My Second Year of the War Part 15

Hills and valleys do not exist, all landscape being flat to the aviator's eye, as we know; but against reason some mental kink made me feel that this optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when we came to the coast, where only the green sward which crowns them was visible and beyond this a line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of white lace that was moving--the surf.

Soldiers who were returning from leave in the regular way were having a jumpy pa.s.sage, as one knew by the whitecaps that looked like tiny white flowers on a pewter cloth; only if you looked steadily at one it disappeared and others appeared in its place. Otherwise, the channel in a heavy sea was as still as a painted ocean with painted ships which, however fast they were moving, were making no headway to us traveling as smoothly in our 'bus as a motor boat on a gla.s.sy lake.

I looked at my watch as we crossed the lace edging on the English side and again as we crossed it on the French side. The time elapsed was seventeen and a half minutes, which is not rapid going, even for the broader part of the channel which we chose. The fastest plane, I am told, has made it at the narrowest point in eight and a half minutes.

Not going as high as usual, the pilot did not speed his motor, as the lower the alt.i.tude the more uncomfortable might be the result of engine trouble to his pa.s.senger.

Now, however, we were rising midway of the crossing into the gray bank overhead; one second the channel floor was there and the next it was not. Underneath us was mist and ahead and behind and above us only mist, soft and cool against the face. We were wholly out of sight of land and water, above the clouds, detached from earth, lost in the sky between England and France.

This was the great moment to me. I was away from the sound of the guns; from the headlines of newspapers announcing the latest official bulletins; from prisoners' camps and casualty clearing stations; from dugouts and trenches and the Ridge. Here was real peace, the peace of the infinite--and no one could ask you when you thought the war would be over. You were n.o.body, yet again you were the whole population of the world, you and the aviator and the plane, perfectly helpless in one sense and in another gloriously secure. Even he seemed a part of the machine carrying you swiftly on, without any sense of speed except the driving freshness of the air in your face. I felt that I should not mind going on forever. Time was unlimited. There was only s.p.a.ce and the humming of the motor and the faintly gleaming circle of light of the propeller and those two rigid wings with their tracery of braces.

We were not long out of sight of land and water, but long enough to make one wish to fly over the channel again, the next time at ten thousand feet, when it was a gleaming swath hidden at times by patches of luminous nimbus.

The engine stopped. There was the silence of the clouds, cushioned silence, cushioned by the mist. Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan and when we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet or more, France loomed ahead with its lacework of surf and an expanse of chalk cliffs at an angle and landscape rising out of the haze. A few minutes more and the salt thread that kept Napoleon out of England and has kept Germany out of England was behind us. We were over the Continent of Europe.

I had never before understood the character of both England and France so well. England was many little gardens correlated by roads and lanes; France was one great garden. Majestic in their suggestion of s.p.a.ciousness were those broad stretches of hedgeless, fenceless fields, their crop lines sharply drawn as are all lines from a plane, fields between the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, revealing a land where all the soil is tilled.

Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, straight highways that I had often traveled in my comings and goings. But how empty seemed the roads where you were always pa.s.sing motor trucks and guns! Long, gray streaks with occasional specks which, as you rose to a greater height, were lost like scattered beads melting into a ribbon! Reserve trenches that I had known, too, were white tracings on a flat surface in their standard contour of traverses. There was the chateau where I had lived for months. Yes, I could identify that, and there the town where we went to market.

We flew around the tower of a cathedral low enough to see the people moving in the streets, and then, in a final long glide, after an hour and fifty minutes in the air, the rubber wheels touched earth, rose and touched it again before the steady old 'bus slowed down not far from another plane that had arrived only a few minutes previously. When a day of good weather follows a day of bad and the arrivals are frequent, planes are flopping about this aerodrome like so many penguins before they are marshaled by the busy attendants in line along the edge of the field or under the shelter of hangars.

We had had none of those thrilling experiences which are supposed to happen to aerial joy-riders, but had made a perfectly safe, normal trip, which, I repeat, was the real point of this wonderful business of the aerial ferry. I went into the office and officially reported my arrival at the same time that the pilot reported delivery of his plane.

"Good-night," he said. "I'm off to catch the steamer to bring over another 'bus to-morrow."

Waiting near by was my car and soldier chauffeur, who asked, in his quiet English way, if I had had "a good flight, sir;" and soon I was back in the atmosphere of the army as the car sped along the road, past camps, villages and motor trucks, until in the moonlight, as we came over a hill, the cathedral tower of Amiens appeared above the dark ma.s.s of the town against the dim horizon.

XX

THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS

A thousand guns at the master's call--Schoolmaster of the guns--More and more guns but never too many--The gunner's skill which has life and death at stake--"Grandmother" first of the fifteen-inch howitzers--Soldier-mechanics--War still a matter of missiles--Improvements in gunnery--Third rail of the battlefield--The game of guns checkmating guns--A Niagara of death--A giant tube of steel painted in frog patches.

How reconcile that urbane gunner-general, a genius among experts you were told, as the master of a thunderous magic which shot its deadly lightnings over the German area! Let him move a red pin on the map and a tractor was towing a nine-inch gun to a new position; a black pin and a battery of eighteen pounders took the road. A thousand guns answered his call with a hundred thousand sh.e.l.ls when it pleased him. I stood in awe of him, for chaos seemed to be doing his bidding at the end of a pushb.u.t.ton.

Whirlwind curtains of fire and creeping and leaping curtains were his familiar servants, and he set the latest fashion by his improvements.

Had the French or the Germans something new? This he applied. Had he something new? He pa.s.sed on the method to the French and gave the Germans the benefit of its results.

Observers seated in the baskets of observation balloons, aeroplanes circling low in risk of anti-aircraft fire, men sitting in tree-tops and others in front-line trenches spotting the fall of sh.e.l.ls were the eyes for the science he was working out on his map. Those nests and lines of guns that seemed to be simply sending sh.e.l.ls into the blue from their hiding-places played fortissimo and pianissimo under his baton. He correlated their efforts, gave them purpose and system in their roaring traffic of projectiles.

Where Sir Douglas Haig was schoolmaster of the whole, he was schoolmaster of the guns. After the grim days of the salient, when he worked with relics from fortresses and anything that could be improvised against the German artillery, came the latest word in black-throated, fiery-tongued monsters from England where the new gunners had learned their ABC's and he and his a.s.sistants were to teach them solid geometry and calculus and give them a toilsome experience, which was still more useful.

His host kept increasing as more and more guns arrived, but never too many. There cannot be too many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest for a depth of six or eight miles and there would not be enough by the criterion of the infantry, to whom the fortunes of war increasingly related to the nature of the artillery support. He must have smiled with the satisfaction of a farmer over a big harvest yield that filled the granary as the stack of sh.e.l.ls at an ammunition depot spread over the field, and he could go among his guns with the pride of a landowner among his flocks. He knew all the diseases that guns were heir to and their weaknesses of temperament. A gun doctor was part of the establishment. This specialist went among the guns and felt of their pulses and listened to accounts of their symptoms and decided whether they could be cared for at a field hospital or would have to go back to the base.

Temperament? An old eight-inch howitzer which has helped in a dozen curtains of fire and blown in numerous dugouts may be a virtuoso for temperament. Many things enter into mastery of the magic of the thunders, from clear eyesight of observers who see accurately to precision of gunner's skill, of powder, of fuse, of a hundred trifles which can never be too meticulously watched. The erring inspector of munitions far away oversea by an oversight may cost the lives of many soldiers or change the fate of a charge.

Comparable only with the surgeon's skill in the skill which has life and death as the stake of its result is the gunner's. The surgeon is trying to save one life which a slip of the knife may destroy; the gunner is trying both to save and to take life. In the gunner's skill life that is young and st.u.r.dy, muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill, manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little carelessness or the slightest error and monsters with their long, fiery reach may strike you in the back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of dead and wounded and capitulation among smashed dugouts and machine gun positions you may be received by showers of bombs. No wonder that gunners work hard! No wonder that discipline is tightened by the screw of fearful responsibility!

At the front we had a sort of reverence for Grandmother, the first of the fifteen-inch howitzers to arrive as the belated answer of "prepared England" who "forced the war" on "unprepared Germany" to the famous forty-two centimeters that pounded Liege and Maubeuge. Gently Grandmother with her ugly mouth and short neck and mammoth supporting ribs of steel was moved and nursed; for she, too, was temperamental.

Afterward, Grandfather came and Uncle and Cousin and Aunt and many grown sons and daughters, until the British could have turned the city of Lille into ruins had they chosen; but they kept their destruction for the villages on the Somme, which represent a property loss remarkably small, as the average village could be rebuilt for not over two hundred thousand dollars.

Other children of smaller caliber also arrived in surprising numbers.

Make no mistake about that nine-inch howitzer, which appears to be only a monstrous tube of steel firing a monstrous sh.e.l.l, not being a delicately adjusted piece of mechanism. The gunner, his clothes oil-soaked, who has her breech apart pays no attention to the field of guns around him or the burst of a sh.e.l.l a hundred yards away, no more than the man with a motor breakdown pays to pa.s.sing traffic. Is he a soldier? Yes, by his uniform, but primarily a mechanic, this man from Birmingham, who is polishing that heavy piece of steel which, when it locks in the breech, holds the sh.e.l.l fast in place and allows all the force of the explosion to pa.s.s through the muzzle, while the recoil cylinder takes up the shock as nicely as on a battleship, with no tremble of the base set in the debris of a village. He shakes his head, this preoccupied mechanician. It may be necessary to call in the gun doctor. His "how" has been in service a long time, but is not yet showing the signs of general debility of the eight-inch battery near by.

They have fired three times their allowance and are still good for sundry purposes in the gunner-general's play of red and black pins on his map. The life of guns has surpa.s.sed all expectations; but the smaller calibers forward and the _soixante-quinze_ must not suffer from general debility when they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge.

War is still a matter of projectiles, of missiles thrown by powder, whether cannon or rifle, as it was in Napoleon's time, the change being in range, precision and destructive power. The only new departure is the aeroplane, for the gas attack is another form of the Chinese stink-pot and our old mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to the _Flammenwerfer_. The tank with its machine guns applied the principle of projectiles from guns behind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be considered an innovation by mediaeval knights. Bombs and hand grenades and mortars are also old forms of warfare, and close-quarter fighting with the bayonet, as was evident to all practical observers before the war, will endure as long as the only way to occupy a position is by the presence of men on the spot and as long as the defenders fight to hold it in an arena free of interference by guns which must hold their fire in fear of injury to your own soldiers as well as to the enemy.

With all the inventive genius of Europe applied in this war, the heat ray or any other revolutionary means of killing which would make guns and rifles powerless has not been developed. It is still a question of throwing or shooting projectiles accurately at your opponent, only where once it was javelin, or spear, or arrow, now it is a matter of sh.e.l.ls for anywhere from one mile to twenty miles; and the more hits that you could make with javelins or arrows and can make with sh.e.l.ls the more likely it is that victory will incline to your side. Where flights of arrows hid the sun, barrages now blanket the earth.

The improvement in sh.e.l.l fire is revolutionary enough of itself.

Steadily the power of the guns has increased. What they may accomplish is well ill.u.s.trated by the account of a German battalion on the Somme.

When it was ten miles from the front a fifteen-inch sh.e.l.l struck in its billets just before it was ordered forward. On the way luck was against it at every stage of progress and it suffered in turn from nine-inch, eight-inch and six-inch sh.e.l.ls, not to mention bombs from an aviator flying low, and afterward from eighteen pounders. When it reached the trenches a preliminary bombardment was the stroke of fate that led to the prompt capitulation of some two hundred survivors to a British charge. The remainder of the thousand men was practically all casualties from sh.e.l.l-bursts, which, granting some exaggeration in a prisoner's tale, ill.u.s.trates what killing the guns may wreak if the target is under their projectiles.

The gunnery of 1915 seems almost amateurish to that of 1916, a fact hardly revealed to the public by its reading of bulletins and of such a quant.i.ty of miscellaneous information that the significance of it becomes obscure. At the start of the war the Germans had the advantage of many mobile howitzers and immense stores of high explosive sh.e.l.ls, while the French were dependent on their _soixante-quinze_ and shrapnel; and at this disadvantage the brilliancy of their work with this wonderful field gun on the Marne and in Lorraine was the most important contributory factor in saving France next to the vital one of French courage and organization. The Allies had to follow the German suit with howitzers and high explosive sh.e.l.ls and the cry for more and more guns and more and more munitions for the business of blasting your enemy and his positions to bits became universal.

The first barrage, or curtain of fire, ever used to my knowledge was a feeble German effort in the Ypres salient in the autumn of 1914, though the French drum fire distributed over a certain area had, in a sense, a like effect. To make certain of clearness about fundamentals familiar to those at the front but to the general public only a symbol for something not understood, a curtain of fire is a swath of fragments and bullets from bursting projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent reserves from coming to the support of the front line. It is a barrier of death, the third rail of the battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with their showers of bullets, while the high explosives heave up the earth under foot. Shrapnel largely went out of fashion in the period when high explosives smashed in trenches and dugouts; but the answer was deeper dugouts too stoutly roofed to permit of penetration and shrapnel returned to play a leading part again, as we shall see in the description of a charge under an up-to-date curtain of fire in another chapter.

Counter-battery work is another one of the gunner-general's cares, which requires, as it were, the a.s.sistance of the detective branch. Before you can fight you must find the enemy's guns in their hiding-places or take a chance on the probable location of his batteries, which will ordinarily seek every copse, every sunken road and every reverse slope.

The interesting captured essay on British fighting methods, by General von Arnim, the general in command of the Germans opposite the British on the Somme, with its minutiae of directions indicative of how seriously he regarded the New Army, mentioned the superior means of reporting observations to the guns used by British aeroplanes and warned German gunners against taking what had formerly been obvious cover, because British artillery never failed to concentrate on those spots with disastrous results.

Where aeroplanes easily detect lines, be they roads or a column of infantry, as I have said, a battery in the open with guns and gunners the tint of the landscape is not readily distinguishable at the high alt.i.tude to which anti-aircraft gunfire restricts aviators. When a concentration begins on a battery, either the gunners must go to their dugouts or run beyond the range of the sh.e.l.ls until the "strafe" is over. If A could locate all of B's guns and had two thousand guns of his own to keep B's two thousand silenced by counter-battery work and two thousand additional to turn on B's infantry positions, it would be only a matter of continued charges under cover of curtains of fire until the survivors, under the gusts of sh.e.l.ls with no support from their own guns, would yield against such ghastly, hopeless odds.

Such is the power of the guns--and such the game of guns checkmating guns--in their effort to stop the enemy's curtains of fire while maintaining their own that the genius who finds a divining rod which, from a sausage balloon, will point out the position of every enemy battery has fame awaiting him second only to that of the inventor of a system of distilling a death-dealing heat ray from the sun.

And the captured gun! It is a prize no less dear to the infantry's heart to-day than it was a hundred years ago. Our battalion took a battery! There is a thrill for every officer and man and all the friends at home. Muzzle cracked by a direct hit, recoil cylinder broken, wheels in kindling wood, shield fractured--there you have a trophy which is proof of accuracy to all gunners and an everlasting memorial in the town square to the heroism of the men of that locality.

In the gunners' branch of the corps or division staff (which may be next door to the telephone exchange where "h.e.l.lo!" soldiers are busy all day keeping guns, infantry, transport, staff and units, large and small, in touch) the visitor will linger as he listens to the talk of shop by these experts in mechanical destruction. Generic discussions about which caliber of gun is most efficient for this and that purpose have the floor when the result of a recent action does not furnish a fresher topic. There are faddists and old fogies of course, as in every other band of experts. The reports of the infantry out of its experience under sh.e.l.l-bursts, which should be the gospel, may vary; for the infantry think well of the guns when the charge goes home with casualties light and ill when the going is bad.

Every day charts go up to the commanders showing the expenditure of ammunition and the stock of different calibers on hand; for the army is a most fastidious bookkeeper. Always there must be immense reserves for an emergency, and on the Somme a day's allowance when the battle was only "growling" was a month's a year previous. Let the general say the word and fifty thousand more sh.e.l.ls will be fired on Thursday than on Wednesday. He throws off and on the switch of a Niagara of death. The infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant demand. It would like a score of batteries turned on one machine gun, all the batteries in the army against a battalion front, and a sheet of sh.e.l.ls in the air night and day, as you yourself would wish if you were up in the firing-line.

Guardians of the precious lives of their own men and destroyers of the enemy's, the guns keep vigil. Every night the flashes on the horizon are a reminder to those in the distance that the battle never ends. Their voices are like none other except guns; the flash from their muzzles is as suggestive as the spark from a dynamo, which says that death is there for reaching out your hand. Something docile is in their might, like the answering of the elephant's bulk to the mahout's command, in their noiseless elevation and depression, and the bigger they are the smoother appears their recoil as they settle back into place ready for another shot. The valleys where the guns hide play tricks with acoustics. I have sat on a hill with a dozen batteries firing under the brow and their crashes were hardly audible.

"Only an artillery preparation, sir!" said an artilleryman as we started up a slope stiff with guns, as the English say, all firing. You waited your chance to run by after a battery had fired and were on the way toward the next one before the one behind sent another round hurtling overhead.

The deep-throated roar of the big calibers is not so hard on the ears as the crack of the smaller calibers. Returning, you go in face of the blasts and then, though it rarely happens, you have in mind, if you have ever been in front of one, the awkward possibility of a premature burst of a sh.e.l.l in your face. Signs tell you where those black mouths which you might not see are hidden, lest you walk straight into one as it belches flame. When you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every caliber at work and your head aches from the noise, the thing becomes overpowering and monotonous. Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fascination of artillery power.

Riding home one day after hours with the guns in an attack, I saw for the first time one of the monster railroad guns firing as I pa.s.sed by on the road. Would I get out to watch it? I hesitated. Yes, of course. But it was only another gun, a giant tube of steel painted in frog patches to hide it from aerial observation; only another gun, though it sent a two-thousand-pound projectile to a target ten miles away, which a man from a sausage balloon said was "on."

XXI

BY THE WAY