Chapter 4

It was done, so to speak, with blood and tears. For seven months it was impossible for the gunner in training even to see, much less to work or fire the gun to which he was being trained. Zealous officers provided dummy wooden guns for their men. All kinds of devices were tried. And even when the guns themselves arrived, they came often without the indispensable accessories--range-finders, directors, and the like.

It was a time of hideous anxiety for both Government and War Office. For the military history of 1915 was largely a history of shortage of guns and ammunition--whether on the Western or Eastern fronts. All the same, by the end of 1915 the thing was in hand. The shells from the new factories were arriving in ever-increasing volume; and the guns were following.

In a chapter of _England's Effort_ I have described the amazing development of some of the great armament works in order to meet this cry for guns, as I saw it in February 1916. The second stage of the war had then begun. The first was over, and we were steadily overtaking our colossal task. The Somme proved it abundantly. But the expansion _still_ goes on; and what the nation owes to the directing brains and ceaseless energy of these nominally private but really national firms has never been sufficiently recognised. On my writing-desk is a letter received, not many days ago, from a world-famous firm whose works I saw last year: "Since your visit here in the early part of last year, there have been very large additions to the works." Buildings to accommodate new aeroplane and armament construction of different kinds are mentioned, and the letter continues: "We have also put up another gun-shop, 565 feet long, and 163 feet wide--in three extensions--of which the third is nearing completion. These additions are all to increase the output of guns. The value of that output is now 60 per cent, greater than it was in 1915. In the last twelve months, the output of shells has been one and a half times more than it was in the previous year." No wonder that the humane director who writes speaks with keen sympathy of the "long-continued strain" upon masters and men. But he adds--"When we all feel it, we think of our soldiers and sailors, doing their duty--unto death."

And then--to repeat--if the _difficulties of equipment_ were huge, they were almost as nothing to the _difficulties of training_. The facts as the War Office has now revealed them (the latest of these most illuminating brochures is dated April 2nd, 1917) are almost incredible. It will be an interesting time when our War Office and yours come to compare notes!--"when Peace has calmed the world." For you are now facing the same grim task--how to find the shortest cuts to the making of an Army--which confronted us in 1914.

In the first place, what military trainers there were in the country had to be sent abroad with the first Expeditionary Force. Adjutants, N.C.O.'s, all the experienced pilots in the Flying Corps, nearly all the qualified instructors in physical training, the vast majority of all the seasoned men in every branch of the Service--down, as I have said, to the Army cooks--departed overseas. At the very last moment an officer or two were shed from every battalion of the Expeditionary Force to train those left behind. Even so, there was "hardly even a nucleus of experts left." And yet--officers for 500,000 men had to be found--_within a month_--from August 4th, 1914.

How was it done? The War Office answer makes fascinating reading. The small number of regular officers left behind--200 officers of the Indian Army--retired officers, "dug-outs"--all honour to them!--wounded officers from the Front; all were utilised. But the chief sources of supply, as we all know, were the Officers' Training Corps at the Universities and Public Schools which we owe to the divination, the patience, the hard work of Lord Haldane. _Twenty thousand potential officers were supplied_ by the O.T.C's. What should we have done without them?

But even so, there was no time to train them in the practical business of war--and such a war! Yet _their_ business was to train recruits, while they themselves were untrained. At first, those who were granted "temporary commissions" were given a month's training. Then even that became impossible. During the latter months of 1914 "there was practically no special training given to infantry subalterns, with temporary commissions." With 1915, the system of a month's training was revived--pitifully little, yet the best that could be done. But during the first five months of the war most of the infantry subalterns of the new armies "had to train themselves as best they could in the intervals of training their men."

One's pen falters over the words. Before the inward eye rises the phantom host of these boy-officers who sprang to England's aid in the first year of the war, and whose graves lie scattered in an endless series along the western front and on the heights of Gallipoli. Without counting the cost for a moment, they came to the call of the Great Mother, from near and far. "They trained themselves, while they were training their men." Not for them the plenty of guns and shells that now at least lessens the hideous sacrifice that war demands; not for them the many protective devices and safeguards that the war itself has developed. Their young bodies--their precious lives--paid the price. And in the Mother-heart of England they lie--gathered and secure--for ever.

* * * * *

But let me go a little further with the new War Office facts.

The year 1915 saw great and continuous advance. During that year, an _average number of over a million troops_ were being trained in the United Kingdom, apart from the armies abroad. The First, Second, and Third Armies naturally came off much better than the Fourth and Fifth, who were yet being recruited all the time. What equipment, clothes and arms there were the first three armies got; the rest had to wait. But all the same, the units of these later armies were doing the best they could for themselves all the time; nobody stood still. And gradually--surely--order was evolved out of the original chaos. The Army Orders of the past had dropped out of sight with the beginning of the war. Everything had to be planned anew. The one governing factor was the "necessity of getting men to the front at the earliest possible moment." Six months' courses were laid down for all arms. It was very rare, however, that any course could be strictly carried out, and after the first three armies, the training of the rest seemed, for a time, to be all beginnings!--with the final stage farther and farther away. And always the same difficulty of guns, rifles, huts, and the rest.

But, like its own tanks, the War Office went steadily on, negotiating one obstacle after another. Special courses for special subjects began to be set up. Soon artillery officers had no longer to join their batteries _at once_ on appointment; R.E. officers could be given a seven weeks' training at Chatham; little enough, "for a man supposed to know the use and repairs of telephones and telegraphs, or the way to build or destroy a bridge, or how to meet the countless other needs with which a sapper is called upon to deal!" Increasing attention was paid to staff training and staff courses. And insufficient as it all was, for months, the general results of this haphazard training, when the men actually got into the field--all short-comings and disappointments admitted--were nothing short of wonderful. Had the Germans forgotten that we are and always have been a fighting people? That fact, at any rate, was brought home to them by the unbroken spirit of the troops who held the line in France and Flanders in 1915 against all attempts to break through; and at Neuve Chapelle, or Loos, or a hundred other minor engagements, only wanted numbers and ammunition--above all ammunition!--to win them the full victory they had rightly earned.

Of this whole earlier stage, the _junior subaltern_ was the leading figure. It was he--let me insist upon it anew--whose spirit made the new armies. If the tender figure of the "_Lady of the Lamp_" has become for many of us the chief symbol of the Crimean struggle, when Britain comes to embody in sculpture or in painting that which has touched her most deeply in this war, she will choose--surely--the figure of a boy of nineteen, laughing, eager, undaunted, as quick to die as to live, carrying in his young hands the "Luck" of England.

* * * * *

But with the end of 1915, the first stage, the elementary stage, of the new Armies came to an end. When I stood, in March 1916, on the Scherpenberg hill, looking out over the Salient, new conditions reigned. The Officer Cadet Corps had been formed; a lively and continuous intercourse between the realities of the front and the training at home had been set up; special schools in all subjects of military interest had been founded, often, as we have seen, by the zeal of individual officers, to be then gradually incorporated in the Army system. Men insufficiently trained in the early months had been given the opportunity--which they eagerly took--of beginning at the beginning again, correcting mistakes and incorporating all the latest knowledge. Even a lieutenant-colonel, before commanding a battalion, could go to school once more; and even for officers and men "in rest," there were, and are, endless opportunities of seeing and learning, which few wish to forgo.

And that brings me to what is now shaping itself--the final result. The year just passed, indeed--from March to March--has practically rounded our task--though the "learning" of the Army is never over!--and has seen the transformation--whether temporary or permanent, who yet can tell?--of the England of 1914, with its zealous mobs of untrained and "tatterdemalion" recruits, into a great military power,[This letter was finished just as the news of the Easter Monday Battle of Arras was coming in.] disposing of armies in no whit inferior to those of Germany, and bringing to bear upon the science of war--now that Germany has forced us to it--the best intelligence, and the best _character_, of the nation. The most insolent of the German military newspapers are already bitterly confessing it.

* * * * *

My summary--short and imperfect as it is--of this first detailed account of its work which the War Office has allowed to be made public--has carried me far afield.

The motor has been waiting long at the door of the hospitable headquarters which have entertained us! Let me return to it, to the great spectacle of the present--after this retrospect of the Past.

Again the crowded roads--the young and vigorous troops--the manifold sights illustrating branch after branch of the Army. I recall a draft, tired with marching, clambering with joy into some empty lorries, and sitting there peacefully content, with legs dangling and the ever blessed cigarette for company, then an aeroplane station--then a football field, with a violent game going on--a Casualty Clearing Station, almost a large hospital--another football match!--a battery of eighteen-pounders on the march, and beyond an old French market town crowded with lorries and men. In the midst of it D---- suddenly draws my attention to a succession of great nozzles passing us, with their teams and limbers. I have stood beside the forging and tempering of their brothers in the gun-shops of the north, have watched the testing and callipering of their shining throats. They are 6-inch naval guns on their way to the line--like everything else, part of the storm to come.

And in and out, among the lorries and the guns, stream the French folk, women, children, old men, alert, industrious, full of hope, with friendly looks for their Allies. Then the town passes, and we are out again in the open country, leaving the mining village behind. We are not very far at this point from that portion of the line which I saw last year under General X's guidance. But everything looks very quiet and rural, and when we emerged on the high ground of the school we had come to see, I might have imagined myself on a Surrey or Hertfordshire common. The officer in charge, a "mighty hunter" in civil life, showed us his work with a quiet but most contagious enthusiasm. The problem that he, and his colleagues engaged in similar work in other sections of the front, had to solve, was--how to beat the Germans at their own game of "sniping," which cost us so many lives in the first year and a half of war; in other words, how to train a certain number of men to an art of rifle-shooting, combining the instincts and devices of a "Pathfinder" with the subtleties of modern optical and mechanical science. "Don't think of this as meant primarily to kill," says the Chief of the School, as he walks beside me--"it is meant primarily to _protect_. We lost our best men--young and promising officers in particular--by the score before we learnt the tricks of the German 'sniper' and how to meet them." German "sniping," as our guide explains, is by no means all tricks. For the most part, it means just first-rate shooting, combined with the trained instinct and _flair_ of the sportsman. Is there anything that England--and Scotland--should provide more abundantly? Still, there are tricks, and our men have learnt them.

Of the many surprises of the school I may not now speak. Above all, it is a school of _observation_. Nothing escapes the eye or the ear. Every point, for instance, connected with our two unfamiliar figures will have been elaborately noted by those men on the edge of the hill; the officer in charge will presently get a careful report on us.

"We teach our men the old great game of war--wit against wit--courage against courage--life against life. We try many men here, and reject a good few. But the men who have gone through our training here are valuable, both for attack and defence--above all, let me repeat it, they are valuable for _protection_."

And what is meant by this, I have since learnt in greater detail. Before these schools were started, _every day_ saw a heavy toll--especially of officers' lives--taken by German snipers. Compare with this one of the latest records: that out of fifteen battalions there were only nine men killed by snipers _in three months._

We leave the hill, half sliding down the frozen watercourse that leads to it, and are in the motor again, bound for an Army Headquarters.

No. 4

_April 14th_, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--As the news comes flashing in, these April days, and all the world holds its breath to hear the latest messages from Arras and the Vimy ridge, it is natural that in the memory of a woman who, six weeks ago, was a spectator--before the curtain rose--of the actual scene of such events, every incident and figure of that past experience, as she looks back upon it, should gain a peculiar and shining intensity.

The battle of the Vimy Ridge [_April 8th_] is clearly going to be the second (the first was the German retreat on the Somme) of those "decisive events" determining this year the upshot of the war, to which the Commander-in-Chief, with so strong and just a confidence, directed the eyes of this country some three months ago. When I was in the neighbourhood of the great battlefield--one may say it now!--the whole countryside was one vast preparation. The signs of the coming attack were everywhere--troops, guns, ammunition, food dumps, hospitals, air stations--every actor and every property in the vast and tragic play were on the spot, ready for the moment and the word.

Yet, except in the Headquarters and Staff Councils of the Army nobody knew when the moment and the word would come, and nobody spoke of them. The most careful and exact organisation for the great movement was going on. No visitor would hear anything of it. Only the nameless stir in the air, the faces of officers at Headquarters, the general alacrity, the endless _work_ everywhere, prophesied the great things ahead. Perpetual, highly organised, scientific drudgery is three parts of war, it seems, as men now wage it. The Army, as I saw it, was at work--desperately at work!--but "dreaming on things to come."

One delightful hour of that March day stands out for me in particular. The strong, attractive presence of an Army Commander, whose name will be for ever linked with that of the battle of the Vimy ridge, surrounded by a group of distinguished officers; a long table, and a too brief stay; conversation that carries for me the thrill of the _actual thing_, close by, though it may not differ very much from wartalk at home: these are the chief impressions that remain. The General beside me, with that look in his kind eyes which seems to tell of nights shortened by hard work, says a few quietly confident things about the general situation, and then we discuss a problem which one of the party--not a soldier--starts.

Is it true or untrue that long habituation to the seeing or inflicting of pain and death, that the mere sights and sounds of the trenches tend with time to brutalise men, and will make them callous when they return to civil life? Do men grow hard and violent in this furnace after a while, and will the national character suffer thereby in the future? The General denies it strongly. "I see no signs of it. The kindness of the men to each other, to the wounded, whether British or German, to the French civilians, especially the women and children, is as marked as it ever was. It is astonishing the good behaviour of the men in these French towns; it is the rarest thing in the world to get a complaint."

I ask for some particulars of the way in which the British Army "runs" the French towns and villages in our zone. How is it done? "It is all summed up in three words," says an officer present, "M. le Maire!" What we should have done without the local functionaries assigned by the French system to every village and small town it is hard to say. They are generally excellent people; they have the confidence of their fellow townsmen, and know everything about them. Our authorities on taking over a town or village do all the preliminaries through M. le Maire, and all goes well.

The part played, indeed, by these local chiefs of the civil population throughout France during the war has been an honourable and arduous--in many cases a tragic--one. The murder, under the forms of a court-martial, of the Maire of Senlis and his five fellow hostages stands out among the innumerable German cruelties as one of peculiar horror. Everywhere in the occupied departments the Maire has been the surety for his fellows, and the Germans have handled them often as a cruel boy torments some bird or beast he has captured, for the pleasure of showing his power over it.

From the wife of the Maire of an important town in Lorraine I heard the story of how her husband had been carried off as a hostage for three weeks, while the Germans were in occupation. Meanwhile German officers were billeted in her charming old house. "They used to say to me every day with great politeness that they _hoped_ my husband would not be shot. 'But why should he be shot, monsieur? He will do nothing to deserve it.' On which they would shrug their shoulders and say, 'Madame, c'est la guerre!' evidently wishing to see me terrified. But I never gave them that pleasure."

A long drive home, through the dark and silent country. Yet everywhere one feels the presence of the Army. We draw up to look at a sign-post at some cross roads by the light of one of the motor lamps. Instantly a couple of Tommies emerge from the darkness and give help. In passing through a village a gate suddenly opens and a group of horses comes out, led by two men in khaki; or from a Y.M.C.A. hut laughter and song float out into the night. And soon in these farms and cottages everybody will be asleep under the guard of the British Forces, while twenty miles away, in the darkness, the guns we saw in the morning are endlessly harassing and scourging the enemy lines, preparing for the day when the thoughts now maturing in the minds of the Army leaders will leap in flame to light.

* * * * *

To-day we are off for the Somme. I looked out anxiously with the dawn, and saw streaks of white mist lying over the village and the sun struggling through. But as we start on the road to Amiens, the mist gains the upper hand, and we begin to be afraid that we shall not get any of those wide views from the west of Albert over the Somme country which are possible in clear weather. Again the high upland, and this time _three_ tanks on the road, but motionless, alack! the nozzles of their machine guns just visible on their great sides. Then a main road, if it can be called a road since the thaw has been at work upon it. Every mile or two, as our chauffeur explains, the pavé "is all burst up" from below, and we rock and lunge through holes and ruts that only an Army motor can stand. But German prisoners are thick on the worst bits, repairing as hard as they can. Was it perhaps on some of these men that certain of the recent letters that are always coming into G.H.Q. have been found? I will quote a few of those which have not yet seen the light.

Here are a batch of letters written in January of this year from Hamburg and its neighbourhood:

"It is indeed a miserable existence. How will it all end? There is absolutely nothing to be got here. Honey costs _6s. 6d_. a pound, goose fat _18s_. a pound. Lovely prices, aren't they? One cannot do much by way of heating, as there is no coal. We can just freeze and starve at home. Everybody is ill. All the infirmaries are overflowing. Small-pox has broken out. You are being shot at the front, and at home we are gradually perishing."

" ... On the Kaiser's birthday, military bands played everywhere. When one passes and listens to this tomfoolery, and sees the emaciated and overworked men in war-time, swaying to the sounds of music, and enjoying it, one's very gall rises. Why music? Of course, if times were different, one could enjoy music. But to-day! It should be the aim of the higher authorities to put an end to this murder. In every sound of music the dead cry for revenge. I can assure you that it is very surprising that there has not been a single outbreak here, but it neither can nor will last much longer. How can a human being subsist on 1/4 lb. of potatoes a day? I should very much like the Emperor to try and live for a week on the fare we get. He would then say it is impossible.... I heard something this week quite unexpectedly, which although I had guessed it before, yet has depressed me still more. However, we will hope for the best."

"You write to say that you are worse off than a beast of burden.... I couldn't send you any cakes, as we had no more flour.... We have abundant bread tickets. From Thursday to Saturday I can still buy five loaves.... My health is bad; not my asthma, no, but my whole body is collapsing. We are all slowly perishing, and this is what it is all coming to."

" ... The outlook here is also sad. One cannot get a bucket of coal. The stores and dealers have none. The schools are closing, as there is no coal. Soon everybody will be in the same plight. Neither coal nor vegetables can be bought. Holland is sending us nothing more, and we have none. We get 3-1/2 lb. of potatoes per person. In the next few days we shall only have swedes to eat, which must be dried."

* * * * *

A letter written from Hamburg in February, and others from Coblenz are tragic reading:

" ... We shall soon have nothing more to eat. We earn no money, absolutely none; it is sad but true. Many people are dying here from inanition or under-feeding."

Or, take these from Neugersdorf, in Saxony: