Part 21

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.

“A mine!”

“In front of the --th brigade!”

“Ours or the _Boches’_?”

“Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!”

“No, theirs!”

Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.

“Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!” said experienced Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.

The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to us, that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.

“After all that digging, wasting _Boche_ powder in that fashion! The Kaiser won’t like it!” said Mr. Atkins. “We exploded one under them yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn’t wait. They’ve awful tempers, the _Boches_!” And he finished the job on which he was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread surmounted by all the ration jam it would hold; while one of the company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.

* * * * *

“What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?” growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench. “My word! Is His Majesty’s army becoming illiterate? _Strafe_ that sign at the corner! What do you think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at printing?”

The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, “No thoroughfare!” The soldier cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a small stove. Yes, they have cook stoves in the trenches. Why not? The line had been in the same position for six months.

“Little by little we improve our happy home,” said the cook.

The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers’ mess hall, bought at a store in the nearest town.

When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with boarded walls and roof, which was covered with tar paper and a layer of earth set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is baking biscuits for supper.

The officers’ mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheat-field. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest day of the year in this region. The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night.

Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties. Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K. O. P. F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed about forty. It was not right to ask the youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.

“Has any one asked him it yet?” one inquired, referring to some question to the guest.

“Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be over?”

It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army and the world. We had it over with before the soldier cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation:

Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the honour to its neighbour, till a brave man said:

“I will! I will _strafe_ the chicken!”

_Gott strafe England!_ _Strafe_ has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called _Boches_ they are called Strafers. “Won’t you strafe a little for us?” Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes!

That gallant youngster of the K. O. P. F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody’s lap or a wing in anybody’s eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticise his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed permanent “strafer” of all the fowls that came to table.

Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn’t it better that way? Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn’t it the way of the ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day? With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances. In their light-heartedness they made war seem a keen sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches. Youth’s resources defy monotony and death at the same time.

An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and piling sandbags in the wheat-field. The plan was to slip out as soon as it was really dark with a machine gun and a dozen men, get behind the Germans’ own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.

Before dinner, however, J----, who was to be the general of the expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.

J---- had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in summer. He wore trunks with his knees bare. When he had to do a “crawl” he unwound his puttee leggings and wound them over his knees. He and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of the enemy’s sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing Indian, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full realisation that failure in this hide-and-seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young men.

They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the turtles’ heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the wiser.

Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they were old and must have been there for some time.

“I’ll take the machine gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,” said J----.

For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what risks youth might take with machine guns.

We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international copyright on strategy is recognised. We rushed out of the mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, their rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.

“Who are you? Answer, or we fire!” called the ranking young lieutenant.

If any persons present out at front in face of thirty rifles knew the English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation, they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.

“Enough! Cease fire!” said the officer. “Nobody there. If there had been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover.”

This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a fusillade in this kind of a test.

After dinner J---- rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine gun expedition. J----’s knees were black and blue in spots; they were also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning a machine gun on them before they turn one on you.

“One man hit by a stray bullet,” said J----, on his return.

“I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,” said the other officer.

“Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got about the only shot fired at us.”

“Need a stretcher?”

“No.”

Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.

* * * * *

Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more interesting and death more likely.

“It’s dark enough, now,” said one of the youngsters who was out on another scout. “We’ll go out with the patrol.”

By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly detected. The light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides are on the prowl.

“Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,” said the young officer. “They would be more useful than aeroplanes in locating the enemy’s gun positions. A properly reliable owl would come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheat-field at such a point and a machine gun would wipe out the German patrol.”

We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out of the front trench toward the Germans.

“Anybody out?” he asked a soldier, who was on guard at the end of it.

“Yes, two.”

Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.

“Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We’ve everything to keep the _Boches_ off our front lawn except ‘keep off the grass!’ signs.”

It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat’s-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept a brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.

“Down flat!” whispered the officer.

It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army anywhere in France except that flare. However, if a guide, who knows as much about war as this one, says to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine guns and rifles--between the fighting powers of Britain and Germany--you take the hint. The flare sank into the earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces.

“What if we had been seen?”

“They’d have combed the wheat in this neighbourhood thoroughly, and they might have got us.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said.

So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing about it. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.

We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.

Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides, like that around some campfire on the plains.

It seemed quite within the bounds of probability that you might have crawled on up to the Germans and said, “Howdy!” But by the time you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking.

“Well, shall we go back?” asked the officer.

There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer dog’s. Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command of a company of men.

It happened, as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting, shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets swarmed.

* * * * *

It was two A. M. From the dugouts came unmistakable sounds of slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer’s bed chamber was indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it “home-like.” He lay down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I was not the object of any favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot, fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans rather than the American cousin in mind.

“The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable side, I have found,” said my host. “It may not appear so at first, but you will find that it works out that way.”

Nevertheless, one slept, his last recollection that of sniping shots, to be awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade--the “morning hate” or the “morning strafe,” as it was called. After the vigil of darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheat-field watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself, unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were yawning and stirring from their dugouts. After the muster they would take the places of those who had been “on the bridge” through the night.

“It’s a case of how little water you can wash with, isn’t it?” I said to the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles from a town which had a water system. But bringing a water supply in pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back of the trenches.

“Don’t expect much for breakfast,” said the _strafer_ of the chicken. But it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home and abroad.

J---- was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the trench.

XXI

A SCHOOL IN BOMBING

War specialism--A school on a French farm--A lesson--“Bombing them out”--Fighting in zigzag traverses--Cold steel--The bomb storehouse--All shapes and sizes--Revivals of Roman legionary days--A home-made product--A fool-proof, up to the minute and popular (except with the “Boches”) variety.

It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the anarchists’ weapon, which has now become as respectable as the rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.

Present was the chief instructor, a young Scotch subaltern with blue eyes, a pleasant smile, and a Cock o’ the North spirit. He might have been twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.

Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars-- and very much of a regular--who had three ribbons which he had won in previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These two understood each other.

“If you don’t drop it, why, it’s all right!” said the sergeant. “Of course, if you do--”

I did not drop it.

“And when you throw it, sir, you must look out and not hit the man behind and knock the bomb out of your hand. That has happened before to an absent-minded fellow who was about to toss one at the _Boches_, and it doesn’t do to be absent-minded when you throw bombs.”

“They say that you sometimes pick up the German bombs and chuck them back before they explode,” it was suggested.

“Yes, sir, I’ve read things like that in some of the accounts of the reporters who write from Somewhere in France. You don’t happen to know where that is, sir? All I can say is that if you are going to do it you must be quick about it. I shouldn’t advise delaying your decision, sir, or perhaps when you reached down to pick it up, neither your hand nor the bomb would be there. They’d have gone off together, sir.”

“Have you ever been hurt in your handling of bombs?” I asked.

Surprise in the bland blue eyes.

“Oh, no, sir! Bombs are well behaved if you treat them right. It’s all in being thoughtful and considerate of them!” Meanwhile, he was jerking at some kind of a patent fuse set in a shell of high explosive. “This is a poor kind, sir. It’s been discarded, but I thought that you might like to see it. Never did like it. Always making trouble!”

More distance between the audience and the performer.

“Now I’ve got it, sir--get down, sir!”

The audience carried out instructions to the letter, as army regulations require. It got behind the protection of one of the practice-trench traverses. He threw the discard beyond another wall of earth. There was a sharp report, a burst of smoke, and some fragments of earth were tossed into the air.

In a small affair of two hundred yards of trench a week before, it was estimated that the British and the Germans together threw about five thousand bombs in this fashion. It was enough to sadden any Minister of Munitions. However, the British kept the trench.

“Do the men like to become bombers?” I asked the subaltern.

“I should say so! It puts them up in front. It gives them a chance to throw something, and they don’t get much cricket in France, you see. We had a pupil here last week, who broke the throwing record for distance. He was as pleased as Punch with himself. A first-class bombing detachment has a lot of pride of corps.”