My Year of the War Part 20

"Who are you?" he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the veranda window with a jemmy.

For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight. Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self- conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown.

Captain P------was a little way back in another pa.s.sage. I was alone and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and rifles.

"A German spy! That's why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite suspicion," I was going to say, when a call from Captain P------ identified me, and the sentry's att.i.tude changed as suddenly as if the inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might pa.s.s through the fire lines.

"So it's you, is it, right from America?" he said. "I've a sister living at Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A. with three brothers in the United States army."

Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.

"It's mesilf that's going to America when me sarvice in the army is up in one year and six months," he continued. "That's some time yet. I'm going if I'm not killed by the Germans. It's a way that they have, or we wouldn't be killing them."

"What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?"

"No. I'm looking for a better job. I'm thinking I'll be one of your millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste."

Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event, an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the morning.

A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the doorway of his dug-out, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an appetizing aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a sh.e.l.l came. But who worries about sh.e.l.ls? It is like worrying about being struck by lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.

"It looks like good bacon," I remarked.

"It is that!" said the sergeant. "And the hungrier ye are the better. It's your nose that's telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye're hungry yoursilf!"

"Then you're pretty well fed?"

"Well fed, is it? It's stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paty- what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we've nothing else to do and when we've got something to do. We get eggs up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the trenches!"

When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some eggs in evidence.

"And if ye'll not have the bacon, ye'll have a drop of tea. Mind now, while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your tongue a liar!"

Wouldn't I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles and officers' whistles and helmets and fragments of sh.e.l.ls and German diaries.

"It's easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!" I was told. "And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro- German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German."

He pa.s.sed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread through the pulpy ma.s.s caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm thus. .h.i.t must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.

"But ye'll take the tea," said the sergeant, "with a little rum hot in it.

'Twill take the chill out of your bones."

"What if I haven't a chill in my bones?"

"Maybe it's there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before an hour longer--or afther ye're home between the sheets with the rheumatiz, and yell be saying, 'Why didn't I take that gla.s.s?' which I'm holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk."

It was a memorable drink. s.n.a.t.c.hes of brogue followed me from the brazier's glow when I insisted that I must be going.

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had "dug in" after the counter-attacks which followed the battle had ceased.

Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your dam against another flood.

"We are within about sixty yards of the Germans," said Captain P------ at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the braziers well behind.

Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them.

Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.

The Germans were as busy as beavers dam-building. They had a lot of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with s.n.a.t.c.hes of sentences intelligible, and occasionally the energetic, shouted, guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed for Captain P------, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a particular instance.

"What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?" I asked.

"He wouldn't have it; he'd get rebellious," was the reply. "No, you mustn't yell at Tommy. He's a little temperamental about some things and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine."

Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each army and each people to its own ways.

Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking ready at a trigger's pull should life show itself! When daylight comes the British sing out their "Good-morning, Germans!" and the Germans answer, "Good-morning, British!" without adding, "We hope to kill some of you to-day!" Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better than the Briton.

Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk that is getting "jumpy." The Germans in front roared out their contempt in a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans also became "jumpy" and began tearing the air with bullets, firing against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when he is played on the music-hall stage. Possibly he feels the inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of a.n.a.lysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain's professional fighting man, who was the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell, and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man's flesh is soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to have gone home. It was: "Why don't you stop singing and bury your dead?" But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland; and the time is A.D. 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether, perhaps--not many out of the Kaiser's millions. Yet they seemed a great many to one who saw them lying there.

We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers'

diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for a few cents, each one telling the dead man's story and revealing the monotony of a soldier's existence in Europe to-day. These p.a.w.ns of war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover Neuve Chapelle out of those woods in the test of all their drill and waiting. A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not know what he was going against? that only the German general knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one command and forgotten the next.

"Good-night!" called the Irish.

"Good-night and good luck!"

"Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!"

"Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall into a gold mine!"

We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the men remained up around the braziers.

The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes--for there are no pyjamas for officers or men in these "crawls," as they are sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and sleep.

"How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?" officers have been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.

You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin; then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.

No bad odour a.s.sails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part, at least, of the mud off his uniform. This care makes him feel more as if he were "at home" in barracks.

From the breastworks, Captain P------and I went for a stroll in the Village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick stuck into the wall of his earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It was three o'clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the over- bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried sc.r.a.ping one foot on the other, and what I sc.r.a.ped off seemed to reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.

"Don't try!" said the captain. "Lie down and pull your boots off in the doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak."