Grinding of courage of three powerful races—A ridge that will be famous—Germans on the defensive—Efforts to maintain theirmorale—Gas shells—Summer heat, dust and fatigue—Prussian hatred of the British—Dead bodies strapped to guns—Guillemont a granulation of bricks and mortar and earth—"We've only to keep at them, sir"—Stalking machine guns—Machine guns in craters—British cheerfulness—The war will be over when it is won—Soldiers talk shop—An incident of brutal militarism—Simple rules for surviving shell fire—A "happy home" with a shell arriving every minute—Business-like monotony of the battle—Insignificance of one man among millions—A victory of position, of will, ofmorale!
Grinding of courage of three powerful races—A ridge that will be famous—Germans on the defensive—Efforts to maintain theirmorale—Gas shells—Summer heat, dust and fatigue—Prussian hatred of the British—Dead bodies strapped to guns—Guillemont a granulation of bricks and mortar and earth—"We've only to keep at them, sir"—Stalking machine guns—Machine guns in craters—British cheerfulness—The war will be over when it is won—Soldiers talk shop—An incident of brutal militarism—Simple rules for surviving shell fire—A "happy home" with a shell arriving every minute—Business-like monotony of the battle—Insignificance of one man among millions—A victory of position, of will, ofmorale!
Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know all, would really know. Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle. Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources, of courage, and of will of three powerful races.
We are always talking of phases as the result of natural human speculation and tendency to set events in groups. Observers also may gratify this inclination as well as the contemporaneous military expert writing from his maps. It is historically accepted, I think, that the first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved. The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the Western front by an offensive of sledgehammer blows against frontal positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piecemeal attacks, holding the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.
This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in human bravery, industry, determination and endurance—this might one day be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future generations as is Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms, men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.
The German had not yielded his offensive at Verdun after the attack of July 1st. At least, he still showed the face of initiative there while he rested content that at the same time he could maintain his front intact on the Somme. The succeeding attack of July 15th broke his confidence with its suggestion that the confusion in his lines would be too dangerous if it happened over a broader front for him to consider anything but the defensive. Thus, the Allied offensive had broken his offensive.
Now he began drawing away his divisions from the Verdun sector, bringing guns to answer the British and French fire and men whose prodigal use alone could enforce his determination to maintainmoraleand prevent any further bold strokes such as that of July 15th.
His sausage balloons began to reappear in the sky as the summer wore on; he increased the number of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine howitzers were sending their compliments; he stretched out his shell fire over communication trenches and strong points; mustered great quantities of lachrymatory shells and for the first time used gas shells with a generosity which spoke his faith in their efficacy. The lachrymatory shell makes your eyes smart, and the Germans apparently considered this a great auxiliary to high explosives and shrapnel. Was it because of the success of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now placed such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands seems a "dud," which is a shell that has failed to explode; then it blows out a volume of gas.
"If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, "and you hadn't your gas mask on, it might kill you. But when you see one fall you don't run to get a sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxiating yourself."
Another soldier suggested that the Germans had a big supply on hand and were working off the stock for want of other kinds. The British who by this time were settled in the offensive joked about the deluge of gas shells with a gallant, amazing humor. Going up to the Ridge was going to their regular duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. They simply went, that was all, when it was a battalion's turn to go.
July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners worked in their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain came as a blessing to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will not cure; something fixed in their beings.
It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it, they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the war their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had been killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed, from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to their own.
Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore, in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on for years.
Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened to the vast preparations behind the British lines to carry on the offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their "system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ——, you English!"
The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense. Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first! said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but among the mixed troops—the old and the young, the hollow-chested and the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and west—they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies despite the iron discipline.
It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.
It became apparent through those two months of piecemeal advance that the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty "funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if they were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters—well, human psychology does not change. They were the type that made the professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.
Such became members of the machine gun corps, which took an oath never to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them, or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts, than by command.
Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and Longueval and the Switch Trench—these are symbolic names of that attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No for answer.
You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those of Guillemont after it was taken. They were the granulation of bricks and mortar and earth mixed by the blasts of shell fire which crushed solids into dust and splintered splinters. Guillemont lay beyond Trônes Wood across an open space where the German guns had full play. There was a stone quarry on the outskirts, and a quarry no less than a farm like Waterlot, which was to the northward, and Falfemont, to the southward and flanking the village, formed shelter. It was not much of a quarry, but it was a hole which would be refuge for reserves and machine guns. The two farms, clear targets for British guns, had their deep dugouts whose roofs were reinforced by the ruins that fell upon them against penetration even by shells of large caliber. How the Germans fought to keep Falfemont! Once they sent out a charge with the bayonet to meet a British charge between walls of shell fire and there through the mist the steel was seen flashing and vague figures wrestling.
Guillemont and the farms won and Ginchy which lay beyond won and the British had their flank on high ground. Twice they were in Guillemont but could not remain, though as usual they kept some of their gains. It was a battle from dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any kind burrowed in débris or in fields, with the British never ceasing here or elsewhere to continue their pressure. And the débris of a village had particular appeal; it yielded to the spade; its piles gave natural cover.
A British soldier returning from one of the attacks as he hobbled through Trônes Wood expressed to me the essential generalship of the battle. He was outwardly as unemotional as if he were coming home from his day's work, respectful and good-humored, though he had a hole in both arms from machine gun fire, a shrapnel wound in the heel, and seemed a trifle resentful of the added tribute of another shrapnel wound in his shoulder after he had left the firing-line and was on his way to the casualty clearing station. Insisting that he could lift the cigarette I offered him to his lips and light it, too, he said:
"We've only to keep at them, sir. They'll go."
So the British kept at them and so did the French at every point. Was Delville Wood worse than High Wood? This is too nice a distinction in torments to be drawn. Possess either of them completely and command of the Ridge in that section was won. The edge of a wood on the side away from your enemy was the easiest part to hold. It is difficult to range artillery on it because of restricted vision, and the enemy's shells aimed at it strike the trees and burst prematurely among his own men. Other easy, relatively easy, places to hold are the dead spaces of gullies and ravines. There you were out of fire and there you were not; there you could hold and there you could not. Machine gun fire and shell fire were the arbiters of topography more dependable than maps.
Why all the trees were not cut down by the continual bombardments of both sides was past understanding. There was one lone tree on the skyline near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It still had a limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last time that I saw it, pointing with a kind of defiance in its immunity. Of course it had been struck many times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; but only a direct hit on the trunk will bring down a tree. Trees may be slashed and whittled and nicked and gashed and still stand; and when villages have been pulverized except for the timbering of the houses, a scarred shade tree will remain.
Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked sticks among fallen and splintered trunks and upturned roots. How any man could have survived was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made.
Not getting the northern edge of the woods the British began sapping out in trenches to the east toward Ginchy, where the map contours showed the highest ground in that neighborhood. New lines of trenches kept appearing on the map, often with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea Lane and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along the irregular plateau the shells were no more kindly, the bombing and the sapping no less diligent all the way to the windmill, where the Australians were playing the same kind of a game. With the actual summit gained at certain points, these had to be held pending the taking of the whole, or of enough to permit a wave of men to move forward in a general attack without its line being broken by the resistance of strong points, which meant confusion.
Before any charge the machine guns must be "killed." No initiative of pioneer or Indian scout surpassed that exhibited in conquering machine gun positions. When a big game hunter tells you about having stalked tigers, ask him if he has ever stalked a machine gun to its lair.
As for the nature of the lair, here is one where a Briton "dug himself in" to be ready to repulse any counter-attack to recover ground that the British had just won. Some layers of sandbags are sunk level with the earth with an excavation back of them large enough for a machine gun standard and to give the barrel swing and for the gunner, who back of this had dug himself a well four or five feet deep of sufficient diameter to enable him to huddle at the bottom in "stormy weather." He was general and army, too, of his little establishment. In the midst of shells and trench mortars, with bullets whizzing around his head, he had to keep a cool aim and make every pellet which he poured out of his gun muzzle count against the wave of men coming toward him who were at his mercy if he could remain alive for a few minutes and keep his head.
He must not reveal his position before his opportunity came. All around where this Briton had held the fort there were shell-craters like the dots of close shooting around a bull's-eye; no tell-tale blood spots this time, but a pile of two or three hundred cartridge cases lying where they had fallen as they were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck was with the occupant, but not with another man playing the same game not far away. Broken bits of gun and fragments of cloth mixed with earth explained the fate of a German machine gunner who had emplaced his piece in the same manner.
Before a charge, crawl up at night from shell-crater to shell-crater and locate the enemy's machine guns. Then, if your own guns and the trench mortars do not get them, go stalking with supplies of bombs and remember to throw yours before the machine gunner, who also has a stock for such emergencies, throws his. When a machine gun begins rattling into a company front in a charge the men drop for cover, while officers consider how to draw the devil's tusks. Arnold von Winkelried, who gathered the spears to his breast to make a path for his comrades, won his glory because the fighting forces were small in his day. But with such enormous forces as are now engaged and with heroism so common, we make only an incident of the officer who went out to silence a machine gun and was found lying dead across the gun with the gunner dead beside him.
Those whose business it was to observe, the six correspondents, Robinson, Thomas, Gibbs, Philips, Russell and myself, went and came always with a sense of incapacity and sometimes with a feeling that writing was a worthless business when others were fighting. The line of advance on the big map at our quarters extended as the brief army reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day. At corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and officers would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and village, every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station and prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge and within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make shelter from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and lunch and chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or perhaps to hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in Ypres sector, which had become relatively quiet.
They had their letters and packages from home before they slept and had written letters in return after waking; and there was nothing to do now except to relax and breathe, to renew the vitality that had been expended in the fierce work where shells were still threshing the earth, which rose in clouds of dust to settle back again in enduring passive resistance.
There was much talk early in the war about British cheerfulness; so much that officers and men began to resent it as expressing the idea that they took such a war as this as a kind of holiday, when it was the last thing outside of Hades that any sane man would choose. It was a question in my own mind at times if Hades would not have been a pleasant change. Yet the characterization is true, peculiarly true, even in the midst of the fighting on the Ridge. Cheerfulness takes the place of emotionalism as the armor against hardship and death; a good-humored balance between exhilaration and depression which meets smile with smile and creates an atmosphere superior to all vicissitudes. Why should we be downhearted? Why, indeed, when it does no good. Not "Merrie England!" War is not a merry business; but an Englishman may be cheerful for the sake of self and comrades.
Of course, these battalions, officers and men, would talk about when the war would be over. Even the Esquimaux must have an opinion on the subject by this time. That of the men who make the war, whose lives are the lives risked, was worth more, perhaps, than that of people living thousands of miles away; for it is they who are doing the fighting, who will stop fighting. To them it would be over when it was won. The time this would require varied with different men—one year, two years; and again they would turn satirical and argue whether the sixth or the seventh year would be the worst. And they talked shop about the latest wrinkles in fighting; how best to avoid having men buried by shell-bursts; the value of gas and lachrymatory shells; the ratio of high explosives to shrapnel; methods of "cleaning out" dugouts or "doing in" machine guns, all in a routine that had become an accepted part of life like the details of the stock carried and methods of selling in a department store.
Indelible the memories of these talks, which often brought out illustrations of racial temperament. One company was more horrified over having found a German tied to a trenchparadosto be killed by British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of blood and flesh—for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were fighting.
With steel helmets on and gas masks over our shoulders, we would leave our car at the dead line and set off to "see something," when now the fighting was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in the woods, or lost on the horizon where the front line of either of these two great armies, with their immense concentration of men and material and roads gorged with transport and thousands of belching guns, was held by a few men with machine guns in shell-craters, their positions sometimes interwoven. Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying that projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points where the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific gunnery, and always recollect that the German has not enough shells to sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.
It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite safe within a couple of hundred yards of an artillery concentration. That corner of a village, that edge of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that sunken road—keep away from them! Any kind of trench for shrapnel; lie down flat unless a satisfactory dugout is near for protection from high explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at the front and a curtain of fire is put behind you, wait until it is over or go around it. If there is one ahead, wait until another day—provided that you are a spectator. Always bear in mind how unimportant you are, how small a figure on the great field, and that if every shell fired had killed one soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in uniform left alive on the continent of Europe. By observing these simple rules you may see a surprising amount with a chance of surviving.
One day I wanted to go into the old German dugouts under a formless pile of ruins which a British colonel had made his battalion headquarters; but I did not want to go enough to persist when I understood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout—and I always like to be within striking distance of one—was a cave twenty feet deep with a roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments of a town hall are piled on top of this.
The Germans were putting a shell every minute with clockwork regularity into the colonel's "happy home" and at intervals four shells in a salvo. You had to make a run for it between the shells, and if you did not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground with the matting of débris including that of a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the roof of the untenanted premises.
After every battlefield "promenade" I was glad to step into the car waiting at the "dead line," where the chauffeurs frequently had had harder luck in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet I know of no worse place to be in than a car when you hear the first growing scream which indicates that yours is the neighborhood selected by a German battery or two for expending some of its ammunition. When you are in danger you like to be on your feet and to possess every one of your faculties. I used to put cotton in my ears when I walked through the area of the gun positions as some protection to the eardrums from the blasts, but always took it out once I was beyond the big calibers, as an acute hearing after some experience gave you instant warning of any "krump" or five-point-nine coming in your direction, advising you which way to dodge and also saving you from unnecessarily running for a dugout if the shell were passing well overhead or short.
I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite behind and was over the hills in peaceful country. But one never knew. Fifteen miles from the front line was not always safe. Once when a sudden outburst of fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of a town to cover and scattered fragments over the square, one cut open the back of the chauffeur's head just as we were getting into our car.
"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became an inquiry in the mess on the order of "Are you going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?" The only time I felt that I could claim any advantage in phlegm over my comrades was when I slept through two hours of aerial bombing with anti-aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I explained, was no more remarkable than sleeping in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled surface cars and motor horns screeching under your window. A subway employee or a traffic policeman in New York ought never to suffer from shell-shock if he goes to war.
The account of personal risk which in other wars might make a magazine article or a book chapter, once you sat down to write it, melted away as your ego was reduced to its proper place in cosmos. Individuals had never been so obscurely atomic. With hundreds of thousands fighting, personal experience was valuable only as it expressed that of the whole. Each story brought back to the mess was much like others, thrilling for the narrator and repetition for the polite listener, except it was some officer fresh from the communication trench who brought news of what was going on in that day's work.
Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents of a kind like the product of some mighty mill. The public, falsely expecting that the line would be broken, wanted symbols of victory in fronts changing on the map and began to weary of the accounts. It was the late Charles A. Dana who is credited with saying: "If a dog bites a man it is not news, but if a man bites a dog it is."
Let the men attack with hatchets and in evening dress and this would win all the headlines in the land because people at their breakfast tables would say: "Here is something new in the war!" Men killing men was not news, but a battalion of trained bloodhounds sent out to bite the Germans would have been. I used to try to hunt down some of the "novelties" which received the favor of publication, but though they were well known abroad the man in the trenches had heard nothing about them.
Bullets, shells, bayonets and bombs remained the tried and practical methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme feature was that determination which was like a kind of fate in its progress of chipping, chipping at a stone foundation that must yield.
The Ridge seeped in one's very existence. You could see it as clearly in imagination as in reality, with its horizon under shell-bursts and the slope with its maze of burrows and its battered trenches. Into those calm army reports association could read many indications: the telling fact that the German losses in being pressed off the Ridge were as great if not greater than the British, their sufferings worse under a heavier deluge of shell fire, the increased skill of the offensive and the failure of German counter-attacks after each advance.
No one doubted that the Ridge would be taken and taken it was, or all of it that was needed for the drive that was to clean up any outstanding points, with its sweep down into the valley. A victory this, not to be measured by territory; for in one day's rush more ground was gained than in two months of siege. A victory of position, of will, ofmorale! Sharpening its steel and wits on enemy steel and wits in every kind of fighting, the New Army had proved itself in the supreme test of all qualities.
A French lieutenant arm-in-arm with two privates—A luncheon at the front—French regimental officers—Three and four stripes on the sleeves for the number of wounds—Over the parapet twenty-three times—Comradeship of soldiers—Monsieur Élan again—Babysoixante-quinze—An incident truly French.
A French lieutenant arm-in-arm with two privates—A luncheon at the front—French regimental officers—Three and four stripes on the sleeves for the number of wounds—Over the parapet twenty-three times—Comradeship of soldiers—Monsieur Élan again—Babysoixante-quinze—An incident truly French.
This was another French day, an ultra French day, with Monsieur Élan playfully inciting human nature to make holiday in the sight of bursting shells. There had been many other luncheons with generals and staffs in their chateaux which were delightful and illuminating occasions, but this had a distinction of its own not only in its companionship but in its surroundings.
Mon lieutenantwho invited me warned me to eat a light breakfast in order to leave room for adequate material appreciation of the hospitality of his own battalion, in which he had fought in the ranks earning promotion and hiscroix de guerrein a way that was more gratifying to him than the possession of a fortune, chateaux and high-powered cars. I have seen him in the streets of our town "hiking" along with the French marching step arm-in-arm with two French privates, though he was an officer. He introduced them as from "my battalion!" with as much pride as if they were Generals Joffre and Castelnau.
What a setting for a "swell repast," as he jokingly called it! A table made of boxes with boxes for seats and plates of tin, under apple trees looking down into a valley where the transport and blue-clad regiments were winding their way past the eddies of men of the battalion in a rest camp, with thesoixante-quinzefiring from the slopes beyond at intervals and a German battery trying to reach a British sausage balloon hanging lazily in the still air against the blue sky and never getting it. A flurry of figures after some "krumps" had burst at another point meant that some men had been killed and wounded.
As the colonel and the second in command were not present there was no restraint of seniority on the festivity, though I think that seniority knowing what was going on might have felt lonely in its isolation. We had many courses, soup, fish, entrée and roast, salad and cheese which was cheese in a land where they eat cheese, and luscious grapes and pears; everything that the market afforded served in sight of the front line. Why not? France thinks that nothing is too good for her fighters. If ever man ought to have the best it is when to-morrow he returns to the firing-line and hard rations—when to-morrow he may die for France.
The senior captain presided. He was a man of other wars, burned by the suns of Morocco, with a military moustache that gave effect to his spirited manner. When my friend, the lieutenant, joined the regiment as a private he was smooth-shaven and his colonel asked him whether he was a priest or a bookmaker, or meant to be a soldier. Next morning he allowed nature to have her way on his upper lip, the colonel's hint being law in all things to those who served under him.
Every officer had hiscroix de guerrein this colonial battalion with its ranks open to all comers of all degrees and promotion for those who could earn it in face of the machine guns where the New Army privates were earning theirs. One officer with the chest of Hercules, who looked equal to the fiercest Prussian or the tallest Pomeranian and at least one additional small Teuton for good measure, mentioned that he had been in Peking. I asked him if he knew some officer friends of mine who had been there at the same time. He replied that he had been a private then, and he liked the American Y.M.C.A.
His breast was a panoply of medals. Among them was the Legion of Honor, while hiscroix de guerrehad all the stars, bronze, silver and gold, and two palms, as I remember, which meant that twice some deed of his out in the inferno had won official mention for him all the way up from the battalion through brigade, division and corps to the supreme command. The American Y.M.C.A. in Peking ought to be proud of his good opinion.
The architect, tall, well built, smiling and fair-haired, with an intellectual face, sat opposite the little dealer in precious stones who had traveled the world around in his occupation. There was an artist, too, who held an argument with the architect on art whichmon capitaineconsidered meretricious and hair-splitting, his conviction being that they were only airing a wordy pretentiousness and really knew little more of what they were talking about than he. In politics we had a Republican, a Socialist and a Royalist, who also were babbling without capturing any dugouts, according tomon capitainewho was simply a soldier. It was clear that the Socialist and the Royalist were both popular, as well as my friend, though he had been promoted to the staff.
Another present was the "Admiral," a naval officer, commanding the monstrous guns of twelve to seventeen inches mounted on railway trucks, who wrote sonnets between directing two-thousand-pound projectiles on their errands of mashing German dugouts. He did not like gunnery where he did not see his target naval fashion, but he had done so well that he was kept at it. His latest sonnet was to an abstract girl somewhere in France which the Socialist, who was a man of critical judgment in everything and of a rollicking disposition, praised very highly and read aloud with the elocution of a Coquelin.
While others had as many as three and four gold stripes on their sleeves to indicate the number of their wounds, the Socialist had been over the parapet twenty-three times in charges without being hit, which he took as a sure sign that his was the right kind of politics, the Royalist and the Republican disagreeing andmon capitainesaying that politics were a mere matter of taste and being wounded a matter of luck. Thereupon, the Socialist undertook a brief oration rich with humor, relieving it of too much of the seriousness of the tribune in the Chamber of Deputies, where he will probably thunder out his periods one of these days if he contrives to keep on going over the parapet without being hit.
A man was what he was as a man and nothing more in that distinguished company which had gained its distinction by extinguishing Germans. Comradeship made all differences of opinion, birth and wealth only the excuse for banter in this variation of type from the tall architect with his charming manner to the matter-of-fact expert in diamonds and opals, from the big private of colonial regulars who had won his shoulder straps to the fellow with the blue blood of aristocratic France in his veins. The architect I particularly remember, for he was killed in the next charge, and the dealer in precious stones, for a shell-burst in the face would never allow his eyes to see the flash of a diamond again.
But let youth eat, drink and be merry in the shadow of the fortunes of war which might claim some of them to-morrow, making vacancies for promotion of privates down in the camp. Where Cheeriness was the handmaiden ofmoralewith the British, Monsieur Élan was with the French. Everybody talked not only with his lips but with his hands and shoulders, in that absence of self-consciousness which gives grace to free expression. They spoke of their homes at one juncture with a sober and lingering desire and a catch in the throat and they touched on the problems after the war, which they would win or fight on forever, concluding that the men from the trenches who would have the say would make a new and better France and sweep aside any interference with the march of their numbers and patriotism.
We ate until capacity was reached and loitered over the black coffee, with the private who had produced all the courses out of the dugout with the magic of the rabbit out of a hat sharing in the conversation at times without breaking the bonds of discipline. Finally, the cook was brought forth, too, to receive his meed of praise as the real magician. Then we went to pay our respects to the colonel and the second in command. A sturdy little man the colonel, a regular from his neat fatigue cap to the soles of his polished boots, but with a human twinkle through his eyeglasses reflecting much wisdom in the handling of men of all kinds, which, no doubt, was why he was in command of this battalion.
Afterward, we visited the men lounging in their quarters or forming a smiling group, each one ready with quick responses when spoken to, men of all kinds from Apaches of Paris to the sons of princes, perhaps, while the Washington Post March was played for the American. Later, across the road we saw the then new babysoixante-quinzeguns for trench work, which were being wheeled about with a merry appreciation of the fact that a battery of fathersoixante-quinzewas passing by at the time.
Finally, came an incident truly French and delightful in its boyishness, asmon capitainehinted that I should askmon colonelif he would permitmon capitaineto go into town and have dinner with my friend and the admiral and myself, returning in my friend's car in time to proceed to the firing-line with the battalion to-morrow. Accordingly I spoke to the colonel and the twinkle of his eye as he gave consent indicated, perhaps, that he knew who had put me up to it.Mon capitainehad his dinner and a good one, too, and was back at dawn ready for battle.
It is not that France has changed; only that some people who ought to have known better have changed their opinions formed about her after '70 when, in the company of other foreigners, they went to see the sights of Paris.
The "Ferry-Pilot's" office—Everybody is young in the Royal Flying Corps—Any kind of aeroplane to choose from—A flying machine new from the factory—"A good old 'bus"—Twenty planes a day from England to France—England seen from the clouds—An aerial guide-post—Stopping places—The channel from 4,000 feet aloft—Out of sight in the clouds midway between England and France—Tobogganing from the clouds—France from the air—A good flight.
The "Ferry-Pilot's" office—Everybody is young in the Royal Flying Corps—Any kind of aeroplane to choose from—A flying machine new from the factory—"A good old 'bus"—Twenty planes a day from England to France—England seen from the clouds—An aerial guide-post—Stopping places—The channel from 4,000 feet aloft—Out of sight in the clouds midway between England and France—Tobogganing from the clouds—France from the air—A good flight.
Personal experience now intrudes in answer to the question whence come all the aeroplanes that take the place of those lost or worn out, which was made clear when I was in London for a few days' change from the fighting on the Ridge through a request to a general at the War Office for permission to fly back to the front.
"Why not?" he said. "When are you going?"
"Monday."
He called up another general on the telephone and in a few words the arrangements were made.
"And my baggage?" I suggested.
"How much of it?"
"A suit case."
"The machine ought to manage that considering that it carries one hundred and fifty pounds in bombs."
On Monday morning at the appointed hour I was walking past a soldierly line of planes flanking an aerodrome field scattered with others that had just alighted or were about to rise and inquiring my way to the "Ferry-Pilot's" office. I found it, identified by a white-lettered sign on a blackboard, down the main street of temporary buildings occupied by the aviators as quarters.
"Yes, all right," said the young officer sitting at the desk, "but we are making no crossings this morning. There is a storm over the channel."
Weather forecasts, which had long ago disappeared from the English newspapers lest they give information to Zeppelins, had become the privilege of those who travel by air or repulsed aerial raids.
"It may clear up this afternoon," he added. "Why not go up to the mess and make yourself comfortable, and return about three? Perhaps you may go then."
At three I was back in his office, where five or six young aviators were waiting for their orders as jockeys might wait their turn to take out horses. Everybody is young in the Royal Flying Corps and everybody thinks and talks in the terms of youth.
"You can push off at once!" said the officer at the desk.
Of course I must have a pass, which was a duplicate in mimeograph with my name as passenger in place of "machine gunner;" or, to put it another way, I was one joy-rider who must be officially delivered from an aerodrome in England to an aerodrome in France. Youth laughed when I took that view. Had I ever flown before? Oh, yes, a fact that put the situation still more at ease.
"What kind of a 'bus would you like?" asked the master pilot. "We have all kinds going over to-day. Take your choice."
I went out into the field to choose my steed and decided upon a big "pusher," where both aviator and passenger sit forward with the propeller and the roar of the motor behind them. She had been flown down across England from the factory the day before and, tried out, was ready for the channel passage.
"You'll take her over," said the master pilot to one of the group waiting their turn.
Then it occurred to somebody that another official detail had been overlooked, and I had to give my name and address and next of kin to complete formalities which should impress novices, while youth looked on smilingly at forty-three which was wise if not reckless. They put me in an aviator's rig with the addition of a life-belt in case we should get a ducking in the channel and I climbed up into my position for the long run, a roomy place in the semi-circular bow of the beast which was ordinarily occupied by a machine gun and gunner.
"She's a good old 'bus, very steady. You'll like her," said one of the group of youngsters looking on.
There were no straps, these being quite unnecessary, but also there was no seat.
"What isà la mode?" I asked.
"Stand up if you like!"
"Or sit on the edge and let your feet hang over!"
We were all laughing, for the aviation corps is never gloomy. It rises and alights and fights and dies smilingly.
"I like your hospitality, but not having been trained to trapeze work I'll play the Turk," I replied, squatting with legs crossed; and in this position I was able to look over the railing right and left and forward. The world was mine.
Flight being no new thing in the year 1916, I shall not indulge in any rhetoric. The pertinence of the experience was entirely in the fact that I was taking the aerial ferry which sent twenty planes a day to France on an average and perhaps fifty when the weather had held up traffic the previous day. I was to buffet the clouds instead of the waves on a crowded steamer and have a glimpse behind the curtains of military secrecy of the wonders of resource and organization, which are a commonplace to the wonder-workers themselves.
It was to be a straight, business flight, a matter of routine, a flight without any loitering on the way or covering unnecessary distance to reach the destination. There would be risks enough for the plane when it crossed into the enemy's area with its machine gun in position. The gleam of two lines of steel of a railroad set our course. After we had risen to a height of three or four thousand feet an occasional dash of rain whipped your face, and again the soft mist of a cloud.
It was real English weather, overcast; and England plotted under your eye, a vast garden with its hedges, fields and quiet villages, had never been so fully realized in its rich greens. We overtook trains going in our direction and passed trains going in the opposite direction under their trailing spouts of steam. Only an occasional encampment of tents suggested that the land was at war. The soft light melted the different tones of the landscape together in a dreamy whole and always the impression was of a land loved for its hedges, its pastures and its island seclusion, loved as a garden. In order to hold it secure this plane was flying and the great army in France was fighting.
After forty minutes of the exhilaration of flight which never grows stale, the pilot thumped one of the wings which gave out the sound of a drumhead to attract my attention and indicated an immense white arrow on a pasture pointing toward the bank of mist that hid the channel. This was the guide-post of the aerial ferry. He wheeled around it in order to give me a better view, which was his only departure from routine before, on the line of the arrow's pointing, he took his course, leaving the railroad behind, while ahead the green carpet seemed to end in a vaporish horizon.
Usually as they rose for the channel crossing pilots ascended to a height of ten thousand feet, in order that they should have range in case of engine trouble for a long glide which might permit them to reach shore, or, if they must alight in the sea, to descend close to a vessel. In both England and France along the established aerial pathway are certain way stations fit to give rubber tires a soft welcome, with gasoline in store if a fresh supply is required. It was the pride of my pilot, who had formerly been in the navy and had come from South Africa to "do his bit," that in twenty crossings he had never had to make a stop. To-day the clouds kept us down to an altitude of only four thousand feet.
Hills and valleys do not exist, all landscape being flat to the aviator's eye, as we know; but against reason some mental kink made me feel that this optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when we came to the coast, where only the green sward which crowns them was visible and beyond this a line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of white lace that was moving—the surf.
Soldiers who were returning from leave in the regular way were having a jumpy passage, as one knew by the whitecaps that looked like tiny white flowers on a pewter cloth; only if you looked steadily at one it disappeared and others appeared in its place. Otherwise, the channel in a heavy sea was as still as a painted ocean with painted ships which, however fast they were moving, were making no headway to us traveling as smoothly in our 'bus as a motor boat on a glassy lake.
I looked at my watch as we crossed the lace edging on the English side and again as we crossed it on the French side. The time elapsed was seventeen and a half minutes, which is not rapid going, even for the broader part of the channel which we chose. The fastest plane, I am told, has made it at the narrowest point in eight and a half minutes. Not going as high as usual, the pilot did not speed his motor, as the lower the altitude the more uncomfortable might be the result of engine trouble to his passenger.
Now, however, we were rising midway of the crossing into the gray bank overhead; one second the channel floor was there and the next it was not. Underneath us was mist and ahead and behind and above us only mist, soft and cool against the face. We were wholly out of sight of land and water, above the clouds, detached from earth, lost in the sky between England and France.
This was the great moment to me. I was away from the sound of the guns; from the headlines of newspapers announcing the latest official bulletins; from prisoners' camps and casualty clearing stations; from dugouts and trenches and the Ridge. Here was real peace, the peace of the infinite—and no one could ask you when you thought the war would be over. You were nobody, yet again you were the whole population of the world, you and the aviator and the plane, perfectly helpless in one sense and in another gloriously secure. Even he seemed a part of the machine carrying you swiftly on, without any sense of speed except the driving freshness of the air in your face. I felt that I should not mind going on forever. Time was unlimited. There was only space and the humming of the motor and the faintly gleaming circle of light of the propeller and those two rigid wings with their tracery of braces.
We were not long out of sight of land and water, but long enough to make one wish to fly over the channel again, the next time at ten thousand feet, when it was a gleaming swath hidden at times by patches of luminous nimbus.
The engine stopped. There was the silence of the clouds, cushioned silence, cushioned by the mist. Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan and when we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet or more, France loomed ahead with its lacework of surf and an expanse of chalk cliffs at an angle and landscape rising out of the haze. A few minutes more and the salt thread that kept Napoleon out of England and has kept Germany out of England was behind us. We were over the Continent of Europe.
I had never before understood the character of both England and France so well. England was many little gardens correlated by roads and lanes; France was one great garden. Majestic in their suggestion of spaciousness were those broad stretches of hedgeless, fenceless fields, their crop lines sharply drawn as are all lines from a plane, fields between the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, revealing a land where all the soil is tilled.
Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, straight highways that I had often traveled in my comings and goings. But how empty seemed the roads where you were always passing motor trucks and guns! Long, gray streaks with occasional specks which, as you rose to a greater height, were lost like scattered beads melting into a ribbon! Reserve trenches that I had known, too, were white tracings on a flat surface in their standard contour of traverses. There was the chateau where I had lived for months. Yes, I could identify that, and there the town where we went to market.
We flew around the tower of a cathedral low enough to see the people moving in the streets, and then, in a final long glide, after an hour and fifty minutes in the air, the rubber wheels touched earth, rose and touched it again before the steady old 'bus slowed down not far from another plane that had arrived only a few minutes previously. When a day of good weather follows a day of bad and the arrivals are frequent, planes are flopping about this aerodrome like so many penguins before they are marshaled by the busy attendants in line along the edge of the field or under the shelter of hangars.
We had had none of those thrilling experiences which are supposed to happen to aerial joy-riders, but had made a perfectly safe, normal trip, which, I repeat, was the real point of this wonderful business of the aerial ferry. I went into the office and officially reported my arrival at the same time that the pilot reported delivery of his plane.
"Good-night," he said. "I'm off to catch the steamer to bring over another 'bus to-morrow."
Waiting near by was my car and soldier chauffeur, who asked, in his quiet English way, if I had had "a good flight, sir;" and soon I was back in the atmosphere of the army as the car sped along the road, past camps, villages and motor trucks, until in the moonlight, as we came over a hill, the cathedral tower of Amiens appeared above the dark mass of the town against the dim horizon.