My Year of the War Part 27

It was a pleasure to throw this crowning achievement of experiments.

It fitted your hand nicely; it threw easily; it did the business; it was fool-proof against a man in love or a war-poet.

"We saw as soon as this style came out," said the sergeant, "that it was bound to be popular. Everybody asks for it--except the Boches, sir."

XXI My Best Day At The Front

It was the best day because one ran the gamut of the mechanics and emotions of modern war within a single experience--and oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!

It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large chateau. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the British trenches and all the German trenches--spider-weblike lines that cunning human spiders had spun with spades--in that region; and where our batteries were and where some of the German batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.

To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their day.

That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly "hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians agree. Good war is to have millions of sh.e.l.ls and vast reserves ready and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.

But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire- economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with sh.e.l.ls and then dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than Calais.

In their official bulletin the Germans said that they had recovered the trench. They did recover part of it for a few hours. It was then that the commander on the German side must have sent in his report to catch the late evening editions. Commanders do not like to confess the loss of trenches. It is the sort of thing that makes headquarters ask: "What is the matter with you over there, anyway?" There was a time when the German bulletins about the Western front seemed rather truthful; but of late they have been getting into bad habits.

The British general knew what was coming; he knew that he would start the German hornets out of their nest when he took the trench; he knew, too, that he could rely upon his men to hold till they were told to retire or there were none left to retire. The British are a home- loving people, who do not like to be changing their habitations. In succeeding days the question up and down the lines was, "Have we still got that trench?" Only two hundred yards of ditch on the continent of Europe! But was it still ours? Had the Germans succeeded in "strafing" us out of it yet? They had sh.e.l.led all the trenches in the region of the lost trench and had made three determined and unsuccessful counter-attacks when, on the fifth day, we returned to the chateau to ask if it were practicable to visit the new trench.

"At your own risk!" said the staff officer. If we preferred we could sit on the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer day. Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape. Who was at war? Why was anyone at war? Two staff motor-cars awaiting orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages, who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual evidence of war. The staff officer served us with helmets for protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in the staff officer's eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest.

You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff officer's eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from the trenches to join the "brain-trust" in the chateau, know a great deal more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, "At their own risk."

There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a correspondent's leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark at some headquarters, I recall, that "You never know!" which shows that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half the knowledge--and they are at great pains not to part with their half.

We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White- capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front.

At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any farther it might draw sh.e.l.l-fire. Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.

There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the pa.s.ser-by. We were in a dead land.

One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress.

It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command. His men were being pounded by sh.e.l.ls and the inexorable law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of sh.e.l.ls which had cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors.

True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had pa.s.sed on.

There were three of us, two correspondents, L------ and myself, and R------, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind.

Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre, Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not like. We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the public library and to the right for the museum.

Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places; and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a waste of the Kaiser's munitions as there was no one in sight. Yet there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high.

They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those deserted roads.

The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind. Anything that hara.s.ses your enemy is counted to the good. If every sh.e.l.l fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have sh.e.l.ls been so important in war as now. They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent threat of death. The firing of sh.e.l.ls from batteries securely hidden and em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine--a machine that money cannot reproduce--that gun-machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use sh.e.l.ls as freely as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.

Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from sh.e.l.l-storms. The only time that British generals become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:

"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.

By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide.

That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular firing, its sh.e.l.ls sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!"

If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.

Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Sh.e.l.l-fire!" The stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come.

Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.

The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well!

In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him.

What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.

We come to the banks of a ca.n.a.l which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the ca.n.a.l where British and French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months.

Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy sh.e.l.l and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring.

In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with pa.s.sages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.

Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread.

They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted to the cave-dweller's protection because their civilization is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller's time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target.

An officer calls attention to a sh.e.l.l-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station.

"Not even a high explosive"--the kind that bursts on impact after penetration--"could get into that!" he says. "We make them for generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their shoulders."

With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction represented--the c.u.mulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by sh.e.l.ls! After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dug-outs to be ready for another go!

The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer-- stormy. The German gunners were "strafing" in a very lively way this afternoon.

Already we had noticed many sh.e.l.ls bursting five or six hundred yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels faster than big sh.e.l.ls of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that sh.e.l.l has your name and your number on Dug-out Street.

I was certain that it was a big sh.e.l.l, of the kind that will blow a dug-out to pieces. Anyone who had never heard a sh.e.l.l before would have "scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging by the sensation that travels down your backbone.

Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windla.s.s above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the burst of a sh.e.l.l and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling, boring, growing scream of a sh.e.l.l is like no other scream in the world.

A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel drum-head.

If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where, hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks from the concussion.

Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The sh.e.l.l might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half- stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.

"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer, trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.

"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.

This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a nine-inch-sh.e.l.l explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the experiences there are--but only "close." A delightful word that word close, at the front!