Kitchener's Mob Part 6

The better I knew Tommy, the better I liked him. He hasn't a shred of sentimentality in his make-up. There is plenty of sentiment, sincere feeling, but it is admirably concealed. I had been a soldier of the King for many months before I realized that the men with whom I was living, sharing rations and hardships, were anything other than the healthy animals they looked. They relished their food and talked about it. They grumbled at the restraints military discipline imposed upon them, and at the paltry shilling a day which they received for the first really hard work they had ever done. They appeared to regard England as a miserly employer, exacting their last ounce of energy for a wretchedly inadequate wage. To the casual observer, theirs was not the ardor of loyal sons, fighting for a beloved motherland. Rather, it seemed that of irresponsible schoolboys on a long holiday. They said nothing about patriotism or the duty of Englishmen in war-time. And if I attempted to start a conversation along that line, they walked right over me with their boots on.

This was a great disappointment at first. I should never have known, from anything that was said, that a man of them was stirred at the thought of fighting for old England. England was all right, but "I ain't goin' balmy about the old flag and all that stuff." Many of them insisted that they were in the army for personal and selfish reasons alone. They went out of their way to ridicule any and every indication of sentiment.

There was the matter of talk about mothers, for example. I can't imagine this being the case in a volunteer army of American boys, but not once, during fifteen months of British army life, did I hear a discussion of mothers. When the weekly parcels from England arrived and the boys were sharing their cake and chocolate and tobacco, one of them would say, "Good old mum. She ain't a bad sort"; to be answered with reluctant, mouth-filled grunts, or grudging nods of approval. As for fathers, I often thought to myself, "What a tremendous army of posthumous sons!"

Months before I would have been astonished at this reticence. But I had learned to understand Tommy. His silences were as eloquent as any splendid outbursts or glowing tributes could have been. Indeed, they were far more eloquent! Englishmen seem to have an instinctive understanding of the futility, the emptiness, of words in the face of unspeakable experiences. It was a matter of constant wonder to me that men, living in the daily and hourly presence of death, could so surely control and conceal their feelings. Their talk was of anything but home; and yet, I knew they thought of but little else.

One of our boys was killed, and there was the letter to be written to his parents. Three Tommies who knew him best were to attempt this. They made innumerable beginnings. Each of them was afraid of blundering, of causing unnecessary pain by an indelicate revelation of the facts. There was a feminine fineness about their concern which was beautiful to see. The final draft of the letter was a little masterpiece, not of English, but of insight; such a letter as any one of us would have wished his own parents to receive under like circ.u.mstances. Nothing was forgotten which could have made the news in the slightest degree more endurable. Every trifling personal belonging was carefully saved and packed in a little box to follow the letter. All of this was done amid much boisterous jesting. And there was the usual hilarious singing to the wheezing accompaniment of an old mouth-organ. But of reference to home, or mothers, or comradeship,--nothing.

Rarely a night pa.s.sed without its burial parties. "Digging in the garden"

Tommy calls the grave-making. The bodies, wrapped in blankets or waterproof ground-sheets, are lifted over the parados, and carried back a convenient twenty yards or more. The desolation of that garden, choked with weeds and a wild growth of self-sown crops, is indescribable. It was wreckage-strewn, gaping with sh.e.l.l holes, billowing with innumerable graves, a waste land speechlessly pathetic. The poplar trees and willow hedges have been blasted and splintered by sh.e.l.l fire. Tommy calls these "Kaiser Bill's flowers." Coming from England, he feels more deeply than he would care to admit the crimes done to trees in the name of war.

Our chaplain was a devout man, but prudent to a fault. Never, to my knowledge, did he visit us in the trenches. Therefore our burial parties proceeded without the rites of the Church. This arrangement was highly satisfactory to Tommy. He liked to "get the planting done" with the least possible delay or fuss. His whispered conversations while the graves were being scooped were, to say the least, quite out of the spirit of the occasion. Once we were burying two boys with whom we had been having supper a few hours before. There was an artillery duel in progress, the sh.e.l.ls whistling high over our heads, and bursting in great splotches of white fire, far in rear of the opposing lines of trenches. The grave-making went speedily on, while the burial party argued in whispers as to the caliber of the guns. Some said they were six-inch, while others thought nine-inch. Discussion was momentarily suspended when a trench rocket shot in an arc from the enemy's line. We crouched, motionless, until the welcome darkness spread again.

And then, in loud whispers:--

"'Ere! If they was nine-inch, they would 'ave more screech."

And one from the other school of opinion would reply:--

"Don't talk so bloomin' silly! Ain't I a-tellin' you that you can't always size 'em by the screech?"

Not a prayer; not a word, either of censure or of praise, for the boys who had gone; not an expression of opinion as to the meaning of the great change which had come to them and which might come, as suddenly, to any or all of us. And yet I knew that they were each thinking of these things.

There were days when the front was really quiet. The thin trickle of rifle fire only accentuated the stillness of an early summer morning. Far down the line Tommy could be heard, singing to himself as he sat in the door of his dugout, cleaning his rifle, or making a careful scrutiny of his shirt for those unwelcome little parasites which made life so miserable for him at all times. There were pleasant cracklings of burning pine sticks and the sizzle of frying bacon. Great swarms of bluebottle flies buzzed lazily in the warm sunshine. Sometimes, across a pool of noonday silence, we heard birds singing; for the birds didn't desert us.

When we gave them a hearing, they did their cheery little best to a.s.sure us that everything would come right in the end. Once we heard a skylark, an English skylark, singing over No-Man's-Land! I scarcely know which gave me more pleasure, the song, or the sight of the faces of those English lads as they listened. I was deeply touched when one of them said:--

"Ain't 'e a plucky little chap, singin' right in front of Fritzie's trenches fer us English blokes?"

It was a sincere and fitting tribute, as perfect for a soldier as Sh.e.l.ley's "Ode" for a poet.

Along the part of the British front which we held during the summer, the opposing lines of trenches were from less than a hundred to four hundred and fifty or five hundred yards apart. When we were neighborly as regards distance, we were also neighborly as regards social intercourse. In the early mornings when the heavy night mists still concealed the lines, the boys stood head and shoulders above the parapet and shouted:--

"Hi, Fritzie!"

And the greeting was returned:--

"Hi, Tommy!"

Then we conversed. Very few of us knew German, but it is surprising how many Germans could speak English. Frequently they shouted, "Got any 'woodbines,' Tommy?"--his favorite brand of cigarettes; and Tommy would reply, "Sure! Shall I bring 'em over or will you come an' fetch 'em?"

This was often the ice-breaker, the beginning of a conversation which varied considerably in other details.

"Who are you?" Fritzie would shout.

And Tommy, "We're the King's Own 'Ymn of 'Aters"; some such subtle repartee as that. "Wot's your mob?"

"We're a battalion of Irish rifles." The Germans liked to provoke us by pretending that the Irish were disloyal to England.

Sometimes they shouted:--

"Any of you from London?"

"Not arf! Wot was you a-doin' of in London? Witin' tible at Sam Isaac's fish-shop?"

The rising of the mists put an end to these conversations. Sometimes they were concluded earlier with bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire. "All right to be friendly," Tommy would say, "but we got to let 'em know this ain't no love-feast."

CHAPTER VIII

UNDER COVER

I. UNSEEN FORCES

"We come acrost the Channel For to wallop Germany; But they 'aven't got no soldiers-- Not that any one can see.

They plug us with their rifles An' they let their shrapnel fly, But they never takes a pot at us Exceptin' on the sly.

_Chorus_ "Fritzie w'en you comin' out?

This wot you calls a fight?

You won't never get to Calais Always keepin' out o' sight.

"We're a goin' back to Blightey-- Wot's the use a-witin' 'ere Like a lot o' bloomin' mud-larks Fer old Fritzie to appear?

'E never puts 'is napper up Above the parapet.

We been in France fer seven months An' 'aven't seen 'im yet!"

So sang Tommy, the incorrigible parodist, during the long summer days and nights of 1915, when he was impatiently waiting for something to turn up.

For three months and more we were face to face with an enemy whom we rarely saw. It was a weird experience. Rifles cracked, bullets zip-zipped along the top of the parapet, great sh.e.l.ls whistled over our heads or tore immense holes in the trenches, trench-mortar projectiles and hand-grenades were hurled at us, and yet there was not a living soul to be seen across the narrow strip of No-Man's-Land, whence all this murderous rain of steel and lead was coming. Daily we kept careful and continuous watch, searching the long, curving line of German trenches and the ground behind them with our periscopes and field-gla.s.ses, and nearly always with the same barren result. We saw only the thin wreaths of smoke rising, morning and evening, from trench fires; the shattered trees, the forlorn and silent ruins, the long gra.s.s waving in the wind.

Although we were often within two hundred yards of thousands of German soldiers, rarely farther than four hundred yards away, I did not see one of them until we had been in the trenches for more than six weeks, and then only for the interval of a second or two. My German was building up a piece of damaged parapet. I watched the earth being thrown over the top of the trench, when suddenly a head appeared, only to be immediately withdrawn. One of our snipers had evidently been watching, too. A rifle cracked and I saw a cloud of dust arise where the bullet clipped the top of the parapet. The German waved his spade defiantly in the air and continued digging; but he remained discreetly under cover thereafter.

This marked an epoch in my experience in a war of unseen forces. I had actually beheld a German, although Tommy insisted that it was only the old caretaker, "the bloke wot keeps the trenches tidy." This mythical personage, a creature of Tommy's own fancy, a.s.sumed a very real importance during the summer when the attractions at the Western Theater of War were only mildly interesting. "Carl the caretaker" was supposed to be a methodical old man whom the Emperor had left in charge of his trenches on the western front during the absence of the German armies in Russia. Many were the stories told about him at different parts of the line. Sometimes he was endowed with a family. His "missus" and his "three little nippers" were with him, and together they were blocking the way to Berlin of the entire British Army. Sometimes he was "Hans the Grenadier,"

owing to his fondness for nightly bombing parties. Sometimes he was "Minnie's husband," Minnie being that redoubtable lady known in polite military circles as a "Minnenwerfer." As already explained, she was sausage-like in shape, and frightfully demonstrative. When she went visiting at the behest of her husband, Tommy usually contrived to be "not at home," whereupon Minnie wrecked the house and disappeared in a cloud of dense black smoke.

One imagines all sorts of monstrous things about an unseen enemy. The strain of constantly watching and seeing nothing became almost unbearable at times. We were often too far apart to have our early morning interchange of courtesies, and then the constant _phtt-phtt_ of bullets annoyed and exasperated us. I for one welcomed any evidence that our opponents were fathers and husbands and brothers just as we were. I remember my delight, one fine summer morning, at seeing three great kites soaring above the German line. There is much to be said for men who enjoy flying kites. Once they mounted a dummy figure of a man on their parapet.

Tommy had great sport shooting at it, the Germans jiggling its arms and legs in a most laughable manner whenever a hit was registered. In their eagerness to "get a good bead" on the figure, the men threw caution to the winds, and stood on the firing-benches, shooting over the top of the parapet. Fritz and Hans were true sportsmen while the fun was on, and did not once fire at us. Then the dummy was taken down, and we returned to the more serious game of war with the old deadly earnestness. I recall such incidents with joy as I remember certain happy events in childhood.

We needed these trivial occurrences to keep us sane and human. There were not many of them, but such as there were, we talked of for days and weeks afterward.

As for the matter of keeping out of sight, there was a good deal to be said on both sides. Although Tommy was impatient with his prudent enemy and sang songs, twitting him about always keeping under cover, he did not usually forget, in the daytime at least, to make his own observations of the German line with caution. Telescopic sights have made the business of sniping an exact science. They magnify the object aimed at many diameters, and if it remains in view long enough to permit the pulling of a trigger, the chances of a hit are almost one hundred per cent.

II. "THE b.u.t.t-NOTCHER"

Snipers have a roving commission. They move from one part of the line to another, sometimes firing from carefully concealed loopholes in the parapet, sometimes from snipers' nests in trees or hedges. Often they creep out into the tall gra.s.s of No-Man's-Land. There, with a plentiful supply of food and ammunition, they remain for a day or two at a time, lying in wait for victims. It was a cold-blooded business, and hateful to some of the men. With others, the pa.s.sion for it grew. They kept tally of their victims by cutting notches on the b.u.t.ts of their rifles.

I well remember the pleasant June day when I first met a "b.u.t.t-notcher."

I was going for water, to an old farmhouse about half a mile from our sector of trench. It was a day of bright sunshine. Poppies and b.u.t.tercups had taken root in the banks of earth heaped up on either side of the communication trench. They were nodding their heads as gayly in the breeze as of old did Wordsworth's daffodils in the quiet countryside at Rydal Mount. It was a joy to see them there, reminding one that G.o.d was still in his heaven, whatever might be wrong with the world. It was a joy to be alive, a joy which one could share unselfishly with friend and enemy alike. The colossal stupidity of war was never more apparent to me than upon that day. I hated my job, and if I hated any man, it was the one who had invented the murderous little weapon known as a machine gun.