CHAPTER XIIITHE ARBITERS OF VICTORY
“... My guns are better than the German guns ... for instance, my 15-inch shell is equivalent to their 17-inch. The issue is now one between Krupp’s and Birmingham.”(Field-Marshal Sir John French toMr.James O’Grady, M.P., quoted in theDaily News, August 23, 1915.)
“... My guns are better than the German guns ... for instance, my 15-inch shell is equivalent to their 17-inch. The issue is now one between Krupp’s and Birmingham.”
(Field-Marshal Sir John French toMr.James O’Grady, M.P., quoted in theDaily News, August 23, 1915.)
“Too-too! Too-too! Too-too!”
“‘Ul-loh?” (wearily).
“Too-too! Too-too! Too-too!” (with insistence).
“‘Ul-loh?” (with vexation). “‘Ul-loh? ‘Ul-loh?”
The sounds issued forth from a low, cramped dug-out, where a perspiring orderly, squatting on a box, huddled over a crepitating telephone-receiver—not the “gentlemanly article” of your City office or my lady’s boudoir, but a Brobdingnagian kind of instrument. Fragments of conversation drifted out of the hole:
“’Oo? ... I can’t ’ear yer.... Oh! Yessir! Yessir! Yessir!”
Then a sentence was bawled and repeated from mouth to mouth till it reached the orderly standing at the end of the trench. “The Major of the Blankshires sends ’is compliments to Captain X, and there’s a German working-party be’ind the village clearly visible. Will Captain X send a few rounds over?”
The Captain turned wearily to the subaltern by his side (Cambridge O.T.C., out since March, keen as mustard). “Did you ever see such fellows?” he said. Then, to the orderly: “My compliments to the Major, and we have been watching that working-party for the past half-hour. Unfortunately, it is out of range. But tell him, you can, that we have just dispersed another working-party over by the bridge!”
This message is shouted from mouth to mouth, the telephone toots again, but even before the Major in his dug-out a mile away has had his answer, the battery is called up once more from another quarter, with the request to “turn on for a bit” in some other direction.
So it goes on all day, and every day. The guns are the big brothers of the trenches. To them the front line, like the small boy in a London street row, appeals when bullied by the German artillery. To them the men in the trenches look for protection against working-parties preparing new “frightfulness,” against spying aircraft, against undue activity on the part of theminenwerfer.
The gunners keep guard over the front line in a paternal and benevolent, not to say patronizing spirit. Their business it is to find places from which they can keep an eye on the enemy, watch the effect of their shells, and see what the enemy’s guns are doing. No matter that these places are exposed; no matter that the Germans search for them with their guns like caddies “beating” the heather for a lost ball; no matter that, sooner or later, they will be broughtdown about the observers’ ears. Observation is a vital part of artillery work. It saves British lives; it kills Germans.
When German “frightfulness” oversteps the bounds of what is average and bearable, “retaliation” is the word that goes back to the guns. When there are bursts of German “liveliness” going on all along the line, the battery telephones (so the men in the fire-trenches tell me) are so busy that to call up a battery is like trying to get the box-office of the Palace Theatre on the telephone at dinner-time on a Saturday night.
This word “retaliation” has a fine ring about it. To men with nerves jaded by a long spell of shelling with heavy artillery it means a fresh lease of endurance. To the least imaginative it conjures up a picture of the Germans, exulting in their superiority of artillery, watching in fascination from their parapets their “Jack Johnsons” and “Black Marias” ploughing, among eddies of black smoke, great rifts in our trench-lines, starting back in terror as, with a whistling screech, the shells begin to arrive from the opposite direction.
Nothing puts life into weary troops like the sound of their own shells screaming through the air and mingling with the noise of the enemy’s guns. Nothing in the same way puts a greater strain on men, even the most seasoned and hardened troops, than to have to sit still under a fierce bombardment, and to know that their guns must remain inactive because ammunition is limited to so many rounds a day per gun.
Big shell exploding on a road in France. German soldiers in foreground.
Big shell exploding on a road in France. German soldiers in foreground.
Our success at Hooge on August 9 showed us,albeit on a very small scale, what our infantry, adequately supported by artillery, can achieve. The Hooge affair was of quite minor importance, and had next to no bearing on the general situation. It was, however, of the deepest interest to all of us on the Western front, for at this engagement, almost for the first time, the guns had a free hand in the matter of ammunition. It was due to their thorough and devastating preliminary bombardment and their splendid support afterwards that our infantry were able to recapture the lost trenches, and to hold them against all German attempts to win them back.
The battalions who took part in the attack against Hooge were brimful of gratitude towards the gunners. Not only had the guns done the work of cutting the barbed wire and of destroying the enemy’s machine-guns and defences in the most thorough manner, but the timing of the different operations of the artillery—the preliminary bombardment, the lifting on the front line and then thetir de barrage(to prevent the Germans from sending up reinforcements)—was absolutely perfect. As a result, the attacking files were able to push on freely with no fear of coming under their own fire, for, with each position won, the rain of shells lifted and poured down farther ahead.
A bombardment like this makes men optimistic. The infantry, waiting in the paling darkness before dawn for the preliminary bombardment to do its work, were elated as the heavy shells went plumping into the German trenches, as the curtain of smoke from the high-explosive drifted thicker and thicker in the twilight.
The men’s comments were fierce and heartfelt. “Ah! they’re getting it at last, the ——s! That’ll learn ’em! Boom!” (as a shell exploded with a deafening crash). And when the storming-party went forward it was irresistible. The men “had their tails up,” as the army says. Not only did they hurl the Germans out of their trenches, but they held the positions. Every time the Germans massed for a counter-attack our guns were ready for them, and swept the attack away before it had properly developed.
I was able to appreciate the elation of the men who fought at Hooge, because I had already seen, in past months, the evil effects of the shortage of shells. As I talked to these gallant fellows, full of their stories of the fight, I kept thinking of a position I had visited months before where, day after day, the Germans kept up an almost incessant bombardment with shells of all calibres. As so much of their strategy, their action was aimed at achieving a moral effect, like their senseless raids on undefended English seaside resorts. At this particular position they had no chance of breaking through our line, yet, so much do they believe in the effect of high-explosives in undermining themoralof troops, that they fired away ammunition from their guns in the most reckless fashion.
I spent an afternoon in a dug-out there with a Colonel, a fine, hearty body of a man, while the shells passed almost continuously over our heads or burst noisily, with whizzing fragments of hot metal, in our immediate vicinity. He expressed himself very sagelyon this question of shells. “Of course,” he said, “perpetual bombardment like this is a great strain on the men. But they are stout fellows, and they stand it all right. What does upset them, though, is the silence of our guns. My men see that a little energy on the part of our guns promptly reduces the Germans to silence. If we give the Germans shot for shot, and sometimes, for a change, two shells to their one, they become as meek as lambs. What my men lack is the heartening sound of our own shells. When our guns do retaliate, their fire is feeble, and soon dies away. A well-fed man is a better fighter than a fellow with an empty belly. So troops who know that they have the weight of metal behind them may be counted upon to make a better showing than men who feel that they are not properly supported.”
But I do not intend to go further into the shell controversy here. Hooge showed us that the tide has turned. The shells which our guns fired that day were better than anything the gunners had ever seen before. The issue, in the Commander-in-Chief’s expressive phrase, is now between Krupp’s and Birmingham. Birmingham will win if England understands that, were every man left in England and every woman from this moment to give their services to the making of munitions of war, even then our Generals could not conscientiously say they were certain that the supply would be sufficient.
In our former wars the gunners reaped the richest harvest of decorations, for they most often found themselves in a tight corner, and the rule of the Royal Artillery is, “Never lose a gun!” If you want acontrast between the war of movement and the war of positions, between August, 1914, and August, 1915, you have but to look at the gunners then, when the war was in the open, and now, when the belligerents have sat down to a siege. The foaming horses, the jingling accoutrements, the mud-bespattered guns, the gunners falling man by man about their gun—this splendid picture of war, painted on many a glorious page of our military history, has been replaced—temporarily, I know—by as strange a blend of peace and war as can be seen in the field to-day.
Not that in the main the gunner’s task to-day is less perilous than before. Most of the shells that the Germans send over night and day are hunting for our batteries, searching for them principally with the aid of little maps provided by the German air observers. The Germans have to reckon with a resourceful lot of men in our gunners, however, and so skilfully are the guns hidden that more often than not the enemy’s projectiles plump harmlessly into fields, and cause no greater damage than the massacre of a few dozen buttercups and daisies.
But the gunner istoujours en vedette. He must stay with his gun. If his battery is firing, he can take no thought of safety. He must expose himself. Shells or no shells, he must go about his duty. Thus, though the day of the race forward with the guns is over for the moment, the gunners’ casualties go on steadily, in little driblets, it is true, but nevertheless mounting up to a long roll of honour that will show future generations that, in the long months of trench warfare, the Royal Artillery, true to its grandtraditions, did its work as steadfastly and gallantly as in the thrilling days of the retreat from Mons and the advance on the Marne.
The gunners have had a difficult task in Flanders. Since the battle of the Marne the great offensives on our front have been with the enemy. The Germans, even when advancing, never forget for a moment that he who goes forward may also have to fall back, and their striving has always been to secure for themselves good defensible positions from which their guns can dominate our lines. The flatness of the country has made the work of artillery observation both perilous and difficult, and the heroism with which the observation officers exposed themselves in the fighting round Ypres, at Neuve Chapelle, and at Festubert, to mention but a few concrete cases, is a chapter by itself in the roll of fame of the Royal Artillery in this war. The time has not yet come when one may write freely of this most thrilling and perilous of duties at the front, the observing for the guns, but I have seen the observation officers at their work, and feel very strongly that one cannot pass over their gallantry and tenacity in silence.
I have witnessed the growth of our artillery; with it I have passed from the discouraging days of the shell shortage to the brighter era that dawned at Hooge. I have spent many absorbingly interesting days with the gunners in the batteries, with the observation officers at their stations. I have seen in action every type of gun, every type of howitzer, big and small, used in our army to-day. I know the voices of them all—the short, sharp report of thefield-gun, the ear-splitting crash of the 4·7, the air-shaking roar of the heavy howitzer, whose shell in its passage through the air over one’s head produces long-drawn-out reverberating waves of sound that resemble nothing on earth unless it be the echo of a fast motorcar rushing through miles of empty, narrow streets.
But because I have thus seen the work of our guns in the field, because I have been allowed to penetrate thearcanaof gunnery, and to enter holy places where few save those of the craft are suffered to enter, I find myself in a dilemma. Despite the ceaseless activity of German spies in peace and war, there are still many blanks in the German information about our artillery. Far be it from me to fill them in! Permit me, therefore, to leave the guns hidden beneath their covers, cunningly stowed away from prying eyes in their emplacements.
In a battery you get a good idea of the detachment of modern war. The effect of the war of positions is to hold off from the guns the rough-and-tumble of fighting. It happens occasionally, as in the case of the London Territorial “Heavies,” surrounded and captured during the second battle of Ypres, that the tide of battle sweeps up and washes round the guns. But as a general rule the guns, in their positions behind the front, are several miles from the actual firing-line. Their rôle is practically that of the artillery of a besieging force, and they thereby acquire a fixity of tenure which must be particularly sympathetic to the gunners who remember the awful ordeal of the guns on the retreat from Mons.
A skilful fencer who has a good reach and a longfoil can keep his opponent at a distance without moving his position, without losing his calm. The gunners in this war of positions are using a foil several miles long. Their blade is constantly in play, but the enemy is kept at arm’s length. Therefore, the life of the gunners is probably more ordered and stable than the life of any other formation at the front.
In a London newspaper office some years ago I used to know a cable operator who on Saturday nights, when the wires were clear, was wont to pass the time by playing cable chess with the operators at Queenstown or New York. Many an evening I have sat by his side and watched him, poring over his chessboard, with one hand on the cable-key ready to transmit his move across the wires. The sense of long distance, which that quiet cable-room, with its shaded lights, its absorbed chess enthusiast, and its ticking instrument, used to convey, has come back to me in these batteries at the front, where death goes and comes over a stretch of miles.
Among my notes of a visit to a battery of field-guns, I find the following observation: “The coolness, the savageSachlichkeit(a comprehensive German word which may be rendered by ‘business-likeness’) of the gunners; exposed to the constant menace of death at long range themselves, their one thought in life is to ‘get back’ at the enemy on the distant horizon.”
This studied efficiency in the business of slaying is indeed the dominant impression left on the mind by a view of one of these batteries in action. The officers, always neat and trim, are nonchalant andlaconic as they snap out in monosyllables the orders that carry with them winged death; the men serving the gun—just a handful of dust-coloured figures about some ironwork—go about their work swiftly and silently. A word with the telephone orderly as to range and angle and shell, a brisk order, a yellow-painted shell is whipped smartly out of its neatcaissonstanding open by the gun, its doors flung wide like two arms, as though to say, “Help yourself!” there is a snapping and a clicking of bolts and blocks, then the voice of the sergeant: “All ready to fire, sir!”
The gun is laid on its quarry. No gun fires without an object. Somewhere in the sun-bathed flats beyond, where the horizon is smudged in blue behind a curtain of dancing heat, there are men whose glass of life is all but run out. How often have I thought on this picture, in the few seconds’ interval between that short phrase, “All ready to fire, sir!” and the brisk command: “No. 1 gun, fire!” ... A group of Germans, not the fierce helmeted Huns in exquisitely neat uniforms that our artists love to show us in the illustrated papers, but vague figures in ill-fitting dirty grey that makes them look like scavengers, with trousers, showing a band of white lining, turned up over their boots, curiously long tunics unbuttoned at the throat, and little round caps, all stained with mud and sweat, their heads beneath shaved until the skin shows greyish through the pale stubble—a group of vague Unknowns waiting for death.
Perhaps they are walking up a communication trench, plodding in Indian file, silent; maybe they are sitting outside a dug-out talking of the thingswhich form the staple conversation of the men on both sides out here—their food, their duties, their spell of rest from the trenches, their leave, their sergeant. All are marked down by the Power that regulates these things—those that are to die, those that shall survive. Even now one is taking that step forward that shall save his life, another has tarried an instant, and for that instant’s delay he shall die. The cigarette that the officer in our battery is lighting shall give the doomed ones a few seconds’ respite.
The shell is in the gun, bearing in its shining and beautifully turned case that which shall release a never-ending succession of events springing from the widows and orphans which this shot shall make. In a second now it will be sped, in another second its work will be done. There will be telegrams—ill-omened and feared visitants in these days of war—arriving in German homes, in the officer’s flat on the third-floor of a dull street in a garrison town, in the tenement dwelling in a Berlin slum, in a farm in Pomerania, in a wooden cottage on a pine slope in the Black Forest.
There will be tears and hysterics and black stuff and crape in the house; black-bordered announcements, headed by the Iron Cross, in newspapers beginning, “Den Tod für Kaiser und Reich...”; visits of condolence fromOnkel Fritz and Tante Friedain theGutes Zimmer(the parlour); lonely widows and fatherless orphans, bereft sweethearts and heartbroken mothers....
“No. 1 gun, fire!”
The scream of the shell cleaving the air strikes uponthe ear still reverberating from the crash of the explosion. As the breech is opened a thin vapour of smoke blows out of the gun, and vanishes in an instant, as though rejoicing to be free. The men are busied about the gun. In quick succession the other guns of the battery discharge their shots.
The officer turns on his heel. “You’d better stay to tea!” he says. “My people have sent me a birthday cake.”
Give and take!—that is the philosophy of war. These gunners in their placid batteries hear death coming at them in the wind—day after day, night after night. They are matched against worthy foes—from the gunners’ standpoint—fine artillery, well supplied, that shoots well. The guns are the rooks and bishops of this great game of chess. They sweep off the board any piece that comes into their field. The gun which I saw firing to-day may be discovered to-morrow before there is time to shift its position. Then a rain of shells will fall all about it, smashing in the dug-outs, slaying and maiming the devoted men whose place is by their gun.
In this trench warfare the battery is a placid place. So well concealed are the guns, so cunningly hidden, so skilfully blended in their surroundings, that one is often not aware that guns or howitzers are thrusting their noses into the air within twenty yards of where you enter. There is an air of permanency about the large solid dug-outs, a touch of homeliness about the curls of blue smoke that drift lazily aloft from the fires where the cooks are making the tea in tin “dixies.”
The gunners show a certain facetiousness in naming their underground homes. “Rowton House,” “Ritz Hotel,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Ocean View,” are some of the names burnt in fretwork on the neat boards fixed at the entrances to the dug-outs. Within, pictures cut from the illustrated papers are hung, those of pretty ladies and the guns of other armies being more especially favoured. You are sure to find one or two men here engaged in fashioning knick-knacks, such as ash-trays or lamp-stands, out of parts of German shell sent over at the battery. I saw some of these souvenirs, one a sugar-sifter, made by one of our gunners out of the case of a shell—a very well-finished piece of work.
When heavy fighting is on, the battery, though it always preserves its outward calm, is a very busy place. When the guns concentrate during a preliminary bombardment, the gunners hardly get a moment to breathe, but keep on loading and firing, and loading and firing, while all the time fresh supplies of shells are brought up, and the piles of empty shell-cases, with their bronze burnt black at the edges, swell steadily. Then it is that the ammunition convoys stream together to the ammunition railheads, where shells, great and small, neatly packed in their wooden boxes, are lying in the goods-trains that have brought them up from the base.
Soon after the fighting at Festubert in June, I spent a morning at an ammunition railhead. The officer in charge showed me round, a pleasant young man in very old riding-breeches and a khaki shirt, who had an office, a place of wonderful contrivances in theway of chairs and desks and pigeon-holes and shelves made out of empty shell-boxes, installed in a railway-truck. The railhead was established in a railway-siding, where, on three or four sets of metals, long trains were waiting, some full, others empty, about to return to the base to be replenished. The full trains contained the overflow. What can be safely stored is dumped out, and collected by the ammunition convoys—motor lorries of the Mechanical Transport—which come to the railhead daily to fetch supplies, in order to bring deplenished stocks up at the front to the normal level again.
I saw, I believe, almost every form in which “villainous saltpetre digged out of the bowels of the harmless earth” is employed for the dismemberment of man. There were shells galore, from huge 4-foot howitzer shells in enormous coffin-like boxes, one to each, down to small 15-pounder shells, several to a case. There were hundreds of cases of bombs and grenades: stick-bombs, and round bombs, and square bombs; bombs for trench mortars, large and small; boxes of Verey flare-lights, and stacks of S.A.A.—that is, small arms ammunition, rifle and revolver cartridges. I was lost in admiration at the exquisite neatness of the packing—so contrived that by the simplest manipulation the shell and its charges can be lifted safely out of the box without hammering or violence of any kind.
Every day the officer in charge sends in his returns of the amount of ammunition supplied, and the amount in hand. The returns for the preceding days of fighting in the Festubert region were eloquent ofthe part that artillery is playing in this war. The returns are made according to the size and description of shell.
The enormously increased importance of artillery in this war necessitates not only an unlimited supply of ammunition, but more and more new guns of the latest and heaviest types, besides the requisite increase of transport. The enormous output of ammunition from the factories in England demands extended storage accommodation at the base, and a larger service of trains for conveying the supplies from the base to the railheads at the front. The motor-lorries which bring the shell to the gun, the bullet to the rifle, the bomb to the grenadier, must be increased in number to cope with the augmented supplies. Thus, wherever you turn, whether towards the men of the new army flocking out from England, or towards the guns that are to blast for them the path to victory, you are confronted by the same process of expansion which is developing the little Expeditionary Force of Mons and the Marne into the great army upon which—who knows?—may eventually devolve the final task of liberating Europe.