Chapter ELEVEN: The Line

Most of us in our extreme youth, before we leave home and adventure upon the Great Unknown of school life—the most formidable ordeal, by the way, that the majority of us ever have to face—endeavour to prepare ourselves for what we imagine lies before us by a course of study.

We devour stories about schools and schoolboys, with an application most unusual in the young. We have all the tenderfoot’s fear of being considered a tenderfoot, so we take pains to acquire the schoolboy tone; schoolboy atmosphere; schoolboy slang. The exploits of the hero after he becomes “Cock of the School”—whatever that may be—and leads the football team to victory, are dismissed by us as too lofty and distant for our achievement. We are much more interested—more painfully interested—in his experiences as a freshman or fag. We endeavour to pick up tips as to what a boy entering school for the first time should do, and more particularly what he should not do, in order to avoid being tossed in a blanket or sent to Coventry, or labelled “sissy,” or “cry-baby”—and all the other vague terrors which have kept prospective Cocks of the School awake at night since the dawn of Education.

This intensive course of self-preparation has one drawback. None of the things described in the books ever happen at the school to which we are ultimately sent. We have plenty of surprises, plenty of rough experiences; but none quite of the kind anticipated.

American soldiers, arriving on the Western Front in the fourth year of the War, feel themselves in very much the same position as the self-conscious adventurer described above.

Ever since—in some cases, before—our country came in, we have been schooling ourselves for the day when we should find ourselves Over Here, among veteran soldiers. Methods have varied, of course. Some of us have followed every turn of the operations in official summaries and technical articles. To such, the War has been a glorified game, we will say, of scientific football. Others—Miss Sissy Smithers, for instance—have educated themselves upon more popular lines—from the Sunday newspapers, or illustrated magazines of the domestic variety, in which healthy patriotism and “heart interest” are not fettered by any petty considerations of technical possibility.

Over here, Disillusionment awaits both these enthusiasts. The student of tactics soon realizes the difference between fighting a battle in imagination and in reality. Imagination cannot bring home to any human brain the extent to which the chess-board dispositions of modern strategy are tempered by the actualities of modern fighting—in other words, by the strain upon the human machine. All the five senses are affected—hearing, by the appalling din; seeing, by the spectacle of a whole group of human beings blown to shreds; smelling, by the reek of gas and explosives; touching, by the feel of dead men’s faces everywhere under your hand in the darkness; and tasting, by the unforgettable flavour of meat in the mouth after forty-eight hours’ continuous fighting in an atmosphere of human blood. The War is going to be won, not by the strategists, but by the man who can endure these things most steadfastly.

Miss Sissy Smithers need not be taken so seriously. He may be disappointed at first to find that Red Cross nurses follow their calling in Base Hospitals and not in No Man’s Land; and that performing dogs, loaded with secret despatches and medical comforts, are not such a prominent feature of modern warfare as the lady novelist would have us believe. But no enterprise, however grim, was ever the worse for a touch of glamour. Sissy will soon settle down.

Still, we have come to school knowing more than most new boys—far more, indeed, than our seasoned French and British companions knew when they embarked upon their martial education. The American soldier takes the field to-day, thanks to the recorded experiences of others, with a serviceable knowledge of the routine of trench warfare. Gas is no surprise to him, and he is familiar with the tactical handling of bombs, machine guns, and trench-mortars.

Up to date, however, we have not by any means drunk deep of warlike experience, for the good reason that the authorities are breaking us in by degrees. We are now in trenches, holding what is described as a quiet sector of the Line, recently taken over from the French, and hitherto very lightly held.

For the past two years, the Intelligence people tell us, the trenches opposite have been manned by only one German to every four yards of front. Eddie Gillette has already announced that when he has finished doing what he came out here to do the number of Germans opposite may be the same, but the method of distribution will be different. “Not one Dutchman to four yards,” he explains, “but a quarter of a Dutchman to every one yard. Yes, _sir_!”

Every Army has its own system of conducting trench warfare, founded largely upon national characteristics. The Germans, it used to be said, hold their trenches with machine guns, the British with men, the French with artillery. Certainly in nineteen-fifteen, when stationary warfare was the order of the day upon the Western Front, the Germans kept few men in the front trenches—except perhaps at night—leaving the line very much to the protection of barbed wire and machine guns, the latter laid and trained in such a fashion as to create if need be a continuous and impenetrable horizontal lattice-work of bullets in front of every section of the line. The British, having at that time more men than munitions—a battalion was lucky if it possessed four Vickers guns and a single trench-mortar—filled their trenches with as many defenders as they would hold, and trusted, not altogether vainly, to the old British tradition of rapid rifle fire and close work with the bayonet to keep the line intact.

The French temperament called for more elasticity than this. The one thing a Frenchman hates to do in warfare is keep still. He prefers active counter-measures to dogged resistance. So in nineteen-fifteen, whenever a sector of the French trenches was heavily bombarded, the garrison was promptly withdrawn to a position of comparative safety—where, the story goes, they seized the opportunity to cook an extra-elaborate dinner. If the Germans followed up their bombardment with an infantry attack, that attack was met mainly with an intensive barrage from that amazingly rapid and accurate piece of scrap-iron, the _soixante-quinze_ field gun. When the German attack fizzled out, as it usually did, the incident ended, and the French infantry returned to their place in the line. But if it penetrated the barrage and occupied the French trenches, the Frenchman finished his coffee, adjusted Rosalie, his bayonet, and prized Brother Boche out of his new quarters.

But all that was in nineteen-fifteen. In warfare your best teacher is your opponent. Nowadays we have, on each side of No Man’s Land, assimilated one another’s methods. Moreover, trench warfare of to-day has developed into a fluid affair. For one thing, trench-mortars, tanks, and intensive artillery bombardments can make hay of the most elaborate defensive works. You can no longer surround yourself with barbed wire and go comfortably to bed, secure in the knowledge that your opponent cannot possibly get at you without a long and laborious artillery preparation. In nineteen-sixteen, before the First Battle of the Somme, British and French guns pounded the German trenches night and day for three weeks. It was a great pounding, but it cannot be said that the subsequent attack came as a surprise to the enemy. Under such prolonged and pointed attentions even a German is apt to suspect that something is in the wind. But to-day we have other methods. Three minutes of pandemonium from massed trench-mortars—a rush of tanks—and your defences are gone and the Philistine is upon you.

So in nineteen-eighteen we live perpetually upon the _qui vive_, and our methods have been elaborated and standardized to the common measure of our joint experience. Our artillery has the whole front registered. At a given signal it can let down a barrage—a Niagara of shrapnel and high-explosive—upon the strip of earth that separates the enemy’s front line from our own. This can be stationary, to annihilate an enemy attack, or “creeping,” to form a protective screen for an attack of our own. We have machine guns too, set, _à la_ Boche, at fixed angles to maintain a continuous band of fire along each line of our trenches—more especially along the second line; for it is a waste of life and energy to-day to treat the front trench as anything more than a close chain of outposts, screening the real dispositions behind.

And the rifle and bayonet have come back to their own. Two years ago they were in danger of being discarded as obsolete. Every one was bomb mad. It was claimed that a rifle and bayonet are useless against an experienced opponent feeling his way along a zigzag trench in your direction. True; but a bomb is equally useless—or rather, equally dangerous—in the presence of an opponent rushing upon you in the open. So now we have adjusted our perspectives, and each device of war is put to its proper use.

So much for what the author of that little classic, “Dere Mable,” would describe as “Tecknickle stuff.”

Needless to say, we are burning to play with all these new toys simultaneously, like a small boy on Christmas morning. But we have had little opportunity so far. To vary the metaphor, we must eat up our bread and butter before we are allowed cake. We are busy at present learning trench routine. Taking over trenches from another unit, for instance. This is a complicated and exasperating pastime. It usually has to be performed in the dark; otherwise enemy aeroplanes might observe unusual activity behind our line, and advise their artillery to that effect. This involves much night-marching along roads pitted with shell-holes; and the trouble about a shell-hole three feet deep is that in wet weather it looks like a perfectly innocent puddle. Frequently, to avoid congested wheel traffic, we have to march across country in single file, under the leadership of a faltering guide. Not a light must be shown, not a word spoken. Each man, loaded with rifle, equipment, gas apparatus, and a few extra and unauthorized comforts, has to follow the ghostly form of the man immediately in front of him. It is discouraging work, for the simple reason that if you set one hundred men to march in single file in the dark, though the leader may be groping his way forward at the rate of one mile per hour, the last man in the _queue_ is always running, and _has_ to run if he is not to be left behind. No one knows why this should be so, but the uncanny fact remains.

Once you have descended into the communication trenches it is less easy to lose yourself—unless the guide sets the example—but your progress becomes slower than ever. Possibly—probably—you meet a procession going in the opposite direction—a ration-party, maybe, or stretcher-bearers with their patient, cheery freight. The fact that they have no right to be there at all—practically all communication-trenches here are supposed to be one-way thoroughfares—makes matters no easier, though it affords relief in the form of argumentative profanity as you struggle together in the constricted fairway like stout matrons loaded with market-produce in a street-car.

Arrived in the actual trenches, the congestion is even greater, for now there are just twice as many men in the trench as it was constructed to hold, and the outgoing party must never budge until the incoming party have arrived and “taken over.” Taking over is no mere formality either. Officers, machine-gunners, bombers, chemical experts, and other specialists must seek out their “opposite numbers” in the gross darkness and take receipt in due form of ammunition, observation-posts, gas-alarms, and situation reports, amid the crackling of rifle-fire and the sputtering of the illuminating flares.

At last the relief is complete. The word is passed along. The outgoing unit, after communicating sundry items of information as to the habits and customs—mostly unpleasant—of the local Boche, coupled with sundry warnings as to his favourite targets and own tender spots, fades away down the communication-trenches, with whispered expressions of good-will—and you are left alone, wondering what would happen if the enemy were to make a surprise attack _now_.

Trench life is never comfortable at any time, but the first night in a strange trench is the most uncomfortable of all. For one thing, the trench feels unnaturally crowded. Moreover, we are young troops—the youngest troops in the world to-day—and that means much. We have no Mulvaneys or Learoyds among us. If we had, we should be taught a number of things—how to boil a canteen over a couple of glowing chips; how to hollow out a bed in hard soil; where to find water in an apparently dry trench—trifles small in themselves, but making all the difference between misery and comfort.

But that by the way. With daylight comes a new spirit—or rather, the old spirit—of confidence. Eager persons peer over the parapet, to observe where the enemy is, and what he is like. They see little enough. Two hundred yards away an irregular ripple of sandbags—some white, some black—looking like a dirty wave-crest on a brown sea, marks the position of the German fire-trenches. This mixture of colours is thoughtful. If the sandbags were all of one tint, like our own, loopholes would be hard to conceal: under the German system, you never know at a distance whether you are looking at a loophole or merely a black sandbag. The intervening space is a wilderness of shell-holes, splintered tree-stumps, and rusty barbed wire. Further observation is cut short by a sniper’s bullet, which travels past enquiring heads with a vicious crack. We have learned our first lesson. In trench warfare, by daylight at least, curiosity must be satisfied through peepholes or periscopes.

In the trench itself there is plenty to occupy us. There are watches to be kept and manual work to be done. A trench system is eternally throwing out annexes and undergoing repairs, for the artillery on the other side is always busy. There are supplies to be brought up. There is cooking to be done: that occupies much time, for firing-trenches to-day are equipped, like the fashionable lady’s vanity-bag, with everything except the kitchen stove. And no bad thing either. Trench life has been described by competent authorities as “Weeks of Monotony tempered by Half-Hours of Hell.” Nothing dispels monotony like the necessity of practising the primitive domestic virtues. At home we hire expensive menials—or expect our wives—to light our fires and cook our dinners, because we are too busy or too civilized to do it ourselves. Over here we like doing it, because it is our actual instinct to do so, and also passes the time.

As for the Half-Hours of Hell, these mainly take the form of short, furious bombardments and midnight raids. But the German artillery is not very busy in this sector. Guns, and more guns, are urgently required farther north, where the Allied line, after stretching back and back during those anxious days in the spring of the year, has now reacted like a released bowstring and has shot the Boche back to the Meuse.

So far as we can gather from the sources at our disposal—official bulletins, intermittent newspapers, and trench gossip (personified in the American Expeditionary Force by a supposititious individual of great erudition but small reliability, whose Christian name is “Joe”)—our cause is prospering from the North Sea to the Alps. Germany shot her bolt with her third great offensive on the twenty-seventh of May, when German arms once more crossed the Marne and penetrated to within twenty-eight miles of Paris. There they were stayed, in a battle where at least one third of the Allied troops were American, and where the young American Army got its first real chance, and took it. In this operation the Second and Third American Divisions were sent to stiffen the French line. Of these, the Third successfully held a vital bridge-head opposite Château Thierry: the Second captured Bouresches, Belleau Wood, and Vaux.

So much we know for certain, for these things happened before we left England, and official information was available. The work of the Marines, in the Second Division, has already passed into American history. But for news of subsequent happenings we have had to depend too much upon our friend Joe. All we know for certain is that on the fifteenth of July the enemy launched just one more offensive—his fourth and as it proved, his very last. This time, so far as we can gather, the Allies, instead of contenting themselves with defensive tactics, took the business into their own hands and bit suddenly and deeply into the side of the huge, distended, pocketful of Germans which hung down from Soissons over Paris. The pocket promptly contracted itself: the enemy disgorged himself from its mouth, and began to retreat. From all accounts he has been retreating ever since.

French, British, and American troops were all engaged in this, the final and triumphant redressing of the balance. And each were represented by their best. One of our liaison officers tells us of a memorial set up by French soldiers in honour of the dead of the famous Fifty-first Division of the British Army—the Highland Territorials—and of an inscription carved thereon which proclaimed that hereafter the Thistle of Scotland would forever flourish beside the Lilies of France. In that great fight not merely unity of command, but unity of sentiment, seem to have come to their own at last.

The Allied counter-attack struck deep along the whole line. Soissons and Montdidier, we hear, are once more in our hands; while farther north, in Flanders, the British Third and Fourth Armies are sweeping forward for the last time in the blood-soaked valley of the Lys.

As for the American share, we have not heard too much, but what we have heard is enough to make us tingle. We hear of great work by the Regulars of the First, Second, and Third Divisions; by the Twenty-sixth—the Yankees of New England—and by the Forty-second Rainbow Division, from Yaphank. It is also reported that other American Divisions made no small impression upon Brother Boche—the Fourth, the Twenty-eighth; the Thirty-second, and the Seventy-seventh.

The Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth, we understand, are somewhere with the British opposite the Hindenburg Line near Cambrai. Doubtless we shall hear something of them too, in due course. Great days, great days! But to what a fever of exasperation are we aroused, who are not there ourselves!