My Second Year of the War Part 6

All branches of the winning army making themselves at home in the conquered area among the dead and the litter behind the old German first line--this was the fringe of the action. Beyond was the battle itself, with the firing-line still advancing under curtains of sh.e.l.l-bursts.

VIII

FORWARD THE GUNS!

An audacious battery--"An unusual occasion"--Guns to the front at night--Close to the firing-line--Not so dangerous for observers--The German lines near by--Advantages of even a gentle slope--Skilfully chosen German positions--A game of hide and seek with death--Business-like progress--Haze, sh.e.l.l-smoke and moving figures--Each figure part of the "system."

Hadn't that battery commander mistaken his directions when he emplaced his howitzers behind a bluff in the old No Man's Land? Didn't he know that the German infantry was only the other side of the knoll and that two or three score German batteries were in range? I looked for a tornado to descend forthwith upon the gunners' heads. I liked their audacity, but did not court their company when I could not break a habit of mind bred in the rules of trench-tied warfare where the other fellow was on the lookout for just such fair targets as they.

For the moment these "hows" were not firing and the gunners were in a little circ.u.mscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. In due course someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one which they had already registered. Meanwhile, very workmanlike in their shirt-sleeves, they had no concern with the traffic in the rear, except as it related to their own supply of sh.e.l.ls, or with the litter of the field, or the dead, or the burial parties and the scattered wounded pa.s.sing back from the firing-line. Their business relations were exclusively with the battle area hidden by the bluff. I thought that they were "rather fond of themselves" (as the British say) that morning, though not so much so, perhaps, as the crew of the eighteen pounders still farther forward within about a thousand yards of the Germans whom they were pelting with shrapnel.

Ordinarily, the eighteen pounders were expected to keep a distance of four or five thousand yards; but this was "rather an unusual occasion"

as an officer explained. It would never do for the eighteen pounders to be wall-flowers; they must be on the ballroom floor. Had these men who were mechanically slipping sh.e.l.ls into the gun-breeches slept last night or the previous night? Oh, yes, for two or three hours when they were not firing.

What did fatigue matter to an eighteen-pounder spirit released from the eternal grind of trench warfare and pushing across the open in the way that eighteen pounders were meant to do? Weren't they horse artillery?

What use had they had for their horses in the immovable Ypres salient except when they drew back their guns to the billets after their tour of duty?--they who had drilled and drilled in evolutions in England under the impression that field guns were a mobile arm!

When orders came on the afternoon of July 1st to go ahead "right into it" it was like a summons to a holiday for a desk-ridden man brought up in the Rockies. Out into the night with creaking wheels and caissons following with sharp words of urging from the sergeant, "Now, wheelers, as I taught you at Aldershot," as they went across old trenches or up a stiff slope and into the darkness, with transport giving them the right of way, and on to a front that was in motion, with officers studying their maps and directions by the pocket flashlight--this was something like. And a young lieutenant hurried forward to where the rifles were talking to signal back the results of the guns firing from the midst of the battle. Something like, indeed! The fellows training their pieces in keeping with his instructions might be in for a sudden concentration of blasts from the enemy, of course. Wasn't that part of the experience?

Wasn't it their place to take their share of the pounding, and didn't they belong to the guns?

These were examples close at hand, but sprinkled about the well-won area I saw the puffs from other British batteries which, after a nocturnal journey, morning found close to the firing-line. While I was moving about in the neighborhood I cast glances in the direction of that particular battery of eighteen pounders which was still serenely firing without being disturbed by the German guns. There was something unreal about it after nearly two years of the Ypres salient.

But the worst shock to a trench-tied habit of mind was when I stood upon the parapet of a German trench and saw ahead the British firing-line and the German, too. I ducked as instinctively, according to past training, as if I had seen a large, black, murderous thing coming straight for my head. In the stalemate days a dozen sharpshooters waiting for such opportunities would have had a try at you; a machine gun might have loosened up, and even batteries of artillery in their search for game to show itself from cover did not hesitate to snipe with sh.e.l.ls at an individual.

I must be dead; at least, I ought to be according to previous formulae; but realizing that I was still alive and that nothing had cracked or whistled overhead, I took another look and then remained standing. I had been considering myself altogether too important a mortal. German guns and snipers were not going to waste ammunition on a non-combatant on the skyline when they had an overwhelming number of belligerent targets. A few shrapnel breaking remotely were all that we had to bother us, and these were sparingly sent with the palpable message, "We'll let you fellows in the rear know what we would do to you if we were not so preoccupied with other business."

I was near enough to see the operations; to have gone nearer would have been to face in the open the sweep of bullets over the heads of the British front line hugging the earth, which is not wise in these days of the machine gun. A correspondent likes to see without being shot at and his lot is sometimes to be shot at without being able to see anything except the entrance of a dugout, which on some occasions is more inviting than the portals of a palace.

In the distance was the main German second trench line on the crest of Longueval and High Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win after a struggle which left nothing of woods or villages or ridges except sh.e.l.l-craters. Naturally, the Germans had not restricted their original defenses to the ridge itself, any more than the French had theirs to the hills immediately in front of Verdun. They had placed their original first-line trenches along the series of advantageous positions on the slope and turned every bit of woods and every eminence into a strong point on the way back to the second line, whose barbed-wire entanglements rusted by long exposure were distinct under the gla.s.ses.

A German officer stood on the parapet looking out in our direction, probably trying to locate the British infantry advance which was hugging a fold in the ground and resting there for the time being. I imagined how beaver-like were the Germans in the second line strengthening their defenses. I scanned all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a German battery. There must be one under those b.a.l.l.s of black smoke from high explosives from British guns and another a half mile away under the same kind of shower.

"They withdrew most of their guns behind the ridge overnight," said an officer, "in order to avoid capture in case we made another rush."

On the other side of this natural wall they would be safe from any except aerial observation, and the advanced British batteries, though all in the open, were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or just below the skyline of a rise where they had found their a.s.signed position by the map. How much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid man or gun from view counted for I did not realize that day as I was to realize in the fierce fight for position which was to come in succeeding weeks.

It was easy to understand why the Germans had made a strong point in the first line where I was standing, for it was a position which, in relation to both the British and the German trenches, would instantly appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had emplaced machine guns manned by chosen desperate men which had given the British charge its worst experience over a mile front. I could see all the movement over a broad area to the rear which, however, the rise under my feet hid from the ridge where the German officer stood. The advantage which the Germans had after their retreat from the Marne was brought home afresh once you were on conquered ground. A mile more or less of depth had no sentimental interest to them, for they were on foreign soil. They had chosen their positions by armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds of miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the view to a command of observation and ground. This was a simple application of the formula as old as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness that permitted its application and wherever the Allies were to undertake the offensive they must face this military fact, which made the test of their skill against frontal positions all the stiffer and added tribute to success.

The scene in front reminded one of a great carpet which did not lie flat on the floor but was in undulations, with the whole on an incline toward Longueval and High Wood Ridge. The Ridge I shall call it after this, for so it was in capital letters to millions of French, British and German soldiers in the summer of 1916. And this carpet was peopled with men in a game of hide and seek with death among its folds.

No vehicle, no horse was anywhere visible. Yet it was a poignantly live world where the old trench lines had been a dead world--a world alive in the dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging new trenches, in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box, the sh.e.l.l fire seemed different; it had a quality of action and adventure in comparison with the monotonous exhibition which we had watched in stalemate warfare. Death now had some element of glory and sport. It was less like set fate in a stationary shambles.

Directly ahead was a bare sweep of field of waste wild gra.s.s between the German communication trenches where wheat had grown before the war, and the British firing-line seemed like heads fastened to a greenish blanket. Holding the ground that they had gained, they were waiting on something to happen elsewhere. Others must advance before they could go farther.

The battle was not general; it raged at certain points where the Germans had anch.o.r.ed themselves after some recovery from the staggering blow of the first day. Beyond Fricourt the British artillery was making a crushing concentration on a clump of woods. This seemed to be the hottest place of all. I would watch it. Nothing except the blanket of sh.e.l.l-smoke hanging over the trees was visible for a time, unless you counted figures some distance away moving about in a sort of detached pantomime.

Then a line of British infantry seemed to rise out of the pile of the carpet and I could see them moving with a drill-ground steadiness toward the edge of the woods, only to be lost to the eye in a fold of the carpet or in a changed background. There had been something workmanlike and bold about their rigid, matter-of-fact progress, reflective of man-power in battle as seen very distinctly for a s.p.a.ce in that field of baffling and shimmering haze. I thought that I had glimpses of some of them just before they entered the woods and that they were mixing with figures coming out of the woods. At any rate, what was undoubtedly a half company of German prisoners were soon coming down the slope in a body, only to disappear as if they, too, were playing their part in the hide and seek of that irregular landscape with its variation from white chalk to dark green foliage.

Khaki figures stood out against the chalk and melted into the fields or the undergrowth, or came up to the skyline only to be swallowed into the earth probably by the German trench which they were entering. I wondered if one group had been killed, or knocked over, or had merely taken cover in a sh.e.l.l-crater when a German "krump" seemed to burst right among them, though at a distance of even a few hundred yards nothing is so deceiving as the location of a sh.e.l.l-burst in relation to objects in line with it. The black cloud drew a curtain over them. When it lifted they were not on the stage. This was all that one could tell.

What seemed only a platoon became a company for an instant under favorable light refraction. The object of British khaki, French blue and German green is invisibility, but nothing can be designed that will not be visible under certain conditions. A motley such as the "tanks" were painted would be best, but the most utilitarian of generals has not yet dared to suggest motley as a uniform for an army. It occurred to me how distinct the action would have been if the partic.i.p.ants had worn the blue coats and red trousers in which the French fought their early battles of the war.

All was confused in that mixture of haze and sh.e.l.l-smoke and maze of trenches, with the appearing and disappearing soldiers living patterns of the carpet which at times itself seemed to move to one's tiring, intensified gaze. Each one was working out his part of a plan; each was a responsive unit of the system of training for such affairs.

The whole would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehea.r.s.ed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food which fed the artillery-power and man-power that should crush through frontal positions.

IX

WHEN THE FRENCH WON

A big man's small quarters--General Foch--French capacity for enjoying a victory--Winning quality of French as victors--When the heart of France stood still--The bravery of the race--Germany's mistaken estimate of France--Why the French will fight this war to a finish--French and Germans as different breeds as ever lived neighbor--The democracy of the French--_elan_--"War of movement."

The farther south the better the news. There was another world of victory on the other side of a certain dividing road where French and British transport mingled. That world I was to see next on a day of days--a holiday of elation.

A brief note, with its permission to "circulate within the lines,"

written in a bold hand in the chateau where General Foch directed the Northern Group of French Armies, placed no limitation on freedom of movement for my French friend and myself.

Of course, General Foch's chateau was small. All chateaux occupied by big commanders are small, and as a matter of method I am inclined to think. If they have limited quarters there is no room for the intrusion of anyone except their personal staff and they can live with the simplicity which is a soldier's barrack training.

Joffre, Castelnau and Foch were the three great names in the French Army which the public knew after the Marne, and of the three Foch has, perhaps, more of the dash which the world a.s.sociates with the French military type. He simplified victory, which was the result of the same arduous preparation as on the British side, with a single gesture as he swept his pencil across the map from Dompierre to Flaucourt. Thus his army had gone forward and that was all there was to it, which was enough for the French and also for the Germans on this particular front.

"It went well! It goes well!" he said, with dramatic brevity. He had made the plans which were so definite in the bold outline to which he held all subordinates in a coordinated execution; and I should meet the men who had carried out his plans, from artillerists who had blazed the way to infantry who had stormed the enemy trenches. There was no mistaking his happiness. It was not that of a general, but the common happiness of all France.

Victory in France for France could never mean to an Englishman what it meant to a Frenchman. The Englishman would have to be on his own soil before he could understand what was in the heart of the French after their drive on the Somme. I imagined that day that I was a Frenchman.

By proxy I shared their joy of winning, which in a way seemed to be taking an unfair advantage of my position, considering that I had not been fighting.

There is no race, it seems to me, who know quite so well how to enjoy victory as the French. They make it glow with a rare quality which absorbs you into their own exhilaration. I had the feeling that the pulse of every citizen in France had quickened a few beats. All the peasant women as they walked along the road stood a little straighter and the old men and old women were renewing their youth in quiet triumph; for now they had learned the first result of the offensive and might permit themselves to exult.

Once before in this war at the Marne I had followed the French legions in an advance. Then victory meant that France was safe. The people had found salvation through their sacrifice, and their relief was so profound that to the outsider they seemed hardly like the French in their stoic grat.i.tude. This time they were articulate, more like the French of our conception. They could fondle victory and take it apart and play with it and make the most of it.

If I had no more interest in the success of one European people than another, then as a spectator I should choose that it should be to the French, provided that I was permitted to be present. They make victory no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold and efficient, who considers it her right as a superior being, but a gracious person, smiling, laughing, singing in a human fashion, whether she is greeting winning generals or privates or is looking in at the door of a chateau or a peasant's cottage.

An old race, the French, tried out through many victories and defeats until a vital, indescribable quality which may be called the art of living governs all emotions. Victory to the Germans could not mean half what it would to the French. The Germans had expected victory and had organized for it for years as a definite goal in their ambitions. To the French it was a visitation, a reward of courage and kindly fortune and the right to be the French in their own world and in their own way, which to man or to State is the most justifiable of all rights.

Twice the heart of France had stood still in suspense, first on the Marne and then at the opening onslaught on Verdun; and between the Marne and Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil of their France and looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold what remained to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness. When the world expressed its surprise and admiration at French courage France smiled politely, which is the way of France, and in the midst of the shambles, as she strained every nerve, was a little amused, not to say irritated, to think that Frenchmen had to prove again to the world that they were brave.

Whether the son came from the little shops of Paris, from stubborn Brittany, the valley of the Meuse, or the vineyards, war made him the same kind of Frenchman that he was in the time of Louis XIV. and Napoleon, fighting now for France rather than for glory as he did in Napoleon's time; a man cured of the idea of conquest, advanced a step farther than the stage of the conqueror, and his courage, though slower to respond to wrath, the finer. He had proven that the more highly civilized a people, the more content and the more they had to lose by war, the less likely they were to be drawn into war, the more resourceful and the more stubborn in defense they might become--especially that younger generation of Frenchmen with their exemplary habits and their fondness for the open air.

If France had been beaten at the Marne, notice would have been served on humanity that thrift and refinement mean enervation. We should have believed in the alarmists who talk of oriental hordes and of the vigor of primitive manhood overcoming art and education.

The Germans could not give up their idea that both the French and the English must be dying races. The German staff had been well enough informed to realize that they must first destroy the French Army as the continental army most worthy of their steel and, at the same time, they could not convince themselves that France was other than weak. She loved her flesh-pots too well; her families would yield and pay rather than sacrifice only sons.