My Second Year of the War Part 20

Again the clans were gathering and again there ran through the army the antic.i.p.ation which came from the preparation for a great blow. The Canadians were appearing in billets back of the front. If in no other way, I should have known of their presence by their habit of moving about roads and fields getting acquainted with their surroundings and finding out if apples were ripe. For other portions of the country it was a little unfair that these generous and well-paid spenders should take the place of the opulent Australians in villages where small boys already had hordes of pennies and shopkeepers were hastening to replenish their stocks to be equal to their opportunities.

At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, but not to go in against the Prussian Guard, which those with a sense of histrionic fitness desired. When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at Contalmaison he had said, "The Prussian Guard feels that it is surrendering to a foe worthy of its steel when it yields to superior numbers of the English Guard!" or words to that effect according to reports, only to receive the answer that his captors were English factory hands and the like of the New Army, whose officers excused themselves, in the circ.u.mstances, for their ident.i.ty as politely as they could.

Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the Guards were the Guards, England's crack regiments, the officers of each wearing their b.u.t.tons in a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with the distinctive Guards' salute. In the Guards the old spirit of gaiety in face of danger survived. Their officers out in sh.e.l.l-craters under curtains of fire joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner worthy of tradition.

Though the English would have been glad to go against the Prussian Guard with bayonet or bomb or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days are not signaling to the enemy, "Let us have a go between your Guards and our Guards!" but are putting crack regiments and line regiments in a battle line to a common task, where the only criterion is success.

The presence of the Guards, however, yielded interest to another new arrival on the Somme front. When the plan for a style of armored motor car which would cross sh.e.l.l-craters and trenches was laid before an eminent general at the War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from further consideration might have been more blasphemous if he could have spared the time to be anything but satirically brief. Such conservatives probably have prevented many improvements from materializing, and probably they have also saved the world from many futile creations which would only have wasted time and material.

Happily both for geniuses and fools, who all, in the long run, let us hope, receive their just deserts, there is no downing an idea in a free country where continued knocking at doors and waiting in hallways eventually secure it a trial. Then, if it succeeds, the fellow who thought that the conception was original with him finds his claims disputed from all points of the compa.s.s. If it fails, the poor thing goes to a fatherless grave.

I should like to say that I was the originator of the tank--one of the originators. In generous mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals too numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every soldier.

Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I found myself so poor at it that I did not even pa.s.s on my plan to the staff, which had already considered a few thousand plans. Ericsson conceiving a gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man as Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine of war.

To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, was given the task of transforming blue-print plans into reality. There was no certainty that he would succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for every foundry and every skilled finger in the land, was enterprising enough to give him a chance. He and thousands of workmen spent months at this most secret business. If one German spy had access to one workman, then the Germans might know what was coming. n.o.body since Ericsson had a busier time than Swinton without telling anybody what he was doing. The whisperers knew that some diabolical surprise was under way and they would whisper about it. No censor regulations can reach them. Sometimes the tribe was given false information in great confidence in order to keep it too occupied to pa.s.s on the true.

The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary.

Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine danger that n.o.body is surprised at anything that appears at the front unheralded.

One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?"

was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me.

Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more phlegmatic.

In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the sh.e.l.l clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had c.u.mulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas sh.e.l.ls, lachrymatory sh.e.l.ls and _Flammenwerfer_ were as old-fashioned as high explosives and shrapnel. Bombing encounters in saps had no variation. The ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told from the one taken yesterday except by its location on the map. Even the aeroplanes had not lately developed any sensational departures from habit. One paid little more attention to them than a gondolier pays to the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of fire all looked alike. There was no new way of being killed--nothing to break the ghastly monotony of charges and counter-charges.

All the brains of Europe had been busy for two years inventing new forms of destruction, yet no genius had found any sinuous creature that would creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was no antidote.

Everybody was engaged in killing, yet n.o.body was able to "kill to his satisfaction," as the Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing b.a.l.l.s of explosives for one thousand yards.

True, the gas attack at Ypres had been an innovation. It was not a discovery; merely an application of ghastliness which had been considered too horrible for use. As a surprise it had been successful--once. The defense answered with gas masks, which made it still more important that soldiers should not be absent-minded and leave any of their kit out of reach. The same amount of energy put into projectiles would have caused more casualties. Meanwhile, no staff of any army, making its elaborate plans in the use of proved weapons, could be certain that the enemy had not under way, in this age of invention which has given us the wireless, some new weapon which would be irresistible.

Was the tank this revolutionary wonder? Its sponsors had no such hope.

England went on building guns and pouring out sh.e.l.ls, cartridges and bombs. At best, the tanks were another application of an old, established form of killing in vogue with both Daniel Boone and Napoleon's army--bullets.

The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the monster was blocking a road gorged with transport had something of the ludicrousness of, say, a pliocene monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly lain down at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the delay. Those near by were sufficiently entertained by the spectacle which stopped them. They gathered around the tank and gaped and grinned.

The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark-haired Englishman, with a face of oriental stolidity. Questions were shot at him, but he would not even say whether his beast would stand without hitching or not; whether it lived on hay, talc.u.m powder, or the stuff that bombs are made of; or what was the nature of its inwards, or which was the head and which the tail, or if when it seemed to be backing it was really going forward.

By the confession of some white lettering on its body, it was officially one of His Majesty's land ships. It no more occurred to anyone to suggest that it move on and clear the road than to argue with a bulldog which confronts you on a path. I imagined that the feelings of the young officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the curtain of military secrecy into the full blaze of staring, inquiring publicity.

The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. Its body hugged the earth in order to expose as little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it was mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to its low visibility, and there was no more hop in it than in the Gila monster.

The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide being proof against the bullets of machine guns and rifles, it was a moving "strong point" which could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, where machine guns were emplaced to mow down infantry charges, with its own machine guns.

Only now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical product it was no more remarkable than a steam shovel. The wonder was in the part that it was about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, and this a soldier-saving, device.

For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead weight in the path of traffic.

If it could not move of itself, the only way for traffic to pa.s.s was to build a road around it. Then there was a rumbling noise within its body which sounded like some unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself around with the ponderosity of a ca.n.a.l boat being warped into a dock and proceeded on its journey to take its appointed place in the battle line.

Did the Germans know that the tanks were building? I think that they had some inkling a few weeks before the tanks' appearance that something of the sort was under construction. There was a report, too, of a German tank which was not ready in time to meet the British. Some German prisoners said that their first intimation of this new affliction was when the tanks appeared out of the morning mist, bearing down on the trenches; others said that German sausage observation balloons had seen something resembling giant turtles moving across the fields up to the British lines and had given warning to the infantry to be on the lookout.

Thus, something new had come into the war, deepening the thrill of curiosity and intensifying the suspense before an attack. The world, its appet.i.te for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all about the tanks; but instead of the expected mechanical details, censorship would permit only vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, and the tanks were really strong on psychology--subjectively and objectively. It was the objective result in psychology that counted: the effect on the fighting men. Human imagination immediately characterized them as living things; monstrous comrades of infantry in attack.

Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action.

What would happen to the tanks? What would they do to the Germans?

The staff, which had carefully calculated their uses and limitations, had no thought that the tanks would go to Berlin. They were simply a new auxiliary. Probably the average soldier was skeptical of their efficiency; but his skepticism did not interfere with his curiosity. He wanted to see the beast in action.

Christopher Columbus crossing uncharted seas did not undertake a more daring journey than the skippers of the tanks. The cavalryman who charges the enemy's guns in an impulse knows only a few minutes of suspense. A torpedo destroyer bent on coming within torpedo range in face of blasts from a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were sh.e.l.l-craters, whose tempests sudden concentrations of sh.e.l.l fire.

The Germans might have full knowledge of the ships' character and await their appearance with forms of destruction adapted to the purpose. All was speculation and uncertainty. Officers and crew were sealed up in a steel box, the sport of destiny. For months they had been preparing for this day, the crowning experiment and test, and all seemed of a type carefully chosen for their part, soldiers who had turned land sailors, cool and phlegmatic like the monsters which they directed. Each one having given himself up to fate, the rest was easy in these days of war's superexaltation, which makes men appear perfectly normal when death hovers near. Not one would have changed places with any infantryman. Already they had _esprit de corps_. They belonged to an exclusive set of warriors.

Lumberingly dipping in and out of sh.e.l.l-craters, which sometimes half concealed the tanks like ships in a choppy sea, rumbling and wrenching, they appeared out of the morning mist in face of the Germans who put up their heads and began working their machine guns after the usual artillery curtain of fire had lifted.

XXVII

THE TANKS IN ACTION

How the tanks attacked--A tank walking up the main Street of a village--Effect on the Germans--Prussian colonel surrenders to a tank--Tanks against trees--The tank in High Wood--The famous Creme de Menthe--Demolishing a sugar factory--Germans take the tanks seriously--Differences of opinion regarding tanks--Wandering tanks--German attack on a stranded tank--Prehistoric turtles--Saving twenty-five thousand casualties.

With the reverse slope of the Ridge to conceal their approach to the battle line, the tanks squatting among the men at regular intervals over a six-mile front awaiting the cue of zero for the attack at dawn and the mist still holding to cover both tanks and men, the great Somme stage was set in a manner worthy of the debut of the new monsters.

A tactical system of coordinated action had been worked out for the infantry and the untried auxiliary, which only experienced soldiers could have applied with success. According to the nature of the positions in front, the tanks were set definite objectives or left to find their own objectives. They might move on located machine gun positions or answer a hurry call for help from the infantry. Ahead of them was a belt of open field between them and the villages whose capture was to be the consummation of the day's work. While observers were straining their eyes to follow the progress of the tanks and seeing but little, corps headquarters eagerly awaited news of the most picturesque experiment of the war, which might prove ridiculous, or be a wonderful success, or simply come up to expectations.

No more thrilling message was ever brought by an aeroplane than that which said that a tank was "walking" up the main street of Flers surrounded by cheering British soldiers, who were in possession of the village. "Walking" was the word officially given; and very much walking, indeed, the tank must have seemed to the aviator in his swift flight. An eagle looked down on a tortoise which had a serpent's sting. This tank, having attended to its work on the way, pa.s.sed on through Flers bearing a sign: "Extra Special! Great Hun Victory!" Beyond Flers it found itself alongside a battery of German field guns and blazed bullets into the amazed and helpless gunners.

The enemy may have heard of the tanks, but meeting them was a different matter. After he had fought sh.e.l.ls, bullets, bombs, grenades, mortars, bayonets and gas, the tank was the straw that broke the camel's back of many a German. A steel armadillo laying its bulk across a trench and sweeping it on both sides with machine guns brought the familiar complaint that this was not fighting according to rules in a war which ceased to have rules after the bombing of civilian populations, the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and the gas attack at Ypres. It depends on whose ox is gored. There is a lot of difference between seeing the enemy slaughtered by some new device and being slaughtered by one yourself. No wonder that German prisoners who had escaped alive from a trench filled with dead, when they saw a tank on the road as they pa.s.sed to the rear threw up their hands with a guttural: "Mein Gott! There is another!

There is no fighting that! This is not war; it is butchery!" Yes, it was butchery--and butchery is war these days. Wasn't it so always? And as a British officer remarked to the protestants:

"The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague rules, being only armor, machinery and machine guns."

Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after they saw the hopelessness of turning their own machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide.

Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone like finding that his blows go into the air and the other fellow's go home. There seemed a strange loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered himself to a tank, which took him on board and eventually handed him over to an infantry guard; but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel did not.

The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in their armored sh.e.l.ls after the day's fight was over, whether their ships had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or temporarily foundered in sh.e.l.l-holes. Bullets had merely made steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and shrapnel had equally failed to penetrate the armor.

Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's powers is that it "eats"

trees--that is to say, it can cut its way through a wood--and that it can knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it cannot masticate timber. All that it accomplishes must be done by ramming or by lifting up its weight to crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall yields before its ma.s.s.

As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High Wood, where the Germans had held to the upper corner with their nests of machine guns which the preliminary bombardment of British artillery had not silenced and they began their murderous song immediately the British charge started. They commanded the front and the flanks if the men continued to advance and therefore might make a break in the whole movement, which was precisely the object of the desperate resistance that had preserved this strong point at any cost against the rushes of British bombers, trench mortars and artillery sh.e.l.ls for two months.

Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impossible. n.o.body who is sane will leap into a furnace with a cup of water to put out the fire.

Only a battalion commander who is a fool will refuse, in face of concentrated machine gun fire, to stop the charge.

"Leave it to me!" was the unspoken message communicated to the infantry by the sight of that careening, dipping, clambering, steel body as it rumbled toward the miniature fortress. And the infantry, as it saw the tank's machine guns blazing, left it to the tank, and, working its way to the right, kept in touch with the general line of attack, confident that no enemy would be left behind to fire into their backs. Thus, a handful of men capable, with their bullet sprays, of holding up a thousand men found the tables turned on them by another handful manning a tank. They were simply "done in," as the tank officer put it. Safe behind his armor, he had them no less at his mercy than a submarine has a merchant ship. Even if unarmed, a tank could take care of an isolated machine gun position by sitting on it.