A thousand guns at the master's call—Schoolmaster of the guns—More and more guns but never too many—The gunner's skill which has life and death at stake—"Grandmother" first of the fifteen-inch howitzers—Soldier-mechanics—War still a matter of missiles—Improvements in gunnery—Third rail of the battlefield—The game of guns checkmating guns—A Niagara of death—A giant tube of steel painted in frog patches.
A thousand guns at the master's call—Schoolmaster of the guns—More and more guns but never too many—The gunner's skill which has life and death at stake—"Grandmother" first of the fifteen-inch howitzers—Soldier-mechanics—War still a matter of missiles—Improvements in gunnery—Third rail of the battlefield—The game of guns checkmating guns—A Niagara of death—A giant tube of steel painted in frog patches.
How reconcile that urbane gunner-general, a genius among experts you were told, as the master of a thunderous magic which shot its deadly lightnings over the German area! Let him move a red pin on the map and a tractor was towing a nine-inch gun to a new position; a black pin and a battery of eighteen pounders took the road. A thousand guns answered his call with a hundred thousand shells when it pleased him. I stood in awe of him, for chaos seemed to be doing his bidding at the end of a pushbutton.
Whirlwind curtains of fire and creeping and leaping curtains were his familiar servants, and he set the latest fashion by his improvements. Had the French or the Germans something new? This he applied. Had he something new? He passed on the method to the French and gave the Germans the benefit of its results.
Observers seated in the baskets of observation balloons, aeroplanes circling low in risk of anti-aircraft fire, men sitting in tree-tops and others in front-line trenches spotting the fall of shells were the eyes for the science he was working out on his map. Those nests and lines of guns that seemed to be simply sending shells into the blue from their hiding-places played fortissimo and pianissimo under his baton. He correlated their efforts, gave them purpose and system in their roaring traffic of projectiles.
Where Sir Douglas Haig was schoolmaster of the whole, he was schoolmaster of the guns. After the grim days of the salient, when he worked with relics from fortresses and anything that could be improvised against the German artillery, came the latest word in black-throated, fiery-tongued monsters from England where the new gunners had learned their ABC's and he and his assistants were to teach them solid geometry and calculus and give them a toilsome experience, which was still more useful.
His host kept increasing as more and more guns arrived, but never too many. There cannot be too many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest for a depth of six or eight miles and there would not be enough by the criterion of the infantry, to whom the fortunes of war increasingly related to the nature of the artillery support. He must have smiled with the satisfaction of a farmer over a big harvest yield that filled the granary as the stack of shells at an ammunition depot spread over the field, and he could go among his guns with the pride of a landowner among his flocks. He knew all the diseases that guns were heir to and their weaknesses of temperament. A gun doctor was part of the establishment. This specialist went among the guns and felt of their pulses and listened to accounts of their symptoms and decided whether they could be cared for at a field hospital or would have to go back to the base.
Temperament? An old eight-inch howitzer which has helped in a dozen curtains of fire and blown in numerous dugouts may be a virtuoso for temperament. Many things enter into mastery of the magic of the thunders, from clear eyesight of observers who see accurately to precision of gunner's skill, of powder, of fuse, of a hundred trifles which can never be too meticulously watched. The erring inspector of munitions far away oversea by an oversight may cost the lives of many soldiers or change the fate of a charge.
Comparable only with the surgeon's skill in the skill which has life and death as the stake of its result is the gunner's. The surgeon is trying to save one life which a slip of the knife may destroy; the gunner is trying both to save and to take life. In the gunner's skill life that is young and sturdy, muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill, manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little carelessness or the slightest error and monsters with their long, fiery reach may strike you in the back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of dead and wounded and capitulation among smashed dugouts and machine gun positions you may be received by showers of bombs. No wonder that gunners work hard! No wonder that discipline is tightened by the screw of fearful responsibility!
At the front we had a sort of reverence for Grandmother, the first of the fifteen-inch howitzers to arrive as the belated answer of "prepared England" who "forced the war" on "unprepared Germany" to the famous forty-two centimeters that pounded Liège and Maubeuge. Gently Grandmother with her ugly mouth and short neck and mammoth supporting ribs of steel was moved and nursed; for she, too, was temperamental. Afterward, Grandfather came and Uncle and Cousin and Aunt and many grown sons and daughters, until the British could have turned the city of Lille into ruins had they chosen; but they kept their destruction for the villages on the Somme, which represent a property loss remarkably small, as the average village could be rebuilt for not over two hundred thousand dollars.
Other children of smaller caliber also arrived in surprising numbers. Make no mistake about that nine-inch howitzer, which appears to be only a monstrous tube of steel firing a monstrous shell, not being a delicately adjusted piece of mechanism. The gunner, his clothes oil-soaked, who has her breech apart pays no attention to the field of guns around him or the burst of a shell a hundred yards away, no more than the man with a motor breakdown pays to passing traffic. Is he a soldier? Yes, by his uniform, but primarily a mechanic, this man from Birmingham, who is polishing that heavy piece of steel which, when it locks in the breech, holds the shell fast in place and allows all the force of the explosion to pass through the muzzle, while the recoil cylinder takes up the shock as nicely as on a battleship, with no tremble of the base set in the débris of a village. He shakes his head, this preoccupied mechanician. It may be necessary to call in the gun doctor. His "how" has been in service a long time, but is not yet showing the signs of general debility of the eight-inch battery near by. They have fired three times their allowance and are still good for sundry purposes in the gunner-general's play of red and black pins on his map. The life of guns has surpassed all expectations; but the smaller calibers forward and thesoixante-quinzemust not suffer from general debility when they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge.
War is still a matter of projectiles, of missiles thrown by powder, whether cannon or rifle, as it was in Napoleon's time, the change being in range, precision and destructive power. The only new departure is the aeroplane, for the gas attack is another form of the Chinese stink-pot and our old mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to theFlammenwerfer. The tank with its machine guns applied the principle of projectiles from guns behind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be considered an innovation by mediæval knights. Bombs and hand grenades and mortars are also old forms of warfare, and close-quarter fighting with the bayonet, as was evident to all practical observers before the war, will endure as long as the only way to occupy a position is by the presence of men on the spot and as long as the defenders fight to hold it in an arena free of interference by guns which must hold their fire in fear of injury to your own soldiers as well as to the enemy.
With all the inventive genius of Europe applied in this war, the heat ray or any other revolutionary means of killing which would make guns and rifles powerless has not been developed. It is still a question of throwing or shooting projectiles accurately at your opponent, only where once it was javelin, or spear, or arrow, now it is a matter of shells for anywhere from one mile to twenty miles; and the more hits that you could make with javelins or arrows and can make with shells the more likely it is that victory will incline to your side. Where flights of arrows hid the sun, barrages now blanket the earth.
The improvement in shell fire is revolutionary enough of itself. Steadily the power of the guns has increased. What they may accomplish is well illustrated by the account of a German battalion on the Somme. When it was ten miles from the front a fifteen-inch shell struck in its billets just before it was ordered forward. On the way luck was against it at every stage of progress and it suffered in turn from nine-inch, eight-inch and six-inch shells, not to mention bombs from an aviator flying low, and afterward from eighteen pounders. When it reached the trenches a preliminary bombardment was the stroke of fate that led to the prompt capitulation of some two hundred survivors to a British charge. The remainder of the thousand men was practically all casualties from shell-bursts, which, granting some exaggeration in a prisoner's tale, illustrates what killing the guns may wreak if the target is under their projectiles.
The gunnery of 1915 seems almost amateurish to that of 1916, a fact hardly revealed to the public by its reading of bulletins and of such a quantity of miscellaneous information that the significance of it becomes obscure. At the start of the war the Germans had the advantage of many mobile howitzers and immense stores of high explosive shells, while the French were dependent on theirsoixante-quinzeand shrapnel; and at this disadvantage the brilliancy of their work with this wonderful field gun on the Marne and in Lorraine was the most important contributory factor in saving France next to the vital one of French courage and organization. The Allies had to follow the German suit with howitzers and high explosive shells and the cry for more and more guns and more and more munitions for the business of blasting your enemy and his positions to bits became universal.
The first barrage, or curtain of fire, ever used to my knowledge was a feeble German effort in the Ypres salient in the autumn of 1914, though the French drum fire distributed over a certain area had, in a sense, a like effect. To make certain of clearness about fundamentals familiar to those at the front but to the general public only a symbol for something not understood, a curtain of fire is a swath of fragments and bullets from bursting projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent reserves from coming to the support of the front line. It is a barrier of death, the third rail of the battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with their showers of bullets, while the high explosives heave up the earth under foot. Shrapnel largely went out of fashion in the period when high explosives smashed in trenches and dugouts; but the answer was deeper dugouts too stoutly roofed to permit of penetration and shrapnel returned to play a leading part again, as we shall see in the description of a charge under an up-to-date curtain of fire in another chapter.
Counter-battery work is another one of the gunner-general's cares, which requires, as it were, the assistance of the detective branch. Before you can fight you must find the enemy's guns in their hiding-places or take a chance on the probable location of his batteries, which will ordinarily seek every copse, every sunken road and every reverse slope. The interesting captured essay on British fighting methods, by General von Arnim, the general in command of the Germans opposite the British on the Somme, with its minutiæ of directions indicative of how seriously he regarded the New Army, mentioned the superior means of reporting observations to the guns used by British aeroplanes and warned German gunners against taking what had formerly been obvious cover, because British artillery never failed to concentrate on those spots with disastrous results.
Where aeroplanes easily detect lines, be they roads or a column of infantry, as I have said, a battery in the open with guns and gunners the tint of the landscape is not readily distinguishable at the high altitude to which anti-aircraft gunfire restricts aviators. When a concentration begins on a battery, either the gunners must go to their dugouts or run beyond the range of the shells until the "strafe" is over. If A could locate all of B's guns and had two thousand guns of his own to keep B's two thousand silenced by counter-battery work and two thousand additional to turn on B's infantry positions, it would be only a matter of continued charges under cover of curtains of fire until the survivors, under the gusts of shells with no support from their own guns, would yield against such ghastly, hopeless odds.
Such is the power of the guns—and such the game of guns checkmating guns—in their effort to stop the enemy's curtains of fire while maintaining their own that the genius who finds a divining rod which, from a sausage balloon, will point out the position of every enemy battery has fame awaiting him second only to that of the inventor of a system of distilling a death-dealing heat ray from the sun.
And the captured gun! It is a prize no less dear to the infantry's heart to-day than it was a hundred years ago. Our battalion took a battery! There is a thrill for every officer and man and all the friends at home. Muzzle cracked by a direct hit, recoil cylinder broken, wheels in kindling wood, shield fractured—there you have a trophy which is proof of accuracy to all gunners and an everlasting memorial in the town square to the heroism of the men of that locality.
In the gunners' branch of the corps or division staff (which may be next door to the telephone exchange where "Hello!" soldiers are busy all day keeping guns, infantry, transport, staff and units, large and small, in touch) the visitor will linger as he listens to the talk of shop by these experts in mechanical destruction. Generic discussions about which caliber of gun is most efficient for this and that purpose have the floor when the result of a recent action does not furnish a fresher topic. There are faddists and old fogies of course, as in every other band of experts. The reports of the infantry out of its experience under shell-bursts, which should be the gospel, may vary; for the infantry think well of the guns when the charge goes home with casualties light and ill when the going is bad.
Every day charts go up to the commanders showing the expenditure of ammunition and the stock of different calibers on hand; for the army is a most fastidious bookkeeper. Always there must be immense reserves for an emergency, and on the Somme a day's allowance when the battle was only "growling" was a month's a year previous. Let the general say the word and fifty thousand more shells will be fired on Thursday than on Wednesday. He throws off and on the switch of a Niagara of death. The infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant demand. It would like a score of batteries turned on one machine gun, all the batteries in the army against a battalion front, and a sheet of shells in the air night and day, as you yourself would wish if you were up in the firing-line.
Guardians of the precious lives of their own men and destroyers of the enemy's, the guns keep vigil. Every night the flashes on the horizon are a reminder to those in the distance that the battle never ends. Their voices are like none other except guns; the flash from their muzzles is as suggestive as the spark from a dynamo, which says that death is there for reaching out your hand. Something docile is in their might, like the answering of the elephant's bulk to the mahout's command, in their noiseless elevation and depression, and the bigger they are the smoother appears their recoil as they settle back into place ready for another shot. The valleys where the guns hide play tricks with acoustics. I have sat on a hill with a dozen batteries firing under the brow and their crashes were hardly audible.
"Only an artillery preparation, sir!" said an artilleryman as we started up a slope stiff with guns, as the English say, all firing. You waited your chance to run by after a battery had fired and were on the way toward the next one before the one behind sent another round hurtling overhead.
The deep-throated roar of the big calibers is not so hard on the ears as the crack of the smaller calibers. Returning, you go in face of the blasts and then, though it rarely happens, you have in mind, if you have ever been in front of one, the awkward possibility of a premature burst of a shell in your face. Signs tell you where those black mouths which you might not see are hidden, lest you walk straight into one as it belches flame. When you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every caliber at work and your head aches from the noise, the thing becomes overpowering and monotonous. Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fascination of artillery power.
Riding home one day after hours with the guns in an attack, I saw for the first time one of the monster railroad guns firing as I passed by on the road. Would I get out to watch it? I hesitated. Yes, of course. But it was only another gun, a giant tube of steel painted in frog patches to hide it from aerial observation; only another gun, though it sent a two-thousand-pound projectile to a target ten miles away, which a man from a sausage balloon said was "on."
The River Somme—Amiens cathedral—Sunday afternoon promenaders—Women, old men and boys—A prosperous old town—Madame of the little Restaurant des Huîtres—The old waiter at the hotel—The stork and the sea-gull—Distinguished visitors—Horses and dogs—Water carts—Gossips of battle—The donkeys.
The River Somme—Amiens cathedral—Sunday afternoon promenaders—Women, old men and boys—A prosperous old town—Madame of the little Restaurant des Huîtres—The old waiter at the hotel—The stork and the sea-gull—Distinguished visitors—Horses and dogs—Water carts—Gossips of battle—The donkeys.
What contrasts! There was none so pleasant as that when you took the river road homeward after an action. Leaving behind the Ridge and the scarred slope and the crowding motor trucks in their cloud of dust, you were in a green world soothing to eyes which were painful from watching shell-blasts. Along the banks of the Somme on a hot day you might see white figures of muscle-armored youth washed clean of the grime of the firing-line in the exhilaration of minutes, seconds, glowingly lived without regard to the morrow, shaking drops of water free from white skins, under the shade of trees untouched by shell fire, after a plunge in cool waters. Then from a hill where a panorama was flung free to the eye, the Somme at your feet held islands of peace in its shining net as it broke away from confining green walls and wound across the plain toward Amiens.
The Somme is kindly by nature with a desire to embrace all the country around, and Amiens has trained its natural bent to man's service.
It gave softer springs than those of any ambulance for big motor scows that brought the badly wounded down from the front past the rich market gardens that sent their produce in other boats to market. Under bridges its current was divided and subdivided until no one could tell which was Somme and which canal, busy itself as the peasants and the shopkeepers doing a good turn to humankind, grinding wheat in one place and in another farther on turning a loom to weave the rich velvets for which Amiens is famous, and between its stages of usefulness supplying a Venetian effect where balconies leaned across one of its subdivisions, an area of old houses on crooked, short streets at their back huddled with a kind of ancient reverence near the great cathedral.
At first you might be discriminative about the exterior of Amiens cathedral, having in mind only the interior as being worth while. I went inside frequently and the call to go was strongest after seeing an action. Standing on that stone floor where princes and warriors had stood through eight hundred years of the history of France, I have seen looking up at the incomparable nave with its majestic symmetry, Frenchpoilusin their faded blue, helmets in hand and perhaps the white of a bandage showing, spruce generals who had a few hours away from their commands, dust-laden dispatch riders, boyish officers with the bit of blue ribbon that they had won for bravery on their breasts and knots of privates in worn khaki. The man who had been a laborer before he put on uniform was possessed by the same awe as the one who had been favored by birth and education. A black-robed priest passing with his soft tread could not have differed much to the eye from one who was there when the Black Prince was fighting in France or the soldiers of Joan or of Condé came to look at the nave.
The cathedral and the Somme helped to make you whole with the world and with time. After weeks you ceased to be discriminative about the exterior. The cathedral was simply the cathedral. Returning from the field, I knew where on every road I should have the first glimpse of its serene, assertive mass above the sea of roofs—always there, always the same, immortal; while the Ridge rocked with the Allied gun-blasts that formed the police line of fire for its protection.
I liked to walk up the canal tow-path where the townspeople went on Sunday afternoons for their promenade, the blue of French soldiers on leave mingling with civilian black—soldiers with wives or mothers on their arms, safe for the time being. One scene reappears to memory as I write: A young fellow back from the trenches bearing his sturdy boy of two on his shoulder and the black-eyed young mother walking beside him, both having eyes for nothing in the world except the boy.
The old fishermen would tell you as they waited for a bite that the German wasfichu, their faith in the credit of France unimpaired as they lived on the income of the savings of their industry before they retired. You asked gardeners about business, which you knew was good with that ever-hungry and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the market. One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas and I saw a diver preparing to go down to examine the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look on with a lively interest, when we might have seen hundreds of guns firing. It was a change. Nights, after dispatches were written, Gibbs and I, anything but gory-minded, would walk in the silence, having the tow-path to ourselves, and after a mutual agreement to talk of anything but the war would revert to the same old subject.
On other days when only "nibbling" was proceeding on the Ridge you might strike across country over the stubble, flushing partridges from the clover. And the women, the old men and the boys got in all the crops. How I do not know, except by rising early and keeping at it until dark, which is the way that most things worth while are accomplished in this world. Those boys from ten to sixteen who were driving the plow for next year's sowing had become men in their steadiness.
Amiens was happy in the memory of the frustration of what might have happened when her citizens looked at the posters, already valuable relics, that had been put up by von Kluck's army as it passed through on the way to its about-face on the Marne. The old town, out of the battle area, out of the reach of shells, had prospered exceedingly. Shopkeepers, particularly those who sold oysters, fresh fish, fruits, cheese, all delicacies whatsoever to victims of iron rations in the trenches, could retire on their profits unless they died from exhaustion in accumulating more. They took your money so politely that parting with it was a pleasure, no matter what the prices, though they were always lower for fresh eggs than in New York.
We came to know all with the intimacy that war develops, but for sheer character and energy the blue ribbon goes to Madame of the little Restaurant des Huîtres. She needed no gallant husband to make her a marshal's wife, as in the case of Sans-Gêne, for she was a marshal herself. She should have thecroix de guerrewith all the stars and a palm, too, for knowing how to cook. A small stove which was as busy with its sizzling pans as a bombing party stood at the foot of a cramped stairway, whose ascent revealed a few tables, with none for two and everybody sitting elbow to elbow, as it were, in the small dining-room. There were dishes enough and clean, too, and spotless serviettes, but no display of porcelain and silver was necessary, for the food was a sufficient attraction. Madame was all for action. If you did not order quickly she did so for you, taking it for granted that a wavering mind indicated a palate that called for arbitrary treatment.
She had a machine gun tongue on occasion. If you did not like her restaurant it was clear that other customers were waiting for your place, and generals capitulated as promptly as lieutenants. A camaraderie developed at table under the spur of her dynamic presence and her occasional artillery concentrations, which were brief and decisive, for she had no time to waste. Broiled lobster and sole, oysters, filets and chops, sizzling fried potatoes, crisp salads, mountains of forest strawberries with pots of thick cream and delectable coffee descended from her hands, with no mistake in any orders or delay in the prompt succession of courses, on the cloth before you by some legerdemain of manipulation in the narrow quarters to the accompaniment of her repartee. It was past understanding how she accomplished such results in quantity and quality on that single stove with the help of one assistant whom, apparently, she found in the way at times; for the assistant would draw back in the manner of one who had put her finger into an electric fan as her mistress began a manipulation of pots and pans.
If Madame des Huîtres should come to New York, I wonder—yes, she would be overwhelmed by people who had anything like a trench appetite. Soon she would be capitalized, with branches des Huîtres up and down the land, while she would no longer touch a skillet, but would ride in a limousine and grow fat, and I should not like her any more.
People who could not get into des Huîtres or were not in the secret which, I fear, was selfishly kept by those who were, had to dine at the hotel, where a certain old waiter—all young ones being at the front—though called mad could be made the object of method if he had not method in madness. When he seemed about to collapse with fatigue, tell him that there had been a big haul of German prisoners on the Ridge and the blaze of delight in his dark eyes would galvanize him. If he should falter again, a shout of, "Vive l'Entente cordiale! En avant!" would send him off with coat-tails at right angles to his body as he sprang into the midst of the riot of waiters outside the kitchen door, from which he would emerge triumphantly bearing the course that was next in order. Nor would he allow you to skip one. You must take them all or, as the penalty of breaking up the system, you went hungry.
Outside in the court where you went for coffee and might sometimes get it if you gave the head waiter good news from the front, a stork and a sea-gull with clipped wings posed at the fountain. What tales of battle were told in sight of this incongruous pair whose antics relieved the strain of war! When the stork took a step or two the gull plodded along after him and when the gull moved the stork also moved, the two never being more than three or four feet apart. Yet each maintained an attitude of detachment as if loath to admit the slightest affection for each other. Foolish birds, as many said and laughed at them; and again, heroes out of the hell on the Ridge and wholly unconscious of their heroism said that the two had the wisdom of the ages, particularly the stork, though expert artillery opinion was that the practical gull thought that only his own watchfulness kept the wisdom of the ages from being drowned in the fountain in an absent-minded moment, though the water was not up to a stork's ankle-joint. More nonsense, when the call was for reaction from the mighty drama, was woven around these entertainers by men who could not go to plays than would be credible to people reading official bulletins; woven by dining parties of officers who when dusk fell went indoors and gathered around the piano before going into a charge on the morrow.
At intervals men in civilian clothes, soft hats, gaiters over everyday trousers, golf suits, hunting suits, appeared at the hotel or were seen stalking about captured German trenches, their garb as odd in that ordered world of khaki as powdered wig, knee-breeches and silver buckles strolling up Piccadilly or Fifth Avenue. Prime ministers, Cabinet members, great financiers, potentates, journalists, poets, artists of many nationalities came to do the town. They saw the Ridge under its blanket of shell-smoke, the mighty columns of transport, all the complex, enormous organization of that secret world, peeked into German dugouts, and in common with all observers estimated the distance of the nearest shell-burst from their own persons.
Many were amazed to find that generals worked in chateaux over maps, directing by telephone, instead of standing on hilltops to give their commands, and that war was a systematic business, which made those who had been at the front writing and writing to prove that it was wonder if nobody read what they wrote. An American who said that he did not see why all the trucks and horses and wagons and men did not lose their way was suggestive of the first vivid impressions which the "new eye" brought to the scene. Another praised my first book for the way it had made life at the front clear and then proceeded to state his surprise at finding that trenches did not run straight, but in traverses, and that soldiers lived in houses instead of tents and gunners did not see their targets. Now he had seen this mighty army at work for himself. It is the only way. I give up hope of making others see it.
So grim the processes of fighting, so lacking in picturesqueness, that one welcomed any of the old symbols of war. I regretted yet rejoiced that the horse was still a factor. It was good to think that the gasoline engine had saved the sore backs of the pack animals of other days, removed the horror of dead horses beside the road and horses driven to exhaustion by the urgency of fierce necessity, and that a shell in the transport meant a radiator smashed instead of flesh torn and scattered. Yet the horse was still serving man at the front and the dog still flattering him. I have seen dogs lying dead on the field where the mascot of a battalion had run along with the men in a charge; dogs were found in German dugouts, and one dog adopted by a corps staff had refused to leave the side of his fallen master, a German officer, until the body was removed.
The horse brought four-footed life into the dead world of the slope, patiently drawing his load, mindless of gun-blasts and the shriek of shell-fragments once he was habituated to them. As he can pass over rough ground, he goes into areas where no motor vehicle except the tanks may go. He need not wait on the road-builders before he takes the eighteen pounders to their new positions or follows them with ammunition. Far out on the field I have seen groups of artillery horses waiting in a dip in the ground while their guns were within five hundred yards of the firing-line, and winding across dead fields toward an isolated battery the caisson horses trotting along with shells bursting around them.
Upon August days when the breeze that passed overhead was only tantalization to men in communication trenches carrying up ammunition and bombs, when dugouts were ovens, when the sun made the steel helmet a hot skillet-lid over throbbing temples, the horse-drawn water carts wound up the slope to assuage burning thirst and back again, between the gates of hell and the piping station, making no more fuss than a country postman on his rounds.
Practically all the water that the fighters had, aside from what was in their canteens, must be brought up in this way, for the village wells were filled with the remains of shell-crushed houses. Gossips of battle the water men, they and the stretcher-bearers both non-combatants going and coming under the shells up to the battle line, but particularly so the water men, who passed the time of day with every branch, each working in its own compartment. When the weather was bad the water man's business became slack and the lot of the stretcher-bearer grew worse in the mud. What stories the stretcher-bearers brought in of wounded blown off litters by shells, of the necessity of choosing the man most likely to survive when only one of two could be carried, of whispered messages from the dying, and themselves keeping to their work with cheery British phlegm; and the water men told of new gun positions, of where the shells were thickest, of how the fight was going.
It irritated the water men, prosaic in their disregard of danger, to have a tank hit on the way out. If it were hit on the way back when it was empty this was of less account, for new tanks were waiting in reserve. Tragedy for them was when a horse was killed and often they returned with horses wounded. It did not occur to the man that he might be hit; it was the loss of a horse or a tank that worried him. One had his cart knocked over by a salvo of shells and set upright by the next, whereupon, according to the account, he said to his mare: "Come on, Mary, I always told you the Boches were bad shots!" But there are too many stories of the water men to repeat without sifting.
We must not forget the little donkeys which the French brought from Africa to take the place of men in carrying supplies up to the trenches. Single file they trotted along on their errand and they had their own hospitals for wounded. It is said that when curtains of fire began ahead they would throw forward their long ears inquiringly and hug close to the side of the trench for cover and even edge into a dugout with the men, who made room for as much donkey as possible, or when in the open they would seek the shelter of shell-craters. Lest their perspicacity be underrated, French soldiers even credited the wise elders among them with the ability to distinguish between different calibers of shells.
"Nose dives" and "crashers"—The most intense duels in history—Aviators the pride of nations—Beauchamp—The D'Artagnan of the air—Mastery of the air—The aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure—Nearer immortality than any other living man can be—The British are reckless aviators—Aerial influence on the soldier's psychology—Varieties of aeroplanes—Immense numbers of aeroplanes in the battles in the air.
"Nose dives" and "crashers"—The most intense duels in history—Aviators the pride of nations—Beauchamp—The D'Artagnan of the air—Mastery of the air—The aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure—Nearer immortality than any other living man can be—The British are reckless aviators—Aerial influence on the soldier's psychology—Varieties of aeroplanes—Immense numbers of aeroplanes in the battles in the air.
Wing tip touching wing tip two phantoms passed in the mist fifteen thousand feet above the earth and British plane and German plane which had grazed each other were lost in the bank of cloud. The dark mass which an aviator sees approaching when he is over the battlefield proves to be a fifteen-inch shell at the top of its parabola which passes ten feet over his head. A German aviator thinking he is near home circles downward on an overcast day toward a British aerodrome to find out his mistake too late, and steps out of his machine to be asked by his captors if he won't come in and have tea. Thus, true accounts that come to the aviators' mess make it unnecessary to carry your imagination with you at the front.
They talk of "nose dives" and "crashers," which mean the way an enemy's plane was brought down, and although they have no pose or theatricalism the consciousness of belonging to the wonder corps of modern war is not lacking. One returns from a flight and finds that a three-inch anti-aircraft gun-shell has gone through the body of his plane.
"So that was it! Hardly felt it!" he said.
If the shell had exploded? Oh, well, that is a habit of shells; and in that case the pilot would be in the German lines unrecognizable among the débris of his machine after a "crasher."
Where in the old West gunmen used to put a notch on their revolver handle for every man killed, now in each aviator's record is the number of enemy planes which he has brought down. When a Frenchman has ten his name goes into the official bulletin. Everything contributes to urge on the fighting aviator to more and more victims till one day he, too, is a victim. Never were duels so detached or so intense. No clashing of steel, no flecks of blood, only two men with wings. While the soldier feels his weapon go home and the bomber sees his bomb in flight, the aviator watches for his opponent to drop forward in his seat as the first sign that he has lost control of his plane and of victory, and he does not hear the passing of the bullets that answer those from his own machine gun. One hero comes to take the place of another who has been lost. A smiling English youth was embarrassed when asked how he brought down the great Immelmann, most famous of German aviators.
Nelson's "Death or Westminster Abbey" has become paraphrased to "Death or thecommuniqué." At twenty-one, while a general of division is unknown except in the army an aviator's name may be the boast of a nation. In him is expressed the national imagination, the sense of hero-worship which people love to personify. The British aviation corps stuck to anonymity until the giving of a Victoria Cross one day revealed that Lieutenant Ball had brought down his twenty-sixth German plane.
Soon after the taking of Fort Douaumont when I was at Verdun, Beauchamp, blond, blue-eyed and gentle of manner, who had thrilled all France by bombing Essen, said, "Now they will expect me to go farther and do something greater;" and I was not surprised to learn a month later that he had been killed. Something in the way he spoke convinced me that he foresaw death and accepted it as a matter of course; and he realized, too, the penalty of being a hero. He had flown over Essen and dropped his bombs and seen them burst, which was all of his story.
The public thrill over such exploits is the greater because of their simplicity. An aviator has no experiences on the road; he cannot stop to talk to anyone. There is flight; there is a lever that releases a bomb; there is a machine gun. He may not indulge in psychology, which would be wool-gathering, when every faculty is objectively occupied. He is strangely helpless, a human being borne through space by a machine, and when he returns to the mess he really has little to tell except as it relates to mechanism and technique.
The Royal Flying Corps, which is the official name, never wants for volunteers. Ever the number of pilots is in excess of the number of machines. Young men with embroidered wings on their breasts, which prove that they have qualified, waited on factories to turn out wings for flying. Flight itself is simple, but the initiative equal to great deeds is another thing. Here you revert to an innate gift of the individual who, finding in danger the zest of a glorious, curiosity, the intoxication of action, clear eye, steady hand answering lightning quickness of thought, becomes the D'Artagnan of the air. There is no telling what boyish neophyte will show a steady hand in daring the supreme hazards with light heart, or what man whom his friends thought was born for aviation may lack the touch of genius.
Far up in the air there is an imaginary boundary line which lies over the battle line; and there is another which may be on your side or on the other side of the battle line. It is the location of the second line that tells who has the mastery of the air. A word of bare and impressive meaning this of mastery in war, which represents force without qualification; that the other man is down and you are up, the other fends and you thrust. More glorious than the swift rush of destroyer to a battleship that of the British planes whose bombs brought down six German sausage balloons in flames before the Grand Offensive began.
I need never have visited an aerodrome on the Somme to know whether Briton and Frenchman or German was master of the air. The answer was there whenever you looked in the heavens in the absence of iron crosses on the hovering or scudding or turning plane wings and the multiplicity of bull's-eyes; in the abandoned way that both British and French pickets flew over the enemy area, as if space were theirs and they dared any interference. If you saw a German plane appear you could count three or four Allied planes appearing from different directions to surround it. The German had to go or be caught in a cross fire, and manoeuvered to his death.
Mastery of the air is another essential of superiority for an offensive; one of the vital features in the organized whole of an attack. As you press men and guns forward enemy planes must not locate your movements. Your planes with fighting planes as interference must force a passage for your observers to spot the fall of shells on new targets, to assist in reporting the progress of charges and to play their proper auxiliary part in the complex system of army intelligence.
Before the offensive new aerodromes began to appear along the front at the same time that new roads were building. An army that had lacked both planes and guns at the start now had both. Every aviator knew that he was expected to gain and hold the mastery; his part was set no less than that of the infantry. Where should "the spirit that quickeneth" dwell if not with the aviators? No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure.
He leaves a comfortable bed, with bath, a good breakfast, the comradeship of a pleasant mess, the care of servants, to mount his steed. When he returns he has only to step out of his seat. Mechanics look after his plane and refreshment and shade in summer and warmth in winter await alike the spoiled child of the favored, adventurous corps who has not the gift and never quite dares the great hazards as well as the one who dares them to his certain end. All depends on the man.
Rising ten or fifteen thousand feet, slipping in and out of clouds, the aviator breathes pure ozone on a dustless roadway, the world a carpet under him; and though death is at his elbow it is no grimy companion like death in the trenches. He is up or he is down, and when he is up the thrill that holds his faculties permits of no apprehensions. There is no halfway business of ghastly wounds which foredoom survival as a cripple. Alive, he is nearer immortality than any other living man can be; dead, his spirit leaves him while he is in the heavens. Death comes splendidly, quickly, and until the last moment he is trying to keep control of his machine. It is not for him to envy the days of cavalry charges. He does not depend upon the companionship of other men to carry him on, but is the autocrat of his own fate, the ruler of his own dreams. All hours of daylight are the same to him. At any time he may be called to flight and perhaps to die. The glories of sunset and sunrise are his between the sun and the earth.
You expect the British to be cool aviators, but with their phlegm, as we have seen, goes that singular love of risk, of adventure, which sends them to shoot tigers and climb mountains. Indeed, the Englishman's phlegm is a sort of leash holding in check a certain recklessness which his seeming casualness conceals. After it had become almost a law that no aviator should descend lower than twelve thousand feet, British aviators on the Somme descended to three hundred, emptied their machine guns into the enemy, and escaped the patter of rifle fire which the surprised German soldiers had hardly begun before the plane at two miles a minute or more was out of range.
When Lord Kitchener was inspecting an aerodrome in France in 1914 he said: "One day you will be flying and evoluting in squadrons like the navy;" and the aviators, then feeling their way step by step, smiled doubtfully, convinced that "K" had an imagination. A few months later the prophecy had come true and the types of planes had increased until they were as numerous as the types of guns.
The swift falcon waiting fifteen thousand feet up for his prey to add another to his list in thecommuniquéis as distinct from the one in which I crossed the channel as the destroyer is from the cruiser and from some still bigger types as is the cruiser from a battleship. While the enemy was being fought down, bombs were dropped not by pounds but by tons on villages and billets, on ammunition dumps and rail-heads, adding their destruction to that of the shells.
There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of observation, for it affected the enemy'smorale. A soldier likes to see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away. The aerial influence on his psychology is enormous, for he can watch the planes as he lies in a shell-crater with his machine gun or stands guard in the trench; he has glimpses of passing wings overhead between the bursts of shells. To know that his guns are not replying adequately and that every time one of his planes appears it is driven to cover takes the edge off initiative, courage and discipline, in the resentment that he is handicapped.
German prisoners used to say on the Somme that their aviators were "funks," though the Allied aviators knew that it was not their opponents' lack of courage which was the principal fault, even if they had lostmoralefrom being the under dog and lacked British and French initiative, but numbers and material. It was resource against resource again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufacture of the fragile framework, of the wonderful engines with their short lives, and of the skilled battalions of workers in factories. The Germans had to bring more planes from another front in order to restore the balance. The Allies foreseeing this brought still more themselves, till the numbers were so immense that when a battle between a score of planes on either side took place no one dared venture the opinion that the limit had been reached—not while there was so much room in the air and volunteers for the aviation corps were so plentiful.
Thiepval again—Director of tactics of an army corps—Graduates of Staff Colleges—Army jargon—An army director's office—"Hope you will see a good show"—"This road is shelled; closed to vehicles"—A perfect summer afternoon—The view across No Man's Land—Nests of burrowers more cunning than any rodents—men—Tranquil preliminaries to an attack—The patent curtain of fire—Registering by practice shots—Running as men will run only from death—The tall officer who collapsed—"The shower of death."
Thiepval again—Director of tactics of an army corps—Graduates of Staff Colleges—Army jargon—An army director's office—"Hope you will see a good show"—"This road is shelled; closed to vehicles"—A perfect summer afternoon—The view across No Man's Land—Nests of burrowers more cunning than any rodents—men—Tranquil preliminaries to an attack—The patent curtain of fire—Registering by practice shots—Running as men will run only from death—The tall officer who collapsed—"The shower of death."
"We had a good show day before yesterday," said Brigadier-General Philip Howell, when I went to call on him one day. "Sorry you were not here. You could have seen it excellently."
The corps of which he was general staff officer had taken a section of first-line trench at Thiepval with more prisoners than casualties, which is the kind of news they like to hear at General Headquarters. Thiepval was always in the background of the army's mind, the symbol of rankling memory which irritated British stubbornness and consoled the enemy for his defeat of July 15th and his gradual loss of the Ridge. The Germans, on the defensive, considered that the failure to take Thiepval at the beginning of the Somme battle proved its impregnability; the British, on the offensive, considered no place impregnable.
Faintly visible from the hills around Albert, distinctly from the observation post in a high tree, the remains of the village looked like a patch of coal dust smeared in a fold of the high ground. When British fifteen-inch shells made it their target some of the dust rose in a great geyser and fell back into place; but there were cellars in Thiepval which even fifteen-inch shells could not penetrate.
"However, we'll make the Germans there form the habit of staying indoors," said a gunner.
Howell who had the Thiepval task in hand I had first known at Uskub in Macedonia in the days of the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy—days which seem far away. A lieutenant then, Howell had an assignment fromThe Times, while home on leave from India, in order to make a study of the Balkan situation. In our walks around Uskub as we discussed the politics and the armies of the world I found that all was grist that came to his keen mind. His ideas about soldiering were explicit and practical. It was such hard-working, observant officers as he, most of them students at one time or another at the Staff College, who, when the crisis came, as the result of their application in peace time, became the organizers and commanders of the New Army. The lieutenant I had met at Uskub was now, at thirty-eight, the director of the tactics of an army corps which was solving the problem of reducing the most redoubtable of field works.
Whenever I think of the Staff College I am reminded that at the close of the American Civil War the commanders of all the armies and most of the corps were graduates of West Point, which serves to prove that a man of ability with a good military education has the start of one who has not, though no laws govern geniuses; and if we should ever have to fight another great war I look for our generals to have studied at Leavenworth and when the war ends for the leaders to be men whom the public did not know when it began.
"We shall have another show to-morrow and I think that will be a good one, too," said Howell.
All attacks are "shows;" big shows over two or three miles or more of front, little shows over a thousand yards or so, while five hundred yards is merely "cleaning up a trench." It may seem a flippant way of speaking, but it is simply the application of jargon to the everyday work of an organization. An attack that fails is a "washout," for not all attacks succeed. If they did, progress would be a matter of marching.
"Zero is at four; come at two," Howell said when I was going.
At two the next afternoon I found him occupied less with final details than with the routine business of one who is clearing his desk preparatory to a week-end holiday. Against the wall of what had been once a bedroom in the house of the leading citizen of the town, which was his office, he had an improvised bookkeeper's desk and on it were the mapped plans of the afternoon's operation, which he had worked over with the diligence and professional earnestness of an architect over his blue prints. He had been over the ground and studied it with the care of a landscape gardener who is going to make improvements.
"A smoke barrage screen along there," he explained, indicating the line of a German trench, "but a real attack along here"—which sounded familiar from staff officers in chateaux.
Every detail of the German positions was accurately outlined, yard by yard, their machine guns definitely located.
"We're uncertain about that one," he remarked, laying his pencil on the map symbol for an M.G.
Trench mortars had another symbol, deep dugouts another. It was the business of somebody to get all this information without being communicative about his methods. Referring to a section of a hundred yards or more he remarked that an eager company commander had thought that he could take a bit of German trench there and had taken it, which meant that the gunners had to be informed so as to rearrange the barrage or curtain of fire with the resulting necessity of fresh observations and fresh registry of practice shots. I judged that Howell did not want the men to be too eager; he wanted them just eager enough.
This game being played along the whole front has, of course, been likened to chess, with guns and men as pieces. I had in mind the dummy actors and dummy scenery with which stage managers try out their acts, only in this instance there was never any rehearsal on the actual stage with the actual scenery unless a first attack had failed, as the Germans will not permit such liberties except under machine gun fire. A call or two came over the telephone about some minor details, the principal ones being already settled.
"It's time to go," he said finally.
The corps commander was downstairs in the dining-room comfortably smoking his pipe after tea. There would be nothing for him to do until news of the attack had been received. "I hope you will see a good show," he remarked, by way ofau revoir.
How earnestly he hoped it there is no use of mentioning here. It is taken for granted. Carefully thought out plans backed by hundreds of guns and the lives of men at stake—and against the Thiepval fortifications!
"Yes, we'll make it nicely," concluded Howell, as we went down the steps. A man used to motoring ten miles to catch the nine-thirty to town could not have been more certain of the disposal of his time than this soldier on the way to an attack. His car which was waiting had a right of way up to front such as is enjoyed only by the manager of the works on his own premises. Of course he paid no attention to the sign, "This road is shelled; closed to vehicles," at the beginning of a stretch of road which looked unused and desolate.
"A car in front of me here the other day received a direct hit from a 'krump,' and car and passengers practically disappeared before my eyes," he remarked, without further dwelling on the incident; for the Germans were, in turn, irritated with the insistence of these stubborn British that they could take Thiepval.
Three prisoners in the barbed-wire inclosure that we passed looked lonely. They must have been picked up in a little bombing affair in a sap.
"I think that they will have plenty of companions this evening," said Howell. "How they will enjoy their dinner!" He smiled in recollection as did I of that familiar sight of prisoners eating. Nothing excites hunger like a battle or gives such zest to appetite as knowledge that you are out of danger. I know that it is true and so does everybody at the front.
As his car knew no regulations except his wishes he might take it as far as it could go without trying to cross trenches. I wonder how long it would have taken me if I had had a map and asked no questions to find my way to the gallery seat which Howell had chosen for watching the show. After we had passed guns with only one out of ten firing leisurely but all with their covers off, the gunners near their pieces and ample ammunition at hand, we cut straight up the slope, Howell glancing at his wrist watch and asking if he were walking too fast for me. We dropped into a communication trench at a point which experience had proven was the right place to begin to take cover.
"This is a good place," he said at length, and we rubbed our helmets with some of the chalk lumps of the parapet, which left the black spot of our field glasses the only bit of us not in harmony with our background.
It was a perfect afternoon in late summer, without wind or excessive heat, the blue sky unflecked; such an afternoon as you would choose for lolling in a hammock and reading a book. The foreground was a slope downward to a little valley where the usual limbless tree-trunks were standing in a grove that had been thoroughly shelled. No one was in sight there, and an occasional German five-point-nine shell burst on the mixture of splinters and earth.
On the other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see. Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-craters and the remains of the dead from the British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed. On the other side of this was two hundred yards of desolate stretch up to the wavy, chalky excavation from the deep cutting of the German first-line trench, as distinct as a white line on dark-brown paper. There was no sign of life here, either, or to the rear where ran the network of other excavations as the result of the almost two years of German digging, the whole thrown in relief on the slope up to the bare trunks of two or three trees thrust upward from the smudge of the ruins of Thiepval.
Just a knoll in rolling farm country, that was all; but it concealed burrows upon burrows of burrowers more cunning than any rodents—men. Since July 1st the Germans had not been idle. They had had time to profit from the lesson of the attack with additions and improvements. They had deepened dugouts and joined them by galleries; they had Box and Cox hiding-places; nests defensible from all sides which became known as Mystery Works and Wonder Works. The message of that gashed and spaded hillside was one of mortal defiance.
Occasionally a British high explosive broke in the German trench and all up and down the line as far as we could see this desultory shell fire was proceeding, giving no sign of where the next attack was coming, which was part of the plan.
"It's ten to four!" said Howell. "We were here in ample time. I hope we get them at relief," which was when a battalion that had been on duty was relieved by a battalion that had been in rest.
He laid his map on the parapet and the location and plan of the attack became clear as a part of the extensive operations in the Thiepval-Mouquet Farm sector. The British were turning the flank of these Thiepval positions as they swung in from the joint of the break of July 1st up to the Pozières Ridge. A squeeze here and a squeeze there; an attack on that side and then on this; one bite after another.
"I hope you will like our patent barrage," said the artillery general, as he stopped for a moment on the way to a near-by observation post. "We are thinking rather well of it ourselves of late." He did not even have to touch a pushbutton to turn on the current. He had set four as zero.
I am not going to speak of suspense before the attack as being in the very air and so forth. I felt it personally, but the Germans did not feel it or, at least, the British did not want them to feel it. There was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for shell-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme offensive had begun. One could ask nothing better than that the tranquillity should put the Germans to sleep. To the staff expert, however, the dead world lived without the sight of men. Every square rod of ground had some message.
Of course, I knew what was coming at four o'clock, but I was amazed at its power and accuracy when it did come—this improved method of artillery preparation, this patent curtain of fire. An outburst of screaming shells overhead that became a continuous, roaring sweep like that of a number of endless railroad trains in the air signified that the guns which had been idle were all speaking. Every one by scattered practice shots had registered on the German first-line trench at the point where its shell-bursts would form its link in the chain of bursts. Over the wavy line of chalk for the front of the attack broke the flashes of cracking shrapnel jackets, whose bullets were whipping up spurts of chalk like spurts of dust on a road from a hailstorm.
As the gun-blasts began I saw some figures rise up back of the German trench. I judged that they were the relief coming up or a working party that had been under cover. These Germans had to make a quick decision: Would they try a leap for the dugouts or a leap to the rear? They decided on flight. A hundred-yard sprint and they would be out of that murderous swath laid so accurately on a narrow belt. They ran as men will only run from death. No goose-stepping or "after you, sir" limited their eagerness. I had to smile at their precipitancy and as some dropped it was hard to realize that they had fallen from death or wounds. They seemed only manikins in a pantomime.
Then a lone figure stepped up out of a communication trench just back of the German first line. This tall officer, who could see nothing between walls of earth where he was, stood up in full view looking around as if taking stock of the situation, deciding, perhaps, whether that smoke barrage to his right now rolling out of the British trench was on the real line of attack or was only for deception; observing and concluding what his men, I judge, were never to know, for, as a man will when struck a hard blow behind the knees, he collapsed suddenly and the earth swallowed him up before the bursts of shrapnel smoke had become so thick over the trench that it formed a curtain.
There must have been a shell a minute to the yard. Shrapnel bullets were hissing into the mouths of dugouts; death was hugging every crevice, saying to the Germans:
"Keep down! Keep out of the rain! If you try to get out with a machine gun you will be killed! Our infantry is coming!"