MIDNIGHT IN THE FRONT LINE.
7th November.
"So you knew those people that have just gone by in the carriage,
Lovel."
"How should I know them?"
"Then why did you let them past you?"
"It's true, I wasn't strict enough. But they roared out such a
G.H.Q.[C] at me that I didn't dare to stop them."
[C] General Head Quarters.
"Wave your lantern, Lovel. Here's another carriage."
So chatted, during this night of 7th November, on the road to Bapaume,
two of His Majesty's Tommies. They were two scrubby little Scotsmen.
Each wore his tam-o'-shanter falling over one eye.
The night was almost beautiful; the sky covered with fleecy clouds,
among which, like a great liquid eye, the moon showed herself now and
then. We were going to spend the night in the English lines.
Very few sounds are to be heard. The farmers' dogs have long abandoned
this unpeaceful country, and the crowing of the cocks, those earliest
victims of every war, has even longer been stilled.
Silence reigns.
How is it, then, that this silence seems menacing? It only seems so.
Stop a moment and listen. Do you not now hear in the darkness a host of
little sounds? An invisible world is moving about us. Listen!
Yes, there is the sound of many feet on the road--not the brisk tramp
of the parade ground, but the steps of the poor souls who are fighting
their way through the mud. It is as if ten thousand little wings were
flapping.
All lights are out. The long stream of motor-cars moves upon the road
in perfect order. Midnight. Now the preparations for the advance are
at their height. Now is the time when the reliefs come up, the blessed
hour, so long expected by those who quit the trenches, by those who go
into them so bravely met.
In their English helmets, which look like basins upside-down, caked
with mud--already--to the eyes, with their rifles shouldered, slung,
or carried in the hand, but each one carefully protected by its canvas
cover, smoking their pipes, their chests thrown forward against the
weight of their bursting haversacks, steady of step and bright of eye,
the Tommies go forward to relieve their friends.
When they feel the need of a rest the men in khaki, quite regardless
of the mud, throw themselves down on the sopping earth, and man,
clothing, and soil become one. In this country of the dead you may
hardly distinguish shadows from the objects which throw them.
Every now and then a despatch rider passes us--day and night, it is
all one to these links in the chain of communication--a motor-cyclist,
crouched over his handle-bar, hands and nose frozen, eyes red, his
nerves on edge, skirting the side of the road, and sometimes remaining
there, stuck. Or perhaps it is a horseman, leading his exhausted beast
by its bridle, but determined, though he kill his horse, to get his
work done before morning.
But now the horizon, black hitherto, lights up with flashes that
seem to be lightning. These are followed by dull thuds. The British
artillery has chosen this moment before the dawn to reawaken the Boche
to the realisation of his own abominable existence.
Shall we climb this tree for a better view? Up there we shall see
marvellously. We grope our way upwards. The wind, which has risen
and now blows strongly, rocks the great tree and us with it in the
darkness. It is delightful. Think of all the brave fellows who climb up
here at all times of the day and night, to sit for hours in constant
peril of their lives! A stimulating thought!
And what a fine seat for the fireworks! One doesn't miss a thing.
See that blue light! And the red fire on the right! What's that
glow--look!--over there?
"An eighteen-inch," says somebody. He means that they have just fired
one of the great eighteen-inch guns. It is, of course, an English gun.
We continue our journey through the night, coming ever nearer to the
firing line. Our guide knows every smallest path of this section like
the palm of his hand--better, indeed, than his own London streets.
Here, lately, he got his first wound. There--where that anti-aircraft
gun is lurking--he saw his best friend fall. And this place is not safe
even yet. All round us the guns, great and small, sing their chorus to
the night. Was not that short thud, a moment ago, a 75? Odd, how things
get mixed up nowadays! A 75 with the English! Hullo, there! Can you
tell us what that was just now?
And now we are amazed to see an immense light which, how I cannot tell,
has suddenly flooded the whole sky with a red glare. Our guide, who has
passed months on end in the trenches, tells us that he has never before
seen this appearance. It seems like an _Aurora borealis_, pierced to
the zenith by a perpendicular ray, like an L, of a still fiercer red.
And now upon this weirdly-lit background rise thick spirals of vapour.
And the picture is miles long. Mysterious, deadly beauty, that the
bursting of the shrapnel seems to applaud!
There is no mystery. A squadron of German war planes has crossed the
first lines in the darkness and dropped incendiary bombs where it has
supposed a store of munitions to be. The perpendicular beam--a stripe
upon that red cloth--is the ray of a searchlight, probing the dark sky.
This _Aurora borealis_--this Northern Dawn--is the work of man, and
will soon be put to flight by the dawn of the coming day.
"And what's that, Major?" one of us asks, pointing to a star.
"One of the good God's aeroplanes," says the Englishman.