the Germans.

“Would you like a _Boche_ helmet for a souvenir, sir?” asked a soldier, who appeared on the outer edge of the group. He was the small, active type, a British soldier with the _élan_ of the Frenchman. “There are lots of them out there among the German dead”--the unburied German dead, who fell like grass before the mower in a desperate and futile counter-attack to recover Neuve Chapelle. “I’ll have one for you on your way back.”

There was no stopping him; he had gone.

“Matty’s a devil!” said the big man. “He’ll get it, all right. He’s equal to reaching over the _Boches_’ parapet and picking one off a _Boche’s_ head!”

As we proceeded on our way, officers came out of the little houses to meet Captain P---- and the stranger civilian. They had to come out, as there was no room to take us inside; and sometimes they talked shop together after I had answered the usual question, “Is America against us?” There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly because of the prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any feeling that we might be did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or lead them to express any bitterness or break into argument.

“How are things going on over your side?”

“Nicely.”

“Any shelling?”

“A little this morning. No harm done.”

“We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day.”

“Ought to have some sandbags up to-night.”

“It’s a bad place there. They’ve got a machine gun trained which has quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn’t put in a word, but the general didn’t think it worth while.”

“You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every time. We’re gradually getting shipshape, though.”

Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a way of picking off tall officers, who are standing up among their houses. In the course of their talk they happened to mention such an instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have mentioned.

“Poor S---- did not last long. He had been out only three weeks.”

“How is J----? Hit badly?”

“Through the shoulder; not seriously.”

“H---- is back. Recovered very quickly.”

Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit--another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this group of officers might be gone to-morrow.

“I have one, sir,” said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned past his station. “Bullet went right through the head and came out the peak!”

It was time that Captain P---- was back to his own command. As we came to his company’s line word was just being passed from sentry to sentry:

“Not firing. Patrols going out.”

It was midnight now.

“We’ll go in the other direction,” said Captain P----, when he had learned that there was no news.

This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had something to say.

XVII

WITH THE IRISH

The Irish have something to say!--The Irish in America--The misguided Germans--The American’s visit an event--Veterans of Mons--Eggs in the trenches!--Irish hospitality--A dum-dum souvenir--A memorable drink--Sixty yards from the Germans--The Germans at work--British discipline, a comparison--A vision of the German dead--German diaries--Pawns of war--A heaven of soap and hot water--In the captain’s “house”--Soldier shop talk--Trench appetite--A village literally flailed--Pity the refugees.

Here, not the Irish Sea lay between the broad _a_ and the brogue, but the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners’ hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have something to say was correct. They had; for that matter, there are always individual Irishmen in the English regiments, lest English phlegm should let conversation run short.

The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in height, with a heavy moustache, and the ear-pieces of his cap tied under his chin though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.

“Who are you?” he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the veranda window with a jimmy.

For the nearer you get to the front, the more you feel that you are in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight. Every one is doing something definite as a part of the machine except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown.

Captain P---- was a little way back in another passage. I was alone and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and rifles.

“A German spy! That’s why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite suspicion,” I was going to say, when a call from Captain P---- identified me, and the sentry’s attitude changed as suddenly as if the inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might pass through the fire-lines.

“So it’s you, is it, right from America?” he said. “I’ve a sister living at Nashua, New Hampshire, U. S. A., with three brothers in the United States army.”

Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.

“It’s mesilf that’s going to America when me sarvice in the army is up in one year and six months,” he continued. “That’s some time yet. I’m going if I’m not killed by the Germans. It’s a way that they have, or we wouldn’t be killing them.”

“What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?”

“No. I’m looking for a better job. I’m thinking I’ll be one of your millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste.”

“What do you think of the Germans?”

“It’s little thinking we’re doing and more shooting. Now do ye know our opinion of them?”

“Some of the Irish in America are pro-German.”

“Now will ye listen to that! Their words come out of their mouths without acquainting their heads and hearts with what they are saying. Did you ever find nine Irishmen on the right side without one doing the talking for the divil for the joy of argument? It’s the Irish that would be at home in the German army doing the goose-step and taking orders from the Kaiser, is it not, now?”

“And what about the Germans--are they winning?”

“They started out strong, singing and goose-stepping high, for the Kaiser had told them that if they died for him they could burgle the world, and they thought it a grand idea. Shure, we accommodated them. There’s plenty of them dead, and some of them are wondering if, when they’re all dead, the Kaiser will have any more of the world than when he started, which makes them sorry for him and they give him another ‘Hoch’! ’Tis the nature of them, because they’ve never been told different.”

Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of their little houses and dugouts to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event, an American appearing in that trench in the small hours of the morning.

“I’ve a brother in Oklahoma!” said one.

“Is he a millionaire yet?” I asked.

“If he is he’s keeping it a secret!”

Some of them had been at Mons; a few of them had gone through the whole campaign without a scratch; more had been wounded and returned to the front. I like to ask that question, “Were you at Mons?” and get the answer, “Yes, sir, I was; I was through it all!” without boasting--a Mons veteran need not boast--but in the spirit of pride. To have been at Mons, where that hard-bought retreat of one against five began, will ever be enough glory for English, Scotch, Irish, or Welsh. It is like saying, “I was in Pickett’s charge!”

A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the doorway of his dugout, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an appetising aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.

“It looks like good bacon,” I remarked.

“It is that!” said the sergeant. “And the hungrier ye are the better. It’s your nose that’s telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye’re hungry yoursilf!”

“Then you’re pretty well fed?”

“Well fed, is it? It’s stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paté what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we’ve nothing else to do and when we’ve got to do something. We get eggs up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the trenches!”

When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some eggs in evidence.

“And if ye’ll not have the bacon, ye’ll have a drop of tea. Mind, now, while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your tongue a liar!”

Irish hospitality responded to the impulse of a warm Irish heart. Wouldn’t I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles and officers’ whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and German diaries.

“It’s easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!” I was told. “And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German.”

He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.

“But ye’ll take the tea,” said the sergeant, “with a little rum hot in it. ’Twill take the chill out of your bones.”

“What if I haven’t a chill in my bones?”

“Maybe it’s there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before an hour longer--or afther ye’re home between the sheets with the rheumatiz, and ye’ll be saying, ‘Why didn’t I take that glass?’ which I’m holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk.”

Held out by a man who had been at Mons and “through it all”! It was a memorable drink. Champagne poured out by a butler at your elbow is insipid beside it. Snatches of brogue followed me from the brazier’s glow when I insisted that I must be going.