Chapter X: Part 10

You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of humanity and of that quiet, kindly general and the things that he and the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for keeping an army’s artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals of your Varsity football team, which any one instinctly keeps--the reason of a world cause.

Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting the fall of its shells, which is engrossing, too, and amazingly simple. Of course, this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that one of the British planes has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If the plane does locate it, there is more work due in “make-up” to complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as among battleships of the North Atlantic.

Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dugout for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.

“We found the mother wild out there in the woods,” one of the men explained. “She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn’t let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We’ll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?”

On our way back to the general’s headquarters we must have passed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone’s throw away; and yet in an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy but engaged in destroying all the enemy’s batteries, according to the account. Eleven months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.

Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station. They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper across the street was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.

There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant, who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old man to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn’t it his wheat? Didn’t he need the crop?

The Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid the towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.

XIX

ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER

The anti-aeroplane gun--Tricks of the trade--The vagabond of the
army lines--Before the days of Archibald--Pie for the Taube--
“Swaggerest” of the gun tribe--Sport of war--Puffs in the
blue--Difficulty of accuracy--“Sending the prying aerial eye
home”--The business of planes.

There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.

At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport in some new direction, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.

If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that was going on in an enemy’s lines. They must keep up so high that through the aviator’s glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over the parapet of a trench when the enemy’s trench is only a hundred yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.

Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a noon-day cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred yards behind the Taube. A soft thistleblow against the blue it seems at that altitude; but it wouldn’t if it were about your ears. Then it would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and you would hear the whiz of scores of bullets and fragments.

The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald’s steel throat and another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming. He knows that one means many, once he is in range.

Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to sidestep. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator’s eye.

Archibald’s propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night finds him and the day’s duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day. Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up, Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of dawn, on the lookout for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for aviators are also up early.

Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the British army, every one would be known as Archibald. When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the field guns.

It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault. Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald. When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to get one.

Archibald, who is quite the “swaggerest” of the gun tribe, has his own private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry’s former part as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy’s scouts. Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have pride, _élan_, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetisers and condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht’s crew and as lively as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally bound to think rather well of themselves.

Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their shells after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board, or any of the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers softly to his touch.

Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target-- which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession, for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eyes.

You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator? He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of the escaped prisoner, who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next shell fired at the same point will be wide of the target.

Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to the range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute. Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till it burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator’s speed and guessing from experience which way he will turn next.

That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises. Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says. But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance. Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.

But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are accustomed to the whiz of shell-fragments and bullets and to have their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out of commission, and frequently though the men be wounded, they are able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.

To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German, have, to escape anti-aircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.

A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their news.

XX

TRENCHES IN SUMMER

General Mud “down and out”--“What hopes!”--Heroes in khaki--
“Tickets to England”--Coddling at home--Comradeship among the
men--The uses of barbed wire--“Your hat, sir!”--Sniping--
Sentimental Mr. Atkins--Exchange of pleasantries--A “Boche”
joke--A mine explodes--Wasting the Kaiser’s powder--A maze of
trench “streets”--A soldier cook--And cook stoves--Officers’
mess--Fresh from Sandhurst--“When do you think the war will
be over?”--_Strafing_ the chicken--From favourite actors to
military methods--A night crawl between trenches--An alarm--In
the midst of barbed-wire--Crawling patrols in the wheat field--
A narrow escape--A trench cot--The “morning hate”--A memory of
cheerful hospitality.

It was the same trench in June, still a relatively “quiet corner,” which I had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that had been so wet could become so dry.

This time the approach was made in daylight through a long communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought, on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far; and he glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a post of his dugout.

“I wanted to see if it were time to make another report,” he said. “We are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to some one else knows what is happening in his subordinate’s department.”

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces on 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--shells, 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 halos 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 any one may meet.

But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eye-witnesses 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 nobility 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 one goes 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,” etc., 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 soldierdom in a quiet corner; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, 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 the 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 glasses 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 shell. 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 mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it might be a space 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 back of the lines if you’d prefer to stay in France!”

I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to the trench. These tender-hearted 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 realise 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 back of 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 bloody 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 glasses, I saw a wisp of a 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 of the flag 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 wheat-field, 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 passed the word through to our colonel, who passed 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 would 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?”

The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, “No thoroughfare!” The soldier cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a small stove. Yes, they have cook stoves in the trenches. Why not? The line had been in the same position for six months.

“Little by little we improve our happy home,” said the cook.

The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers’ mess hall, bought at a store in the nearest town.

When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with boarded walls and roof, which was covered with tar paper and a layer of earth set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is baking biscuits for supper.

The officers’ mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheat-field. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest day of the year in this region. The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night.

Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties. Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K. O. P. F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed about forty. It was not right to ask the youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.

“Has any one asked him it yet?” one inquired, referring to some question to the guest.

“Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be over?”

It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army and the world. We had it over with before the soldier cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation:

Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the honour to its neighbour, till a brave man said:

“I will! I will _strafe_ the chicken!”

_Gott strafe England!_ _Strafe_ has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called _Boches_ they are called Strafers. “Won’t you strafe a little for us?” Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes!

That gallant youngster of the K. O. P. F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody’s lap or a wing in anybody’s eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticise his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed permanent “strafer” of all the fowls that came to table.

Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn’t it better that way? Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn’t it the way of the ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day? With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances. In their light-heartedness they made war seem a keen sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches. Youth’s resources defy monotony and death at the same time.

An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and piling sandbags in the wheat-field. The plan was to slip out as soon as it was really dark with a machine gun and a dozen men, get behind the Germans’ own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.

Before dinner, however, J----, who was to be the general of the expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.

J---- had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in summer. He wore trunks with his knees bare. When he had to do a “crawl” he unwound his puttee leggings and wound them over his knees. He and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of the enemy’s sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing Indian, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full realisation that failure in this hide-and-seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young men.

They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the turtles’ heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the wiser.

Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they were old and must have been there for some time.

“I’ll take the machine gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,” said J----.

For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what risks youth might take with machine guns.

We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international copyright on strategy is recognised. We rushed out of the mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, their rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.

“Who are you? Answer, or we fire!” called the ranking young lieutenant.

If any persons present out at front in face of thirty rifles knew the English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation, they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.

“Enough! Cease fire!” said the officer. “Nobody there. If there had been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover.”

This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a fusillade in this kind of a test.

After dinner J---- rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine gun expedition. J----’s knees were black and blue in spots; they were also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning a machine gun on them before they turn one on you.

“One man hit by a stray bullet,” said J----, on his return.

“I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,” said the other officer.

“Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got about the only shot fired at us.”

“Need a stretcher?”

“No.”

Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.

* * * * *

Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more interesting and death more likely.

“It’s dark enough, now,” said one of the youngsters who was out on another scout. “We’ll go out with the patrol.”

By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly detected. The light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides are on the prowl.

“Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,” said the young officer. “They would be more useful than aeroplanes in locating the enemy’s gun positions. A properly reliable owl would come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheat-field at such a point and a machine gun would wipe out the German patrol.”

We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out of the front trench toward the Germans.

“Anybody out?” he asked a soldier, who was on guard at the end of it.

“Yes, two.”

Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.

“Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We’ve everything to keep the _Boches_ off our front lawn except ‘keep off the grass!’ signs.”

It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat’s-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept a brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.

“Down flat!” whispered the officer.

It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army anywhere in France except that flare. However, if a guide, who knows as much about war as this one, says to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine guns and rifles--between the fighting powers of Britain and Germany--you take the hint. The flare sank into the earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces.

“What if we had been seen?”

“They’d have combed the wheat in this neighbourhood thoroughly, and they might have got us.”

“It’s hard to believe,” I said.

So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing about it. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.

We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.

Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides, like that around some campfire on the plains.

It seemed quite within the bounds of probability that you might have crawled on up to the Germans and said, “Howdy!” But by the time you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking.

“Well, shall we go back?” asked the officer.

There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer dog’s. Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command of a company of men.

It happened, as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting, shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets swarmed.

* * * * *

It was two A. M. From the dugouts came unmistakable sounds of slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer’s bed chamber was indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it “home-like.” He lay down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I was not the object of any favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot, fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans rather than the American cousin in mind.

“The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable side, I have found,” said my host. “It may not appear so at first, but you will find that it works out that way.”

Nevertheless, one slept, his last recollection that of sniping shots, to be awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade--the “morning hate” or the “morning strafe,” as it was called. After the vigil of darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheat-field watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself, unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were yawning and stirring from their dugouts. After the muster they would take the places of those who had been “on the bridge” through the night.

“It’s a case of how little water you can wash with, isn’t it?” I said to the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles from a town which had a water system. But bringing a water supply in pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back of the trenches.

“Don’t expect much for breakfast,” said the _strafer_ of the chicken. But it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home and abroad.

J---- was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the trench.

XXI

A SCHOOL IN BOMBING

War specialism--A school on a French farm--A lesson--“Bombing
them out”--Fighting in zigzag traverses--Cold steel--The bomb
storehouse--All shapes and sizes--Revivals of Roman legionary
days--A home-made product--A fool-proof, up to the minute and
popular (except with the “Boches”) variety.

It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the anarchists’ weapon, which has now become as respectable as the rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.

Present was the chief instructor, a young Scotch subaltern with blue eyes, a pleasant smile, and a Cock o’ the North spirit. He might have been twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.

Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars-- and very much of a regular--who had three ribbons which he had won in previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These two understood each other.

“If you don’t drop it, why, it’s all right!” said the sergeant. “Of course, if you do--”

I did not drop it.

“And when you throw it, sir, you must look out and not hit the man behind and knock the bomb out of your hand. That has happened before to an absent-minded fellow who was about to toss one at the _Boches_, and it doesn’t do to be absent-minded when you throw bombs.”

“They say that you sometimes pick up the German bombs and chuck them back before they explode,” it was suggested.

“Yes, sir, I’ve read things like that in some of the accounts of the reporters who write from Somewhere in France. You don’t happen to know where that is, sir? All I can say is that if you are going to do it you must be quick about it. I shouldn’t advise delaying your decision, sir, or perhaps when you reached down to pick it up, neither your hand nor the bomb would be there. They’d have gone off together, sir.”

“Have you ever been hurt in your handling of bombs?” I asked.

Surprise in the bland blue eyes.

“Oh, no, sir! Bombs are well behaved if you treat them right. It’s all in being thoughtful and considerate of them!” Meanwhile, he was jerking at some kind of a patent fuse set in a shell of high explosive. “This is a poor kind, sir. It’s been discarded, but I thought that you might like to see it. Never did like it. Always making trouble!”

More distance between the audience and the performer.

“Now I’ve got it, sir--get down, sir!”

The audience carried out instructions to the letter, as army regulations require. It got behind the protection of one of the practice-trench traverses. He threw the discard beyond another wall of earth. There was a sharp report, a burst of smoke, and some fragments of earth were tossed into the air.

In a small affair of two hundred yards of trench a week before, it was estimated that the British and the Germans together threw about five thousand bombs in this fashion. It was enough to sadden any Minister of Munitions. However, the British kept the trench.

“Do the men like to become bombers?” I asked the subaltern.

“I should say so! It puts them up in front. It gives them a chance to throw something, and they don’t get much cricket in France, you see. We had a pupil here last week, who broke the throwing record for distance. He was as pleased as Punch with himself. A first-class bombing detachment has a lot of pride of corps.”

To bomb soon became as common a verb with the army as to bayonet. “We bombed them out” meant a section of trench taken. As you know, a trench is dug and built with sandbags in zigzag traverses. In following the course of a trench it is as if you followed the sides of the squares of a checkerboard up and down and across on the same tier of squares. The square itself is a bank of earth, with the cut on either side and in front of it. When a bombing party bombs their way into possession of a section of German trench, there are Germans under cover of the traverses on either side. They are waiting around the corner to shoot the first British head that shows itself.

“It is important that you and not the _Boches_ chuck the bombs over first,” explained the subaltern. “Also, that you get them into the right traverse, or they may be as troublesome to you as to the enemy.”

With bombs bursting in their faces, the Germans who are not put out of action are blinded and stunned. In the moment when they are thus off guard, the aggressors leap around the corner.

“And then?”

“Stick ’em, sir!” said the matter-of-fact sergeant. “Yes, the cold steel is best. And do it first! As Mr. MacPherson said, it’s very important to do it first.”

It has been found that something short is handy for this kind of work. In such cramped quarters--a ditch six feet deep and from two to three feet broad--the rifle is an awkward length to permit of prompt and skilful use of the bayonet.

“Yes, sir, you can mix it up better with something handy--to think that British soldiers would come to fighting like assassins!” said the sergeant. “You must be spry on such occasions. It’s no time for wool-gathering.”

Not a smile from him or the subaltern all the time. They were the kind you would like to have along in a tight corner, whether you had to fight with knives, fists, or seventeen-inch howitzers.

The sergeant took us into the storehouse where he kept his supply of bombs.

“What if a German shell should strike your storehouse?” I asked.

“Then, sir, I expect that most of the bombs would be exploded. Bombs are very peculiar in their habits. What do you think, sir?”

It was no trouble to show stock, as clerks at the stores say. He brought forth all the different kinds of bombs that British ingenuity has invented--but no, not all invented. These would mount into the thousands. Every British inventor who knows anything about explosives has tried his hand at a new kind of bomb. One means all the kinds which the British War Office has considered worth a practice test. The spectator was allowed to handle each one as much as he pleased. There had been occasions, that boyish Scotch subaltern told me, when the men who were examining the products of British ingenuity--well, the subaltern had sandy hair, too, which heightened the effect of his blue eye.

There were yellow and green and blue and black and striped bombs; egg-shaped, barrel-shaped, conical, and concave bombs; bombs that were exploded by pulling a string and by pressing a button--all these to be thrown by hand, without mentioning grenades and other larger varieties to be thrown by mechanical means, which would have made a Chinese warrior of Confucius’ time or a Roman legionary feel at home.

“This was the first-born,” the subaltern explained, “the first thing we could lay our hands on when the close quarters’ trench warfare began.”

It was as out of date as grandfather’s smooth-bore, the tin-pot bomb that both sides used early in the winter. A wick was attached to the high explosive, wrapped in cloth and stuck in an ordinary army jam can.