My Second Year of the War Part 18

XXIV

WATCHING A CHARGE

The British trench comes to life--The line goes forward--A modern charge no chance for heroics--Machine-like forward movement--The most wicked sound in a battle--The first machine gun--A beautiful barrage--The dreaded "shorts"--The barrage lifts to the second line--The leap into the trenches--Figures in green with hands up--Captured from dugouts--A man who made his choice and paid the price--German answering fire--Second part of the program--Again the protecting barrage--Success--Waves of men advancing behind waves of sh.e.l.l fire--Prisoners in good fettle--Brigadier-General Philip Howell.

Now the British trench came to life. What seemed like a row of khaki-colored washbasins bottom side up and fast to a taut string rose out of the cut in the earth on the other side of the valley, and after them came the shoulders and bodies of British soldiers who began climbing over the parapet just as a man would come up the cellar stairs.

This was the charge.

Five minutes the barrage or curtain of fire was to last and five minutes was the allotted time for these English soldiers to go from theirs to the German trench which they were to take. So many paces to the minute was the calculation of their rate of progress across that dreadful No Man's Land, where machine guns and German curtains of fire had wrought death in the preceding charge of July 1st.

Every detail of the men's equipment was visible as their full-length figures appeared on the background of the gray-green slope. They were entirely exposed to fire from the German trench. Any tyro with a rifle on the German parapet could have brought down a man with every shot. Yet none fell; all were going forward.

I would watch the line over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of observation in the concrete.

The average layman conceives of a charge as a rush. So it is on the drill-ground, but not where its movement is timed to arrival on the second before a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must not be winded when there is hot work awaiting them in close encounters around traverses and at the mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead of his companions; no one crying, "Come on, boys!" no one swinging his steel helmet aloft, for he needed it for protection from any sudden burst of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, keeping line and intervals except where they had to pa.s.s around sh.e.l.l-craters.

If this charge had none of the display of other days it had all the more thrill because of its workmanlike and regulated progress. No get-drunk-six-days-of-the-week-and-fight-like-h--l-on-Sunday business of the swashbuckling age before Thiepval. Every man must do his part as coolly as if he were walking a tight rope with no net to catch him, with death to be reckoned with in the course of a systematic evolution.

"Very good! A trifle eager there! Excellent!" Howell sweeping the field with his gla.s.ses was speaking in the expert appreciation of a football coach watching his team at practice. "No machine guns yet," he said for the second time, showing the apprehension that was in his mind.

I, too, had been listening for the staccato of the machine gun, which is the most penetrating, mechanical and wicked, to my mind, of all the instruments of the terrible battle orchestra, as sinister as the clicking of a switch which you know will derail a pa.s.senger train. The men were halfway to the German trench, now. Two and a half minutes of the allotted five had pa.s.sed. In my narrow sector of vision not one man had yet fallen. They might have been in a manoeuver and their goal a deserted ditch. Looking right and left my eye ran along the line of st.u.r.dy, moving backs which seemed less concerned than the spectator. Not only because you were on their side but as the reward of their steadiness, you wanted them to conquer that stretch of first-line fortifications. Any second you expected to see the first sh.e.l.l-burst of the answering German barrage break in the midst of them.

Then came the first sharp, metallic note which there is no mistaking, audible in the midst of sh.e.l.l-screams and gun-crashes, off to the right, chilling your heart, quickening your observation with awful curiosity and drawing your attention away from the men in front as you looked for signs of a machine gun's gathering of a human harvest. Rat-tat-tat-tat in quick succession, then a pause before another series instead of continuous and slower cracks, and you knew that it was not a German but a British machine gun farther away than you had thought.

More than ever you rejoiced in every one of the bursts of stored lightning thick as fireflies in the blanket of smoke over the German trench, for every one meant a shower of bullets to keep down enemy machine guns. The French say "_Belle!_" when they see such a barrage, and beautiful is the word for it to those men who were going across the field toward this sh.e.l.l-made nimbus looking too soft in the bright sunlight to have darts of death. All the sh.e.l.l-bursts seemed to be in a breadth of twenty or thirty yards. How could guns firing at a range of from two to five thousand yards attain such accuracy!

The men were three-quarters of the distance, now. As they drew nearer to the barrage another apprehension numbed your thought. You feared to see a "short"--one of the sh.e.l.ls from their own guns which did not carry far enough bursting among the men--and this, as one English soldier who had been knocked over by a short said, with dry humor, was "very discouraging, sir, though I suppose it is well meant." A terrible thing, that, to the public, killing your own men with your own sh.e.l.ls. It is better to lose a few of them in this way than many from German machine guns by lifting the barrage too soon, but fear of public indignation had its influence in the early days of British gunnery. The better the gunnery the closer the infantry can go and the greater its confidence. A sh.e.l.l that bursts fifteen or twenty yards short means only the slightest fault in length of fuse, error of elevation, or fault in registry, back where the muzzles are pouring out their projectiles from the other side of the slope. And there were no shorts that day. Every sh.e.l.l that I saw burst was "on." It was perfect gunnery.

Now it seemed that the men were going straight into the blanket over the trenches still cut with flashes. Some forward ones who had become eager were at the edge of the area of dust-spatters from shrapnel bullets in the white chalk. Didn't they know that another twenty yards meant death?

Was their methodical phlegm such that they acted entirely by rule? No, they knew their part. They stopped and stood waiting. Others were on the second of the five minutes' allowance as suddenly all the flashes ceased and nothing remained over the trench but the mantle of smoke. The barrage had been lifted from the first to the second-line German trench as you lift the spray of a hose from one flower bed to another.

This was the moment of action for the men of the charge, not one of whom had yet fired a shot. Each man was distinctly outlined against the white background as, bayonets glistening and hands drawn back with bombs ready to throw, they sprang forward to be at the mouths of the dugouts before the Germans came out. Some leaped directly into the trench, others ran along the parapet a few steps looking for a vantage point or throwing a bomb as they went before they descended. It was a quick, urgent, hit-and-run sort of business and in an instant all were out of sight and the fighting was man to man, with the guns of both sides keeping their hands off this conflict under ground. The entranced gaze for a moment leaving that line of chalk saw a second British wave advancing in the same way as the first from the British first-line trench.

"All in along the whole line. Bombing their way forward there!" said Howell, with matter-of-fact understanding of the progress of events.

I blinked tired eyes and once more pressed them to the twelve diameters of magnification, every diameter having full play in the clear light. I saw nothing but little bursts of smoke rising out of the black streak in the chalk which was the trench itself, each one from an egg of high explosive thrown at close quarters but not numerous enough to leave any doubt of the result and very evidently against a few recalcitrants who still held out.

Next, a British soldier appeared on the parapet and his att.i.tude was that of one of the military police directing traffic at a busy crossroads close to the battle front. His part in the carefully worked out system was shown when a figure in green came out of the trench with hands held up in the approved signal of surrender the world over. The figure was the first of a file with hands up--and very much in earnest in this att.i.tude, too, which is the one that the British and the French consider most becoming in a German--who were started on toward the first-line British trench. All along the front small bands of prisoners were appearing in the same way. There would have been something ridiculous about it, if it had not been so real.

For the most part, the prisoners had been breached from dugouts which had no exit through galleries after the Germans had been held fast by the barrage. It was either a case of coming out at once or being bombed to death in their holes; so they came out.

"A live prisoner would be of more use to his fatherland one day than a dead one, even though he had no more chance to fight again than a rabbit held up by the ears," as one of the German prisoners said.

"More use to yourself, too," remarked his captor.

"That had occurred to me, also," admitted the German.

During the filing out of the different bags of prisoners two incidents pa.s.sed before my eye with a realism that would have been worth a small fortune to a motion picture man if equally dramatic ones had not been posed. A German sprang out of the trench, evidently either of a mind to resist or else in a panic, and dropped behind one of the piles of chalk thrown up in the process of excavation. A British soldier went after him and he held up his hands and was dispatched to join one of the groups.

Another who sought cover in the same way was of different temperament, or perhaps resistance was inspired by the fact that he had a bomb. He threw it at a British soldier who seemed to dodge it and drop on all fours, the bomb bursting behind him. Bombs then came from all directions at the German. There was no time to parley; he had made his choice and must pay the price. He rolled over after the smoke had risen from the explosions and then remained a still green blot against the chalk. A British soldier bent over the figure in a hasty examination and then sprang into the trench, where evidently he was needed.

"The Germans are very slow with their sh.e.l.l fire," said Howell in the course of his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, as he watched the operations.

Answering barrages, including a visitation to our own position which was completely exposed, were in order. Howell himself had been knocked over by a sh.e.l.l here during the last attack. One explanation given later by a German officer for the tardiness of the German guns was that the staff had thought the British too stupid to attack from that direction, which pleased Howell as showing the advantage of racial reputation as an aid to strategy.

However, the German artillery was not altogether unresponsive. It was putting some "krumps" into the neighborhood of the British first line and one of the bands of prisoners ran into the burst of a five-point-nine. Ran is the word, for they were going as fast as they could to get beyond their own curtain of fire, which experience told them would soon be due. I saw this lot submerged in the spout of smoke and dust but did not see how many if any were hit, as the sound of a machine gun drew my attention across the dead gra.s.s of the old No Man's Land to the German--I should say the former German--first-line trench where an Englishman had his machine gun on the _parados_ and was sweeping the field across to the German second-line trench. Perhaps some of the Germans who had run away from the barrage at the start had been hiding in sh.e.l.l-craters or had shown signs of moving or there were targets elsewhere.

So far so good, as Howell remarked. That supposedly impregnable German fortification that had repulsed the first British attempt had been taken as easily as if it were a boy's snow fort, thanks to the patent curtain of fire and the skill that had been developed by battle lessons. It was retribution for the men who had fallen in vain on July 1st. Howell was not thinking of that, but of the second objective in the afternoon's plan. By this time not more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed since the first charge had "gone over the lid." Out of the cut in the welt of chalk the line of helmets rose again and England started across the field toward the German second-line trench, which was really a part of the main first-line fortification on the slope, in the same manner as toward the first.

What about their protecting barrage? My eyes had been so intently occupied that my ears had been uncommunicative and in a start of glad surprise I realized that the same infernal sweep of sh.e.l.ls was going overhead and farther up on the Ridge fireflies were flashing out of the mantle of smoke that blanketed the second line. Now the background better absorbed the khaki tint and the figures of the men became more and more hazy until they disappeared altogether as the flashes in front of them ceased. Howell had to translate from the signals results which I could not visually verify. One by one items of news appeared in rocket flashes through the gathering haze which began to obscure the slope itself.

"I think we have everything that we expected to take this afternoon,"

said Howell, at length. "The Germans are very slow to respond. I think we rather took them by surprise."

They had not even begun sh.e.l.ling their old first line, which they ought to have known was now in British possession and which they must have had registered, as a matter of course; or possibly their own intelligence was poor and they had no real information of what had been proceeding on the slope under the clouds of smoke, or their wires had been cut and their messengers killed by sh.e.l.l fire. This was certain, that the British in the first-line German trench had a choice lot of dugouts in good condition for shelter, as the patent barrage does not smash in the enemy's homes, only closes the doors with curtains of death.

"I hope you're improving your dugouts," British soldiers would call out across No Man's Land, "as that is all the better for us when we take them!"

We stayed on till Howell's expert eye had had its fill of details, with no burst of sh.e.l.ls to interfere with our comfort; though by the rules we ought to have had a good "strafing," which was another reminder of my debt to the German for his consideration to the American correspondent at the British front.

"What do you think of our patent barrage, now?" said the artillery general returning from his post of observation.

"Wonderful!" was all that one could say.

"A good show!" said Howell.

The rejoicing of both was better expressed in their eyes than in words.

Good news, too, for the corps commander smoking his pipe and waiting, and for every battalion engaged--oh, particularly for the battalions!

"Congratulations!" The exclamation was pa.s.sed back and forth as we met other officers on our way to brigade headquarters in a dugout on the hillside, where Howell's felicitations to the happy brigadier on the way that his men had gone in were followed by suggestions and a discussion about future plans, which I left to them while I had a look through the brigadier's telescope at Thiepval Ridge under the patterns of sh.e.l.l fire of average days, which proved that the Germans were making no attempt at a counter-attack to recover lost ground. I imagined that the German staff was dumfounded to hear that their redoubtable old first line could possibly have been taken with so little fireworks.

It was when I came to the guns on our return that I felt an awe which I wanted to translate into appreciation. They were firing slowly now or not firing at all, and the idle gunners were lounging about. They had not seen their own curtain of fire or the infantry charge; they had been as detached from the action as the crew of a battleship turret. It was their accuracy and their coordination with the infantry and the infantry's coordination with the barrage that had expressed better than volumes of reports the possibilities of the offensive with waves of men advancing behind waves of sh.e.l.l fire, which was applied in the taking of Douaumont later and must be the solution of the problem of a decision on the Western front.

Above the communication trenches the steel helmets of the British and the gray fatigue caps of German prisoners were bobbing toward the rear and at the casualty clearing station the doctor said, "Very light!" in answer to the question about losses. The prisoners were in unusually good fettle even for men safe out of sh.e.l.l fire; many had no chalk on their clothes to indicate a struggle. They had been sitting in their dugouts and walked out when an Englishman appeared at the door. Yes, they said that they had been caught just before relief, and the relief had been carried out in an unexpected fashion. If they must be taken they, too, liked the patent barrage.

"I'll let you know when there's to be another show," said Howell, as we parted at corps headquarters; but none could ever surpa.s.s this one in its success or its opportunity of intimate observation.

This was the last time I saw him. A few days later, on one of his tours to study the ground for an attack, he was killed by a sh.e.l.l. Army custom permits the mention of his name because he is dead. He was a steadfast friend, an able soldier, an upright, kindly, high-minded gentleman; and when I was asked, not by the lady who had never kept up her interest so long in anything as in this war, but by another, if living at the front is a big strain, the answer is in the word that comes that a man whom you have just seen in the fulness of life and strength is gone.

XXV

CANADA IS STUBBORN

What is Canada fighting for?--The Kaiser has brought Canadians together--The land of immense distances--Canada's unfaltering spirit--Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and sentimentally--Ypres salient mud--Canadians invented the trench raid--A wrestling fight in the mud--Germans "try it on" the Canadians--"The limit" in artillery fire--Maple Leaf spirit--Baseball talk on the firing line--A good sprinkling of Americans.