Part 18

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after the counter-attacks which had followed the battle had been checked. Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your dam against another flood.

“We are within about sixty yards of the Germans,” said Captain P----, at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the braziers well behind.

Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them. Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.

The Germans were as busy as beavers dam building. They had a lot of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches of sentences intelligible and occasionally the energetic, shouted, guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed for Captain P----, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a particular instance.

“What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t have it; he’d get rebellious,” was the reply. “No, you mustn’t yell at Tommy. He’s a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine.”

Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each army and each people to its own ways.

Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking ready at a trigger’s pull should life show itself! When daylight comes the British sing out their “Good morning, Germans!” and the Germans answer, “Good morning, British!” without adding, “We hope to kill some of you to-day!” Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes. The thing was ridiculous.

At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better than the Briton. Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk, that is getting “jumpy.” The Germans in front roared out their contempt in a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans also became “jumpy” and began tearing the air with bullets, firing against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when he is played on the music hall stage. Possibly he feels the inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain’s professional fighting man, who was the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell, and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of machine guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and well-aimed rifle bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man’s flesh is soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to have gone home. It was: “Why don’t you stop singing and bury your dead?” But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland. And the time is A. D., 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether, perhaps--not many out of the Kaiser’s millions. Yet they seemed a great many to one who saw them lying there.

We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers’ diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for a few cents, each one telling the dead man’s story and revealing the monotony of a soldier’s existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover Neuve Chapelle--out of those woods in the test of all their drill and waiting.

A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not know what he was going against? that only the German general knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one command and forgotten the next.

“Good night!” called the Irish.

“Good night and good luck!”

“Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!”

“Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall into a gold mine!”

We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the men remained up around the braziers. The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes--for there are no pajamas for officers or men in these “crawls,” as they are sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and sleep.

“How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?” officers have been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.

You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin; then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.

No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part, at least, of the mud off his uniform. It makes him feel more as if he were “at home” in barracks.

From the breastworks, Captain P---- and I went for a stroll in the village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick stuck into the wall of his little earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It was three o’clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the over-bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.

“Don’t try!” said the captain. “Lie down and pull your boots off in the doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak.”

Sleep! Does a débutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such good company, the company of this captain, who was smiling all the while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest, who had been with armies before!

It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a kind of promenade. On this visit I was in the family. If it is the right kind of a family that is the way to get a good impression. There would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.

So Captain P---- and I lay there talking. One felt the dampness of the earth under his body and the walls exuded moisture. The average cellar was dry by comparison. “You will get your death of cold!” any mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet, peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat country of Northern France and Flanders.

“It is very horrible, this kind of warfare,” said the captain. He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. “All war is very horrible, of course.” Regular soldiers rarely take any other view. They know war.

“With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave,” I suggested.

“Oh, that arm is all right!” he replied. “This is what I am paid for”-- which I had heard regulars say before. “And it is for England!” he added, in his quiet way. “Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans,” he went on. “The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can’t hate.”

Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists in war.

“Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?”

“No. We must win by fighting,” he replied. This was in March, 1915. “You know,” he went on, taking another tack, “when one gets back to England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very nice.”

“Yes. I’ve found the same after roughing it,” I agreed. “One is most particular that he has every comfort to which civilisation entitles him.”

We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing, and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or three minutes and the firing died down to silence.

Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not yet received theirs, he had none himself.

“It’s not fair to the men,” he said. “I don’t want anything they don’t have.”

No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage of his soldiers, who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and dangers shared.

What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me; one of the most memorable of my life.

“I was glad you could come,” he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.

Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some trees.

In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant’s cottage that was battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some surprise, that I had not washed my face.

“The food was just as good, wasn’t it?” remarked the major. “We get quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre supper.”

With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison. All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle. An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the houses as under the pestle head in a mortar; blown walls into dust; taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and thrown them back with another explosion.

Neuve Chapelle had been literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British artillery, which the British had to make after the war began to compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone, wronged, bullied Germany quite unprepared-- Austria with her fifty millions does not count--was fighting on the defensive against wicked, aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been plotting and planning “the day” when they would conquer the Germans.

Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted into a spool of wire, the other simply mashed.

Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers’ benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on the roads if strong enough, helping France any way they could, not murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!

XVIII

WITH THE GUNS

A war of explosions--And machines--Battle-panorama style--Value of surprise--Ever hungry guns--Accurate or blind and groping guns--Demon guns--Balloon observations--Finding the guns-- Ingenious concealments--“Funk pits”--Mechanism--Bookkeeping and trigonometry--“Cover!”--The German aeroplane--New howitzers and their crews--The general--A gun specialist-- The “hell-for-leather” guns--The “curtain of fire”--In operation--Spotting the targets--How the system works--A chagrined gunner--A bull’s eye!--The Germans retort--Horrible fascination of war--A queer “refugee”--“Besides, they are women and children.”

It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and mines laid under the enemy’s trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to three-inch and machine guns; a war of machinery, with man still the pre-eminent machine.

Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand passes of all other travellers. Any one who tried to keep out of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all a matter of chance, with long odds or short odds, according to the neighbourhood you are in. If shells come, they come without warning and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at least, I am.

“Gawd! W’at a ’ole!” remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.

It is only eighteen years ago that, at the battle of Domoko in the Greco-Turkish war, I saw half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open and discharge salvos with black powder, in the good, old, battle-panorama style. One battery of modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked:

“There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!”

He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the next day.

“No, not very heavy. No attack,” a division staff officer explained. “The _Boches_ had been building a redoubt and we turned on some h. e. s.”--meaning high explosive shells.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of modern war. What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane had been watching them day by day and that the spot was nicely registered on a British gunner’s map. On this map it was a certain numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at that point. The gunners waited till the house of cards was up before knocking it to pieces.

Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without getting a single shell. Then it may get a score in ten minutes; or it may be shelled regularly every day for weeks. “They are shelling X again,” or, “They have been leaving Z alone for a long time,” is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud of having escaped altogether and proud of the number and size of the shells received.

“Did you get any?” I asked the division staff officer, who had told me about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common question that, at the front, “Did you get any?” (meaning Germans). A practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with casualties.

“Yes, quite a number,” said the officer. “Our observer saw them lying about.”

The guns are watching for targets at all hours--the ever hungry, ever ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically calculating, marvellously accurate, and also the guessing, wondering, blind, groping, helpless, guns, which toss their steel messengers over streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for their unseen prey in a wide landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dugout as you hear an approaching scream, and the earth trembles, the air is wracked by a concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand yards away, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when, before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of chaos that they seem to possess when the fighting-trench and the dugouts and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the amount of damage they have done is guesswork; and helpless without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them.

One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an enemy’s demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy’s eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged.

Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the amount of hell sent by the enemy’s which you have tasted. After you have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say, “Nice old demon!” and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take too much personal interest in you.

You must have some one to show you the way or you would not find any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate half the guns. He might miss “Grandmother” and “Sister” and “Betsy” and “Mike” and even “Mister Archibald,” who is the only one who does not altogether try to avoid publicity.