Part 19

When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high ground as possible for a bird’s-eye view of battle, all you see is the explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar. Tugging at its moorings, it turns this way and that with the breeze. The speck directly beneath it through the glasses becomes an ordinary balloon basket and other specks attached to a guy rope play the part of the tail of a kite, helping to steady the type of balloon which has taken the place of the old spherical type for observation.

Any one who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how difficult it is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because of the jerking and pitching and trembling due to the envelope’s response to air-movements. The new type partly overcomes this drawback. To shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper drum-head to a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when shells were bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their commanders seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery’s reach. Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon observer hopes to see the enemy’s guns. He is watching for shell-bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether or not they are on the target.

Riding along the roads at the front, one may know that there is a battery a stone’s throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-muzzle warns him of its presence. It was wonderful to me that the artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns were, let alone the enemy’s. I imagine that he could return to a field and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll. His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which wise, old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven, or from under grandfather’s chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be there.

You might be walking across the fields and minded to go through a hedge and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun’s crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn’t grin as much as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.

“I’ll show you a big one, first!” said the general.

We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to know and we don’t want them to know. A pencil-point on their map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at that gun.

And then?

Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not know the location of any of the German batteries which had concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did not, they ought to be court-martialed for needlessly risking the precious lives of trained men. They would make for the “funk pits,” just as the gunners of any other power would.

The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell. Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for big guns have pretty thick cuticle. When the storm was over, the gunners would move the gun to another hiding-place; which would mean a good deal of work on account of its size.

It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a view to demoralising the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will demolish an enemy’s trench and let your infantry take possession of the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy’s artillery concentrates on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.

Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its parabola, its nose struck brick or earth or pavement and it exploded.

Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with figures on them, and other scales which play between the map and the gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind variation, all worked out with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it seemed a matter of bookkeeping and trigonometry rather than war.

If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a hundred men. If it went into the dugout of a support trench it would get everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into the open field it would probably get nobody.

“Cover!” some one exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and everybody promptly got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing about, he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners’ map was ours.

These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters. These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners had drilled in England, and had tried their “eight-inch hows” out on the target range, and brought them across the Channel, and nursed them along the French roads, and finally set them up in their hidden lair. Now they waited for observers to assist them in registration.

When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard; but he stopped that. At the front there is an end of the ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears. Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men went on with their recess, playing football in a nearby field.

The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not yet the veterans’ manner. It was clear that they had done everything required by the text-book of theory--the latest, up-to-date text-book of experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a shot by the enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest directions, though there was some difference among military experts on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the beginner to do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him do otherwise.

The general had a suggestion about the application of the method. He had little to say, the general, and it all was in the spirit of comradeship and much to the point. Few things escaped his observation. It seems fairly true that one who knows any branch of human endeavour well makes his work appear easy. Once a gunner always a gunner is characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life with guns. He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the guns on a certain section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire when it was needed in the commander’s plans.

If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they had qualified; and sometimes new-comers shoot quite as well as veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the general who is in charge of an expanding plant. New guns are just beginning to come; England is only beginning to make war. It takes time to make a gun and time to train men to fire it. The war will be won by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill when the war began.

“Here are some who have been in France from the first,” said the general, when we came to a battery of field-guns; of the eighteen-pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the hell-for-leather guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the pitched-battle conditions, before armies settled down in trenches and growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast fortifications.

These are called “light stuff” and “whiz-bangs” now, in army parlance. They throw an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, and so fast that one chases another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns that you might think eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones which could follow as rapidly as the engineers could lay bridges for them to cross.

They are the boys who weave the “curtain of fire” which you read about in the French official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The gun itself seems to possess intelligence.

There was the finesse of gunners’ craft, worthy of veterans, in the way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands. They did not change the location of their battery, and their judgment that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention their “funk pits,” which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye to the protection which comes of experience with German high explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of their business had been fought into them for eleven months.

Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard. Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front the German Staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.

It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden and tables and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how scrupulous they were about litter.

For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their week’s washing, taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every day they received London papers and letters from home. When they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty’s expense in the pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of sods over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from the gun-muzzles.

It was when leaving another battery that, out of the tail of my eye, I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the report, where, through undergrowth, we stepped among the busy groups around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres.

An order for some “heavy stuff” at a certain point on the map was being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of concentrated destruction, and closing the door again. All that detail of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the same act on the stage.

All ready, the word given, a crack, and through the air in front you saw a wingless, black object rising in a curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose, multiplied by ten, rising to its zenith and then descending till it passed out of sight behind a green bank of foliage on the horizon.

After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.

There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he was too busy to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree to make in the next if it were not; or if the word came to shift the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake the enemy up here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire-end some one was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I once found an observer, who was sitting upon a cushion looking out through a chink broken in a wall, with a signal corps operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies within your own lines, looking for such holes.

From this post I could make out the German and the British trenches in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields, and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a hole for his remains. If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk pit, as the gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which suited his taste better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches, are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to locate the other’s eyes, the other’s guns and troops, and the least movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.

“Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery officers.

Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from the orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show firing, this that we watched from an observing station, but part of the day’s work for the guns and the general. First; the map; “here and there,” as an officer’s finger pointed; and then one looked across the fields, green and brown and golden with summer crops.

Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm. We were going to put some “heavy stuff” in there and some “light stuff,” too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a certain tree.

Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in a certain building. “Heavy stuff” exclusively for this.

No enemy’s wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without interruption; and no German working party ought to be allowed to build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the monotony of their drudgery.

Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them is given by the artillery commander, as a part of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans.

One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By the effect of the enemy’s shells you judge what the effect of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theory and practice has become much the same with either adversary. For example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the enemy’s guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any rate, you may kill a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being killed.

By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer, whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately the calibre.

A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt; a second’s delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on a winter day, and then the sound of the burst. The next was over. With the third the “heavy stuff” ought to be right on.

But don’t forget that there was also an order for some “light stuff,” identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working party as it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly on. Exactly on is the way the British gunners like to fill an order f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.

Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards’ range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where they should.

No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for the shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless you are. Any good-enough temperament is ruled off wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that quiet-mannered general, after all his efforts to remedy the error in those guns!

But the general was quite human. He was not the “strafing” kind.

“I know those guns have an error!” he said, as he put his hand on the officer’s arm. That was all; but that was a good deal to the officer. Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being down-hearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunner, nor the adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first shot, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target.

“Right on!”

And again and again--right on!

The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane’s conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

“Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general. “It’s always hard to hold gunners down when they are on the target like that.”

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself. The Germans got two extra for full measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of the artillerists’ duty. The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising. Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

“The _Boches_ will be coming back at us soon, you will see!” said one of the officers at our observation post. “They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target”--which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.