continuously. It was a day of hard infantry fighting, of attacks that
were held up and had to be renewed, of German counter-efforts to shift
us from points won at the opening of our attack. All day long F.O.O.'s
and liaison officers telephoned reports of changes in our front line,
and five times I turned on our batteries to respond to S.O.S. calls. By
the end of the day we held three parts of the ground that our Higher
Command had planned to seize.
III. AN AUSTRALIAN "HAND-OVER"
There followed three months of varied kinds of soldiering: short spells
holding the line, odd days in rest areas, quick shifts to other parts
of the Front, occasional participation in carefully prepared raids on
Hun trenches, one whole fortnight in a riverside village where even the
Boche night-bombers did not come, and where we held a joyous
race-meeting--seventy riders in one race--and a spit-and-polish horse
show. There was the fresh burst by the Hun armies that seemed to spell
the doom of Reims. We began to notice larger and larger bodies of
arriving Americans, but did not expect them to be in the war on an
impressive scale until 1918 was out. Leave to England remained at a
standstill. The universal phrase of 1916 and 1917, "Roll on Duration,"
had almost entirely disappeared from the men's letters that came before
me for censoring. Yet no one seemed depressed. Every one appeared
possessed of a sane and calm belief that things would work out right in
the long-run. We should just have to hold the Hun off this year, and by
honest endeavour during training opportunities fit ourselves to fight
with added effectiveness in 1919, when America would be properly in the
field and the Allies' turn would come.
The second week in May the Brigade, after a fourteen-mile march, came
again into the land of rolling heights and sunken roads in which for
three and a half years most of our fighting had been done. A "sausage"
balloon anchored to the ground, a pumping-station and four
square-shaped water-troughs, and a dozen or so shanties built of
sandbags and rusted iron, dotted the green-and-brown landscape.
Waggon tracks had cut ugly brown ways through clover-fields and
grasslands. A new system of trenches stretched to north and to south
from the main road along which the Brigade were moving. Men of the
Labour Corps were stolidly filling shell-holes in the road surface with
broken stones, and digging sump-holes for draining away the
rain-and-mud torrents that were sure to come. A long dark wood crowned
the ridge three miles in front of us. In the centre a slender spire
tipped the tree-tops.
"That's Baisieux Church," said Major Bullivant, with whom I was riding
along the horse track at the side of the road. "Do you know the latest
motto for the Labour Corps?" he added inconsequentially, looking down
at a bespectacled man in khaki who eased up as we passed. "_Infra
dig._," he went on, with a humorous side-glance, and without pausing
for my answer.
Away to the east muffled boomings as if giants were shaking blankets.
My mind turned to July 1916, when first I arrived in France and came
along this very road at 3.30 one morning as the sun's rim began to peep
above the long dark wood. How easy to recall that morning! I had
brought fifty-three men from the Base, reinforcements for the
Divisional Artillery, and half-believed that the war could not proceed
unless I delivered them to their destination in the shortest possible
time; and my indignant keenness when I reached the village behind the
long dark wood and learned that no one there knew anything about the
two lorries that were to transport my party the remainder of the
journey to the Front! Did I not rouse a frowning town major and two
amazed sergeant-majors before 5 A.M. and demand that they should do
something in the matter? And did not my fifty-three men eventually
complete a triumphant pilgrimage in no fewer than thirteen ammunition
lorries--to find that they and myself had arrived a day earlier than we
were expected? And here was I again in the same stretch of country, and
the British line not so far forward as it had been two years before.
We pitched tents and tethered our horses in the wood, and before
nightfall I walked into the village to look at the spot beneath the
church tower where I had halted my fifty-three men, and to view again
the barn in which I had roused the most helpful of the two
sergeant-majors. Alas for the sentiment! All French villages seem much
alike, with their mud-wall barns and tiled cottages, when you have
passed through scores of them, as I have done since July 1916. I could
not be certain of the building.
Coming back to our camp through the heart of the wood, I chanced upon a
place of worship that only a being of fancy and imagination and
devoutness could have fashioned. Inside a high oval hedge, close-woven
with much patient labour, stood an altar made of banked-up turf,
surmounted by a plain wooden cross. Turf benches to seat a hundred and
fifty worshippers faced the altar. Above, the wind rustled softly
through the branches of tall birches and larch trees, bent over until
they touched, and made one think of Gothic arches. There was wonderful
peace and rest in the place. Some one told me afterwards that the
chaplain of a London Division had built it. It was a happy thought.
* * * * *
In the morning I went with the colonel through the village, and a mile
and a half along a road leading east that for half a mile was lined
with camouflage screens. "The Boche holds the ridge over there,"
remarked the colonel, stretching an arm towards high ground swathed in
a blue haze five miles away. A painted notice-board told all and sundry
that horse traffic was not permitted on the road until after dusk. We
struck off to the left, dropped into a trench where we saw a red
triangular flag flying, and said "Good-day" to the brigade-major of the
Infantry brigade who had made their headquarters at this spot. Then we
got out of the trench again, and walked along the top until we came to
what was to be our future home--the headquarters of the Australian
Field Artillery Brigade that we were to relieve by 10 P.M. We received
a cheery welcome from a plump, youngish Australian colonel, and a
fair-haired adjutant with blue sparkling eyes.
When a brigade of artillery relieves another brigade of artillery,
there is a ceremony, known as "handing-over," to be gone through. The
outgoing brigade presents to the in-coming brigade maps and documents
showing the positions of the batteries, the O.P.'s, the liaison duties
with the infantry, the amount of ammunition to be kept at the gun
positions, the zones covered, the S.O.S. arrangements, and similar
information detailing daily work and responsibilities. I can recall no
"hand-over" so perfect in its way as this one. The Australian Brigade's
defence file was a beautifully arranged, typed document, and a child
could have understood the indexing. True, the extent and number of
their headquarters staff was astonishing. Against our two clerks they
had three clerks, and a skilled draughtsman for map-making; also an
N.C.O. whose sole _magnum opus_ was the weekly compiling of Army Form
B. 213. But there could be no doubt that they carried on war in a most
business-like way.
The colonel went off with the Australian colonel to inspect the battery
positions and view the front line from the O.P.'s, and sent me back to
bring up our mess cart and to arrange for the fetching of our kit. By
tea-time we were properly installed; and indeed the Australian colonel
and his adjutant remained as our guests at dinner.
The mess, cut out of the side of the trench and lined with corrugated
iron, possessed an ingeniously manufactured door--part of a drum-tight
wing of a French aeroplane. The officers' sleeping quarters were thirty
feet below ground, in an old French dug-out, with steps so unequal in
height that it was the prudent course to descend backwards with your
hands grasping the steps nearest your chin.
The Australian colonel dipped his hand for the fifth time into the box
of canteen chocolates that Manning had placed on the table with the
port. "That's a nice Sam Browne of yours," he observed, noticing the
gloss on our adjutant's belt.
"I hope you don't take a fancy to it, sir," replied our adjutant
quickly. "We're all afraid of you, you know. I've put a double piquet
on our waggon lines for fear some of your fellows take a liking to our
horses."
The Australian colonel and his adjutant laughed good-naturedly, and the
colonel told us a story of a captain and a sergeant-major in another
Australian brigade who were accomplished "looters."
One night the pair were hauling down a tent which they thought was
empty, when a yell made them aware that an officer was sleeping in it.
The captain took to his heels, but the sergeant-major was captured.
"The next day," concluded the Australian colonel, "the captain had to
go and make all sorts of apologies to get his sergeant-major off. The
other people agreed, provided the officer ransomed him with half a
dozen pit-props and ten sheets of corrugated iron. For a long time
afterwards we used to chaff the captain, and tell him that he valued
his sergeant-major at six pit-props and ten sheets of iron."
Hot sweltering days followed. Most mornings I spent at the O.P.
watching our batteries' efforts to knock out suspected enemy trench
mortars, or staring through my binoculars trying to pick out Boche
transport, or fresh digging operations. The tramp back at midday along
the communication trenches was boiling-hot going. I used to think
"People working in London will be pining just now for green fields and
country air. For myself, I'd give anything for a cool ride on a London
bus." In the afternoons there were reserve battery positions--in case
of a swift Hun advance--to be reconnoitred, gaps in the barbed-wire
systems to be located, and bits of trenches that would have to be
filled in to allow our waggons to cross. Divisional Artillery were
insistent upon timed reports of hostile shelling, particularly gas
shelling, and this formed another portion of my special work. One day
intimation came from Division that Fentiman and Robson had been
accepted for the Air Service. "It's the only way to get leave to
England," said Robson jocularly. Fentiman's chief regret was that he
would have to leave behind a mare that he had got from the Tank Corps.
"She pulls so," he told me one afternoon when I met him jogging along
the road, "that if I turned on to the grass at this moment and put
spurs into her, she wouldn't stop till she got to Amiens.... No one in
the Tank Corps has been able to pull her up under four miles, and only
then when she came to a seven-foot hedge.... But I was beginning to
understand her."
When I accompanied the colonel on his visits to the Infantry brigades
all the talk was of the training of the youngsters, who now formed so
considerable a portion of the battalion strengths. "They are good
stuff," I heard one of the brigadiers say, "and I keep drumming into
them that they are fighting for England, and that the Boche mustn't gain
another yard of ground." He was a fighter, this brigadier--although I
have never yet met another officer who took it as a matter of course
that his camp-bed should be equipped with linen sheets when he was
living in the firing line.
About three-quarters of a mile from our headquarters was a tiny
cemetery, set in a grove of trees on a bare hillside, sequestered,
beautiful in its peacefulness and quiet. One morning, very early, I
walked out to view it more closely. It had escaped severe shelling,
although chipped tombstones and broken railings and scattered pieces of
painted wire wreaths showed that the hell-blast of destruction had not
altogether passed it by. I went softly into the little chapel. On the
floor, muddy, noisy-sleeping soldiers lay sprawled in ungainly
attitudes. Rifles were piled against the wall; mess-tins and
water-bottles lay even upon the altar. And somehow there seemed nothing
incongruous about the spectacle, nothing that would hurt a profoundly
religious mind. It was all part of the war.
And one night when I was restless, and even the heavy drugging warmth
of the dug-out did not dull me to sleep, I climbed up into the open
air. It was a lovely night. The long dark wood stood out black and
distinct in the clear moonlight; the stars twinkled in their calm
abode. Suddenly a near-by battery of long-range guns cracked out an
ear-splitting salvo. And before the desolating rush of the shells had
faded from the ear a nightingale hidden among the trees burst into
song. That also was part of the war.
IV. HAPPY DAYS!
During the month of June Brigade Headquarters retired from the trench
dug-out and settled in the end house of the village, a white-walled,
vine-clad building, with a courtyard and stables and a neat garden that
only one Boche shell had smitten. On the door of the large room that we
chose for the mess there still remained a request in French, written in
a clear painstaking hand, that billeted officers should keep to the
linoleum strips laid across the carpet when proceeding to the two inner
rooms. But there was no linoleum now, and no carpet. On the otherwise
bare wall was hung a massively-framed portrait of the proprietor--a
clean-shaven middle-aged Frenchman of obviously high intelligence. A
family press-cutting album contained an underlined report from a local
newspaper of a concert given in the village on June 6, 1914:--
_Tres remarque le duo de mandoline avec accompagnement de violon
execute par trois gracieuses jeunes filles qui font a chacune de
nos soirees admirer par les amateurs du beau, leur talent
d'artiste!_
I gathered that the three young girls were daughters of the house; I
also noted that _trois gracieuses jeunes filles_ was doubly
underlined.
One of our servants used to be a professional gardener, and in a couple
of days he had weeded the paths and brought skill and knowledge to bear
on the neglected vegetable beds. We had excellent salad from that
garden and fresh strawberries, while there were roses to spare for the
tall vases on the mantelpiece in the mess; and before we came away our
gardener had looked to the future and planted lettuce and turnips and
leeks, and even English pansies. The Boche gunners never got a line on
to that house, and though aeroplanes cruised above us every night not a
single bomb dropped near.
The town major, a learned and discursive subaltern, relieved on account
of rheumatic troubles from more strenuous duties with an Infantry
regiment, joined our mess and proved a valuable addition. He was a
talented mathematician whose researches had carried him to where
mathematics soar into the realms of imagination; he had a horror of
misplaced relatives, and possessed a reliable palate in the matter of
red wines. One dinner-time he talked himself out on the possibilities
of the metric system, and pictured the effects of a right angle with a
hundred instead of ninety degrees. Another night he walked me up and
down the garden until 2 A.M., expatiating on astronomy. He tried to
make me realise the beyond comprehension remoteness of the new star by
explaining that astronomers did not calculate its distance from the
earth in thousands of miles. "Light travels at 186,000 miles a second;
to astronomers the new star is 2000 years away," he concluded.
As I have said, he was a valuable addition to our mess. One day he took
me to a neighbouring village and introduced me to a fat
comfortable-looking Maire, who spread his hands on his capacious knees
and invited us to try a cooling nip of absinthe. After which he
produced from a small choice store a bottle of fifty-year-old brandy,
and made the town major take it away in token of a friendship that
began in the way-back days of 1915.
All this may not sound like war, but I am trying to write down some of
the average daily happenings in a field-artillery brigade that has seen
as much service as any brigade in the new armies.
For several days Wilde, the signalling officer, and the doctor
conducted an acrid argument that arose from the doctor's astounding
assertion that he had seen a Philadelphia base-ball player smite a
base-ball so clean and hard that it travelled 400 yards before it
pitched. Wilde, with supreme scorn, pointed out that no such claim had
been made even for a golf ball. The doctor made play with the names of
Speaker, Cobb, and other transatlantic celebrities. Then one day Wilde
rushed into the mess flourishing a London Sunday paper that referred in
glowing terms to a mighty base-ball hit of 136 yards, made on the Royal
Arsenal football ground; after which the doctor retired to cope with
the plague of boils that had descended upon the Brigade. This and a
severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred
patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils.
We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing
with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in
cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look
like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day,
when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his chin, appeared
plastered accordingly.
By July we had side-stepped north and were housed in a chateau that
really deserved the appellation, though it was far from being as
massively built as an average English country seat of like importance.
It belonged to one of the oldest families in France. Wide noble
staircases led to vast rooms made untenable by shell fire. Fragments of
rare stained glass littered the vacant private chapel. The most
valuable paintings, the best of the Louis XV. furniture, and the
choicest tapestry had been removed to safety. In one room I entered
some bucolic wag had clothed a bust of Venus in a lance-corporal's cap
and field-service jacket, and affixed a box-respirator in the alert
position. We made the mess in what had been the nursery, and the
adjutant and myself slept in bunks off an elaborately mined passage, in
making which British tunnellers had worked so hard that cracks showed
in the wall above, and the whole wing appeared undecided whether or not
to sink. We learned that there were two schools of opinion regarding
the safety of the passage. The Engineers of one Division thought the
wing would not subside; some equally competent Engineers shook their
heads and said no civil authority would dream of passing the passage as
safe. The adjutant and myself relied upon the optimists; at any rate,
we should be safe from the Hun gunners, who treated the chateau as one
of their datum points.
We were relieving an Army Field Artillery brigade commanded by a
well-known scientific gunner, and on the afternoon that we arrived he
took the colonel and myself on an explanatory tour of the battery
positions and the "O.P.'s." They were leaving their guns in position
for us to use. There was a Corps standing order that steel helmets
should be worn and box-respirators kept in the alert position in this
part of the line. So first we girded up ourselves in compliance with
orders. Then our guide made us walk in single file and keep close to
the houses as we walked along the main street. "He has a beautiful view
of the chateau gates and can see movement in the centre of the road,"
he informed us.
It was a terribly battered village. The church tower had been knocked
out of shape. Roofs that had escaped being smashed in were threadbare,
or seemed to be slipping off skeleton houses. Mutilated telegraph-poles
and broken straggly wires, evil-smelling pools of water, scattered
bricks, torn roadways, and walls blackened and scarred by bomb and
shell, completed a scene of mournfulness and desolation. We passed one
corner house on the shutters of which some "infanteers" had chalked the
inviting saucy sign, "Ben Jonson's Cafe." Then we struck across a
fast-ripening wheat-field and put up a mother partridge who was
agonised with fear lest we should discover her young ones. "It will be
a pity if these crops can't be gathered in," remarked our colonel. To
right and left of us, and beyond the ruined village that lay
immediately in front, were yellow fields ready for the harvesters.
"Does he shell much?" continued the colonel.
"Not consistently," replied the other colonel. "I don't think he does
much observed shooting. He's copying our method of sudden bursts of
fire, though."
We inspected two O.P.'s on one side of the wide valley that led towards
the front line, picked up, through binoculars, the chief reference
points in Bocheland, and had a look at two heavily-camouflaged
anti-tank guns that were a feature of the defence in this part of the
front. Myriads of fat overfed flies buzzed in the trenches through
which we passed. Hot and dusty, we came back about 6 P.M., and entered
the chateau kitchen-garden through a hole that had been knocked in the
high, ancient, russet-red brick wall. The sudden scent of box and of
sweet-smelling herbs roused a tingling sense of pleasure and of
recollection. I never failed afterwards to return to the chateau by
that way.
The other colonel came out with us again next morning, although our
batteries were now in possession, and his own officers and men had gone
a long way back. He wanted to show our colonel some observation points
from the O.P. on the other side of the valley.
A certain incident resulted. As we passed A Battery's position we saw
Dumble, the battery captain, looking through the dial-sight of his No.
1 gun, apparently trying to discover whether a black-and-white
signalling-pole, planted fifty yards in front of the gun, was in line
with a piece of hop-pole fifty yards farther on. Both colonels stared
fixedly at the spectacle. "What's become of the aiming-posts?" said the
other colonel, puzzled and stern.
When a gun has fired satisfactorily on a certain target, which is also
a well-defined point on the map, and it is desired to make this
particular line of fire the standard line, or, as it is commonly
called, the zero line, the normal method is to align two aiming-posts
with such accuracy that, no matter what other targets are fired upon,
the gun can always be brought back to its zero line by means of the
aiming-posts. Absolute accuracy being essential, the aiming-posts are
specially designed and are of a settled pattern. Judge of the two
colonels' astonishment then when they perceived Dumble's impromptu
contrivance.
"Have you no aiming-posts?" our colonel asked Dumble sharply.
"No, sir, the other battery would not leave theirs behind. I had
understood it was arranged that we should hand over ours at the waggon
line, and that they should leave theirs here to give us the lines of
fire."
"Of course," interrupted the other colonel; "but what are you doing
now? You can't get your line with those things."
"I'm trying to do the best I can, sir, until my own aiming-posts
arrive."
"Yes, but it's hopeless trying to fix those ridiculous things in the
same positions as the aiming-posts. Who was it gave the order to remove
the aiming-posts?"
"The subaltern who was waiting for us to relieve your battery, sir."
"The battery commander wasn't here then?"
"No, sir. I believe he'd gone on ahead to the waggon lines."
"I'm exceedingly sorry this has happened," said the other colonel,
turning to our colonel. "I'll have the battery commander and the other
officer up here at once, and they can go forward with your officer when
he registers the guns again. It's disgraceful. I'll stop their next
leave for this." He disappeared into the battery telephone pit to send
through orders for the recalling of the delinquent officers.
"Not a bad idea to make an inspection round the day after you have
handed over," remarked our colonel to me drily. "This is rather an
instructive example."