Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.
"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff," said a soldier, and another corrected him:
"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up flares!"
"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"
"And singing the hymn of hate!"
Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.
"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"
"Ours or the Boches'?"
"Ours, from the way the smoke went—our fuse!"
"No, theirs!"
Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.
"Not enough guns—not enough noise for an attack!" said experiencedTommy, who knew what an attack was like.
The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.
"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.
"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at printing?"
The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No thoroughfare!" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not? The line had been in the same position for six months.
"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.
The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall, bought at a shop in the nearest town.
When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.
The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheatfield. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night.
Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties.
Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was not right to ask the youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.
"Has anyone asked him it yet?" one inquired, referring to some question to the guest.
"Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be over?"
It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world. We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.
Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said:
"I will! I will strafe the chicken!" 'Gott strafe England!' Strafe has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers. "Won't you strafe a little for us?" Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes? That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody's lap or a wing in anybody's eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls that came to table.
Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn't it better that way? Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn't it the way of the ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day? With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances. In their lightheartedness they made war seem a keen sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches. Youth's resources defy monotony and death at the same time.
An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and piling sandbags in the wheatfield. The plan was to slip out as soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get behind the Germans' own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.
Before dinner, however, J———, who was to be the general of the expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.
J——had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in summer. He wore shorts with his knees bare. When he had to do a "crawl" he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees. He and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of the enemy's sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and- seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young men.
They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the turtles' heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the wiser. Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they were old and must have been there for some time.
"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it," said J———. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.
We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international copyright in strategy is recognized. We rushed out of the mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.
"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young lieutenant.
If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation, they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."
This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a fusillade in this kind of a test.
After dinner J———rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun expedition. J———'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were also—well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!
"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J———on his return.
"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg," said the other officer.
"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got about the only shot fired at us."
"Need a stretcher?"
"No."
Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.
Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more interesting and death more likely.
"It's dark enough, now," said one of the youngsters who was out on another scout. "We'll go out with the patrol."
By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly detected. Light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides are on the prowl.
"Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have," said the young officer. "They would be more useful than aeroplanes in locating the enemy's gun-positions. A properly reliable owl would come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheatfield at such a point and a machine-gun would wipe out that patrol."
We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out of the front trench toward the Germans.
"Anybody out?" he asked a soldier who was on guard at the end of it.
"Yes, two."
Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge, as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol returned it closed the gate again.
"Look out for that wire—just there! Do you see it? We've everything to keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass!' signs."
It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head between the trenches.
"Down flat!" whispered the officer.
It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles—between the fighting powers of England and Germany—you take the hint. The flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of sparks in our faces.
"What if we had been seen?"
"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they might have got us."
"It's hard to believe," I said.
So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.
We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.
Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides, like that around some camp-fire on the plains.
It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy!" But by the time you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's. Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the command of a company of men.
It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting, shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets swarmed.
It was two a.m. From the dug-outs came unmistakable sounds of slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer's bedchamber was indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it "home-like." He lay down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I was not the object of favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot, fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans rather than the American cousin in mind.
"The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable side, I have found," said my host. "It may not appear so at first, but you will find it works out that way."
Nevertheless, I slept, my last recollection that of sniping shots, to be awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade—the "morning hate" or the "morning strafe" as it is called. After the vigil of darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheatfield watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself, unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were yawning and stirring from their dug-outs. After the muster they would take the places of those who had been "on the bridge" through the night.
"It's a case of how little water you can wash with, isn't it?" I said to the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles from a town which had water laid on. But bringing a water supply in pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back of the trenches.
"Don't expect much for breakfast," said the strafer of the chicken. But it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home and abroad.
J———was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the trench.
XXA School In Bombing
It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the anarchists' weapon, which has now become as respectable as the rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.
Present was the chief instructor, a Scottish subaltern with blue eyes, a pleasant smile, and a Cock-o'-the-North spirit. He might have been twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.
Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars—and very much of a regular—who had three ribbons which he had won in previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These two understood each other.
"If you don't drop it, why, it's all right!" said the sergeant. "Of course, if you do———"
I did not drop it.
"And when you throw it, sir, you must look out and not hit the man behind you and knock the bomb out of your hand. That has happened before to an absent-minded fellow who was about to toss one at the Boches, and it doesn't do to be absent-minded when you throw bombs."
"They say that you sometimes pick up the German bombs and chuck them back before they explode," I suggested.
"Yes, sir, I've read things like that in some of the accounts of the reporters who write from Somewhere in France. You don't happen to know where that is, sir? All I can say is that if you are going to do it you must be quick about it. I shouldn't advise delaying decision, sir, or perhaps when you reached down to pick it up, neither your hand nor the bomb would be there. They'd have gone off together, sir."
"Have you ever been hurt in your handling of bombs?" I asked.
Surprise in the bland blue eyes. "Oh, no, sir! Bombs are well behaved if you treat them right. It's all in being thoughtful and considerate of them!" Meanwhile, he was jerking at some kind of a patent fuse set in a shell of high explosive. "This is a poor kind, sir. It's been discarded, but I thought that you might like to see it. Never did like it. Always making trouble!"
More distance between the audience and the performer. "Now I've got it, sir—get down, sir!" The audience carried out instructions to the letter, as army regulations require. It got behind the protection of one of the practice-trench traverses. He threw the discard behind another wall of earth. There was a sharp report, a burst of smoke, and some fragments of earth were tossed into the air.
In a small affair of two hundred yards of trench a week before, it was estimated that the British and the Germans together threw about five thousand bombs in this fashion. It was enough to sadden any Minister of Munitions. However, the British kept the trench.
"Do the men like to become bombers?" I asked the subaltern.
"I should say so! It puts them up in front. It gives them a chance to throw something, and they don't get much cricket in France, you see. We had a pupil here last week who broke the throwing record for distance. He was as pleased as Punch with himself. A first-class bombing detachment has a lot of pride of corps."
To bomb soon became as common a verb with the army as to bayonet. "We bombed them out" meant a section of trench taken by throwing bombs. As you know, a trench is dug and built with sandbags in zigzag traverses. In following the course of a trench it is as if you followed the sides of the squares of a checker board up and down and across on the same tier of squares. The square itself is a bank of earth, with the cut on either side and in front of it. When a bombing-party bombs its way into possession of a section of German trench, there are Germans under cover of the traverses on either side. They are waiting around the corner to shoot the first British head that shows itself.
"It is important that you and not the Boches chuck the bombs over first," explained the subaltern. "Also, that you get them into the right traverse, or they may be as troublesome to you as to the enemy."
With bombs bursting in their faces, the Germans who are not put out of action are blinded and stunned. In that moment when they are off guard, the aggressors leap around the corner.
"And then?"
"Stick 'em, sir!" said the matter-of-fact sergeant. "Yes, the cold steel is best. And do it first! As Mr. MacPherson said, it's very important to do it first."
It has been found that something short is handy for this kind of work. In such cramped quarters—a ditch six feet deep and from two to three feet broad—the rifle is an awkward length to permit of prompt and skilful use of the bayonet.
"Yes, sir, you can mix it up better with something handy—to think that British soldiers would come to fighting like assassins!" said the sergeant. "You must be spry on such occasions. It's no time for wool- gathering."
Not a smile from him or the subaltern all the time. They were the kind you would like to have along in a tight corner, whether you had to fight with knives, fists, or seventeen-inch howitzers.
The sergeant took us into the storehouse where he kept his supply of bombs.
"What if a German shell should strike your storehouse?" I asked.
"Then, sir, I expect that most of the bombs would be exploded.Bombs are very peculiar in their habits. What do you think, sir?"
It was no trouble to show stock, as clerks at the stores say. He brought forth all the different kinds of bombs that British ingenuity had invented—but no, not all invented. These would mount into the thousands. Every British inventor who knows anything about explosives has tried his hand at a new kind of bomb. One means all the kinds which the British War Office has considered worth a practice test. The spectator was allowed to handle each one as much as he pleased. There had been occasions, that boyish Scottish subaltern told me, when the men who were examining the products of British ingenuity—well, the subaltern had sandy hair, too, which heightened the effect of his blue eyes.
There were yellow and green and blue and black and striped bombs; egg-shaped, barrel-shaped, conical, and concave bombs; bombs that were exploded by pulling a string and by pressing a button—all these to be thrown by hand, without mentioning grenades and other larger varieties to be thrown by mechanical means, which would have made a Chinese warrior of Confucius' time or a Roman legionary feel at home.
"This was the first-born," the subaltern explained, "the first thing we could lay our hands on when the close quarters' trench warfare began."
It was as out of date as grandfather's smooth-bore, the tin-pot bomb that both sides used early in the winter. A wick was attached to the high explosive, wrapped in cloth and stuck in an ordinary army jam tin.
"Quite home-made, as you see, sir," remarked the sergeant. "Used to fix them up ourselves in the trenches in odd hours—saved burying the refuse jam tins according to medical corps directions—and you threw them at the Boches. Had to use a match to light it. Very old- fashioned, sir. I wonder if that old fuse has got damp. No, it's going all right"—and he threw the jam pot, which made a good explosion. Later, when he began hammering the end of another he looked up in mild surprise at the dignified back-stepping of the spectators.
"Is that fuse out?" someone asked.
"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," he replied. "It's safer. But here is the best; we're discarding the others," he went on, as he picked up a bomb.
It was a pleasure to throw this crowning achievement of experiments. It fitted your hand nicely; it threw easily; it did the business; it was fool-proof against a man in love or a war-poet.
"We saw as soon as this style came out," said the sergeant, "that it was bound to be popular. Everybody asks for it—except the Boches, sir."
XXIMy Best Day At The Front
It was the best day because one ran the gamut of the mechanics and emotions of modern war within a single experience—and oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!
It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large château. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the British trenches and all the German trenches—spider-weblike lines that cunning human spiders had spun with spades—in that region; and where our batteries were and where some of the German batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.
To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their day.
That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly "hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians agree. Good war is to have millions of shells and vast reserves ready and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.
But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire- economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with shells and then dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than Calais.
In their official bulletin the Germans said that they had recovered the trench. They did recover part of it for a few hours. It was then that the commander on the German side must have sent in his report to catch the late evening editions. Commanders do not like to confess the loss of trenches. It is the sort of thing that makes headquarters ask: "What is the matter with you over there, anyway?" There was a time when the German bulletins about the Western front seemed rather truthful; but of late they have been getting into bad habits.
The British general knew what was coming; he knew that he would start the German hornets out of their nest when he took the trench; he knew, too, that he could rely upon his men to hold till they were told to retire or there were none left to retire. The British are a home- loving people, who do not like to be changing their habitations. In succeeding days the question up and down the lines was, "Have we still got that trench?" Only two hundred yards of ditch on the continent of Europe! But was it still ours? Had the Germans succeeded in "strafing" us out of it yet? They had shelled all the trenches in the region of the lost trench and had made three determined and unsuccessful counter-attacks when, on the fifth day, we returned to the château to ask if it were practicable to visit the new trench.
"At your own risk!" said the staff officer. If we preferred we could sit on the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer day. Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape. Who was at war? Why was anyone at war? Two staff motor-cars awaiting orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages, who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual evidence of war. The staff officer served us with helmets for protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in the staff officer's eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest. You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff officer's eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from the trenches to join the "brain-trust" in the château, know a great deal more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, "At their own risk."
There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a correspondent's leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark at some headquarters, I recall, that "You never know!" which shows that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half the knowledge—and they are at great pains not to part with their half.
We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White- capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front.
At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.
There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land. One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress.
It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors.
True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.
There were three of us, two correspondents, L——— and myself, and R———, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind. Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre, Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not like. We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the public library and to the right for the museum.
Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places; and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a waste of the Kaiser's munitions as there was no one in sight. Yet there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high. They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those deserted roads.
The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind. Anything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so important in war as now. They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine—a machine that money cannot reproduce—that gun-machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.
Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that British generals become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:
"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.
By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide.
That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!" If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.
Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come.
Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.
The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.
We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months. Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring.
In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.
Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread. They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted to the cave-dweller's protection because their civilization is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller's time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target.
An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station.
"Not even a high explosive"—the kind that bursts on impact after penetration—"could get into that!" he says. "We make them for generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their shoulders."
With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction represented—the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells! After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dug-outs to be ready for another go!
The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer— stormy. The German gunners were "strafing" in a very lively way this afternoon.
Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dug-out Street.
I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dug-out to pieces. Anyone who had never heard a shell before would have "scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging by the sensation that travels down your backbone.
Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling, boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world. A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel drum-head.
If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where, hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks from the concussion.
Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half- stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.
"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer, trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.
"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.
This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the experiences there are—but only "close." A delightful word that word close, at the front!
The Germans were generous that afternoon. Another scream seemed aimed at my head. L——— disagreed with me; he said that it was aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of the trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner's large scale map, to hit. It is wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at all.
This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being. We got some fours and fives as we walked along. Three bursting as near together as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk. Then the thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line. Only, unlike the thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a German artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.
We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more soldiers, leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did not look up at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the passivity of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball- grounds.
A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death till death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by itself. Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were low—unnecessarily, because they were from British guns. No danger from them unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve position.
For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working for them and for you, giving blow for blow.
The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the enemy, calls for more and harder blows.
Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields, lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always so on summer days. Between the screams you hear their full-pitched chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.
Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions, and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.
It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud. The British aviators are so low that the bull's-eye identification marks are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets. But scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them. In the midst of a lacework of puffs of shrapnel-bursts, which slowly spread in the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good; probably his plane-cloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel- fragments to remain aloft longer.
Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at you I Get in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British airmen! But Herr Taube always stays high—the Br'er Fox of the air. Of course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it was real.
Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and large calibre. One-two-three-four in as quick succession as the roll of a drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we have made ourselves masters of the German trench. British shells responded.
"Ours again!"
But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your head—ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier who was smiling. The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at the expense of the sightseer who had dodged one of our own shells. In addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal columns in order to preserve our dignity.
We were witnessing what is called the "artillery preparation for an infantry attack," which was to try to recover that two hundred yards of trench from the British. Only the Germans did not limit their attention to the lost trench. It was hottest there around the bend of our line, from our view-point; for there they must maul the trench into formless debris and cut the barbed wire in front of it before the charge was made.
"They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep us guessing," said the officer, "before they make their final concentration. So it's pretty thick around this part."
"Which might include the communication trench?"
"Certainly. This makes a good line shot. No doubt they will spare us a few when they think it is our turn. We do the same thing. So it goes."
From the variety of screams of big shells and little shells and screams harrowingly close and reassuringly high, which were indicated as ours, one was warranted in suggesting that the British were doing considerable artillery preparation themselves.
"We must give them as good as they send—and better."
Better seemed correct.
"Those close ones you hear are doubtless meant for the front German trench, which accounts for their low trajectory; the others for their support trenches or any battery-positions that our planes have located." We could not see where the British shells were striking. We could judge only of the accuracy of some of the German fire. Considering the storm being visited on the support trench which we had just left, we were more than ever glad to be out of it. Artillery is the war burglar's jemmy; but it has to batter the house into ruins and blow up the safe and kill most of the family before the burglar can enter. Clouds of dust rose from the explosions; limbs of trees were lopped off by tornadoes of steel hail.
"There! Look at that tree!"
In front of a portion of the British support trench a few of a line of stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion. Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a sharp blow from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried across the splintered stump with crushing impact from the power of its flight, plus the power of the burst of the explosive charge which broke the shell-jacket into slashing fragments; and the towering column of limbs, branches, and foliage laid its length on the ground with a majestic dignity. Which shows what one shell can do, one of three which burst not far away at the same time. In time, the shells would get all the trees; make them into chips and splinters and toothpicks.
"I'd rather that it would hit a tree-trunk than my trunk," said L———.
"But you would not have got it as badly as the tree," said the officer reassuringly. "The substance would have been too soft for sufficient impact for a burst. It would have gone right through!"
XXIIMore Best Day
At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.
"Without any anaesthetic," he explained. "No chance if we sent him back to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well. Already chirking up."
A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the family practitioner's cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room; who has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger on your pulse.
"The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea," he continued, "only we have antiseptics now. It's wonderful how little you can work with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men, these, with great recuperative power and discipline and resolution— very different patients from those we usually operate on."
Tea was served inside the battalion commander's dugout. Tea is as essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average American in summer. They do not think of getting on without it if they can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.
It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a busy man's sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer the function had just come over the network of wires which connects up the whole army, from trenches to headquarters—good news in the midst of the shells.
German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies like Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike live-and-let- live idea, which has something to do with keeping the United States intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up over the British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes; for it is clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the British Empire.
"Hans and Jacob we have named them," said the colonel, referring to two Germans who were buried back of his dug-out. "It's dull up here when the Boches are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play. We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches. Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it, but not after you have been in the trenches for a while."
A little gruesome—true! Not in the trenches—true, too! Where all is satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow———"
Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had messed with him and marched with him and known him in the fullness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident. What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself, was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the dug-out. The subject was changed to something about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know? "It was here that he was hit," another officer said, as we moved on in the trench. "He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along. He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him."
A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.
Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers, which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all as a part of the day's work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.
Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it. How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade? Never! He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite.
Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses who look after you will.
I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners are a cult.
There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.
But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting. They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.
Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!
For the second permissible—periscopes are tempting targets—I looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it.
Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together. Another wounded man was brought by.
"They're bombing up ahead. He has just been hit." As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal à propos as an outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men. We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench that were beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!
"A Boche gas shell!" we were told, as we passed an informal excavation in the communication trench on our way back. "Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they will recover."
"The Boches want us to hurry!" exclaimed L———.
They were giving the communication trench a turn at "strafing," now, and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use trying to respond to one's natural inclination to run away from the pursuing shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.
"But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it."
We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations made by shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with your only view of surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged. Crash—and safe again!
"Pretty!" L——— said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R———, also smiling, had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.
"Yes—pretty!" R———and I exclaimed together.
L———took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R——— that he had said "A black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing." Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.