Chapter XII: Under Fire

Asked what it feels like to be under fire, a soldier replied: "It makes you sweat waiting for the shock of getting hit. It is the suspense that tries. The first few weeks at the war are awful. You awaken in your sleep and think you are being fired at. Not that the German infantry are good marksmen (the artillery are). Why, the other day I noticed a chap who had been aiming in my direction for several minutes, and none of ours had been touched. I stood up and said to a chum: 'Watch that chap. I bet you he won't hit me.' And he didn't, for I heard the bullet whistle by several inches wide."

The feeling of waiting to go under fire is thus described: "We were to hold the trenches at all costs, and things began to take a serious turn. It was then that I and my chum took photographs we had with us from our pockets and looked long into the faces of those we had left at home. Then we took out our small books and made our wills, and then waited."

A private of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment wrote: "There were many field artillery drivers with spare horses behind a shed, and one was asleep in front of me on a truss of hay. A shell from a 'Black Maria' came over the corner of the shed and dropped not more than 8 feet from me. It killed the poor driver and blew one horse up and the other horses into a heap. It seemed to me as if I had been suddenly thrown into a white hot furnace, and a big metallic door slammed on me. I was dazed for five minutes and shaky all day, but the feeling soon wore off. It is wonderful how soon you get over these things. These 'Black Maria' shells make a screaming noise, followed by a terrific explosion, but the effect is purely local, except for splinters flying. Next day we came under rifle fire as well as big gun fire. Then we knew it. It was not a pleasant sight to see men falling around you screaming. I remember saying to a chap alongside of me, 'I wouldn't give twopence for my chance.'"

"It's a curious sort of feeling," another man wrote, "to be under fire. It's--well you feel that war is a really dangerous thing."

Much of course depends upon the soldier's temperament. An officer had the moral courage to write in a letter, "I have been under fire a few times now, and like it less every time."

An Indian soldier gave the impression of himself and of his fellows: "The shell fire was a bit troublesome at first, because it was far worse than anything we had ever experienced in frontier fighting, and few of us had had any experience of being under fire. We soon got used to it, and it didn't trouble us more than thunder. The rifle fire wasn't so bad, for the Germans aren't very good shots. Still, it was annoying to us to have to lie still under it when we like to be getting to close grips."

An officer described a retreat under fire as follows: "My platoon (fifty men) was some 200 yards behind the firing line to start with. I was soon ordered to bring them up, which was not a too comfortable job, as shells were bursting by now just in front of us. However, I shouted to the men, telling them to go on, and saying that they would be safer further up the hill. Then the battery doing most of the firing on us stopped for a moment to reload and resight, and I got the men on a hundred yards, and then the shells began bursting like hail just where we had come from. Then they kept altering their range from time to time, and you could sometimes hear the shot and shell come down only a few yards off, and of course you could always hear the shell singing through the air, and sometimes felt the breath of them. Around me the men behaved splendidly. (The whole regiment has been congratulated on its having done well.) We lay there in the potato crop like partridges. I think we were all too petrified to move; but where we were we lay just below the crest of a ridge waiting to crawl up to see to fire if any German infantry came along. We lay under that shell fire for three hours, and I think that none of us will ever forget the feeling of thinking that the next moment we might be dead--perhaps blown to atoms. I kept wondering what it was going to feel like to be dead, and all sorts of little things that I had done, and places I had been to years ago and had quite forgotten, kept passing through my mind. I have often heard of this happening to a drowning man, but have never experienced it before, and don't want to again! I think you get so strung up that your nerves get into an abnormal condition. My brain seemed extraordinarily cool and collected, which I was proud of and am still; but I looked at my hands and saw them moving and twisting in an extraordinary way, as if they didn't belong to me, and when I tried to use my field-glasses to spy at the Germans, it was as much as I could do with the greatest effort to get them up to my eyes, and then I could scarcely see. When the order to retire came our company got it late. I told my platoon--those who were left--to double back and assemble behind a house in a road behind us. I stopped behind to collect stragglers and to carry a couple of wounded into the house, where the doctor was seeing to them; and I believe I was the last to leave. By this time the bullets had begun to sing all round us, and the German infantry were getting close, so it was high time to clear out. I and a last party of five climbed up a pear tree and over a garden wall, and so, creeping along with the bullets now flying all round, we got over another wall and so up a path exposed for a short way. We ran along this, and I remember, as an instance of the stupid things one does in moments of excitement, my little hair-brush jumped out suddenly from my haversack, and I ran back five or six yards to pick it up, and risked a life for a hair-brush! I found subsequently two holes in my haversack where a bullet had passed through, just grazing my clothes, and it may have been then that it went through."

I did not myself know Mr. Geoffrey Pearson, Lord Cowdray's son, but a friend of his told me so much about him that it was with sorrow that I read the dramatic story of his death. He and a sergeant-major were acting as motor-cyclists with the motor transport, and what happened is thus told by the sergeant-major: "We were going along a straight piece of road, with open country on either side, and were letting our machines out for all they were worth. We were alone. Suddenly, without the least warning, we seemed to ride into a perfect hailstorm of bullets which came over from somewhere on our left. Ahead of us the road ran into a little wood. 'Come on, we'll ride for it,' I said, and we dashed through in safety. Hardly had we entered the wood belt, however, than we rode into a group of German cavalry--about fifty of them--scattered about on either side of the road. They immediately fired at us. We saw the game was up, as there was no getting away from them at all, so we tumbled off our bikes, put up our hands, and surrendered. The Germans treated us shamefully. They gave us nothing to eat, and taunted and jeered at us at every opportunity. That night we spent in the open, lying on the roadside between two men. We had no overcoats, and it was most bitterly cold. I think I have never been so cold in my life as I was that night. The Germans took us on with them on their advance against the French. They made us go into the trenches with them. We were thrust in the line with the rest under a terrific fire from the French guns and infantry. We decided to make a dash for it. The Germans were all very busy with the fight, and we were able to crawl away unperceived out of the trenches and through the long grass. Moreover, when we were about 200 or 300 yards away the Germans saw us, and a number of them immediately opened fire. Pearson was shot through the head. We were under fire with a vengeance."

Speaking of a particularly fierce fight a Gordon Highlander said that it might have been a sham one the way the Gordons took it. In the thick of it they sang Harry Lauder's latest. Those who could not sing whistled, and those who could not whistle talked about football, and joked with each other.

One of the West Kent Regiment speaking of the German artillery fire said that the din seems to hit you. You feel as if your ears would burst, and the teeth fall out of your head. He thought little, however, of the enemy's infantry. "If we fired as badly as they do we would be put in jail."

A Dublin Fusilier said that while the shells shrieked blue murder over their heads they smoked cigarettes, sang about the girls, and were as cool as Liffy water. "If I should arrive home safe I think I shall get a job as doorkeeper at an oyster shop, as I am having a course of shell dodging."

Corporal F. Leeming, R.F.A., wrote to his wife: "I am all right, but still have to keep ducking every time a 'messenger from the Kaiser' comes whistling round. It is not exactly like throwing eggs about when their shells burst. They make a hole in the ground about 20 feet across, and the noise is terrible and nerve-racking. You feel pretty shaky at first."

According to Private Thomas Mulholland, Highland Light Infantry, shells were not as much appreciated at a dance as ladies would have been: "In the trenches last week we held a dance, for want of something better to do. Of course, the only partners were fellow-soldiers; but still it was a change from the monotony of shell fire. Not that the shells were absent, for just when we had settled down to enjoy the jigging the enemy began to worry us with shrapnel. The shells burst all around, and one burst in the middle of a little group of men giving a Gaelic four-hand reel. Every man was killed. After that we thought it best to stop."

Afternoon tea under fire was like this: "The mugs were passed round with the biscuits and the 'bully' as best they could by the mess orderlies, but it was hard work messing without getting more than we wanted. My next-door neighbour, so to speak, got a shrapnel bullet in his tin, and another two doors off had his biscuit shot out of his hand. Private Plant had a cigarette shot out of his mouth, and a comrade got a bullet into his tin of bully beef. 'It saves the trouble of opening it,' was his remark."

One day a shell smashed a breakfast porridge pot, and another scattered a dinner of stew. "We cursed more about that stew than if we had been hit ourselves."

"It beats Banagher," said a jocular private in the Royal Irish, "how these Germans always disturb us at meal times. I suppose it's just the smell of the bacon that they're after. They seem to look for a blooming Ritz Hotel in the firing line."

Men can even sleep when under fire. "It is a most extraordinary thing," said an officer to _The Daily Telegraph_ special correspondent, "to see soldiers lying on their straw soundly asleep when German shells are bursting all round them. Men keep on snoring even after a shell has burst within 5 or 6 yards over their heads and half filled their trenches with fresh earth. One gets so used to the firing, that, though it may sound incredible, it soon becomes far less noticeable than city traffic, for instance."