Chapter LXI: Mounting a Great Gun (2)

That extreme peril has never recurred. But there were months in 1915 when men in our trenches still felt that the upper hand was not theirs. What would happen was this. Once or twice in the day the Germans, after their meals, would spray a piece of our trench with trench-mortar bombs and rifle-grenades. As a rule they did not mean to attack, in the fuller sense. The piece was not an overture; it was complete in itself; a sort of isolated _pas d’intimidation_. Not many men on our side would be killed. But, while the shower went on, everyone on duty in our firing trench felt with crystal clearness that he was on the defensive. At each fresh discharge he would plaster himself upon the front wall of the trench and gaze upwards for the coming evil. If he saw the approaching waddle of a trench-mortar bomb, wagging its tail through the air, he would judge it like a catch in the long field, only with an ardent desire to miss it; and to this end he would jump round corners of trench and put solid angles of earth between him and the large muted sound like “pfloonk” that was to ensue. If what he heard was the thin hiss or spit of a rifle grenade, then he knew that it could not be seen, and he kept his head down and wondered how near the venomous little metallic smash of the burst would be. In any case he was bespattered, throughout the bombardment, with little falling bits of earth, warm metals and products of combustion; the tinkling of this hail on his helmet deepened his rueful sense of resemblance to a hen crouching under the lee of a hedge in bad weather. And, all this time, our own mortars and guns would be silent or--almost worse than silence itself--would reply with the mildness of Sterne’s patient ass. “Please do not shell our front trench. But, if you want to, you may,” so they seemed to be saying.

From these mortifications the men in the firing trench, and the gunners who had endured the sharper torment of not being able to help them, were saved by the women, whom Mr. Bone shows us working at home, arming their knights for battle in a sense more valid than any known to Froissart or Malory. There came a time, most moving and memorable to all who were then in our trenches, when any German attempt to gall them began to evoke new, heart-warming sounds. All the upper air, over the place where the pelted sentries were crouching, seemed to have come to life on our side. At last our own trench mortars were answering, not in a few grudged monosyllables, but volubly, out of the fulness of the dump. Higher up also, there rose arch over arch, as it were, of audible, reassuring protection--first the low-pitched bridges of sound traced by the whizz of our field guns, and then the vast rainbow curve of our heavier shells making wing, high over head, with a more august, leisurely waft that sounded divinely. It was a changed and cheered world to be living in. We had the upper hand now, and every woman turning a shell or driving a crane in England had helped us to have it.

We have it now still more securely. Since that time we have learnt the technique of attack--how to keep what we take and how to take what we want at no more than it need cost in lives. We have won, in hard fight, the best of all posts of observation--the sky, so that during the great engagements last year on the Somme there was not a German aeroplane to be seen in the air while ours were ranging everywhere over the battlefield, each with its eyes on the enemy’s lines and its voice at the ear of our guns. Our men and the gunners have now crossed bayonets so often that all the old awe in which Europe held the men of Sedan and Sadowa is gone; boys from Wiltshire and Worcestershire farms, recruits of a few months before, have chased Prussian guardsmen uphill out of their trenches and then held these ruined defences against all that those picked products of intensive military culture could do to regain them.

All this turning of tables has been brought about by one cause, in the sense that if that cause had been absent, the care and skill of the finest leaders, the daring of all our airmen, the staunchness of all our infantry would have been strength to no purpose. Munition workers have woven the curtain of smoke that our gunners now draw between our advancing troops and the eyes of their enemy. It is munitions that, thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. They are drawings of victory in the making, and of the saving of hundreds of thousands of British lives.

G.H.Q., FRANCE,

_March, 1917_

LXI

MOUNTING A GREAT GUN

One of the largest guns viewed from the breech. However many large guns may have been turned out by the same men before, a glow of pride is always felt in a gun shop when one more masterpiece like this is ready at last to go out to its work in the field.

LXII

ERECTING AEROPLANES

A great contrast to the scenes in the gun shop. Here everything is light and delicate, the bright, varnished wood curved to delicate shapes like violins, the women flitting with their needlecraft around the wide, dazzling planes and the brilliant pigmy engines shining like jewels--all seem gay and exhilarating after the sombre company of the guns. There is even a lightsome airiness about the thought that these delicate creations _fly_ away from their makers’ hands when completed and do not burden any railway with their transit.

LXIII

AN AEROPLANE ON THE STOCKS

Another view of the same shop. Close to, the propeller seems a great thing, wonderfully subtle in its graceful curves.

LXIV

THE GIANT SLOTTERS

These machines are among the largest of their kind. A row of them, jutting colossally forward like the heads of Egyptian sculptured lions, make an impressive feature in the spacious avenues of a great machine shop. The nearer machine is at work on part of a big gun mounting.

LXV

NIGHT WORK ON THE BREECH OF A GREAT GUN

The breech is open: underneath it, hidden from sight, the mechanics are at work. Such a scene has a special appeal to those who loved the stories of Jules Verne in their youth. These largest of all guns seem as if they could fulfil the hopes of Verne’s sanguine President of the Gun Club and justify his fervid belief in ballistics as your only science.

LXVI

THE HOWITZER SHOP

Howitzers of various calibres are in the background; in the foreground, guns of lighter types. Guns are like ships; each piece seems endowed with a personality which endears it to its creators. The soldiers to whose keeping they are sent feel a similar tenderness towards their own special charge. They express it by giving them fond names like “Saucy Sue,” “Sweet Seventeen,” “Jill Johnson,” “Our Lizzie,” and “’Ria.”

LXVII

THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN

“A scene,” the artist writes, “so romantic in its mingling of grimness and mystery that one thinks with compunction of the long line of romantic artists whose lot it was not to have seen it!” The work on hand seems carried on by noiseless ghosts, so completely is the noise of their labours drowned by the incessant hum of machines.

LXVIII

SOME GREAT GUNS

A sketch in the heavy gun bay. The size of these unmounted guns may be judged by the figures at work near them.

LXIX

MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES

This is a corner in the gun shop where heavy gun forgings of all sorts lie about, awaiting their turn on the machines. The overhead crane is lifting one of the guns. Many of these cranes are being driven by women.

LXX

A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE

The big gun tube is rotating slowly while the tool inside scoops out long shavings of the metal like cheese parings. The mounting heaps of the metal shavings are constantly cleared away. The iridescent colours of these shavings (showing the different temperings of the steel) present surprisingly beautiful effects to the eye, tired with the bewildering rotations of the immense gun tubes on their machines.

LXXI

RUINS NEAR ARRAS

Landscape near Arras is like the biblical vine hanging over a wall--“All the archers have shot at her.” Injured, but not yet destroyed, the woods seem like creatures scared, as if the trees themselves were possessed with the disquiet of dryads crouching somewhere in hiding. Many different parts of the front have their own almost personal expression, but it is seldom one of fear. At and around Arras this expression of alarm is so curiously strong that, if he transgressed prose, the visitor might fancy the taut bulrushes were nature’s hair standing on end, and a slight stir in the poplars her shudder. By some means, which a layman cannot mark down, Mr. Bone has suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this vacuous and unnerved landscape.

LXXII

ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND

High ground near “King George’s Hill,” whence the King viewed the main battlefield of 1916; the drawing shows this in the distance. The foreground was won last July by the Manchesters. They found in No Man’s Land the bodies of many Frenchmen killed in earlier fighting, and buried them beside their own dead. Not all the bodies could be identified: Some of the crosses shown in the drawing bear such inscriptions as “In honoured Memory of Two Unknown French Soldiers, buried here.”

LXXIII (a and b)

A ROAD NEAR THE FRONT

The canvas screen on the left remains from a time when this stretch of road was under enemy observation. The battle of the Somme has left it far behind the front. From a point just beyond the trees indicated upon the skyline on the right every detail of a part of the fighting on July 1st, 1916, could be seen.

A TRAIN OF LORRIES

Whether on the road between a rail-head and the front, or during a halt by the way, or at rest in their own park, the lorries of a Division keep their proper distance or interval from each other, like men on parade. If one falls lame it is taken in tow; if disabled past towing, it falls out and waits for a first-aid mobile workshop to come and repair it. The scene here is one of the two chief roads to the Somme front. In July and August, 1916, the procession of lorries along it was often unbroken for several miles. Field railways have much lightened its traffic since then.

LXXIV

ON THE SOMME. R.F.C. MEN BUILDING THEIR WINTER HUT

To most English soldiers it is one of the compensations, and not of the hardships, of active service that they so often have to do work which is not their own trade nor a regular part of all soldiering. They find a flavour of the sport of peace-time camping-out in the work of making or finding their own shelter from the weather. Sometimes it is done, as here, with excellent materials, sometimes with hardly any at all, and the man who has built himself a rain-proof hut, for one, out of a few old biscuit tins, some sticks and a waste piece of corrugated iron enjoys a special thrill of triumphant ingenuity.

LXXV

MARICOURT: THE RUINS OF THE VILLAGE

Near Maricourt the British line ended, and the French began, during the battle of the Somme. Blue and khaki were equally blended in the endless lines of traffic passing both ways through Maricourt and raising a barrage of dust all along the road to Bray-sur-Somme. At Maricourt crossroads there was a doubled post of military police, one man British and one French, ready with rebuke or instruction in either tongue. The place is now several miles behind the British front, and its old animation is gone. It and the woods near it are less completely destroyed than most of the neighbouring villages. Many walls are standing; even a few roofs remain.

LXXVI

ON THE SOMME, NEAR MAMETZ

The German front line, until July 1st, 1916, run a few yards on the spectator’s side of the two dismounted figures in the foreground. In the background are the bare poles of Mametz Wood. The nearest figure can be known for an Australian, by his hat.

LXXVII

A MARKET PLACE. TRANSPORT RESTING

After work the divisional motor transport lorries return methodically to their own parks. During long journeys they rest now and then, tucked into the right of the road or standing in a market place, while the men eat their haversack rations. Mixed with the lorries here are their seniors, the covered vans of French country carriers and, still older, the long, low, French farm wagons now drawn by horses, but built, as is shown by the very low pole, for draught oxen. In the market place there wait also the cars of British staff officers visiting the town. The handsome building in the background has its red-brick façade set off with alternating square bosses of white stone, on each side of the windows, after the custom of 17th and early 18th century builders.

LXXVIII (a and b)

THE “BLIGHTY BOAT” AND A HOSPITAL SHIP

Leaving a French base port. The artist has contrived to suggest in his drawing of the homeward hastening leave-boat the happy eagerness with which the eyes and minds of all on board are turned westward. The slower hospital ship is just leaving the harbour. There is no possibility of any honest failure to distinguish, by day or night, the black painted lightless transport from the hospital ship with its gleaming white and light-green paint and its festal-looking tiers and crosses of scores of brilliant green and red lamps.

SCOTTISH TROOPS ON A TROOPSHIP

There are some Scottish soldiers on all troopships. On this one there were no others. The Highlanders on the drawing have the good fortune to be on deck and also not to be crowded. On most troopships the men, if on deck, look, at a little distance, like a solid brown mass.

LXXIX

TROOPS RETURNING FROM THE ANCRE

A unit coming back from the trenches to rest is unlike anything ever seen at home. Everyone is dead tired; everyone, though washed and shaved, has caked mud on his uniform; most of the men are stooping to get well under the weight of their packs and so ease the cut of the straps on their shoulders; cooks and a few footsore men trail behind the transport wagons and field kitchens, taking a tow with one hand. Odds and ends of light baggage are carried in little, almost toy-like hand-carts, the men pulling them by many ropes and pushing them from behind. Some men, perhaps, are wearing German helmets. Everyone’s face has a look of contented collapse, the restful reaction of senses and nerves relaxed after many days of strained attention and short sleep. The weary and happy procession serpentines slowly across the chalk downs, carried along by the rhythm of the swing it has learnt from months of route marching in England.

LXXX

A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE

The ship’s large wooden Red Cross, to be illuminated at night with electric lights, is seen near the centre of the drawing.

THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT

Our Western front is a line that does not really end at the sea. If it did, then its left flank might be turned. But its real left flank is not there. It is somewhere far out on a line that runs north-west of Nieuport, through and beyond the North Sea. The British soldier in Belgium or France may not see much of the Navy itself. But every day brings him some proof that the Navy is holding its part of the line. His letters never go wrong, and he knows that, but for the Fleet, they would have to make their way to him like swimmers across a bay full of sharks. It is faith in the Navy that makes the men going on leave laugh when obeying the order to put on lifebelts on leaving harbour. In the soldier’s mind that long left flank of our line is not forgotten but rather written off, once for all, as unbreakable. He puts much the same sort of trust in the power of the Fleet as he puts in the affection of friends at home. To him it is one of the things that need never be feared for; it cannot fail.

This is not to say that soldiers underrate the hardness of the Navy’s task. A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is through. When a naval officer, who visited the Somme front last summer, and saw a fight near Martinpuich, rejoined the ship that he commanded, he paraded his whole ship’s company and spent two hours in telling them what a rough time the soldiers had, and what fine work they were doing. The generosity of the praise made his soldier guide feel almost ashamed, remembering the almost instant fate of the “Cressy,” “Aboukir,” and “Hogue,” and the obedience of the “Theseus” to the heart-breaking order to abandon her sinking consort.

Few officers or men from the western front can visit the Fleet; but the winds of chance, which blow casualties and convalescents all about Great Britain, drop a few of them down in spots where the Fleet, as Mr. Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like a sentry moving alertly on his post; a few wounded ships steaming in more sedately, or taking a tow, one with a couple of funnels knocked out of the straight, another with a field-dressing of bedding stuffed into a hole in her side, and the whole wound, apparently, smeared with red paint, as the surgeons smear flesh wounds with yellow; and then of the coming ashore, the men triumphant and happy, the officers learning with astonishment and indignation that people at home had heard more of losses than of the victory.

Mr. Bone’s drawings give an insight into the world of the Navy to which these random glimpses can add nothing. “H.M.S. ‘Lion’ in dry dock” (LXXXIII) is wonderful, technically--if a layman may judge--and in spirit. A whole aspect of modern naval life is lit up by “A boiler-room on a battleship” (XCIII). For, to the astonished landsman visiting a man-of-war, the sailors of to-day seem to work and eat and sleep in a variety of engineering laboratories, surrounded by countless wheels, handles, buttons and bells for the evocation or dismissal of the genies of steam, petrol and electricity. Nothing could be more unlike the lower decks of seventeenth and eighteenth century battleships as we imagine them. The only things which have not changed, from the days of Drake to those of Hawke, and from Nelson’s time to Beatty’s, are the hereditary instinct for the sea and the fine fighting temperament of officers and men.

G. H. Q., FRANCE,

_April, 1917_

LXXXI

“OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA

Viewed from the bridge. A large oil “tanker” is alongside. Unseen, but very fast, the oil fuel is running into the battleship. How great a boon this new fuel is can be understood, at any rate partly, by those who have endured the coaling of a great ship in the old way. The scene shown in the drawing was animated by the changeful gleam of the gay signal flags flapping in the foreground and by the flashing of the wings of innumerable hungry gulls.

LXXXII

ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)

The ship’s funnel behind and the sailor’s figure on the left help to give the scale of the great gun.

LXXXIII

H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK

The great hull we see here has seen more battling in the present war than any other of our “capital” ships. Officially “sunk” by the Germans, she will yet prove a troublesome ghost to them. In the foreground the dockyard workers are busily surveying the ship’s Gargantuan cables for weakened or damaged links.

LXXXIV

ON A BATTLESHIP: LOWERING A BOAT FROM THE MAIN DERRICK

The “Main Derrick” is a great crane and lifts a heavy boat like the one in the drawing, or an Admiral’s barge, out of the water and stows it on deck with the greatest ease.

LXXXV

APPROACHING A BATTLESHIP AT NIGHT

A battleship revealed by the beam of its own searchlight. A big gun emerges in silhouette, as well as a sentry on duty. One feels considerable awe when threading one’s way in a small picket boat between the ships of the Fleet at night.

LXXXVI

A LINE OF DESTROYERS

A line of destroyers at anchor. Seen from a distance, in this formation, a long line of destroyers looks curiously like a battalion drawn up in line of platoons in file, at a wide interval, and standing on the sea. It will be remembered that the battle of Jutland was as much a battle of destroyers as of any other type of warship.

LXXXVII

ON A BATTLESHIP: A GUN TURRET

Part of the deck of one of the most famous of British ships, cleared for action.

LXXXVIII

ON A BATTLESHIP IN THE FORTH

Britain has many beautiful estuaries, but the Forth has features like the distant Highland hills and its enormous Bridge which make it unique among our waterways. The Bridge makes even the largest warship seem a pigmy, yet one has a queer sensation when about to pass under it for the first time; one momentarily expects all the ship’s top hamper to be carried away--everything about the Bridge being on so big a scale that what is safely distant seems perilously close.

LXXXIX (a and b)

A FLEET SEASCAPE

To the left a group of destroyers are gathered round a parent ship. To the right is the beginning of an imposing line of battleships.

THE CREW AT A SMALL GUN ON A BATTLESHIP

From this point of view the shield partly hides the muzzle of the gun. The gun crew are listening to instructions. Note the “Navy Warm” worn by the figure in the middle: often, when the weather is “fine” from the landsman’s point of view, it is still bitterly cold on the North Sea. Two larger guns can be seen protruding from their turret in the deck below.

XC

THE FO’C’SLE OF A BATTLESHIP

The crew of a Battleship at “General Drill” on a brisk spring morning is an exhilarating sight to the spectator posted at a quiet corner well out of the way. The band of the Marines plays, and the maximum of everything possible seems to be going on at once. In the sketch the ship’s boats have been launched and are making their way with steady stroke out to a neighbouring ship and back.

XCI

ON A BATTLESHIP: THE AFTER DECK

The delicate but firm precision of the drawing conveys aptly the general air of a man-of-war’s deck, where everything is intricate without confusion, and busy without fuss.

XCII

INSIDE THE TURRET

Interior of a Big Gun Turret on a Battleship, with the crew at their stations. The breech of the gun is open and looks gigantic in this confined space where every inch is made to serve some purpose. An officer is seen in the gangway between the twin guns, but of course the higher direction of the firing is transmitted from the “Fire control” station situated elsewhere.

XCIII

A BOILER ROOM ON A BATTLESHIP

The vessel is oil-driven, so the stoke-hold is robbed of its old terrors and is remarkably cool. The stokers seem few in proportion to the size of the place, but they are experts of a higher class than coal furnaces required.

XCIV (a and b)

PRACTICE FIRING: BIG GUNS ON A BATTLESHIP

Here the scale of the great guns is only given by the dwarfed rail beneath and by the long stretch of horizon which the funnels subtend. But no merely physical ratio can convey the impression of enormousness that a great naval gun makes on the imagination. By subtler technical means the artist has managed to transfuse this impression from his own imagination to that of the spectator of the drawing.

ON A BATTLESHIP: SUNSET AFTER A WET DAY

The sailor has much to bear from the weather, but at any rate he sees to extraordinary advantage the glories of sunset and the “incomparable pomp of dawn,” unsullied by the smoke of the land.

XCV

ON A BATTLESHIP: AIRING BLANKETS

An unfamiliar aspect of a warship to the public, but, to Jack, it returns with unfailing regularity once a week. In the cramped space it requires careful management to keep all the great crew in health and comfort.

XCVI

CAPTAIN CYRIL FULLER,

C.M.G., D.S.O., ROYAL NAVY

XCVII

THE FLEET’S POST OFFICE

To the right is an old hulk which now serves as a sorting office for the Fleet’s Post. Around it there is at certain hours a busy scene, picket boats coming from the various ships to deliver or collect their mails.

XCVIII

IN THE SUBMERGED TORPEDO FLAT OF A BATTLESHIP

Interior of the Chamber from which the torpedoes are fired. The torpedo in the foreground is partly engaged in the tube through which it will be fired. To the right is seen the exterior of another tube. The men are lowering, for stowage in safety, a trial torpedo which has been fired for a practice run and then re-captured.

XCIX

SAILORS ON A BATTLESHIP MAKING MUNITIONS FOR THE ARMY

This is Jack at his handiest, especially from the Army point of view. The party are using spare time to make “grommets” of rope-work to go round the bases of 9.2 shells. Not many people, even in the Army, know that the Army have come to look to the men of the Fleet for a great supply of these necessaries.

C

THE CINEMA ON A BATTLESHIP

A relaxation immensely popular and quite easy for the handy men, who abound in the Navy, to equip and run. Being their own child, each ship takes a pride in its “pictures.” The operator in this case was the Chief Mechanician of the ship and the film the “Battle of the Ancre.” In the centre are a group of midshipmen, to the right a group of warrant officers. In the foreground will be observed the ever ready fire hose.