Chapter 17

Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without getting a single shell. Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes; or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing 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 the 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 unseen prey in a wide landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching scream and the earth trembles and 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 distant, 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 firing-trench and the dug- outs 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 all 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 someone 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.

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 that 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. Anyone 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 they are on the target or not.

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 is 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 little 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 guns of the German battery which had concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the precious lives of trained men. They would make for the "funk-pits," as they call the dug-outs, 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 cuticles. When the storm was over, the gunners would move their treasure 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 demoralizing 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 building, earth, or pavement and it exploded.

Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with figures, 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 book-keeping 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 dug-out 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!" someone 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 they had tried their "eight-inch hows" out on the target range and brought them across the Channel and nursed them along 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 the general 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 near-by field.

The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not yet the veteran's manner. It was clear that they had done everything required by the textbook of theory--the latest, up-to-date textbook 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 all was in the spirit of comradeship and quite to the point. Not much escaped his observation.

It seems fairly true that one who knows his work well in any branch of human endeavour makes it 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 required in the commander's plans.

If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they had qualified; and sometimes newcomers 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. The war will be decided 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 "whizz-bangs" now, in army parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.

They are the boys who weave the "curtain of fire" which you read about in the 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 the nature of 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 the business had been fought into them for over a year.

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, 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 weekly laundry, taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every day they received the 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 sod 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 we stepped through undergrowth among the busy group 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. 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 thunder peal and through the air you saw a wingless, black object in a faint 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 chessboard 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 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 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 up the enemy here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire-end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I found one observer, who was sitting on a cushion looking out through a chink 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 British and the German 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 the burial of 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 purpose 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 figures," 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 an orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and 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 fields, green and brown and golden with the 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 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 effect of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theories and practice has become much the same by either adversary. For example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the 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 get 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.