Action Front Part 18

"No," said the sergeant, "but they've just had time since they got mine."

"Got yours?" said the bewildered signaler.

"Yes, didn't I tell you?" said the sergeant. "When I went out for a look round that time, I found an artillery signaler laying out a new line, and I got him to let me tap in and send a message through his battery to headquarters."

"You might have told me," said the aggrieved signaler. "It would have saved me a heap of sweat getting that message through." After he had finished his message to the rear station he spoke reflectively: "Lucky thing you did get through," he said. "'Twas a pretty close shave. The O.C. should have a 'thank you' for you over it."

"I don't suppose," answered the sergeant, "the O.C. will ever know or ever trouble about it; he sent a message to the signaling company to send through--and it was sent through. There's the beginning and the end of it."

And as he said, so it was; or rather the end of it was in those three words that appeared later in the despatch: "It is reported."

CONSCRIPT COURAGE

You must know plenty of people--if you yourself are not one of them--who hold out stoutly against any military compulsion or conscription in the belief that the "fetched" man can never be the equal in valor and fighting instinct of the volunteer, can only be a source of weakness in any platoon, company and regiment. This tale may throw a new light on that argument.

Gerald Bunthrop was not a conscript in the strict sense of the word, because when he enlisted no legal form of conscription existed in the United Kingdom; but he was, as many more have been, a moral conscript, a man utterly averse to any form of soldiering, much less fighting, very reluctantly driven into the Army by force of circ.u.mstance and pressure from without himself. Before the War the Army and its ways were to him a sealed book. Of war he had the haziest ideas compounded of novels he had read and dimly remembered and mental pictures in a confused jumble of Charles O'Malley dragoons on spirited charges, half-forgotten ill.u.s.trations in the papers of pith-helmeted infantry in the Boer War, faint boyhood recollections of Magersfontein and the glumness of the "Black Week"--a much more realistic and vivid impression of Waterloo as described by Brigadier Gerard--and odd figures of black Soudanese, of Light Brigade troopers, of Peninsula red-coats, of Sepoys and bonneted Highlanders in the Mutiny period, and of Life Guard sentries at Whitehall, lines of fixed bayonets on City procession routes, and khaki-clad Terriers seen about railway stations and on bus-tops with incongruous rifles on Sat.u.r.day afternoons.

Actually, it is not correct to include these living figures in his vague idea of war. They had to him no connection with anything outside normal peaceful life, stirred his thoughts to war no more than seeing a gasbracket would wake him to imaginings of a coalmine or a pit explosion. His slight conceptions of war, then, were a mere matter of print and books and pictures, and the first months of this present war were exactly the same, no more and no less--newspaper paragraphs and photos and drawings in the weeklies hanging on the bookstalls. He read about the Retreat and the Advance, skimmed the prophets' forecasts, gulped the communiques with interest a good deal fainter than he read the accounts of the football matches or a boxing bout. He expected "our side" to win of course, and was quite patriotic; was in fact a "supporter" of the British Army in exactly the sense of being a "supporter" or "follower" of Tottenham Hotspurs or Kent County. Any thoughts that he might shoulder a rifle and fight Germans would at that time, if it had entered his head, have seemed just as ridiculous as a thought that he should play in the Final at the Crystal Palace or step into the ring to fight Carpentier. It took a long time to move him from this att.i.tude of aloofness. Recruiting posters failed utterly to touch him. He looked at them, criticized them, even discussed their "goodness" or drawing power on recruits with complete detachment and without the vaguest idea that they were addressed to him. He bought Allies' flag-b.u.t.tons, and subscribed with his fellow-employees to a Red Cross Fund, and joined them again in sending some sixpences to a newspaper Smokes Gift Fund; he always most scrupulously stood up and uncovered to "G.o.d Save the King," and clapped and encored vociferously any patriotic songs or sentiments from the stage. He thought he was doing his full duty as a loyal Briton, and even--this was when he promised a regular sixpence a week to the Smokes Fund--going perhaps a little beyond it. First hints and suggestions that he should enlist he treated as an excellent jest, and when at last they became too frequent and pointed for that, and began to come from complete strangers, he became justly indignant at such "impudence" and "interference," and began long explainings to people he knew, that he wasn't the one to be bullied into anything, that fighting wasn't "his line," that he "had no liking for soldiering," that he would have gone like a shot, but had his own good and adequate reasons for not doing so.

There is no need to tell of the stages by which he arrived at the conclusion that he must enlist: from the first dawning wonder at such a possibility, through qualms of doubt and fear and spasms of hope and--almost--courage, to a dull apathy of resignation. No need to tell either the particular circ.u.mstances that "conscripted" him at last, because although his name is not real the man himself is, and one has no wish to bring shame on him or his people. I have only described him so closely to make it very clear that he was driven to enlistment, that a less promising recruit never joined up, that he was a conscript in every real sense of the word. We can pa.s.s over all his training, his introduction to the life of the trenches, his feelings of terror under conditions as little dangerous as the trenches could be. He managed, more or less, to hide this terror, as many a worse and many a better man has done before him, until one day----

The Germans had made a fierce attack, had overborne a section of the defense and taken a good deal of trenched ground, had been counter-attacked and partly driven back, had scourged the lost parts with a fresh tempest of artillery fire and driven in again to close quarters, to hot bomb and bayonet work; were again checked and for the moment held.

Private Gerald Bunthrop's battalion had been hurried up to support the broken and breaking line, was thrust into a badly wrecked trench with crumbling sides and broken traverses, with many dead and wounded c.u.mbering the feet of the few defenders, with a reek of high-explosive fumes catching their throats and nostrils. The open ground beyond the trench was scattered thick with great heaps of German dead, a few more sprawled on the broken parapet, another and lesser few were huddled in the trench itself amongst the many khaki forms. The battalion holding the trench had been almost annihilated in the task, had in fact at first been driven out from part of the line and had only reoccupied it with heavy losses. Bunthrop had with his battalion pa.s.sed along some smashed communication trenches and over the open ground this fighting had covered, and the sights they saw in pa.s.sing might easily have shaken the stoutest hearts and nerves. They made the approach, too, under a destructive fire with high-explosive sh.e.l.ls screaming and crashing over, around, and amongst them, with bullets whistling and hissing about them and striking the ground with the sound of constantly exploding Chinese crackers.

Bunthrop himself, to state the fact baldly, was in an agony of fear. He might have been tempted to bolt, but was restrained by a complete lack of any idea where to bolt to, by a lingering remnant of self-respect, and by a firm conviction that he would be dealt with mercilessly if he openly ran. But when he reached the comparative shelter of the broken trench all these safeguards of his decent behavior vanished. He flung himself into the trench, cowered in its deepest part, made not the slightest attempt to look over the parapet, much less to use his rifle.

There is this much of excuse for him, that on the very instant that they reached the cover of the trench a bursting high-explosive had caught the four men next in line to him. The excuse may be insufficient for those who have never witnessed at very close hand the instant and terrible destruction of four companions with whom they have eaten and slept and talked and moved and had their intimate being for many months; but those who have known such happenings will understand.

Bunthrop's sergeant understood, and because he was a good sergeant and had the instinct for the right handling of men--it must have been an instinct, because, up to a year before, he had been ledger clerk in a City office and had handled nothing more alive than columns of figures in a book--he issued exactly the order that appealed exactly to Bunthrop's terror and roused him from a shivering embodiment of fear to a live thinking and order-obeying private. "Get up and sling some of those sandbags back on the parapet, Bunthrop!" he said, "and see if you can't make some decent cover for yourself. You've nothing there that would stop a half-crippled Hun jumping in on top of you." When he came back along the trench five minutes later he found Bunthrop feverishly busy re-piling sandbags and strengthening the parapet, ducking hastily and crouching low when a sh.e.l.l roared past overhead, but hurriedly resuming work the instant it had pa.s.sed. Then came the fresh German attack, preceded by five minutes' intense artillery fire, concentrated on the half-wrecked trench. The inferno of noise, the rush and roar of the approaching sh.e.l.ls, the crash and earth-shaking thunder of their explosions, the ear-splitting cracks overhead of high-explosive shrapnel, the drone and whirr and thump of their flying fragments--the whole racking, roaring, deafening, sense-destroying tempest of noise was too much for Bunthrop's nerve. He flung down and flattened himself to the trench bottom again, squeezing himself close to the earth, submerged and drowned in a sweeping wave of panic fear. He gave no heed to the orders of his platoon commander, the shouting of his sergeant, the stir that ran along the trench, the flat spitting reports of the rifles that began to crack rapidly in a swiftly increasing volume of fire. A huge fragment of sh.e.l.l came down and struck the trench bottom with a suggestively violent thud a foot from his head. Half sick with the instant thought, "If it had been a foot this way!..." half crazed with the sense of openness to such a missile, Bunthrop rose to his knees, pressing close to the forward parapet, and looking wildly about him. His sergeant saw him. "You, Bunthrop," he shouted, "are you hit?

Get up, you fool, and shoot! If we can't stop 'em before they reach here we're done in." Bunthrop hardly heeded him. Along the trench the men were shooting at top speed over the parapet; a dozen paces away two of the battalion machine-guns were clattering and racketing in rapid gusts of fire; a little farther along a third one had jambed and was being jerked and hammered at by a couple of sweating men and a wildly cursing boy officer. So much Bunthrop saw, and then with a hideous screeching roar a high explosive fell and burst in a shattering crash, a spouting hurricane of noise and smoke and flung earth and fragments.

Bunthrop found himself half buried in a landslide of crumbling trench, struggled desperately clear, gasping and choking in the black cloud of smoke and fumes, saw presently, as the smoke thinned and dissolved, a chaos of broken earth and sandbags where the machine-guns had stood; saw one man and an officer dragging their gun from the debris, setting it up again on the broken edge of the trench. Another man staggered up the crumbling earth bank to help, and presently amongst them they got the gun into action again. The officer left it and ran to where he saw the other gun half buried in loose earth. He dragged it clear, found it undamaged, looked round, shouted at Bunthrop crouching flat against the trench wall; shouted again, came down the earth bank to him with a rush. "Come and help!" he yelled, grabbing at Bunthrop's arm. Bunthrop mumbled stupidly in reply. "What?" shouted the officer. "Come and help, will you? Never mind if you are hurt," as he noticed a smear of blood on the private's face. "You'll be hurt worse if they get into this trench with the bayonet. Come on and help!" Bunthrop, hardly understanding, obeyed the stronger will and followed him back to the gun. "Can you load?" demanded the officer. "Can you fill the cartridges into these drums while I shoot?" Bunthrop had had in a remote period of his training some machine-gun instruction. He nodded and mumbled again.

"G.o.d!" said the officer. "Look at 'em! There's enough to eat us if they get to bayonet distance! We _must_ stop 'em with the bullet. Hurry up, man; hurry, if you don't want to be skewered like a stuck pig!" He rattled off burst after burst of fire, clamoring at Bunthrop to hurry, hurry, hurry. A wounded machine-gunner joined them, and then some others, and the gun began to spit a steady string of bullets again. By this time the full meaning of the officer's words--the meaning, too, of remarks between the wounded helpers--had soaked into Bunthrop's brain.

Their only hope, his only hope of life, lay in stopping the attack before it reached the trench; and the machine-guns were a main factor in the stopping. He lost interest in everything except cramming the cartridges into their place. When the officer was. .h.i.t and rolled backwards and lay groaning and swearing, Bunthrop's chief and agonizing thought was that they--he--had lost the a.s.sistance and protection of the gun. When one of the wounded gunners took the officer's place and reopened fire, Bunthrop's only concern again was to keep pace with the loading. The thoughts were repeated exactly when that gunner was. .h.i.t and collapsed and his place was taken by another man. And by now the urgent need of keeping the gun going was so impressed on Bunthrop that when the next gunner was struck down and the gun stood idle and deserted it was Bunthrop who turned wildly urging the other loaders to get up and keep the gun going; babbled excitedly about the only hope being to stop the Germans before they "got in" with the bayonet, repeated again and again at them the officer's phrase about "skewered like stuck pigs." The others hung back. They had seen man after man struck down at the gun, they could hear the _hiss_ and _whitt_ of the bullets over their heads, the constant cracker-like smacks of others that hit the parapet, and--they hung back. "Why th' 'ell don't you do it yerself?" demanded one of them, angered by Bunthrop's goading and in some degree, no doubt, by the disagreeable knowledge that they were flinching from a duty.

And then Bunthrop, the "conscript," the man who had held back from war to the last possible minute, who hated soldiering and shrank from violence and all fighting, who was known to his fellows as "a funk,"

the source of much uneasiness to company and platoon commanders and sergeants as "a weak spot," Bunthrop did what these others, these average good men who had "joined up" freely, who had longed for the end of home training and the transfer "out Front," dared not do. Bunthrop scrambled up the broken bank, seized the gun, swung the sights full to the broad gray target, and opened fire. He kept it going steadily, too, with a sleet of bullets whistling and whipping past him, kept on after a bullet s.n.a.t.c.hed the cap from his head, and others in quick succession cut away a shoulder strap, scored a red weal across his neck, stabbed through the point of his shoulder. And when a sh.e.l.l-fragment smashed the gun under his hands, he left it only to plunge hastily to the other gun abandoned by all but dead and dying; pulled off a dead man who sprawled across it and recommenced shooting. He stopped firing only when his last cartridge was gone; squatted a moment longer staring over the sights, and then raised his head and peered out into the trailing film of smoke clouds from the bursting sh.e.l.ls. Although it took him a minute to be sure of it he saw plainly at last that the attack was broken. Dimly he could see the heaped cl.u.s.ters of dead that lay out in the open, the crawling and limping figures of the wounded who sought safety back in the cover of their own trench, and more than that he could see men running with their heads stooped and their gray coats flapping about their ankles. It was this last that roused him again to action. He scrambled hurriedly back down the broken parapet into the trench. "Come on, you fellows," he shouted to two or three nearby men who continued to fire their rifles over the parapet. "It's no use waitin' here any longer." A heavy sh.e.l.l whooped roaring over them and crashed thunderously close behind the parapet. Bunthrop paid no slightest heed to it. His wide, staring eyes and white face, and blood smeared from the trickling wound in his neck, his capless head and tumbled hair, his clay and mud-caked and blood-stained uniform all gave him a look of wildness, of desperation, of abandonment. His sergeant, the man who had seen his fear and set him to pile the sandbags, caught sight of him again now, heard some word of his shoutings, and pushed hastily along the trench to where he fidgeted and called angrily to the others to "chuck that silly shooting--I'm goin' anyhow ... what's the use...."

The sergeant interrupted sharply.

"Here, you shut up, Bunthrop," he shouted. "Keep down in the trench.

You're wounded, aren't you? Well, you'll get back presently."

"That be d.a.m.n," said Bunthrop. "You don't understand. They're runnin'

away, but we can't go out after 'em if these silly blighters here keep shootin'. Come on now, or they'll all be gone." And Private Bunthrop, the despised "conscript," slung his bayoneted rifle over his wounded shoulder and commenced to scramble up out over the front of the broken parapet. And what is more he was really and genuinely annoyed when the sergeant catching him by the heel dragged him down again and ordered him to stay there.

"Don't you understand?" he stuttered excitedly, and gesticulating fiercely towards the front. "They're runnin', I tell you; the blighters are runnin' away. Why can't we get out after 'em?"

SMASHING THE COUNTER-ATTACK

" ... _a violent counter-attack was delivered but was successfully repulsed at every point with heavy losses to the enemy_."--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

There appears to be some doubt as to who rightly claims to have been the first to notice and report signs of the ma.s.sing of heavy forces of Germans for the counter-attack on our positions. The infantry say that a scouting patrol fumbling about in the darkness in front of the forward fire trench heard suspicious sounds--little clickings of equipment and accouterments, stealthy rustlings, distant tramping--and reported on their return to the trench. An artillery observing officer is said to have seen flitting shadows of figures in the gray light of the dawn mists, and, later, an odd glimpse of cautious movement amongst the trees of a wood some little distance behind the German lines, and an unbroken pa.s.sing of gray-covered heads behind a portion of a communication trench parapet. He also reported, and he may have been responsible for the dozen or so of shrapnel that were flung tentatively into and over the wood. An airman droning high over the lines, with fleecy white puffs of shrapnel smoke breaking about him, also saw and reported clearly "large force of Germans ma.s.sing Map Square So-and-so."

But whoever was responsible for the first report matters little. The great point is that the movement was detected in good time, apparently before the preparations for attack were complete, so that the final arraying and disposal of the force for the launching of the attack was hampered and checked, and made perforce under a demoralizing artillery fire.

What the results might have been if the full weight of the ma.s.sed attack could have been prepared without detection and flung on our lines without warning is hard to say; but there is every chance that our first line at least might have been broken into and swamped by the sheer weight of numbers. That, clearly, is what the Germans had intended, and from the number of men employed it is evident that they meant to push to the full any chance our breaking line gave them to reoccupy and hold fast a considerable portion of the ground they had lost. It is said that three to four full divisions were used. If that is correct, it is certain that the German army was minus three to four effective divisions when the attack withdrew, that a good half of the men in them would never fight again. The attack lost its first great advantage in losing the element of surprise. The bulk of the troops would have been moved into position in the hours of darkness. That wood, in all probability, was filled with men by night. The only daylight movement attempted would have been the cautious filling of the trenches, the pouring in of the long gray-coated lines along the communication trenches, all keeping well down and under cover. Under the elaborate system of deep trenches, fire-, and support-, communication- and approach-trenches running back for miles to emerge only behind houses or hill or wood, it is surprising how large a ma.s.s of men can be pushed into the forward trenches without any disclosure of movement to the enemy. Scores of thousands of men may be packed away waiting motionless for the word, more thousands may be pouring slowly up the communication ways, and still more thousands standing ready a mile or two behind the lines; and yet to any eye looking from the enemy's side the country is empty and still, and bare of life as a swept barn. Even the all-seeing airmen can be cheated, and see nothing but the usual quiet countryside, the tangled crisscross of trenches, looking from above like so many wriggling lines of thin white braid with a black cord-center, the neat dolls' toy-houses and streets of the villages, the straight, broad ribbon of the Route Nationale, all still and lifeless, except for an odd cart or two on the high road, a few dotted figures in the village streets. Below the flying-men the packed thousands are crouched still to earth. At the sound of the engine's drone, at sight of the wheeling shape, square miles of country stiffen to immobility, men scurry under cover of wall or bush, the long, moving lines in the trenches halt and sink down and hang their heads (next to movement the light dots of upturned, staring faces are the quickest and surest betrayal of the earth-men to the air-men), the open roads are emptied of men into the ditches and under the trees. For civilized man, in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple lesson by the beasts of the field and birds of the air; the armed hosts are hushed and stilled by the pa.s.sing air-machine, exactly as the finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its pa.s.sing wing.

But this time some movement in the trenches, some delay in halting a regiment, some neglect to keep men under cover, some transport too suspiciously close-s.p.a.ced on the roads, betrayed the movement. His suspicions aroused, the airman would have risked the anti-aircraft guns and dropped a few hundred feet and narrowly searched each hillside and wood for the telltale gray against the green. Then the wireless would commence to talk, or the 'plane swoop round and drive headlong for home to report.

And then, picture the bustle at the different headquarters, the stir amongst the signalers, the frantic pipings of the telephone "buzzers,"

the sharp calls. "Take a message. Ready? Brigade H.Q. to O.C.

Such-and-such Battery," or "to O.C. So-and-So Regiment"; imagine the furtive scurry in the trenches to man the parapets, and prepare bombs, and lay out more ammunition; the rush at the batteries, the quick consulting of squared maps, the bellowed string of orders in a jargon of angles of sight, correctors, ranges, figures and measures of degrees and yards, the first scramble about the guns dropping to the smooth work of ordered movement, the peering gun muzzles jerking and twitching to their ordained angles, the click and slam of the closing breech-blocks, the tense stillness as each gun reports "Ready!" and waits the word to fire.

And all the while imagine the Germans out there, creeping through the trees, crowding along the trenches, sifting out and settling down into the old favorite formation, making all ready for one more desperate trial of it, stacking the cards for yet another deep gambling plunge on the great German game--the ma.s.sed attack in solid lines at close interval. The plan no doubt was the same old plan--a quick and overwhelming torrent of sh.e.l.l fire, a sudden hurricane of high explosive on the forward trench, and then, before the supports could be hurried up and brought in any weight through the reeking, shaking inferno of the sh.e.l.l-smitten communication trenches, the surge forward of line upon line, wave upon wave, of close-locked infantry.

But the density of ma.s.s, the solid breadth, the depth, bulk, and weight of men so irresistible at close-quarter work, is an invitation to utter destruction if it is caught by the guns before it can move. And so this time it was caught. Given their target, given the word "Go," the guns wasted no moment. The first battery ready burst a quick couple of ranging shots over the wood. A spray of torn leaves whirling from the tree tops, the toss of a broken branch, showed the range correct; and before the first rounds' solid white cotton-wooly b.a.l.l.s of smoke had thinned and disappeared, puff-puff-puff the shrapnel commenced to burst in clouds over the wood. That was the beginning. Gun after gun, battery after battery, picked up the range and poured sh.e.l.ls over and into the wood, went searching every hollow and hole, rending and destroying trench and dug-out, parapet and parados. The trenches, clean white streaks and zig-zags of chalk on a green slope, made perfect targets on which the guns made perfect shooting; the wood was a mark that no gun could miss, and surely no gun missed. What the scene in that wood must have been is beyond imagining and beyond telling. It was quickly shrouded in a pall of drifting smoke, and dimly through this the observing officers directing the fire of their guns could see clouds of leaves and twigs whirling and leaping under the lashing shrapnel, could see branches and smashed tree-trunks and great clods of earth and stone flying upward and outward from the blast of the lyddite sh.e.l.ls. The wood was slashed to ribbons, rent and riddled to tatters, deluged from above with tearing blizzards of shrapnel bullets, scorched and riven with high-explosive sh.e.l.ls. In the trenches our men cowered at first, listening in awe to the rushing whirlwinds of the sh.e.l.ls' pa.s.sage over their heads, the roar of the cannonade behind them, the crash and boom of the bursting sh.e.l.ls in front, the shriek and whirr of flying splinters, the splintering crash of the shattering trees.

The German artillery strove to pick up the plan of the attack, to beat down the torrent of our batteries' fire, to smash in the forward trenches, shake the defense, open the way for the ma.s.sed attack. But the contest was too unequal, the devastation amongst the crowded ma.s.s of German infantry too awful to be allowed to continue. Plainly the attack, ready or not ready, had to be launched at speed, or perish where it stood.

And so it was that our New Armies had a glimpse of what the old "Contemptible Little Army" has seen and faced so often, the huge gray bulk looming through the drifting smoke, the packed ma.s.s of the old German infantry attack. There were some of these "Old Contemptibles,"

as they proudly style themselves now, who said when it was all over, and they had time to think of anything but loading and firing a red-hot rifle, that this attack did not compare favorably with the German attacks of the Mons-Marne days, that it lacked something of the steadiness, the rolling majesty of power, the swinging stride of the old attacks; that it did not come so far or so fast, that beaten back it took longer to rally and come again, that coming again it was easier than ever to bring to a stand. But against that these "Old Contemptibles" admit that they never in the old days fought under such favorable conditions, that here in this fight they were in better constructed and deeper trenches, that they were far better provided with machine-guns, and, above all, that they had never, never, never had such a magnificent backing from our guns, such a tremendous stream of sh.e.l.ls helping to smash the attack.

And smashed, hopelessly and horribly smashed, the attack a.s.suredly was.

The woods in and behind which the German hordes were ma.s.sed lay from three to four hundred yards from the muzzles of our rifles. Imagine it, you men who were not there, you men of the New Armies still training at home, you riflemen practicing and striving to work up the number of aimed rounds fired in "the mad minute," you machine-gunners riddling holes in a target or a row of posts. Imagine it, oh you Artillery, imagine the target lavishly displayed in solid blocks in the open, with a good four hundred yards of ground to go under your streaming gun-muzzles. The gunners who were there that day will tell you how they used that target, will tell you how they stretched themselves to the call for "gun-fire" (which is an order for each gun to act independently, to fire and keep on firing as fast as it can be served), how the guns grew hotter and hotter, till the paint bubbled and blistered and flaked off them in patches, till the breech burned the incautious hand laid on it, till spurts of oil had to be sluiced into the breech from a can between rounds and sizzled and boiled like fat in a frying-pan as it fell on the hot steel, how the whole gun smoked and reeked with heated oil, and how the gun-detachments were half-deaf for days after.

It was such a target as gunners in their fondest dreams dare hardly hope for; and such a target as war may never see again, for surely the fate of such ma.s.sed attacks will be a warning to all infantry commanders for all time.

The guns took their toll, and where death from above missed, death from the level came in an unbroken torrent of bullets sleeting across the open from rifles and machine-guns. On our trenches sh.e.l.ls were still bursting, maxim and rifle bullets were still pelting from somewhere in half enfilade at long range. But our men had no time to pay heed to these. They hitched themselves well up on the parapet to get the fuller view of their mark; their officers for the most part had no need to bother about directing or controlling the fire--what need, indeed, to direct with such a target bulking big before the sights? What need to control when the only speed limit was a man's capacity to aim and fire?

So the officers, for the most part, took rifle themselves and helped pelt lead into the slaughter-pit.

There are few, if any, who can give details of how or when the attack perished. A thick haze of smoke from the bursting sh.e.l.ls blurred the picture. To the eyes of the defenders there was only a picture of that smoke-fog, with a gray wall of men looming through it, moving, walking, running towards them, falling and rolling, and looming up again and coming on, melting away into tangled heaps that disappeared again behind advancing men, who in turn became more falling and fallen piles.

It was like watching those chariot races in a theater where the horses gallop on a stage revolving under their feet, and for all their fury of motion always remain in the same place. So it was with the German line--it was pressing furiously forward, but always appeared to remain stationary or to advance so slowly that it gave no impression of advancing, but merely of growing bigger. Once, or perhaps twice, the advancing line disappeared altogether, melted away behind the drifting smoke, leaving only the ma.s.s of dark blotches sprawled on the gra.s.s. At these times the fire died away along a part of our front, and the men paused to gulp a drink from a water-bottle, to look round and tilt their caps back and wipe the sweat from their brows, to gasp joyful remarks to one another about "gettin' a bit of our own back," and "this pays for the ninth o' May," and then listen to the full, deep roar of rifle-fire that rolled out from further down the line, and try to peer through the shifting smoke to see how "the lot next door" was faring.

But these respites were short. A call and a crackle of fire at their elbows brought them back to business, to the grim business of purposeful and methodical killing, of wiping out that moving wall that was coming steadily at them again through the smoke and flame of the bursting sh.e.l.ls. The great bulk of the line came no nearer than a hundred yards from our line; part pressed in another twenty or thirty yards, and odd bunches of the dead were found still closer. But none came to grips--none, indeed, were found within forty yards of our rifles' wall of fire. A scattered remnant of the attackers ran back, some whole and some hurt, thousands crawled away wounded, to reach the safe shelter of their support trenches, some to be struck down by the sh.e.l.ls that still kept pounding down upon the death-swept field. The counter-attack was smashed--hopelessly and horribly smashed.

A GENERAL ACTION

"_At some points our lines have been slightly advanced and their position improved_."--EXTRACT FROM DESPATCH

It has to be admitted by all who know him that the average British soldier has a deep-rooted and emphatic objection to "fatigues," all trench-digging and pick-and-shovel work being included under that t.i.tle. This applies to the New Armies as well as the Old, and when one remembers the safety conferred by a good deep trench and the fact that few men are anxious to be killed sooner than is strictly necessary, the objection is regrettable and very surprising. Still there it is, and any officer will tell you that his men look on trench-digging with distaste, have to be constantly persuaded and chivvied into doing anything like their best at it, and on the whole would apparently much rather take their chance in a shallow or poorly-constructed trench than be at the labor of making it deep and safe.