At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.
"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack —that is the first degree. You might call this the second."
It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.
Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.
Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when—well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"—Caesar's ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher- bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.
"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the chauffeur—also British and imperturbable—whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.
"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."
As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.
Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.
XXIIIWinning And Losing
Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.
At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another, became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.
The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.
The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course.
Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.
You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth.
In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.
The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not be done—later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.
With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.
"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.
It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.
It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self- punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.
But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else—the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let- us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick" one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.
One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.
At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won—the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns and the Germans with them.
When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until———!
Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.
The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive—thanks to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is highly sensitized steel in response to will.
They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman's pastime and his birthright.
The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army, gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure on his wrist-watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze of dust from shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was his prisoner.
There was nothing gruesome about listening to a diffident soldier explaining how he "bombed them out," and you shared his amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck up his head from a dug-out within a foot of the face of a British soldier who was peeping inside to see if any more Germans were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.
When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were reminded that although the war was old the British army was young. There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making.
XXIVThe Maple Leaf Folk
These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.
When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.
What a strange place to find Canadians—at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to that contrast.
All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won—they had such a lot—to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.
The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells "hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba. Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act. Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.
One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."
It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal.
They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.
"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."
They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it" when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back—and then he goes in. We went in. We charged—well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."
Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy—straight work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders———" etc.
My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing- match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.
As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'élite. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.
I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its membership and its distance from home.
Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown the lid off with high explosives.
It was in a big château that I heard the story—a story characteristic of modern warfare at its highest pitch—and felt its thrill when told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!
For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat's before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough. Ask the generals in whose command they have served if you have any doubts. There is one way to win praise at the front: by fighting. The P.P.s knew the way.
"Too bad Gault is not here. He's in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.
"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show—piece of shell in the eye."
"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."
The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.
The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire, which means shells all over the place and machine-guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.
On the night of May 7th the P.P.s had a muster of six hundred and thirty-five men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps caused by death, wounds, and sickness. Bear in mind that before this war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per cent, and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent, and that with the loss of thirty per cent, it was supposed to have borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.
The Germans were quiet that night, suggestively quiet. At 4.30 a.m. the prelude began; by 5.30 the German gunners had fairly warmed to their work. They were using every kind of shell they had in the locker. Every signal wire the P.P.s possessed had been cut. The brigade commander could not know what was happening to them and they could not know his wishes; except that it may be taken for granted that the orders of any British brigade commander are always to "stick it." The shell-fire was as thick at the P.P.s' backs as in front of them; they were fenced in by it. And they were infantry taking what the guns gave in order to put them out of business so that the way would be clear for the German infantry to charge. In theory they ought to have been buried and mangled beyond the power of resistance by what is called "the artillery preparation for the infantry in attack."
Every man of the P.P.s knew what was coming. There was relief in their hearts when they saw the Germans break from their trenches and start down the slope of the hill in front. Now they could take it out of the German infantry in payment for what the German guns were doing to them. This was their only thought. Being good shots, with the instinct of the man who is used to shooting at game, the P.P.s "shoot to kill" and at individual targets. The light green of the German uniform is more visible on the deep green background of spring grass and foliage than against the tints of autumn. At two or three or four hundred yards neither Corporal Christy, the old bear-hunter, lying on the parapet nor other marksmen of the P.P.s could miss their marks. They kept on knocking down Germans; they didn't know that men around them were being hit; they did not know they were being shelled except when a burst shook their aim or filled their eyes with dust. In that case they wiped the dust out of their eyes and went on. The first that many of them realized that the German attack was broken was when they saw green blots in front of the standing figures, which were now going in the other direction. Then the thing was to keep as many of these as possible from returning over the hill. After that they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little more comfortable. For there was no taking the wounded to the rear. They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again, spectators of their comrades' valour without the preoccupation of action.
In the official war journal where a battalion keeps its records—that precious historical document which will be safeguarded in fireproof vaults one of these days—you may read in cold, official language what happened in one section of the British line on the 8th of May. Thus:
"7 a.m. Fire trench on right blown in at several points … 9 a.m. Lieutenants Martin and Triggs were hit and came out of left communicating trench with number of wounded . . . Captain Still and Lieutenant de Bay hit also . . . 9.30 a.m. All machine-guns were buried (by high explosive shells) but two were dug out and mounted again. A shell killed every man in one section . . . 10.30 a.m. Lieutenant Edwards was killed . . . Lieutenant Crawford, who was most gallant, was severely wounded . . . Captain Adamson, who had been handing out ammunition, was hit in the shoulder, but continued to work with only one arm useful . . . Sergeant-Major Frazer, who was also handing out ammunition to support trenches, was killed instantly by a bullet in the head."
At 10.30 only four officers remained fit for action. All were lieutenants. The ranking one of these was Niven, in command after Gault was wounded at 7 a.m. We have all met the Niven type anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, the high-strung, wiry type who moves about too fast to carry any loose flesh and accumulates none because he does move about so fast. A little man Niven, rancher and horseman, with a good education and a knowledge of men. He rather fits the old saying about licking his weight in wild cats—wild cats being nearer his size than lions or tigers.
Eight months before he had not known any more about war than thousands of other Canadians of his type, except that soldiers carried rifles over their shoulders and kept step. But he had "Fanny" Farquhar, of the British army, for his teacher; and he studied the book of war in the midst of shells and bullets, which means that the lessons stick in the same way as the lesson the small boy receives when he touches the red-hot end of a poker to ascertain how it feels.
Writing in the midst of ruined trenches rocked by the concussion of shells, every message he sent that day, every report he made by orderly after the wires were down was written out very explicitly; which Farquhar had taught him was the army way. The record is there of his coolness when the lid was blown off of hell. For all you can tell by the firm chirography, he might have been sending a note to a ranch foreman.
When his communications were cut, he was not certain how much support he had on his flanks. It looked for a time as if he had none. After the first charge was repulsed, he made contact with the King's Royal Rifle Corps on his right. He knew from the nature of the first German charge that the second would be worse than the first. The Germans had advanced some machine-guns; they would be able to place their increased artillery fire more accurately.
Again green figures started down that hill and again they were put back. Then Niven was able to establish contact with the Shropshire Light Infantry, another regiment on his left. So he knew that right and left he was supported, and by seasoned British regulars. This was very, very comforting, especially when German machine-gun fire was not only coming from the front but in enfilade, which is most trying to a soldier's steadiness. In other words, the P.P.s were shooting at Germans in front, while bullets were whipping crosswise of their trenches and of the regulars on their flanks, too. Some of the German infantrymen who had not been hit or had not fallen back had dug themselves cover and were firing at a closer range.
The Germans had located the points in the P.P.s' trench occupied by machine-guns. At least, they could put these hornets' nests out of business if not all the individual riflemen. So they concentrated high explosive shells on the guns. This did the trick; it buried them. But a buried machine-gun may be dug out and fired again. It may be dug out two or three times and keep on firing as long as it will work and there is anyone to man it.
While the machine-guns were being exhumed every man in one sector of the trench was killed. Then the left half of the right fire trench had three or four shells, one after another, bang into it. There was no trench left; only macerated earth and mangled men. Those emerging alive were told to retreat to the communication trench. Next, the right end of the left fire trench was blown in. When the survivors fell back to the communication trench that also was blown in their face.
"Oh, but we were having a merry party!" as Lieutenant Vandenberg put it.
Niven and his lieutenants were moving here and there to the point of each new explosion to ascertain the amount of damage and to decide what was to be done as the result. One soldier described Niven's eyes as sparks emitted from two holes in his dust-caked face.
Pappineau tells how a tree outside the trench was cut in two by a shell and its trunk laid across the breach of the trench caused by another shell; and lying over the trunk, limp and lifeless where he had fallen, was a man killed by still another shell.
"I remember how he looked because I had to step around him and over the trunk," said Pappineau.
Unless you did have to step around a dead or a wounded man there was no time to observe his appearance; for by noon there were as many dead and wounded in the P.P.s' trench as there were men fit for action.
Those unhurt did not have to be steadied by their superiors. Knocked down by a concussion they sprang up with the promptness of disgust of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate need, a word was sufficient. They understood what was wanted of them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it, and the thicker the more so, they must try to keep some dirt between all of their bodies except the head and arm which had to be up in order to fire.
At 1.30 p.m. a cheer rose from that trench. It was in greeting of a platoon of the King's Royal Rifles which had come as a reinforcement. Oh, but this band of Tommies did look good to the P.P.s! And the little prize package that the very reliable Mr. Atkins had with him —the machine-gun! You can always count on Mr. Atkins to remain "among those present" to the last on such occasions.
Now Niven got word by messenger to go to the nearest point where the telephone was working and tell the brigade commander the complete details of the situation. The brigade commander asked him if he could stick, and he said, "Yes, sir!" which is what Colonel "Fanny" Farquhar would have said. This trip was hardly what would be called peaceful. The orderly whom Niven had with him both going and coming was hit by high explosive shells. Niven is so small that it is difficult to hit him. He is about up to Major Gault's shoulder.
He had been worrying about his supply of rifle-cartridges. There were not enough to take care of another German infantry charge, which was surely coming. After repelling two charges, think of failing to repel the third for want of ammunition! Think of Corporal Christy, the bear- hunter, with the Germans thick in front of him and no bullets for his rifle! But appeared again Mr. Thomas Atkins, another platoon of him, with twenty boxes of cartridges, which was rather a risky burden to bring through shell-fire. The relief as these were distributed was that of having something at your throat which threatens to strangle you removed.
Making another tour of his trenches a little later in the afternoon, Niven found that there was a gap of fifty yards between his left and the right of the adjoining regiment. Fifty yards is the inch on the end of a man's nose in trench-warfare on such an occasion. He was able to place eight men in the gap. At least, they could keep a look out and tell him what was going on.
It was not cheering news to learn that the regiments on his left had withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear—a long distance in trench warfare. But the P.P.s had no time to retire. They could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their demoralization except to flee from the danger in front, regardless of more danger to the rear. They were held where they were under what cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells, putting the machine- guns out of action.
Now the Germans were coming on again in their supreme effort. It was as a nightmare, in which only the objective of effort is recalled and all else is a vague struggle of every ounce of strength which one can exert against smothering odds. No use to ask these men what they thought. What do you think when you are climbing up a rope whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice? You climb; that is all.
The P.P.s shot at Germans. After a night without sleep, after a day among their dead and wounded, after torrents of shell-fire, after breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of exaltation entirely oblivious of danger, of their surroundings, mindless of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug of war. Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who could "shoot the eye off an ant," as Niven said, leaned out over the parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying down and the Germans were so thick that he could not afford any misses.
Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine-gun at last. Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it up again. The explosion which destroyed the gun finally crushed his leg and arm. He crawled out of the debris toward the support trench which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.
The Germans got possession of a section of the P.P.s' trench where, it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the Germans were to go in this direction. When the day's work was done, there, in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P.P.s counted their numbers. Of the six hundred and thirty-five men who had begun the fight at daybreak, one hundred and fifty men and four officers, Niven, Pappineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for duty.
Vandenberg is a Hollander, but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at Zacetecas and at home fighting with the P.P.s in front of Ypres.
Darkness found all the survivors among the P.P.s in the support and communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead who were in the fire-trench. Most of them had already been buried by shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by their living comrades, Niven recited such portions as he could recall of the Church of England service for the dead—recited them with a tight throat. Then the P.P.s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the position to their relief, a battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Corporal Christy, the bear-hunter, had his "luck with him." He had not even a scratch.
Such is the story of a hard fight by one battalion in the kind of warfare waged in Europe these days, a story only partially told; a story to make a book. All the praise that the P.P.s, millionaire or labourer, scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they are worthy of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best, one poor, little, finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and military secrecy something of what has happened many times in a small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea.
Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French château were the P.P.s colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There is room, one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between Halifax and Vancouver.
"Of course we could not take our colours into action," said Niven. "They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell-crater. But we've always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would."
In her honour, an old custom has been renewed in France: knights are fighting in the name of a fair lady.
XXVMany Pictures
A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day's experiences. One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come to the gateway of our château. They are pages at random out of a library of overwhelming information.
One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice; again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the gloaming they return to roost.
If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an hour, and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer gangways or customs houses.
The airmen are a type which one associates with certain marked characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem rather shy, men given to observation rather than to talking; accustomed to using their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realize that some quiet, young fellow who is pointed out has had so many hairbreadth escapes. What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights' heroes who are borne away-on magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if they had broken a shoelace.
Up in their seat, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another adventure. They have all the spirit of corps of the oldest regiments, and, besides, a spirit peculiar to the newest branch in the service of war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is because of the British temperament, with that combination of coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes belies. Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterizes air service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few.
Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks going about our village street. They were from the cadet school where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with chocolate drops on their, sleeve-bands as commissioned officers. This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals. His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to his efforts to cook in her kitchen; woman-like, she would rather handle the pots and pans herself.
Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population goes; so the two get on better than French and English military authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to understand each other and to see that difference in race does not mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for property and the rights of the population.
And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.
"Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass," wrote a Sikh soldier home, "and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land."
Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey, bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war. Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water. They would watch that for hours.
Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is the secret of the American's nervous energy. It seemed to me that it was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the year, let alone fighting Germans.
Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.
You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the force.
The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them in a gymkhana. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, "Good!" when the performer succeeded, or, "Too bad!" when he failed.
If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said: "We try to be fair to the natives!" which means that they are just and even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit, yet holds together for that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how to rule.
That church bell across the street from our château begins its clangor at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the fields in harvest time. But its peal carrying across the farmlands is softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening. In the morning it tells them that the day is long and they have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.
"Will they do it?"
We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said, France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell were clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with—as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution—and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.
A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge.
These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the pain de ménage that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.
One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual. But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own—their soldiers of France!
When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears the wreath-circled crossed batons of a field-marshal.
It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander, though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the trench-line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognized in a figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the British army in France. No need of a call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months' drill at home, and said, "Very good!" and was away to other inspections where he might not necessarily say, "Very good!"
Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was the last of such platforms erected for him.
"Inspections! They are second nature to us!" said a new army man. "We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general's own fault if it isn't found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting."
Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing twenty men and one officer, for this is chalked on .the door. Before they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of their voices is pleasant.
A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on the sleeve. The sergeant-major was an old regular, the knowing back-bone of the battalion, who had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith hadn't got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.
Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road. Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect. They were "bunkies," pals, chums.
"When did you enlist?" I asked.
"In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was our duty, then; but we've been a long time arriving."
"How do you like it?"
"We are not yet masters of the language, we find," said the schoolmaster, "though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it."
"I'm learning the gestures fast, though," said the architect.
"The French are glad to see us," said the schoolmaster. "They call us the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming. But now we are here, I think they will find that we can keep up our end."
They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.
"Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never are," said the schoolmaster.
"We ought to be well grounded in the principles," said the architect thoughtfully, "and they say that in a week or two of actual experience you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in England. Then, too, having shells burst around you will be strange at first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir. All the Bucks men have!" There crept in the pride of regiment, of locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.
They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming—a millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army, which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go against that solid battle front from Switzerland to the North Sea.
We have heard enough—quite enough for most of us?—about the German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a brier-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British Constitution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the willing prince.
This was one of the shells that hit—one of the hundred that hit. The time was summer; the place, the La Bassée region. Probably the fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.
The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La Bassée region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward, and rows of poplar trees along the level, and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That "hot corner" is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while shrapnel trims the hedges.
A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell- burst—a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.
A third man was the best illustration of shell-destructiveness. Bullets make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been killed instantly. He was also an illustration of how hard it is to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German shell, after all.
Returning by the same road by which we came a motor-car ran swiftly by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the big, painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot- soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.
Before we reached the village where our car waited, the ambulance passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house—taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers—for any re- dressing if necessary, before another ambulance started journey, with motor-trucks and staff motor-cars giving right of way, to a spotless, white hospital ship which would take them home to England the next night.
It had been an incident of life at the front, and of the organization of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a great city.
XXVIFinding The Grand Fleet
Good fortune slipped a message across the Channel to the British front, which became the magic carpet of transition from the life of the burrowing army in its trenches to the life of battleships; from motors trailing dust over French roads, to destroyers trailing foam in choppy seas off English coasts.
But there was more than one place to go in that wonderful week; more than ships to see if one would know something of the intricate, busy world of the Admiralty's work, which makes coastguards a part of its personnel. The transition is less sudden if we begin with a ride in an open car along the coast of Scotland. Dusk had fallen on the purple cloudlands of heather dotted with the white spots of grazing sheep in the Scottish Highlands under changing skies, with headlands stretching out into the misty reaches of the North Sea, forbidding in the chill air after the warmth of France and suggestive of the uninviting theatre where, in approaching winter, patrols and trawlers and mine-sweepers carried on their work to within range of the guns of Heligoland. A people who lived in such a chill land, in sight of such a chill sea, and who spoke of their "Bonnie Scotland forever," were worthy to be masters of that sea. The Americans who think of Britain as a small island forget the distance from Land's End to John o' Groat's, which represents coast line to be guarded; and we may find a lesson, too, we who must make our real defence by sea, in tireless vigils which may be our own if the old Armageddon beast ever comes threatening the far-longer coast line that we have to defend. For you may never know what war is till war comes. Not even the Germans knew, though they had practised with a lifelike dummy behind the curtains for forty years.
At intervals, just as in the military zone in France, sentries stopped us and took the number of our car; but this time sentries who were guarding a navy's rather than an army's secrets. With darkness we passed the light of an occasional inn, while cottage lights made a scattered sprinkling among the dim masses of the hills. A man might have been puzzled as to where all the kilted Highland soldiers whom he had seen at the front came from, if he had not known that the canny Highlanders enlist Lowlanders in kilty regiments.
The Frenchmen of our party—M. Stephen Pichon, former Foreign Minister, M. René Bazin, of the Académie Française, M. Joseph Reinach, of the Figaro, M. Pierre Mille, of Le Temps, and M. Henri Ponsot—who had never been in Scotland before, were on the look out for a civilian Scots in kilts and were grievously disappointed not to find a single one.
This night ride convinced me that however many Germans might be moving about in England under the guise of cockney or of Lancashire dialects in quest of information, none has any chance in Scotland. He could never get the burr, I am sure, unless born in Scotland; and if he were, once he had it the triumph ought to make him a Scotsman at heart.
The officer of the Royal Navy who was in the car with me confessed to less faith in his symbol of authority than in the generations' bred burr of our chauffeur to carry conviction of our genuineness; so arguments were left to him and successfully, including two or three with Scotch cattle, which seemed to be co-operating with the sentries to block the road.
After an hour's run inland, as the car rose over a ridge and descended on a sharp grade, in the distance under the moonlight we saw the floor of the sea again, melting into opaqueness, with curving fringes of foam along the irregular shore cut by the indentations of the firths. Now the sentries were more frequent and more particular. Our single light gave dim form to the figures of sailors, soldiers, and boy scouts on patrol.
"They have done remarkably well, these boys!" said the officer. "Our fears that, boy like, they would see all kinds of things which didn't exist were quite needless. The work has taught them a sense of responsibility which will remain with them after the war, when their experience will be a precious memory. They realize that it isn't play, but a serious business, and act accordingly."
With all the houses and the countryside dark, the rays of our lamp seemed an invading comet to the men who held up lanterns with red twinkles of warning.
"The patrol boats have complained about your lights, sir!" said one obdurate sentry.
We looked out into the black wall in the direction of the sea and could see no sign of a patrol boat. How had it been able to inform this lone sentry of that flying ray which disclosed the line of a coastal road to anyone at sea? He would not accept the best argumentative burr that our chauffeur could produce as sufficient explanation or guarantee. Most Scottish of Scots in physiognomy and shrewd matter-of- factness, as revealed in the glare of the lantern, he might have been on watch in the Highland fastnesses in Prince Charlie's time.
"Captain R———, of the Royal Navy!" explained the officer, introducing himself.
"I'll take your name and address!" said the sentry.
"The Admiralty. I take the responsibility."
"As I'll report, sir!" said the sentry, not so convinced but he burred something further into the chauffeur's ear.
This seems to have little to do with the navy, but it has much, indeed, as a part of unfathomable, complicated business of guards within guards, intelligence battling with intelligence, deceiving raiders by land or sea, of those responsible for the safety of England and the mastery of the seas.
It is from the navy yard that the ships go forth to battle and to the navy yard they must return for supplies and for the grooming beat of hammers in the dry dock. Those who work at a navy yard keep the navy's house; welcome home all the family, from Dreadnoughts to trawlers, give them cheer and shelter and bind up their wounds.
The quarter-deck of action for Admiral Lowry, commanding the great base on the Forth, which was begun before the war and hastened to completion since, was a substantial brick building. Adjoining his office, where he worked with engineers' blue prints as well as with sea charts, he had fitted up a small bedroom where he slept, to be at hand if an emergency arose.
Partly we walked, as he showed us over his domain of steam- shovels, machine shops, cement factories, of building and repairs, of coaling and docking, and partly we rode on a car that ran over temporary rails laid for trucks loaded with rocks and dirt. Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, a river bottom had been filled in back of the quays with material that had been excavated to form a vast basin with cement walls, where squadrons of Dreadnoughts might rest and await their turn to be warped into the great dry docks which open off it in chasmlike galleries.
"The largest contract in all England," said the contractor. "And here is the man who checks up my work," he added, nodding to the lean, Scottish naval engineer who was with us. It was clear from his looks that only material of the best quality and work that was true would be acceptable to this canny mentor of efficiency, "And the workers? Have you had any strikes here?"
"No. We have employed double the usual number of men from the start of the war," he said. "I'm afraid that the Welsh coal troubles have been accepted as characteristic. Our men have been reasonable and patriotic. They have shown the right spirit. If they hadn't, how could we have accomplished that?"
We were looking down into the depths of a dry dock blasted out of the rock, which had been begun and completed within the year. And we had heard nothing of all this through those twelve months! No writer, no photographer, chronicled this silent labour! Double lines of guards surrounded the place day and night. Only tried patriots might enter this world of a busy army in smudged workmen's clothes, bending to their tasks with that ordered discipline of industrialism which wears no uniforms, marches without beat of drums, and toils that the ships shall want nothing to ensure victory.
XXVIIOn A Destroyer
Now we were on our way to the great thing—to our look behind the curtain at the hidden hosts of sea-power. Of some eight hundred tons burden our steed, doing eighteen knots, which was a dog-trot for one of her speed.
"A destroyer is like a motor-car," said the commander. "If you rush her all the time she wears out. We give her the limit only when necessary."
On the bridge the zest of travel on a dolphin of steel held the bridle on eagerness to reach the journey's end. We all like to see things well done, and here one had his first taste of how well things are done in the British navy, which did not have to make ready for war after the war began. With an open eye one went, and the experience of other navies as a balance for his observation; but one lost one's heart to the British navy and might as well confess it now. A six months' cruise with our own battleship fleet was a proper introduction to the experience.
After the arduous monotony of the trenches and after the traffic of London, it was freedom and sport and ecstasy to be there, with the rush of salt air on the face! Our commander was under thirty years of age; and that destroyer responded to his will like a stringed instrument. He seemed a part of her, her nerves welded to his.
"Specialized in torpedo work," he said, in answer to a question. "That is the way of the British navy: to learn one thing well before you go on with another. If in the course of it you learn how to command, larger responsibilities await you. If not—there's retired pay."
Behind a shield which sheltered them from the spray on the forward deck, significantly free of everything but that four-inch gun, its crew was stationed. The commander had only to lean over and speak through a tube and give a range, and the music began. For the tube was bifurcated at the end to an ear-mask over a youngster's head; a youngster who had real sailor's smiling blue eyes, like the commander's own. For hours he would sit waiting in the hope that game would be sighted. No fisherman could be more patient or more cheerful.
"Before he came into the navy he was a chauffeur. He likes this," said the commander.
"In case of a submarine you do not want to lose any time; is that it?"
"Yes," he replied. "You never can tell when we might have a chance to put a shot into Fritz's periscope or ram him—Fritz is our name for submarines."
Were all the commanders of destroyers up to his mark? How many more had the British navy caught young and trained to such quickness of decision and in the art of imparting it to his men?
Three hundred revolutions! The destroyer changed speed. Five hundred! She changed speed again. Out of the mist in the distance flashed a white ribbon knot that seemed to be tied to a destroyer's bow and behind it another destroyer, and still others, lean, catlike, but running as if legless, with greased bodies sliding over the sea. We snapped out a message to them and they answered like passing birds on the wing, before they swept out of sight behind a headland with uncanny ease of speed. Literal swarms of destroyers England had running to and fro in the North Sea, keen for the chase and too quick at dodging and too fast to be in any danger of the under-water dagger thrust of the assassins whom they sought. There cannot be too many. They are the eyes of the navy; they gather information and carry a sting in their torpedo tubes.
It was chilly there on the bridge, with the prospect too entrancing not to remain even if one froze. But here stepped in naval preparedness with thick, short coats of llama wool.
"Served out to all the men last winter, when we were in the thick of it patrolling," the commander explained. "You'll not get cold in that!"
"And yourself?" was suggested to the commander.
"Oh, it is not cold enough for that in September! We're hardened to it. You come from the land and feel the change of air; we are at sea all the time," he replied, He was without a great-coat; and the ease with which he held his footing made landlubbers feel their awkwardness.
A jumpy, uncertain tidal sea was running. Yet our destroyer slipped over the waves, cut through them, played with them, and let them seem to play with her, all the while laughing at them in the confident power of her softly purring vitals.
"Look out!" which at the front in France was a signal to jump for a "funk pit." We ducked, as a cloud of spray passed above the heavy canvas and clattered like hail against the smokestack. "There won't be any more!" said the commander. He was right. He knew that passage. One wondered if he did not know every gallon of water in the North Sea, which he had experienced in all its moods.