My Year of the War Part 24

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing- trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping, to the boredom of billets.

"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig, and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust-- what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for babes, but better than "K.K." bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins, British regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come-- sh.e.l.ls, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.

There is much to be thankful for. The King's Own Particular Fusiliers, as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On every man's cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history; but no battle honours equal that of the regiment's part in the second battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment's story, whom you picture in imagination with haloes of glory in the wish that you might have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A.D. 1915, whom anyone may meet.

But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses of the action. To remark that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down hill. It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave. Why talk about it?

One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather expects to be killed. The other two "got tickets to England," as they say. My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my!

What hopes!

Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it, he has. My lady's patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins knows it will be; and she will wonder if the "stick it" quality of the British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has more kinks in his mental equipment than mere n.o.bility ever guesses, and he is having the time of his life in more respects than strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any pretence to bravery.

If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and says, "How are you?" and, "Are you going to Berlin?" and, "Are you comfortable?" etc., Tommy Atkins will say, "Yes, sir," and "Very well, sir," as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.

Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had pa.s.sed, is found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and comradeship and "joshing" are here among men to whom wounds and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less than in a shop or a factory.

Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction, which, to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any stranger.

"All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear," says Mr.

Atkins. "Put it down in the guidebooks."

Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of sandbags which is the enemy's line. It was late June at its loveliest; no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away and an occasional sniper's bullet. One cracked past as I was looking through my gla.s.ses to see if there were any evidence of life in the German trenches.

"Your hat, sir!"

Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had come down and the head under it, most expeditiously. Up to eight hundred yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs, even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a sh.e.l.l. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.

"Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the big one at the right?"

In the ma.s.s of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it might be a s.p.a.ce cut away for the swing of a rifle-barrel. Perhaps sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.

"It's about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus, from a machine-gun!"

A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.

"Not giving you much excitement!" said Tommy.

"I suppose I'd get a little if I stood up on the parapet?" I asked.

"You wouldn't get a ticket for England; you'd get a box!"

"There's a cemetery just behind the lines if you'd prefer to stay in France!"

I had pa.s.sed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to the trench. These tenderhearted soldiers who joked with death had placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes, he's loaded with sentiment, but not for the "movies."

"Keep your head down there, Eames!" called a corporal. "I don't want to be taking an inventory of your kit."

Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a b.l.o.o.d.y reward for his patience.

The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing.

As I swept the line of German trenches with the gla.s.ses I saw a wisp of flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds, and I saw that it was the tricolour of France.

"A Boche joke!" Tommy explained.

"Probably they are hating the French to-day?"

"No, it's been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally. They'd get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of humour."

"If it were a German flag?" I suggested.

"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain!"

Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.

"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,"

said a soldier, and another corrected him:

"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up flares!"

"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"

"And singing the hymn of hate!"

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.

"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"

"Ours or the Boches'?"

"Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!"

"No, theirs!"

Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.

"Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.

The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who pa.s.sed the word through to our colonel, who pa.s.sed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.

"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.

"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at printing?"