Part 20

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I’ll-hit-you character to siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some distance away.

They say the sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports’ Club shooting at clay pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets for the instant that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points being scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.

You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of humanity and of that quiet, kindly general and the things that he and the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for keeping an army’s artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals of your Varsity football team, which any one instinctly keeps--the reason of a world cause.

Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting the fall of its shells, which is engrossing, too, and amazingly simple. Of course, this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that one of the British planes has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If the plane does locate it, there is more work due in “make-up” to complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as among battleships of the North Atlantic.

Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dugout for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.

“We found the mother wild out there in the woods,” one of the men explained. “She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn’t let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We’ll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?”

On our way back to the general’s headquarters we must have passed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone’s throw away; and yet in an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy but engaged in destroying all the enemy’s batteries, according to the account. Eleven months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.

Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station. They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper across the street was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.

There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant, who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old man to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn’t it his wheat? Didn’t he need the crop?

The Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid the towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.

XIX

ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER

The anti-aeroplane gun--Tricks of the trade--The vagabond of the army lines--Before the days of Archibald--Pie for the Taube-- “Swaggerest” of the gun tribe--Sport of war--Puffs in the blue--Difficulty of accuracy--“Sending the prying aerial eye home”--The business of planes.

There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.

At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport in some new direction, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.

If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that was going on in an enemy’s lines. They must keep up so high that through the aviator’s glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over the parapet of a trench when the enemy’s trench is only a hundred yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.

Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a noon-day cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred yards behind the Taube. A soft thistleblow against the blue it seems at that altitude; but it wouldn’t if it were about your ears. Then it would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and you would hear the whiz of scores of bullets and fragments.

The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald’s steel throat and another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming. He knows that one means many, once he is in range.

Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to sidestep. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator’s eye.

Archibald’s propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night finds him and the day’s duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day. Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up, Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of dawn, on the lookout for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for aviators are also up early.

Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the British army, every one would be known as Archibald. When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the field guns.

It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault. Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald. When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to get one.

Archibald, who is quite the “swaggerest” of the gun tribe, has his own private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry’s former part as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy’s scouts. Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have pride, _élan_, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetisers and condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht’s crew and as lively as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally bound to think rather well of themselves.

Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their shells after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board, or any of the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers softly to his touch.

Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target-- which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession, for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eyes.

You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator? He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of the escaped prisoner, who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next shell fired at the same point will be wide of the target.

Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to the range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute. Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till it burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator’s speed and guessing from experience which way he will turn next.

That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises. Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says. But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance. Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.

But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are accustomed to the whiz of shell-fragments and bullets and to have their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out of commission, and frequently though the men be wounded, they are able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.

To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German, have, to escape anti-aircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.

A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their news.

XX

TRENCHES IN SUMMER

General Mud “down and out”--“What hopes!”--Heroes in khaki-- “Tickets to England”--Coddling at home--Comradeship among the men--The uses of barbed wire--“Your hat, sir!”--Sniping-- Sentimental Mr. Atkins--Exchange of pleasantries--A “Boche” joke--A mine explodes--Wasting the Kaiser’s powder--A maze of trench “streets”--A soldier cook--And cook stoves--Officers’ mess--Fresh from Sandhurst--“When do you think the war will be over?”--_Strafing_ the chicken--From favourite actors to military methods--A night crawl between trenches--An alarm--In the midst of barbed-wire--Crawling patrols in the wheat field-- A narrow escape--A trench cot--The “morning hate”--A memory of cheerful hospitality.

It was the same trench in June, still a relatively “quiet corner,” which I had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that had been so wet could become so dry.

This time the approach was made in daylight through a long communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought, on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far; and he glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a post of his dugout.

“I wanted to see if it were time to make another report,” he said. “We are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to some one else knows what is happening in his subordinate’s department.”

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces on the hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a company. General Mud was “down and out.” He waited on the winter rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping, to the boredom of billets.

* * * * *

“What hopes!” was the current phrase I heard among the men in these trenches. It shared honours with _strafe_. You have only one life to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig, and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for babes, but better than “K.K.” bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins, British regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come--shells, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.

There is much to be thankful for. The King’s Own Particular Fusiliers, as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On every man’s cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history; but no battle honours equal that of the regiment’s part in the second battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment’s story, whom you picture in imagination with halos of glory in the wish that you might have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A. D. 1915, whom any one may meet.

But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eye-witnesses of the action. To remark that the K. O. P. F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down hill. It is the business of the K. O. P. F. to be brave. Why talk about it?

One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather expects to be killed. The other two “got tickets to England,” as they say. My lady will take the convalescents joy riding in her car and afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my! What hopes!

Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it, he has. My lady’s patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins knows it will be; and she will wonder if the “stick it” quality of the British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses and he is having the time of his life in more respects than strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any pretence to bravery.

If one goes as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and says, “How are you?” and, “Are you going to Berlin?” and, “Are you comfortable?” etc., Tommy Atkins will say, “Yes, sir,” and “Very well, sir,” etc., as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.

Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family; into that very human family of soldierdom in a quiet corner; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and comradeship and “joshing” are here among men to whom wounds and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down behind the parapet and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less than in a shop or a factory.

Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction, which, to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any stranger.

“All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear,” says Mr. Atkins. “Put it down in the guidebooks.”

Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some farmer sowed before the positions were established in this area is now in head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of sandbags which is the enemy’s line. It was late June at its loveliest; no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away and an occasional sniper’s bullet. One cracked past as I was looking through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the German trenches.

“Your hat, sir!”

Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had come down and the head under it most expeditiously. Up to eight hundred yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs, even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a shell. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.

“Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the big one at the right?”

In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle barrel. Perhaps sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.

“It’s about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus, from a machine gun!”

A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.

“Not giving you much excitement!” said Tommy.

“I suppose I’d get a little if I stood up on the parapet?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t get a ticket for England; you’d get a box!”

“There’s a cemetery just back of the lines if you’d prefer to stay in France!”

I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to the trench. These tender-hearted soldiers who joked with death had placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes, he’s loaded with sentiment, but not for the movies.

“Keep your head down there, Eames!” called a corporal. “I don’t want to be taking an inventory of your kit.”

Eames did not even realise that his head was above the parapet. The hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways back of the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward for his patience.

The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing.

As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses, I saw a wisp of a flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds of the flag and I saw that it was the tricolour of France.

“A _Boche_ joke!” Tommy explained.

“Probably they are hating the French to-day?”

“No, it’s been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally. They’d get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of humour.”

“If it were a German flag?” I suggested.

“What hopes! We’d make it into a lace curtain!”

Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheat-field, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.

“There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old _Boche_ professor in spectacles, who moves a machine gun up and down for a bluff,” said a soldier, and another corrected him:

“No, the old professor’s the one that walks along at night sending up flares!”

“Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!”

“And singing the hymn of hate!”