My Year of the War Part 21

Sleep! Does a debutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies before!

It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a kind of promenade. On this account I was in the family. If it is the right kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression. There would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.

So Captain P------ and I lay there talking. I felt the dampness of the earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture. The average cellar was dry by comparison. "You will get your death of cold!" any mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet, peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat country of Northern France and Flanders.

"It is very horrible, this kind of warfare," said the captain. He was thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. "All war is very horrible, of course." Regular soldiers rarely take any other view.

They know war.

"With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave," I suggested.

"Oh, that arm is all right!" he replied. "This is what I am paid for"-- which I had heard regulars say before. "And it is for England!" he added, in his quiet way. "Sometimes I think we should fight better if we officers could hate the Germans," he went on. "The German idea is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can't hate."

Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the lips of Cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists in war.

"Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?"

"No. We must win by fighting," he replied. This was in March, 1915.

"You know," he went on, taking another tack, "when one gets back to England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very nice."

"Yes. I've found the same after roughing it," I agreed. "One is most particular that he has every comfort to which civilization ent.i.tles him."

We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing, and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or three minutes and the firing died down to silence.

Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not yet received theirs, he had none himself.

"It's not fair to the men," he said. "I don't want anything they don't have."

No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage of his soldiers who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and dangers shared.

What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me; one of the most memorable of my life.

"I was glad you could come," he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.

Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets came rather close before we pa.s.sed out of his vision among some trees.

In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant's cottage that was battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real trench appet.i.te. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some surprise, that I had not washed my face.

"The food was just as good, wasn't it?" remarked the major. "We get quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre supper."

With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one bombardment, for the British had been sh.e.l.ling Neuve Chapelle off and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison.

All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle.

An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The sh.e.l.ls had done a good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the houses as under the pestle-head in a mortar; blown walls into dust; taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and thrown them back with another explosion. Neuve Chapelle had been literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British artillery, which the British had to make after the war began in order to compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone, wronged, bullied Germany, quite unprepared--Austria with her fifty millions does not count--was fighting on the defensive against wicked, aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been plotting and planning "the day" when they would conquer the Germans.

Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted into a spool of wire, the other simply smashed.

Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers'

benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on the roads if strong enough, helping France in any way they could, not murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!

XVII With The Guns

It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to sh.e.l.ls thrown as far as twenty miles and to mines laid under the enemy's trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to three-inch and machine-guns; a war of machinery, with man still the pre-eminent machine.

Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming sh.e.l.ls laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand pa.s.ses of all other travellers. Anyone who tried to keep out of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all a matter of chance with long odds or short odds, according to the neighbourhood you are in. If sh.e.l.ls come, they come without warning and without ceremony. n.o.body is afraid of sh.e.l.ls and everybody is--at least, I am.

"Gawd! Wat a 'ole!" remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.

It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style. One battery of modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from sh.e.l.ls burst by impact on the ground, a j.a.panese military attache remarked:

"There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!"

He was right. He knew his business as a military attache. But the Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have enough. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the next day.

"No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained.

"The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some h.e.s."--meaning high explosive sh.e.l.ls.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were un.o.bserved. They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of modern war.

What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely registered on a British gunner's map. On this map it was a certain numbered point. Press a b.u.t.ton, as it were, and you ring the bell with a sh.e.l.l at that point. And the gunners waited till the house of cards was up before knocking it to pieces.

Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without getting a single sh.e.l.l. Then it may get a score of sh.e.l.ls in ten minutes; or it may be sh.e.l.led regularly every day for ensuing weeks. "They are sh.e.l.ling X again," or, "They have been leaving Z alone for a long time," is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of the sh.e.l.ls received.

"Did you get any?" I asked the division staff officer who had told me about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common question that, at the front, "Did you get any?" (meaning Germans). A practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with casualties.

"Yes, quite a number," said the officer. "Our observer saw them lying about."

The guns are watching for the targets at all hours--the ever-hungry, ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating, marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind, groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand yards distant, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when, before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug- outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen sh.e.l.ls fall harmlessly in a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the sh.e.l.ls. .h.i.t and the amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them.

One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy's eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged.

Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the amount of h.e.l.l sent by the enemy's which you have tasted. After you have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are convinced that the next sh.e.l.l is bound to get you, you fall into the att.i.tude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say, "Nice old demon!" and watch him toss a sh.e.l.l three or four miles into the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take too much personal interest in you.

You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate half the guns. He might miss "Grandmother" and "Sister" and "Betsy"

and "Mike" and even "Mister Archibald," who is the only one who does not altogether try to avoid publicity.

When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high ground as possible for a bird's-eye view of battle, all that you see is the explosion of the sh.e.l.ls; never anything of the guns which are firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar.