Chapter 18

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, and after the second's delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on a winter day, came 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 "Right 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 that 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 that 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 veteran general, after all his efforts to try 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; and 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 downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first one, 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 these 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 wireless station got two extra shells 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 who was 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.

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about 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 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 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 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 anyone instinctively 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 enough, too, and amazingly simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as among battleships of our North Atlantic fleet.

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 dug-out 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. Twelve 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 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 farmer 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?

And 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 towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.

XVIII Archibald The Archer

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, 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 noonday 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 thistledown against the blue it seems at that altitude; but it would not 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 whizz 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 side- step. 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 look-out 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 "swaggerist" 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 appetizers 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 eye.

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 whizz 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 man 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 antiaircraft 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.

XIX Trenches In Summer

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 dug-out.

"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 someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's department."

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of 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 haloes 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 anyone may meet.

But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses 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 you go 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," 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 soldier-dom 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 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!"