Part 8

He or one of his assistants (for it always seemed to me that half the French Army helped to carry his papers round for him) it was that first introduced us to the fascinations of the ring-making industry. It appears that an industrious Frenchman, one supposes a jeweller by trade, early in the war hit upon the idea of collecting the fuses of hostile shells that fell near him, melting down the aluminium of which they are largely made, and casting it into rings, which he ornamented by letting in pieces of brass or copper, also components of the fuse. The practice spread like wildfire through the French troops, it gave a congenial occupation to their busy fingers, and brought them a gratifying increase of income. Our men were at first ready customers--there was little enough for them to spend money upon, the inhabitants had been cleared out of the surrounding villages, and no civilian population means no _estaminets_. But some of the more commercially-minded among us--the whole story is as a microcosm of our commercial supremacy as a nation--loath to see this profitable trade passing them by, determined to enter into competition. The first experiments were dramatic enough. A band of telephonists collected a large store of wood torn from ruined houses, and of coal, fetched at no small risk from a mine that was usually under fire, in the observation post, which happened then to be a fairly large house well back from the hostile lines, so that a fire was allowed in the telephonists' room. Here one evening they collected, like a band of alchemists for the fusion of the Philosopher's Stone, and here I chanced upon them, the room lit only by the glare of a huge fire, around which they all crouched, their eyes fixed upon a saucepan that held in its depths one small fuse, which the Master of the Black Arts periodically poked enquiringly with the point of his bayonet. I believe that attempt ended in the necessity for a sudden and disastrous quenching, brought about by the fact that the house itself showed ominous signs of catching fire. After many vicissitudes the art became centred in the battery cooks, who, having the unfair advantage that in the natural course of events they worked by a fire all day, formed a sort of Guild of Ring Makers, and some very creditable work was produced. Their first step was to undersell the French, and they succeeded to such an extent that the cook-house became a miniature Birmingham, and orders had to be placed early to secure delivery. Souvenirs these rings became in a land where everybody seems to ask everybody else for a "souvenir," a term that has become so wide that it covers everything portable. One day I was standing in a doorway when surely the youngest soldier in the French army--he could not have been more than fourteen; I suppose he was a drummer boy, but how he reached so close to the firing line has always puzzled me--passed me and saluted gravely. My smile must have reassured him, for he stopped and after some hesitation looked at me and saluted again. "Souvenir, monsieur!" he blurted out at last. "Souvenir?" said I, "Quelle espèce de souvenir désirez-vous?" With a grin that threatened to sever the top of his head from the rest of his body, he replied, "Souvenir de bully-beef, monsieur!" He got it.

The flies that marred the soothing ointment of this position were certain mysterious bullets that flew about at strange hours of the night and day. Nobody was ever actually hit, but people strolling about between the guns heard a whirr overhead that made then duck involuntarily, and heated officers would dash into the mess swearing that they had seen bullets flatten themselves against brick walls within an inch of their noses. Scepticism, or even a suggestion that they were spent bullets from the firing line, was treated as insubordination. A sniper it must be, a snark who crept into our lines, shot his bolt, then softly and silently vanished away. One evening the combined patience of the battery could bear it no longer--I think somebody had staggered into the mess in a condition of collapse, and upon being revived with a rum ration, proceeded to explain how his cigarette had been shot out of his mouth by a bullet that passed between his teeth. At all events, it was decided to inform the French and request them to take steps to abate the nuisance. They, in the expressive jargon of the day, were all over it. Parties of men from their lines and our own crept out in the dusk to hunt the sniper--what a glorious opportunity of winning fame by returning with his scalp, or one of his ears, or whatever part of a sniper one does bring back as a trophy! Dozens of parties, each more subtle than the other in their proposed methods of action, crept out in the rapidly-falling dusk, and with them the greater number of our officers, armed with looted rifles and more subtlety than all the rest of the parties put together. Then night fell dark and moonless, and the fun began. Each party, busily engaged in its own game of blind-man's-buff, caught sight of some other party, and opened a hot and furious fire upon them. The remaining parties, seeing the flashes, emptied their magazines in their direction. By an hour or so after dark, the battle was in full swing. At ten o'clock such of the battery as were not engaged in the chase were cowering in their dug-outs and there was not a whole pane of glass for miles around. At half-past ten, a telephonist going to the O.P. to relieve his comrade was forced to take shelter in a disused communication trench, and to remain there all night, any attempt on his part to climb out being met by rapid fire from every direction at once. At eleven, a mitrailleuse was dragged up by an excited knot of men, and opened fire in the direction from which there seemed to come most noise. At half-past, fire had become general all along the line, everybody, supposing that his neighbour knew what he was aiming at, firing in the same direction as he did. At midnight the Germans, thinking it a shame to be left so long out of the picture, and possibly tired of being kept awake, opened with a field battery, an inconsiderate action that effectually damped the proceedings. By one o'clock all was quiet again, and, much to my astonishment, every one returned whole, each man having seen the sniper and had at least a dozen shots at him, every one of which by his own account must have been fatal. Subsequent inquiries revealed the amazing fact that the French also had suffered no casualties. Yet alas! no more, apparently, had the sniper, for the bullets continued to whizz and valuable officers to have hair-breadth escapes until the time came for us to leave the place.

On the next night we were shelled, probably by way of retaliation for the disturbance of the previous night. The enemy seemed to know our approximate position, and "searched and swept" all round us with heavy shell, but never contrived to burst one within twenty yards of the guns. It happened to be my business to walk about the battery, exhorting men to keep under cover. In the middle of it all a party of French soldiers walked nonchalantly through our lines. "Prenez garde," I shouted, "Il y a des obus qui tombe par ici, descendez dans les abris!" They thanked me and ran into the dug-outs. The next shell burst pretty close, covering everything with fragments. Out dashed my Frenchmen, and in answer to my expostulations, "Nous en voulons un souvenir," they replied, and forthwith began to hunt for the fuse.

Magnificent as are the French infantry, their artillery far surpass them. To those who have any knowledge of artillery work, the French appear as performers of miracles. Their equipment, their incomparable _soixante-quinze_, is a frail-looking cheaply constructed affair, giving the impression of weakness and inefficiency. Their _personnel_ seems utterly inadequate, both in men and officers, their methods of ammunition supply are rudimentary. But a French battery will come into action in an inconceivably short time, and will continue in action night and day at a rate of fire that is unbelievable to one who has not heard it. Minor technical details, such as sights, are far in advance of our own, even in the case of some old heavy pieces, whose mirror sight utterly shames by its convenience and simplicity our extraordinary device for the same purpose. And the officers, how keen they were! Scarcely a day passed but some two or three came into the battery and courteously enquired if they might examine _les pièces_. Of course they could, we were only too happy to exhibit them, and then what explanations and comparisons between theirs and ours! "Ce frein-ci n'est pas mal, mais pourquoi les ressorts sont-ils d'une telle longueur?" or "Mon dieu, que cet appareil de portage est compliqué!" Keen men and keen critics, equally eager to show us their weapons and to hear our criticisms upon them. Their colonel included us in his command at such times as we supported the French batteries, which was fairly frequently. A spare figure in a close-fitting jacket, a bullet-shaped head set with a pair of piercing eyes that discovered everything without the assistance of the tongue, he was the ideal of an artillery officer. He had the scientific mind that absorbs every detail and stores it away in a pigeon-hole ready for immediate use. Never once after the first time that I was introduced to him, did he fail, wherever we met, to stop, shake hands and address me by name. In a hurried quarter of an hour I once recited to him all the technical details of the howitzer with which we were armed. Weeks afterwards I heard him repeat faultlessly all the details, with others which he had noticed for himself. If he be a type of the senior artillery officer, happy are our Allies in the possession of such men.

Another incident that occurred to us will show the unvarying promptitude and courtesy with which the French treated us. It happened that close to the battery and in the middle of the French infantry billets was a ruined church tower, of which a certain portion still stood, enough, we discovered, to make it worth our while to build a series of ladders within it, and to use the bell-beam as an emergency observation post. But Monsieur le Poilu thought that this was a capital spot into which to climb, and from thence to wave his képi to his friends and generally to behave in such a manner as to attract the attention of hostile observers, with the not unnatural result that one fine evening the enemy fired a few rounds at it, narrowly missing our senior subaltern, and, which was a matter for far deeper concern, the ration lorry. Complaint being made to the colonel, he, after several complimentary remarks as to our skill in using so unfavourable a place, promised that there should be no repetition of the offence. Ever afterwards an armed guard was posted at the base of the tower, with orders to admit no one but ourselves.

Those French soldiers, what children they were, as their behaviour in the tower showed! Whenever we were in action, a crowd of them would gather behind the guns to watch the shell in its flight, as is perfectly easy with any low-velocity howitzer. "Venez voir l'obus!" they would cry, and, as the gun fired, "Le voila, voyez, voyez! ah, il tombe----" and a shriek of delight would almost drown one's subsequent orders. What children and what men! Perfect fighters, eager to rush to the attack, yet patient under the iron discipline of the trenches, easily moved to a wild display of nervous energy, possessing creative imagination, yet stoical under agony to a surpassing degree. And not the men only, but every class--peasants, doctors, priests, each in his own sphere, are imbued with the highest spirit of which man can boast, the spirit of self-sacrifice. I hold no brief for any form of doctrine, being one of those who hold that all religions are nothing but quibbles round a central truth that no sane man denies, but the devotion of the French priest strikes me with the deepest admiration. I have seen a battery heavily shelled and suffer many casualties, so that the detachments were forced to take to their dug-outs. The doctor galloped up on horseback, but the priest on foot, running with his soutane tucked up round his waist, was there first, out in the open administering extreme unction to the mortally wounded, helping others to a place of safety. "Greater love hath no man than this----"

IX

CHANGING POSITION

The preparation of a battery position is a business that requires much labour and considerable time, if anything more elaborate than mere screening from view is attempted. Deep pits must be dug for the guns, and slopes cut into these pits by which the said guns may be hauled in and out. These pits must be floored with an elaborate platform, their sides must be revetted, that is to say that boards, corrugated iron or some similar substance must be fixed against them to prevent their falling in, and, most difficult feat of all, they must be roofed over with as much earth as such roof beams as can be procured can be made to bear. When the pits are completed, deep caverns must be dug and prepared to serve as refuges for the detachments in case of the battery being shelled. Other shelters must be provided as magazines for ammunition, as a room for the telephone and its operators, as a refuge for the section commanders. Billets must be found for the men and officers, if no billets are available dug-outs must be made. Places must be found for cook-houses, washing-places, work-shops, stores. A battery position prepared for lengthy occupation is a most elaborate work, and one does not light-heartedly desert it for an open plain where everything remains to be done. But sooner or later the dread message comes: "The battery will be prepared to move at 6 p.m. to-morrow. An officer will proceed forthwith to such-and-such a place where he will be shown the new position selected." Off goes the officer in the car, he meets some deputy from headquarters, and the two trudge off together through the ever-present mud. "Here you are," says the deputy cheerfully; "how does this suit you? Splendid place. Look at that orchard; you could hide the guns under the trees." The battery officer stares glumly at a dozen apple trees, each of which is of a size to flourish contentedly in a fair-sized flower-pot, and makes some dubious reply. "I never knew such difficult fellows to please as you siege battery fellows are in my life! Well, come and look over here. There's a natural pit, ready dug for you; it'll hold all the battery easily." With this the guide indicates with no little pride a gully, at the bottom of which stagnates rather than flows a greenish liquid with an odour of the most clinging type. "Yes, it might be a bit difficult to get the guns in and out, certainly. What about concealment behind that hedge?" But the hedge proves to be separated from the only road by an impassable morass. At last the orchard is selected as the least impossible under the circumstances, and the officer returns to his battery thoroughly convinced that he has selected the worst possible position on the whole front, and wondering what on earth will be said to him when he exhibits it to the rest of the battery.

Or else the proposed site is in the middle of a village, a place with a reputation for being shelled that is notorious from Ypres to Loos. A fabulous arc of fire is demanded from the battery, and weary hours are spent looking for a more or less concealed spot that will allow of the trajectory clearing houses and trees in all the required directions. At last it is found, the necessary measurements made and found satisfactory, when an officer strolls up. "Good-afternoon. You're not going to stop here long, are you? Going to put a battery here! I wouldn't be you for something, then. I've been about here for weeks, and they always strafe the schoolhouse there every day about this time. Look out, here she comes----" and a "woolly bear" or a "whizz-bang" or some other fiendish and aptly named projectile bursts neatly over the building that one had appropriated in one's mind's eye for a mess. Wearily the search begins again--this might do, perhaps--but by now the "evening hate" is in full swing, and a heavy shell settles with a self-satisfied "crrrump!" in the middle of one's oasis, digging one's gun-pits before one's eyes, as it were.

On one occasion the position chosen for us was the really beautiful garden of a medium-sized château. The front was a well-planned mass of shrubbery, intersected with paths and flower-beds, the back a walled vegetable garden, most scrupulously maintained, planted with every sort of vegetable and fruit and provided with a good range of glass. The owner of the place lived in the château, and his gardener worked on the premises. The dismay of these good people when they were told that the place was to be turned into a battery and the men billeted in the château can better be imagined than described. The owner was a philosopher, and took matters calmly. "Enfin, c'est la guerre, que voulez-vous?" he said sadly as we expressed our horror at the necessity of ruining this little paradise. The gardener was no philosopher, and when I look back upon the mutilated shrubberies, the trodden-down grass plots, the hotbeds with their boarding torn up for revetment, the old wall breached in many places for easy access, the broken panes in the greenhouses and, worst of all, four yawning chasms where once the asparagus, the strawberries and the artichokes dwelt together in amity, I do not wonder at the hostile spirit he displayed. I can see him now dancing round the sergeant-major, an imperturbable person of few words in his own tongue, and of none in French, whom he found cutting a few cabbages for the sergeants' dinner. "Sacré nom d'un cochon, regardez-là le voleur qui arrache mes petits choux! Ah, les anglais sont incroyables!" "No compree," says the sergeant-major, and goes on with his garnering. The gardener got something of his own back that night, however, for the garden had a very complete system of hydrants all over it, which same hydrants our friend stealthily visited with the turn-key, which he then disposed of and departed. It was pitch dark and we were all busy working, so that it was some time before we noticed the gathering floods, and the whole place was inches deep in mud and water by the time that we had discovered how to turn it off again. We never brought the crime home to the criminal, but a certain hidden gleam of triumph in that gardener's wholly disapproving eye has always convinced me of his guilt.

We had much to contend with in occupying that position. Several times we were held up in our work, first by somebody who said the situation was too exposed and that it was sheer suicide to occupy a house that was conspicuous for miles round; then by the urgent representations of a French officer who commanded a battery near by, and who declared that we should draw down fire upon the devoted heads of his people; and finally by a conference who debated for some time whether we were really required in that sector at all. However, we got all these matters satisfactorily settled at last, and set to work in earnest. And digging pits by night in the light of a few hurricane lamps is work indeed, especially if it rains persistently, as it almost invariably does. Unskilful wielders of the pick are apt to drive their lethal weapons into everything but the ground they mean to excavate, their favourite targets being such parts of their neighbours as get in their way. This leads to acrimonious wrangling and consequent delay. Better this, however, than the adventure of one lusty champion, who with a mighty effort drove his pick clean through the cast-iron main that supplied the delinquent hydrants, whereby he converted, in an incredibly short space of time, that half-completed pit into a sea of mud and water some four feet deep. To any one who expresses a fondness for bathing I recommend the plugging of a four-inch main, with a good pressure behind it, lying at the bottom of four feet of a cream-like mixture of chalk, clay and water at three o'clock on an autumn morning.

Geology, we are told, is the science that deals with the constitutents of the earth. A new chapter should be written to the text-books, a new branch of the science has been rendered necessary by the war, the study of the properties of mud. Mud is now elevated to the dignity of a fifth element, but surpasses the other four by its perpetual presence, equalled only by that of the ether which pervades everything we know. Mud shares its motto with the Royal Regiment of Artillery, one lives in it, sleeps in it, and not infrequently eats it--indeed, competent experts with carefully trained palates are said to be able to tell from the flavour of the bacon at breakfast the exact part of the line in which it has been rolled before issue. Surely in all the ancient mythologies some student may find for mud some presiding deity that we may suitably propitiate?

Nor were such more or less natural phenomena our only hindrances. No sooner were the pits completed, than somebody more perspicacious than his fellows discovered that we had been ordered to lay them out in the wrong direction, and they had to be cut out still further to allow the platforms to be slewed round through the required angle. This order reached us one evening just as we were promising ourselves a night in bed after our strenuous labours, and the despair of all ranks spread like a mephitic vapour over the country-side in a mist of strange profanity. The men, however, whose spirits are proof against continued despondency under the most depressing circumstances, set to work with a will, and the tedious digging was finished at last. Then came the far more interesting business of revetting and roofing. Now, obviously revetting and roofing require planks, beams, iron sheets, and material of that nature, and equally obviously the department that professes to provide stores of this description, and whose imagination rarely soars above the level of sandbags, is utterly unable to supply such things. The only course left is to find them for oneself, and fortunately a row of houses whose inhabitants had been evicted stood on this occasion near at hand, and these we gutted. Doors, shutters, floor-boards, rafters, everything but the bricks themselves, we contrived to utilize, until we had everything we could desire except girders for our roofs, which were to be of earth. Now a fifteen-foot span of earth two feet in thickness requires a good deal of supporting, and after several experiments with rafters, experiments that sometimes had unpleasant results for those who conducted them, we decided that something stronger was required. Here, again, almost in the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson, we found what we required at our very door, but not before one adventurous spirit had invited an early death (from which may he long be spared!) by driving a particularly noisy lorry into a coal mine overlooking the German lines in search of pit-props. Our discovery was due to an eagle eye that discovered a notice-board bearing the words "Défense de circuler sur la voie," whose owner, realizing that there could be no temptation to circulate on the line if there was no line upon which to circulate, investigated further and found a grass-grown colliery siding. Here were our long-sought girders, and with their discovery our troubles were practically over. Certainly the guns had yet to be lowered into the pits, and hauling heavy guns over soft garden mould on a dark night is an undertaking to try the most angelic patience, but on this occasion, for the first and last time, the Mud-god smiled upon us, and that midnight we knew the true happiness that comes of the successful completion of strenuous labour.