Chapter 22

"Pretty!" L------ said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R------, also smiling, had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.

"Yes--pretty!" R------and I exclaimed together.

L------took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R------ that he had said "A black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing." Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.

At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.

"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack --that is the first degree. You might call this the second."

It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.

Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.

Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when--well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"--Caesar's ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher- bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.

"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.

"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."

As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.

Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.

XXIII Winning And Losing

Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.

At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another, became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.

The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.

The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course.

Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.

You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth.

In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.

The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not be done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.

"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.

It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self- punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.

But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let- us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick" one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.

One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.

At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns and the Germans with them.

When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until------!

Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.

The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is highly sensitized steel in response to will.

They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman's pastime and his birthright.

The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army, gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure on his wrist-watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze of dust from shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was his prisoner.

There was nothing gruesome about listening to a diffident soldier explaining how he "bombed them out," and you shared his amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck up his head from a dug-out within a foot of the face of a British soldier who was peeping inside to see if any more Germans were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.

When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were reminded that although the war was old the British army was young. There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making.

XXIV The Maple Leaf Folk

These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.

When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.

What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to that contrast.

All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won--they had such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.

The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells "hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba. Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act. Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.

One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."

It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal.

They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.

"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."

They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it" when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.

"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."

Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy--straight work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.

If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders------" etc.

My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing- match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.

As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'élite. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.

I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its membership and its distance from home.

Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown the lid off with high explosives.

It was in a big château that I heard the story--a story characteristic of modern warfare at its highest pitch--and felt its thrill when told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!

For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat's before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough. Ask the generals in whose command they have served if you have any doubts. There is one way to win praise at the front: by fighting. The P.P.s knew the way.

"Too bad Gault is not here. He's in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.

"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show--piece of shell in the eye."

"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."

The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.

The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire, which means shells all over the place and machine-guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.