Chapter IV: Part 4

Of the picturesque appearance of these French troops a few words may be said. There is an entry in my diary about this time, "Walked down to headquarters this morning. Saw two Frenchmen dressed alike." And to the eyes of those accustomed to unvarying khaki, the extraordinary kaleidoscopic effect of steel helmet, képi, coats of all conceivable colours, breeches and trousers likewise, putties that shame the rainbow, and an increasing note of khaki with a dash of colour on the collar or sleeve, strikes very strangely. Even the men of the same regiment do not seem to wear the same kit. One will be met in steel helmet, dark blue coat and red trousers, the next in képi, light blue coat and breeches, and grass-green putties. The authorities knew better than to waste the stocks of clothing that they already had on hand.

It would be impertinent to discuss the fighting qualities of these superb troops. The English Tommy, invariably a keen and usually a perspicacious critic of everything that comes into his range of vision, is apt to comment unfavourably upon what appears to his eye as an undisciplined mob strolling along the roads. But his eyes are gradually opened as first of all he discovers that these men, laden with a far greater weight than he is ever called upon to carry, are travelling quite as fast as he cares to, and then, at the end of the day, he finds that they have made themselves thoroughly comfortable and are enjoying a good meal long before he has thought of anything but the contents of his water-bottle. After that the revelation of their fighting qualities does not come as such a shock to him. Who that has seen them at work, for instance round Souchez or in their magnificent attack on the Double Crassier on October 11, can refrain from blessing our historic national luck for the Allies it has brought us?

And throughout his nature runs the Frenchman's traditional love for the turning of an honest penny. No sooner were we settled in our position than a bearded French soldier, probably a newsvendor in civil life, saw his golden opportunity. In his hours off duty he used to walk back many miles from the position, and return with an armful of English newspapers of the day before. How he procured them was a mystery we never solved, for he always arrived with them hours before we could obtain them anywhere ourselves. "Délé peppers!" he would cry, and the whole battery turned out as one man to greet him and buy his wares, which, by the way, he sold cheaper than their price in the neighbouring towns. How much English he understood I never knew; he would talk it freely with the men, but never with the officers--"Non compris" and a shake of the head was his invariable reply to our advances in this direction. But he always knew the contents of the papers he sold, especially the _Daily Mail_. Certainly his ideas occasionally got a little mixed. I am convinced, for instance, that he was under the impression that Lord Northcliffe was either Dictator of England or had changed places with Lord Kitchener. "Monsieur Lor' Notcliffe il va bien ce matin!" he would say with great satisfaction, "il va finir la guerre sur-le-champ." His politics swayed him to the extent that he always refused to bring us French dailies. "Mais non, je vous dis, monsieur. Vous aimez les journaux français? Bien, demain je vous apporterai peut-être _La Vie Parisienne_, _Le Rire_, ce que vous voulez. Mais _Le Temps_, _Le Matin_? Ceux sont les organes honteuses des capitalistes. _L'Homme Enchaîné_, si vous voulez----"

He or one of his assistants (for it always seemed to me that half the French Army helped to carry his papers round for him) it was that first introduced us to the fascinations of the ring-making industry. It appears that an industrious Frenchman, one supposes a jeweller by trade, early in the war hit upon the idea of collecting the fuses of hostile shells that fell near him, melting down the aluminium of which they are largely made, and casting it into rings, which he ornamented by letting in pieces of brass or copper, also components of the fuse. The practice spread like wildfire through the French troops, it gave a congenial occupation to their busy fingers, and brought them a gratifying increase of income. Our men were at first ready customers--there was little enough for them to spend money upon, the inhabitants had been cleared out of the surrounding villages, and no civilian population means no _estaminets_. But some of the more commercially-minded among us--the whole story is as a microcosm of our commercial supremacy as a nation--loath to see this profitable trade passing them by, determined to enter into competition. The first experiments were dramatic enough. A band of telephonists collected a large store of wood torn from ruined houses, and of coal, fetched at no small risk from a mine that was usually under fire, in the observation post, which happened then to be a fairly large house well back from the hostile lines, so that a fire was allowed in the telephonists' room. Here one evening they collected, like a band of alchemists for the fusion of the Philosopher's Stone, and here I chanced upon them, the room lit only by the glare of a huge fire, around which they all crouched, their eyes fixed upon a saucepan that held in its depths one small fuse, which the Master of the Black Arts periodically poked enquiringly with the point of his bayonet. I believe that attempt ended in the necessity for a sudden and disastrous quenching, brought about by the fact that the house itself showed ominous signs of catching fire. After many vicissitudes the art became centred in the battery cooks, who, having the unfair advantage that in the natural course of events they worked by a fire all day, formed a sort of Guild of Ring Makers, and some very creditable work was produced. Their first step was to undersell the French, and they succeeded to such an extent that the cook-house became a miniature Birmingham, and orders had to be placed early to secure delivery. Souvenirs these rings became in a land where everybody seems to ask everybody else for a "souvenir," a term that has become so wide that it covers everything portable. One day I was standing in a doorway when surely the youngest soldier in the French army--he could not have been more than fourteen; I suppose he was a drummer boy, but how he reached so close to the firing line has always puzzled me--passed me and saluted gravely. My smile must have reassured him, for he stopped and after some hesitation looked at me and saluted again. "Souvenir, monsieur!" he blurted out at last. "Souvenir?" said I, "Quelle espèce de souvenir désirez-vous?" With a grin that threatened to sever the top of his head from the rest of his body, he replied, "Souvenir de bully-beef, monsieur!" He got it.

The flies that marred the soothing ointment of this position were certain mysterious bullets that flew about at strange hours of the night and day. Nobody was ever actually hit, but people strolling about between the guns heard a whirr overhead that made then duck involuntarily, and heated officers would dash into the mess swearing that they had seen bullets flatten themselves against brick walls within an inch of their noses. Scepticism, or even a suggestion that they were spent bullets from the firing line, was treated as insubordination. A sniper it must be, a snark who crept into our lines, shot his bolt, then softly and silently vanished away. One evening the combined patience of the battery could bear it no longer--I think somebody had staggered into the mess in a condition of collapse, and upon being revived with a rum ration, proceeded to explain how his cigarette had been shot out of his mouth by a bullet that passed between his teeth. At all events, it was decided to inform the French and request them to take steps to abate the nuisance. They, in the expressive jargon of the day, were all over it. Parties of men from their lines and our own crept out in the dusk to hunt the sniper--what a glorious opportunity of winning fame by returning with his scalp, or one of his ears, or whatever part of a sniper one does bring back as a trophy! Dozens of parties, each more subtle than the other in their proposed methods of action, crept out in the rapidly-falling dusk, and with them the greater number of our officers, armed with looted rifles and more subtlety than all the rest of the parties put together. Then night fell dark and moonless, and the fun began. Each party, busily engaged in its own game of blind-man's-buff, caught sight of some other party, and opened a hot and furious fire upon them. The remaining parties, seeing the flashes, emptied their magazines in their direction. By an hour or so after dark, the battle was in full swing. At ten o'clock such of the battery as were not engaged in the chase were cowering in their dug-outs and there was not a whole pane of glass for miles around. At half-past ten, a telephonist going to the O.P. to relieve his comrade was forced to take shelter in a disused communication trench, and to remain there all night, any attempt on his part to climb out being met by rapid fire from every direction at once. At eleven, a mitrailleuse was dragged up by an excited knot of men, and opened fire in the direction from which there seemed to come most noise. At half-past, fire had become general all along the line, everybody, supposing that his neighbour knew what he was aiming at, firing in the same direction as he did. At midnight the Germans, thinking it a shame to be left so long out of the picture, and possibly tired of being kept awake, opened with a field battery, an inconsiderate action that effectually damped the proceedings. By one o'clock all was quiet again, and, much to my astonishment, every one returned whole, each man having seen the sniper and had at least a dozen shots at him, every one of which by his own account must have been fatal. Subsequent inquiries revealed the amazing fact that the French also had suffered no casualties. Yet alas! no more, apparently, had the sniper, for the bullets continued to whizz and valuable officers to have hair-breadth escapes until the time came for us to leave the place.

On the next night we were shelled, probably by way of retaliation for the disturbance of the previous night. The enemy seemed to know our approximate position, and "searched and swept" all round us with heavy shell, but never contrived to burst one within twenty yards of the guns. It happened to be my business to walk about the battery, exhorting men to keep under cover. In the middle of it all a party of French soldiers walked nonchalantly through our lines. "Prenez garde," I shouted, "Il y a des obus qui tombe par ici, descendez dans les abris!" They thanked me and ran into the dug-outs. The next shell burst pretty close, covering everything with fragments. Out dashed my Frenchmen, and in answer to my expostulations, "Nous en voulons un souvenir," they replied, and forthwith began to hunt for the fuse.

Magnificent as are the French infantry, their artillery far surpass them. To those who have any knowledge of artillery work, the French appear as performers of miracles. Their equipment, their incomparable _soixante-quinze_, is a frail-looking cheaply constructed affair, giving the impression of weakness and inefficiency. Their _personnel_ seems utterly inadequate, both in men and officers, their methods of ammunition supply are rudimentary. But a French battery will come into action in an inconceivably short time, and will continue in action night and day at a rate of fire that is unbelievable to one who has not heard it. Minor technical details, such as sights, are far in advance of our own, even in the case of some old heavy pieces, whose mirror sight utterly shames by its convenience and simplicity our extraordinary device for the same purpose. And the officers, how keen they were! Scarcely a day passed but some two or three came into the battery and courteously enquired if they might examine _les pièces_. Of course they could, we were only too happy to exhibit them, and then what explanations and comparisons between theirs and ours! "Ce frein-ci n'est pas mal, mais pourquoi les ressorts sont-ils d'une telle longueur?" or "Mon dieu, que cet appareil de portage est compliqué!" Keen men and keen critics, equally eager to show us their weapons and to hear our criticisms upon them. Their colonel included us in his command at such times as we supported the French batteries, which was fairly frequently. A spare figure in a close-fitting jacket, a bullet-shaped head set with a pair of piercing eyes that discovered everything without the assistance of the tongue, he was the ideal of an artillery officer. He had the scientific mind that absorbs every detail and stores it away in a pigeon-hole ready for immediate use. Never once after the first time that I was introduced to him, did he fail, wherever we met, to stop, shake hands and address me by name. In a hurried quarter of an hour I once recited to him all the technical details of the howitzer with which we were armed. Weeks afterwards I heard him repeat faultlessly all the details, with others which he had noticed for himself. If he be a type of the senior artillery officer, happy are our Allies in the possession of such men.

Another incident that occurred to us will show the unvarying promptitude and courtesy with which the French treated us. It happened that close to the battery and in the middle of the French infantry billets was a ruined church tower, of which a certain portion still stood, enough, we discovered, to make it worth our while to build a series of ladders within it, and to use the bell-beam as an emergency observation post. But Monsieur le Poilu thought that this was a capital spot into which to climb, and from thence to wave his képi to his friends and generally to behave in such a manner as to attract the attention of hostile observers, with the not unnatural result that one fine evening the enemy fired a few rounds at it, narrowly missing our senior subaltern, and, which was a matter for far deeper concern, the ration lorry. Complaint being made to the colonel, he, after several complimentary remarks as to our skill in using so unfavourable a place, promised that there should be no repetition of the offence. Ever afterwards an armed guard was posted at the base of the tower, with orders to admit no one but ourselves.

Those French soldiers, what children they were, as their behaviour in the tower showed! Whenever we were in action, a crowd of them would gather behind the guns to watch the shell in its flight, as is perfectly easy with any low-velocity howitzer. "Venez voir l'obus!" they would cry, and, as the gun fired, "Le voila, voyez, voyez! ah, il tombe----" and a shriek of delight would almost drown one's subsequent orders. What children and what men! Perfect fighters, eager to rush to the attack, yet patient under the iron discipline of the trenches, easily moved to a wild display of nervous energy, possessing creative imagination, yet stoical under agony to a surpassing degree. And not the men only, but every class--peasants, doctors, priests, each in his own sphere, are imbued with the highest spirit of which man can boast, the spirit of self-sacrifice. I hold no brief for any form of doctrine, being one of those who hold that all religions are nothing but quibbles round a central truth that no sane man denies, but the devotion of the French priest strikes me with the deepest admiration. I have seen a battery heavily shelled and suffer many casualties, so that the detachments were forced to take to their dug-outs. The doctor galloped up on horseback, but the priest on foot, running with his soutane tucked up round his waist, was there first, out in the open administering extreme unction to the mortally wounded, helping others to a place of safety. "Greater love hath no man than this----"

IX

CHANGING POSITION

The preparation of a battery position is a business that requires much labour and considerable time, if anything more elaborate than mere screening from view is attempted. Deep pits must be dug for the guns, and slopes cut into these pits by which the said guns may be hauled in and out. These pits must be floored with an elaborate platform, their sides must be revetted, that is to say that boards, corrugated iron or some similar substance must be fixed against them to prevent their falling in, and, most difficult feat of all, they must be roofed over with as much earth as such roof beams as can be procured can be made to bear. When the pits are completed, deep caverns must be dug and prepared to serve as refuges for the detachments in case of the battery being shelled. Other shelters must be provided as magazines for ammunition, as a room for the telephone and its operators, as a refuge for the section commanders. Billets must be found for the men and officers, if no billets are available dug-outs must be made. Places must be found for cook-houses, washing-places, work-shops, stores. A battery position prepared for lengthy occupation is a most elaborate work, and one does not light-heartedly desert it for an open plain where everything remains to be done. But sooner or later the dread message comes: "The battery will be prepared to move at 6 p.m. to-morrow. An officer will proceed forthwith to such-and-such a place where he will be shown the new position selected." Off goes the officer in the car, he meets some deputy from headquarters, and the two trudge off together through the ever-present mud. "Here you are," says the deputy cheerfully; "how does this suit you? Splendid place. Look at that orchard; you could hide the guns under the trees." The battery officer stares glumly at a dozen apple trees, each of which is of a size to flourish contentedly in a fair-sized flower-pot, and makes some dubious reply. "I never knew such difficult fellows to please as you siege battery fellows are in my life! Well, come and look over here. There's a natural pit, ready dug for you; it'll hold all the battery easily." With this the guide indicates with no little pride a gully, at the bottom of which stagnates rather than flows a greenish liquid with an odour of the most clinging type. "Yes, it might be a bit difficult to get the guns in and out, certainly. What about concealment behind that hedge?" But the hedge proves to be separated from the only road by an impassable morass. At last the orchard is selected as the least impossible under the circumstances, and the officer returns to his battery thoroughly convinced that he has selected the worst possible position on the whole front, and wondering what on earth will be said to him when he exhibits it to the rest of the battery.

Or else the proposed site is in the middle of a village, a place with a reputation for being shelled that is notorious from Ypres to Loos. A fabulous arc of fire is demanded from the battery, and weary hours are spent looking for a more or less concealed spot that will allow of the trajectory clearing houses and trees in all the required directions. At last it is found, the necessary measurements made and found satisfactory, when an officer strolls up. "Good-afternoon. You're not going to stop here long, are you? Going to put a battery here! I wouldn't be you for something, then. I've been about here for weeks, and they always strafe the schoolhouse there every day about this time. Look out, here she comes----" and a "woolly bear" or a "whizz-bang" or some other fiendish and aptly named projectile bursts neatly over the building that one had appropriated in one's mind's eye for a mess. Wearily the search begins again--this might do, perhaps--but by now the "evening hate" is in full swing, and a heavy shell settles with a self-satisfied "crrrump!" in the middle of one's oasis, digging one's gun-pits before one's eyes, as it were.

On one occasion the position chosen for us was the really beautiful garden of a medium-sized château. The front was a well-planned mass of shrubbery, intersected with paths and flower-beds, the back a walled vegetable garden, most scrupulously maintained, planted with every sort of vegetable and fruit and provided with a good range of glass. The owner of the place lived in the château, and his gardener worked on the premises. The dismay of these good people when they were told that the place was to be turned into a battery and the men billeted in the château can better be imagined than described. The owner was a philosopher, and took matters calmly. "Enfin, c'est la guerre, que voulez-vous?" he said sadly as we expressed our horror at the necessity of ruining this little paradise. The gardener was no philosopher, and when I look back upon the mutilated shrubberies, the trodden-down grass plots, the hotbeds with their boarding torn up for revetment, the old wall breached in many places for easy access, the broken panes in the greenhouses and, worst of all, four yawning chasms where once the asparagus, the strawberries and the artichokes dwelt together in amity, I do not wonder at the hostile spirit he displayed. I can see him now dancing round the sergeant-major, an imperturbable person of few words in his own tongue, and of none in French, whom he found cutting a few cabbages for the sergeants' dinner. "Sacré nom d'un cochon, regardez-là le voleur qui arrache mes petits choux! Ah, les anglais sont incroyables!" "No compree," says the sergeant-major, and goes on with his garnering. The gardener got something of his own back that night, however, for the garden had a very complete system of hydrants all over it, which same hydrants our friend stealthily visited with the turn-key, which he then disposed of and departed. It was pitch dark and we were all busy working, so that it was some time before we noticed the gathering floods, and the whole place was inches deep in mud and water by the time that we had discovered how to turn it off again. We never brought the crime home to the criminal, but a certain hidden gleam of triumph in that gardener's wholly disapproving eye has always convinced me of his guilt.

We had much to contend with in occupying that position. Several times we were held up in our work, first by somebody who said the situation was too exposed and that it was sheer suicide to occupy a house that was conspicuous for miles round; then by the urgent representations of a French officer who commanded a battery near by, and who declared that we should draw down fire upon the devoted heads of his people; and finally by a conference who debated for some time whether we were really required in that sector at all. However, we got all these matters satisfactorily settled at last, and set to work in earnest. And digging pits by night in the light of a few hurricane lamps is work indeed, especially if it rains persistently, as it almost invariably does. Unskilful wielders of the pick are apt to drive their lethal weapons into everything but the ground they mean to excavate, their favourite targets being such parts of their neighbours as get in their way. This leads to acrimonious wrangling and consequent delay. Better this, however, than the adventure of one lusty champion, who with a mighty effort drove his pick clean through the cast-iron main that supplied the delinquent hydrants, whereby he converted, in an incredibly short space of time, that half-completed pit into a sea of mud and water some four feet deep. To any one who expresses a fondness for bathing I recommend the plugging of a four-inch main, with a good pressure behind it, lying at the bottom of four feet of a cream-like mixture of chalk, clay and water at three o'clock on an autumn morning.

Geology, we are told, is the science that deals with the constitutents of the earth. A new chapter should be written to the text-books, a new branch of the science has been rendered necessary by the war, the study of the properties of mud. Mud is now elevated to the dignity of a fifth element, but surpasses the other four by its perpetual presence, equalled only by that of the ether which pervades everything we know. Mud shares its motto with the Royal Regiment of Artillery, one lives in it, sleeps in it, and not infrequently eats it--indeed, competent experts with carefully trained palates are said to be able to tell from the flavour of the bacon at breakfast the exact part of the line in which it has been rolled before issue. Surely in all the ancient mythologies some student may find for mud some presiding deity that we may suitably propitiate?

Nor were such more or less natural phenomena our only hindrances. No sooner were the pits completed, than somebody more perspicacious than his fellows discovered that we had been ordered to lay them out in the wrong direction, and they had to be cut out still further to allow the platforms to be slewed round through the required angle. This order reached us one evening just as we were promising ourselves a night in bed after our strenuous labours, and the despair of all ranks spread like a mephitic vapour over the country-side in a mist of strange profanity. The men, however, whose spirits are proof against continued despondency under the most depressing circumstances, set to work with a will, and the tedious digging was finished at last. Then came the far more interesting business of revetting and roofing. Now, obviously revetting and roofing require planks, beams, iron sheets, and material of that nature, and equally obviously the department that professes to provide stores of this description, and whose imagination rarely soars above the level of sandbags, is utterly unable to supply such things. The only course left is to find them for oneself, and fortunately a row of houses whose inhabitants had been evicted stood on this occasion near at hand, and these we gutted. Doors, shutters, floor-boards, rafters, everything but the bricks themselves, we contrived to utilize, until we had everything we could desire except girders for our roofs, which were to be of earth. Now a fifteen-foot span of earth two feet in thickness requires a good deal of supporting, and after several experiments with rafters, experiments that sometimes had unpleasant results for those who conducted them, we decided that something stronger was required. Here, again, almost in the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson, we found what we required at our very door, but not before one adventurous spirit had invited an early death (from which may he long be spared!) by driving a particularly noisy lorry into a coal mine overlooking the German lines in search of pit-props. Our discovery was due to an eagle eye that discovered a notice-board bearing the words "Défense de circuler sur la voie," whose owner, realizing that there could be no temptation to circulate on the line if there was no line upon which to circulate, investigated further and found a grass-grown colliery siding. Here were our long-sought girders, and with their discovery our troubles were practically over. Certainly the guns had yet to be lowered into the pits, and hauling heavy guns over soft garden mould on a dark night is an undertaking to try the most angelic patience, but on this occasion, for the first and last time, the Mud-god smiled upon us, and that midnight we knew the true happiness that comes of the successful completion of strenuous labour.

Here we remained for some weeks, until again disturbed by the order to change position. Again everything has to be done by night, the guns hauled out of the pits, the thousand and one small stores necessary to the interior economy of the battery packed each in its proper place, the heavy platforms raised and loaded into the lorries. The ease with which any particular article can be mislaid under those circumstances is incredible. Relative weight or importance seems to have no bearing on the matter at all, one is just as likely, upon arriving at dawn in some unknown land, to discover that one has left behind a spare wheel or a handcart or even a battery quartermaster-sergeant, as one is to find a small screwdriver missing. After a while the whole business becomes a nightmare in which one is condemned eternally to spend one's time counting handspikes and lorries and men, and to make the total utterly different every time. And then the line of march! A procession of heavy lorries, some drawing the guns, the rest laden with men, stores and ammunition, looking for all the world like some huge travelling circus, sets off upon a dark foggy night, carrying of course no lights, over roads already laden to their utmost capacity with troops and supply columns, and plentifully besprinkled with shell holes. At the head of the procession rides a group of officers in a car, one of whom has possibly been over the road once by daylight, and about the length of the convoy are scattered here and there men wrestling with recalcitrant motor-bicycles, which they vainly try to restrict to the speed of the column, perhaps four or five miles an hour. Much can happen under these circumstances. Perhaps the rearmost lorry has to stop for adjustment, and by the time the word has passed along the line the car at the head is far away, and the column strung out over a mile or so of road. Or the foremost lorry commences to boil frantically and slows down, whereupon the remainder tread upon one another's heels, until it stops altogether, when the column forms a compact mass that nothing can attempt to pass. Or the geographical instinct of the leader of the expedition fails at a cross-roads, and recourse has to be had to the sentry who stands there. One of two things then happens. Either the man does not know the way and says so, or he does not know the way and with the utmost positiveness declares the route to be by the first road that strikes his fancy. Those to whom the former of these certainties happens are by far the most fortunate, for the attempt to turn a column of lorries on a narrow road, especially if it consists, as it usually does, of a central strip of pavé bordered by fathomless mud, is certain to be fraught with disaster. A fully-loaded ammunition lorry stuck in a ditch is a most heartbreaking sight, particularly (if the bull may be forgiven) if the night is so dark that one cannot see it. It must be unloaded, dragged out by the help of another lorry, which sometimes slides into the ditch itself in the process, and then loaded up again, usually to the accompaniment of uncomplimentary observations from the traffic that it is holding up.

Certainly the accidents that may happen to mechanical transport are many and various, but there are some to which it is not liable. One of the first messages that we received upon our arrival in a certain new position ran as follows, "Report at once all cases of glanders occurring amongst your transport." One has trouble enough without infectious disease to contend with. A motor lorry is a capital thing on a road, even if that road is in a very bad state, but, once take it on to soft or slippery ground, and its imperfections become manifest. First of all its wheels start to slip, and chains are fixed round the felloes to give them a grip. This answers for a while, but suddenly the wheels begin to revolve at a terrific speed, and the chains fly hurtling through the air to the obvious disadvantage of any one who gets in their way. A few men with lamps are sent to look for these, whilst the rest endeavour to give the lorry a start by pushing behind. Start she does, with a sudden leap, and, before she can be stopped, finds the softest part of the whole field and sinks gently but firmly into it until supported on her axles. By this time the search party, having taken all the lanterns with them, is far away, and you feel the lorry sinking without a possibility of doing anything by the light of the one match that the battery possesses. The only thing left to do is to dig her out, support her wheels on planks, and haul her on to the road again with ropes.

But the march ends at last, usually at about two o'clock in the morning, and one arrives tired, cold and very sleepy, in the unknown land. This village is the place we were told to stop at, and the men's billets are said to be somewhere over there. Glad of a walk, I set out to find them, and find in succession a row of tents knee-deep in mud, apparently completely surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, a barn without a roof, and a shed tenanted by two inquisitive and particularly skittish cows. I return to the lorries and find the men drawn up at the side of the road. Having explained the situation, I call for volunteers to spend the night with the cows. The country-bred members of the battery fall out and are marched off to deal with the fierce beasts as best they can. The remainder are carefully shepherded into the roofless barn and the bottomless tents. Judging by the language that arises, this latter party are foiled in their first attack by the wire. But the gunner is an adaptable person, and all contrive to settle themselves as comfortably as possible in a wonderfully short time, leaving me free to find the officer's billet, which turns out to be the drawing-room of a small miller's house. The only corner left is under the grand piano, and there I lay out my valise and am soon fast asleep. Let the troubles of the morning care for themselves!

X

TELEPHONES

The Field Telephone system, that is to say a series of portable telephone instruments connected by a wire laid as required, forms the nervous system of every battery, without which it is useless, or at all events so heavily handicapped that it might as well be out of action. The observing officer depends upon it to transmit his orders to the guns, the group or brigade commander transmits his instructions to his battery commander by its means, and in the battery itself it is used for intercommunication between the control station, the section commanders, billets and other points. All these various lines must be laid as soon as the battery comes into position, and once laid they must be kept under constant supervision. The test of the efficiency of any battery is first the accuracy of its shooting, and second its ability to bring fire to bear upon any point in its area immediately it is ordered to do so. And experience shows that failure in either of these respects can be traced in nearly every case to some factor connected with the telephone system, an instrument or line being out of order at the critical moment, or an inattentive or careless telephonist. It is easy to realize, therefore, the importance of the part played by this instrument in modern artillery practice, and some account of its habits may not be out of place as throwing light upon a particularly interesting phase of life in the zone of war.

The line between the battery and the observation post is the most important of the whole system, for, without it, properly directed fire is impossible. It is also, from the fact that the observation post is usually close to the front line, the most exposed, and therefore most liable to accident. To lay a wire between two given points may seem to be the simplest thing in the world, as indeed it is, but so to lay that wire that it will not constantly be cut is a fine art. There are two ways of laying it, overhead amongst trees and other supports, or underground, digging a narrow trench in which to bury it. The first method is the quickest, and if a line is required for use immediately, the best plan is to lay it overhead, and bury it subsequently if required. But many perils lie in wait for an overhead line. Lay it by any route you will, some wandering shrapnel will burst near by, and one of the bullets, singling out the wire as though it were its especial target, will cut it neatly through, for preference at its most inaccessible point. But the enemy is by no means its greatest danger. There are roads to cross, along which come heavy lorries laden high with stores of all kinds. Put the line up as high as you think absolutely safe, and sooner or later an extra tall load brings it down. Or natural support, such as trees or houses, fails, and at considerable pains you plant a row of light posts. The next party of wire layers that comes along, finding these convenient to their purpose, lay their own line on them in addition. So the process continues, until the light posts, that you designed to carry one wire only, collapse under the strain, and down comes the whole tangle. Worst of all are the unpardonable crimes of some miscreants, who, running short of wire, cut off as much from your line as they require, leaving the cable with a yawning gulf in the middle, or, as a variation, tap their own instruments on to the wire, when the unfortunate observation officer is left to play a maddening game of cross questions and crooked answers with some strange unknown battery. If, on the other hand, the wire is laid underground, a high-explosive shell is sure to find it and make a neat crater in the middle of it, or else the infantry dig a communication trench across it, or its insulation breaks down late one evening and the ensuing night is spent digging it up and looking for the fault.

The best method of ensuring unbroken communication between two points is, of course, to lay more than one line, but wire is usually scarce, and this course is not always possible. Even if this is done, there must be places where the lines run close together, and these are just the places where the shells are sure to drop. During the Four Days' bombardment we had three lines between the battery and our observation post, and on two separate occasions all three were cut at the same time by shell-fire. The quiet deeds of heroism performed by artillery telephonists that are never heard of would fill a volume by themselves. There is very little of the excitement and emulation that makes many a man in the midst of his comrades the hero of a glorious moment, none of the intoxication of battle that banishes all thought of personal safety, in the experiences of a man who goes out to repair a wire under fire. He has plenty of time to think of the dangers he is running, to anticipate the fall of every shell without being able to get out of its way, to wonder what it feels like to lie in agony on the ground, torn by a splinter. Slowly and alone he must follow the track of the wire until he finds the break, and having found it he must set to work to repair it where it lies, a proceeding that may often take a very considerable time. And it is more than probable that nobody but himself and his chum ever knows anything about it. Yet there is never the least hesitation on his part to go out; on one of the occasions mentioned when our lines were cut, the linesman picked up his tools and started along the line as a matter of course, although the determined nature of the hostile shelling was plainly visible, and some of the projectiles were charged with gas. He finished his job and came back to us full of his adventures, which seemed to afford him immense amusement; indeed, I think he was one of those who have learnt that the surest safeguard against fear is a sense of humour, and that danger, if treated as a huge joke, ceases to have any terrors.

And quite apart from actual danger, the linesman's life is a troubled one. As one never knows when the lines may not be required in a hurry, telephonists and linesmen relieve one another day and night. Every few minutes the stations ring one another up, and if no reply can be obtained, the linesman at the calling station starts along the line to find the fault and repair it. It may be that the wire has been cut by shell-fire, or by accidents inherent to its nature, or by the sinful practices of others. Or again, it may sometimes happen that the linesman proceeds on his way, testing as he goes, and finding all correct, until at last he reaches the other station, to discover that the operator there has for some reason disconnected his instrument and forgotten to connect it up again, in which case a lurid and fiery scene takes place, consisting of picturesque recrimination on the part of the outraged linesman, and no less picturesque expostulation on the part of the telephonist, to the effect that it was somebody else's fault. The acrimony displayed varies directly as the temper of the disputants and the distance between the two stations.

It is extremely difficult to train men to use a telephone intelligently, far more so than to teach them the mere technical details of its construction. Because the thing appears to talk, very few people can resist the impulse to treat it as a sentient being, intentionally perverse for the express purpose of annoyance. Ring up your best friend in peace time on a slightly defective instrument and observe how he or she treats the irresponsive toy. If a man, he will grow purple in the face and swear, he may even end by casting the offending thing on the ground and trampling upon it in his fury, if a woman she will grow tearful and excessively petulant, and will certainly pour the vials of her wrath upon you, as being the proximate cause of the trouble. Even so in time of war it is the tendency of the trained telephonist to use harsh words and report the instrument out of action instead of sitting down quietly and finding the cause of the trouble, which he knows perfectly well how to do. Even the best of them can never refrain from shaking the receiver viciously by way of punctuating every sentence, they having been rashly taught by their instructor that a gentle tap on the speaking end of the concern is often useful if speech is faint. And even when this tendency to violence, apparently a component of human nature, is eradicated, there comes the surpassing difficulty of inducing men to speak clearly and distinctly. Of course men of clear speech must be selected in the first place, the uncouth dialects of certain parts of the United Kingdom being not susceptible to the gentlest treatment. For instance, two telephonists, one hailing from Glasgow and the other from the wilds of Glamorgan, will utterly fail to make themselves intelligible to one another. On one occasion a certain dour Scotch subaltern was told to select from his section the six men with the clearest voice and purest accent for training as telephonists. He did so, and they were duly tested--they all spoke a strange tongue which proved upon investigation to be the broadest Scotch! To this day that subaltern cannot understand why they were rejected and he himself loaded with opprobrious epithets.

At one time we were in a position where the French wireless bulletin was transmitted to us in the original over the telephone. The state in which it reached us frequently defied translation, as may well be imagined. I once overheard a reference to the Hartmansweilerkopf coming through. "Are man's wily coughs _wot_? 'Ere, is this a patent medicine advertisement, or wot? Hullo, hullo! Goin' to spell it, are yer? Yes, haitch for 'energy, eye for what? Oh, eye for hass, r for rum, toc, emma, eye for hass, n for Nellie, esses, w for water--'ere, hullo, hullo! What the 'ell are yer gettin' at?" After that they took to sending it by Morse code on the buzzer, and things went along more smoothly, but even then it was a mutilated word that eventually reached me. From which it may be inferred that telephone messages do not always find the recipient in the same form in which they started, especially if they have to be repeated more than once during transmission. The story of the Loos refugees is a case in point.

In addition to the complexities introduced by human failings, the telephone in the field suffers from aberrations of technical origin. Owing to the fact that the earth is used as the path for the return current in nearly every case, an instrument, if sufficiently sensitive, will pick up scraps of conversation between two stations speaking to one another, if the line joining them crosses or approaches to the line joining its own stations. In the case of the territory occupied by a modern army, wherein the chief means of communication is the telephone, extraordinary results are sometimes obtained. I have frequently slept with the receiver of a telephone close to my ear, and in the silence of the night have heard it whispering all sorts of fragmentary messages--"Hullo, hullo, brigade, are you brigade? brigade!--yes, and the old man was awfully fed up about it--brigade, brigade, hullo, can you hear me?--lengthen a hundred, fuse forty-two and a half!" and so on, _pianissimo_, throughout the night. Both sides have frequently obtained valuable information by putting specially sensitive telephones as near as possible to the opposing trenches and listening to the messages they picked up. It is believed that the apparently miraculous knowledge that the Germans at some parts of the line possessed as to the regiments opposed to them--they would often call out, "Hullo, Rutlandshires, are you in yet?" when a totally fresh battalion took over a section of trenches--was obtained by this method. Nor is this earth leakage the only way in which conversations are overheard. If two or more lines run together for any considerable distance, as in practice they often must, owing to an electrical phenomenon known as induction, a conversation taking place along one line is audible in the receivers attached to the remainder. Further, it frequently happens that owing to a shell burst or to carelessness on the part of some line layer, a pole or other support to which a large number of lines are fixed is brought down, and in its fall all the lines are broken. It may often be very difficult to discover, amongst all the ends, which belongs to which, and an inexperienced man, actuated by a sincere and laudable desire to put matters right, is very apt to connect them up by the light of nature. The consequent confusion that arises must provoke to demoniac laughter the denizens of hell. One observation officer finds himself in direct and clear communication with the officer in charge of supplies and transport, another with an advanced dressing station. Infantry headquarters hold long and heated converse with the wagon line of a field battery, the G.$1.$2. Divisional Artillery threatens to place the quartermaster of a territorial battalion under arrest because he steadfastly refuses to open fire immediately on target Z. And a considerable time elapses before all these various people are again connected to the proper quarter.

The very form of the telephonic message lends itself to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. There is a story of an officer named Close, who as forward observation officer for his battery laid out a line to an observation post of his own choosing, and whose linesmen by some accident contrived to get their wire touching one belonging to a different system. His major, wishing to speak to him, called him up, and hearing a "Hullo!" in reply, began "Are you Close?" To his astonishment and delight a strange voice replied, "No, you dam! fool, I'm five thousand yards away!" This same crossing of wires is another common cause of mixed conversations, they chafe one another until the insulation is worn away and a good connection established, when the two sets of instruments respond to one another's calls. This very trouble was the cause of my once being awakened from sleep by the urgent summons of the buzzer. I jumped for the instrument--"Yes, hullo?" And then distinctly came the amazing query "Are you St. Paul?" I think the terms of my reply, in which I convinced my unknown questioner of my utter inability to follow that gentleman's advice about suffering fools gladly, satisfied him that I was not. I found out afterwards that a neighbouring battery had two observing stations, which they had christened Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's respectively. An error in transcription, whereby the singular became substituted for the plural, was probably the cause of my receiving a written message, warning me that certain experiments were to be tried that evening, and beginning in the emphatic terms, "At 6 p.m. some rocket will be fired."

Of the whole complex system of lines, that between headquarters (which in our case is the group commander, batteries being usually organized in groups under a senior officer) and the battery commander is by far the most fertile in trouble. It is not so much the line itself that is to blame, as a sort of nervous feeling that it connects one with one's superior officer, a feeling that in a wholly indefinable way pervades everybody who comes in contact with it. If, as frequently occurs, wire is saved by leading the various battery lines to an exchange, whence a single line runs back to headquarters, the possibility of complication is enormously increased. The process of getting a message through is then a nerve-racking one. I was once assisting the battery commander in the observation post, observing a series that was of some considerable importance--it was during the fighting round Hill 70. In the middle of the transmission of orders to the battery, an interruption comes through from them. "Headquarters want to speak to the major, sir!" "Never mind headquarters, you take my message." Three minutes elapse, during which we get off a few more rounds. Then the battery calls through again, "Headquarters say it's urgent, sir!" "All right, stop firing, switch them through." A long pause, during which the receiver echoes, "Hullo, hullo, exchange! Hullo, can you hear me? I want headquarters. Hullo! Speaking to another battery are they? Hullo, is that headquarters? I'm 320th Siege--here you are, sir." Then a still small voice, "Am I speaking to the major?" "I'm taking the message for him; go on." "Message from G.O.C. Corps Artillery, begins. Please report by noon on 30th instant number of Army Forms XY 9999 in your possession, ends. For your information and compliance please." Fortunately Job was a hasty and impetuous individual compared with the major, or his remarks on having wasted a quarter of an hour of rapidly failing light to receive such a message might have been unthinkable.