Chapter IX: Part 9

“But ye’ll take the tea,” said the sergeant, “with a little rum hot in it. ’Twill take the chill out of your bones.”

“What if I haven’t a chill in my bones?”

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

Held out by a man who had been at Mons and “through it all”! It was a memorable drink. Champagne poured out by a butler at your elbow is insipid beside it. Snatches of brogue followed me from the brazier’s glow when I insisted that I must be going.

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after the counter-attacks which had followed the battle had been checked. Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your dam against another flood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers’ diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for a few cents, each one telling the dead man’s story and revealing the monotony of a soldier’s existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover Neuve Chapelle--out of those woods in the test of all their drill and waiting.

A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not know what he was going against? that only the German general knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one command and forgotten the next.

“Good night!” called the Irish.

“Good night and good luck!”

“Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sleep! Does a débutante 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 visit 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. One felt the dampness of the earth under his 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 civilisation entitles 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 passed 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 appetite. 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 shelling 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 shells 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 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 mashed.

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 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!

XVIII

WITH THE GUNS

A war of explosions--And machines--Battle-panorama style--Value
of surprise--Ever hungry guns--Accurate or blind and groping
guns--Demon guns--Balloon observations--Finding the guns--
Ingenious concealments--“Funk pits”--Mechanism--Bookkeeping
and trigonometry--“Cover!”--The German aeroplane--New
howitzers and their crews--The general--A gun specialist--
The “hell-for-leather” guns--The “curtain of fire”--In
operation--Spotting the targets--How the system works--A
chagrined gunner--A bull’s eye!--The Germans retort--Horrible
fascination of war--A queer “refugee”--“Besides, they are women
and children.”

It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and 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 shells laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand passes of all other travellers. Any one 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 shells come, they come without warning and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at least, I am.

“Gawd! W’at 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 ago that, at the battle of Domoko in the Greco-Turkish war, I saw 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 shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked:

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

He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché. 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 shells.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. 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 button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at that point. 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 shell. Then it may get a score in ten minutes; or it may be shelled regularly every day for weeks. “They are shelling 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 shells 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 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 their unseen prey in a wide landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dugout as you hear an approaching scream, and the earth trembles, 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 away, 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 fighting-trench and the dugouts and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells 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 shells hit and the amount of damage they have done is 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 hell 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 shell is bound to get you, you fall into the attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say, “Nice old demon!” and watch him toss a shell 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 some one 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 you see is the explosion of the shells; 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. Tugging at its moorings, it turns this way and that with the breeze. The speck directly beneath it through the glasses becomes an ordinary balloon basket and other specks attached to a guy rope play the part of the tail of a kite, helping to steady the type of balloon which has taken the place of the old spherical type for observation.

Any one who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how difficult it is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because of the jerking and pitching and trembling due to the envelope’s response to air-movements. The new type partly overcomes this drawback. To shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper drum-head to a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when shells were bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their commanders seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery’s reach. Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon observer hopes to see the enemy’s guns. He is watching for shell-bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether or not they are on the target.

Riding along the roads at the front, one may know that there is a battery a stone’s throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-muzzle warns him of its presence. It was wonderful to me that the artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns were, let alone the enemy’s. I imagine that he could return to a field and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll. His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which wise, old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven, or from under grandfather’s chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be there.

You might be walking across the fields and minded to go through a hedge and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun’s crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn’t grin as much as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.

“I’ll show you a big one, first!” said the general.

We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to know and we don’t want them to know. A pencil-point on their map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at that gun.

And then?

Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not know the location of any of the German batteries which had concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did not, they ought to be court-martialed for needlessly risking the precious lives of trained men. They would make for the “funk pits,” just as the gunners of any other power would.

The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell. Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for big guns have pretty thick cuticle. When the storm was over, the gunners would move the gun to another hiding-place; which would mean a good deal of work on account of its size.

It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a view to demoralising the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will demolish an enemy’s trench and let your infantry take possession of the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy’s artillery concentrates on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.

Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its parabola, its nose struck brick or earth or pavement and it exploded.

Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with figures on them, and other scales which play between the map and the gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind variation, all worked out with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it seemed a matter of bookkeeping and trigonometry rather than war.

If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a hundred men. If it went into the dugout of a support trench it would get everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into the open field it would probably get nobody.

“Cover!” some one exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and everybody promptly got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing about, he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners’ map was ours.

These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters. These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners had drilled in England, and had tried their “eight-inch hows” out on the target range, and brought them across the Channel, and nursed them along the French roads, and finally set them up in their hidden lair. Now they waited for observers to assist them in registration.

When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard; but he stopped that. At the front there is an end of the ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears. Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men went on with their recess, playing football in a nearby field.

The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not yet the veterans’ manner. It was clear that they had done everything required by the text-book of theory--the latest, up-to-date text-book of experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a shot by the enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest directions, though there was some difference among military experts on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the beginner to do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him do otherwise.

The general had a suggestion about the application of the method. He had little to say, the general, and it all was in the spirit of comradeship and much to the point. Few things escaped his observation. It seems fairly true that one who knows any branch of human endeavour well makes his work appear easy. Once a gunner always a gunner is characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life with guns. He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the guns on a certain section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire when it was needed in the commander’s plans.

If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they had qualified; and sometimes new-comers shoot quite as well as veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the general who is in charge of an expanding plant. New guns are just beginning to come; England is only beginning to make war. It takes time to make a gun and time to train men to fire it. The war will be won by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill when the war began.

“Here are some who have been in France from the first,” said the general, when we came to a battery of field-guns; of the eighteen-pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the hell-for-leather guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the pitched-battle conditions, before armies settled down in trenches and growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast fortifications.

These are called “light stuff” and “whiz-bangs” now, in army parlance. They throw an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, and so fast that one chases another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns that you might think eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones which could follow as rapidly as the engineers could lay bridges for them to cross.

They are the boys who weave the “curtain of fire” which you read about in the French official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The gun itself seems to possess intelligence.

There was the finesse of gunners’ craft, worthy of veterans, in the way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands. They did not change the location of their battery, and their judgment that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention their “funk pits,” which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye to the protection which comes of experience with German high explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of their business had been fought into them for eleven months.

Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard. Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front the German Staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.

It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden and tables and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how scrupulous they were about litter.

For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their week’s washing, taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every day they received London papers and letters from home. When they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty’s expense in the pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of sods over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from the gun-muzzles.

It was when leaving another battery that, out of the tail of my eye, I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the report, where, through undergrowth, we stepped among the busy groups around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres.

An order for some “heavy stuff” at a certain point on the map was being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of concentrated destruction, and closing the door again. All that detail of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the same act on the stage.

All ready, the word given, a crack, and through the air in front you saw a wingless, black object rising in a curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose, multiplied by ten, rising to its zenith and then descending till it passed out of sight behind a green bank of foliage on the horizon.

After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.

There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he was too busy to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree to make in the next if it were not; or if the word came to shift the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake the enemy up here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire-end some one was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I once found an observer, who was sitting upon a cushion looking out through a chink broken in a wall, with a signal corps operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies within your own lines, looking for such holes.

From this post I could make out the German and the British trenches in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields, and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a hole for his remains. If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk pit, as the gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which suited his taste better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches, are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to locate the other’s eyes, the other’s guns and troops, and the least movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.

“Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery officers.

Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from the orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show firing, this that we watched from an observing station, but part of the day’s work for the guns and the general. First; the map; “here and there,” as an officer’s finger pointed; and then one looked across the fields, green and brown and golden with summer crops.

Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm. We were going to put some “heavy stuff” in there and some “light stuff,” too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a certain tree.

Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in a certain building. “Heavy stuff” exclusively for this.

No enemy’s wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without interruption; and no German working party ought to be allowed to build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the monotony of their drudgery.

Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them is given by the artillery commander, as a part of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans.

One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By the effect of the enemy’s shells you judge what the effect of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theory and practice has become much the same with either adversary. For example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the enemy’s guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any rate, you may kill a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being killed.

By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer, whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately the calibre.

A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt; a second’s delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on a winter day, and then the sound of the burst. The next was over. With the third the “heavy stuff” ought to be right on.

But don’t forget that there was also an order for some “light stuff,” identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working party as it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly on. Exactly on is the way the British gunners like to fill an order f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.

Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards’ range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where they should.

No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for the shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless you are. Any good-enough temperament is ruled off wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that quiet-mannered general, after all his efforts to remedy the error in those guns!

But the general was quite human. He was not the “strafing” kind.

“I know those guns have an error!” he said, as he put his hand on the officer’s arm. That was all; but that was a good deal to the officer. Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being down-hearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunner, nor the adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first shot, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target.

“Right on!”

And again and again--right on!

The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane’s conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

“Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general. “It’s always hard to hold gunners down when they are on the target like that.”

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself. The Germans got two extra for full measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of the artillerists’ duty. The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising. Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

“The _Boches_ will be coming back at us soon, you will see!” said one of the officers at our observation post. “They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target”--which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I’ll-hit-you character to siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some distance away.

They say the sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports’ Club shooting at clay pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets for the instant that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points being scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.