"You must run across that break. Three o_My Year of the War Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form

time. We're gradually getting shipshape, though."

Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid

no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet

you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a

way of picking off tall officers who are standing up among their

houses. In the course of their talk they happened to speak of such an

instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have

mentioned.

"Poor S------did not last long. He had been out only three weeks."

"How is J------? Hit badly?"

"Through the shoulder; not seriously."

"H------is back. Recovered very quickly."

Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit

--another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this

group of officers might be gone to-morrow.

"I have one, sir," said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned

past his station. "Bullet went right through the head and came out the

peak!"

It was time that Captain P------ was back to his own command. As we

came to his company's line word was just being passed from sentry

to sentry:

"No firing. Patrols going out."

It was midnight now.

"We'll go in the other direction," said Captain P------ when he had

learned that there was no news.

This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had

something to say.

XVI

Nearer The Germans

Here not the Irish Sea lay between the broad a and the brogue, but

the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets

fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners'

hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from

England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have

something to say was correct.

The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in

height, with a heavy moustache and the earpieces of his cap tied

under his chin, though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly

in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he

looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I

certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build.

"Who are you?" he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the

veranda window with a jemmy.

For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are

in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human

weight. Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine

except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-

conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a

dressing-gown.

Captain P------was a little way back in another passage. I was alone

and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and

rifles.

"A German spy! That's why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite

suspicion," I was going to say, when a call from Captain P------

identified me, and the sentry's attitude changed as suddenly as if the

inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might

pass through the fire lines.

"So it's you, is it, right from America?" he said. "I've a sister living at

Nashua, New Hampshire, U.S.A. with three brothers in the United

States army."

Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his

eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was

a tenderfoot seeing the trenches.

"It's mesilf that's going to America when me sarvice in the army is up

in one year and six months," he continued. "That's some time yet. I'm

going if I'm not killed by the Germans. It's a way that they have, or we

wouldn't be killing them."

"What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?"

"No. I'm looking for a better job. I'm thinking I'll be one of your

millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste."

Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of

their little houses and dug-outs to gather around the brazier; and for

every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event,

an American appearing in the trench in the small hours of the

morning.

A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the

doorway of his dug-out, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the

brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an

appetizing aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind

that wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But

who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by

lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.

"It looks like good bacon," I remarked.

"It is that!" said the sergeant. "And the hungrier ye are the better. It's

your nose that's telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye're hungry

yoursilf!"

"Then you're pretty well fed?"

"Well fed, is it? It's stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paty-

what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we've

nothing else to do and when we've got something to do. We get eggs

up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the

trenches!"

When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some

eggs in evidence.

"And if ye'll not have the bacon, ye'll have a drop of tea. Mind now,

while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your

tongue a liar!"

Wouldn't I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles

and officers' whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and

German diaries.

"It's easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!" I

was told. "And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-

German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at

the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German."

He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of

the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German

bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end

thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five

hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between

German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of

a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread

through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm

thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting

that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what

wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.

"But ye'll take the tea," said the sergeant, "with a little rum hot in it.

'Twill take the chill out of your bones."

"What if I haven't a chill in my bones?"

"Maybe it's there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before

an hour longer--or afther ye're home between the sheets with the

rheumatiz, and yell be saying, 'Why didn't I take that glass?' which

I'm holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk."

It was a memorable drink. Snatches of brogue followed me from the

brazier's glow when I insisted that I must be going.

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to

the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had "dug

in" after the counter-attacks which followed the battle had ceased.

Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers

become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build

your dam against another flood.

"We are within about sixty yards of the Germans," said Captain P------

at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the

braziers well behind.

Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in

the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about

twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the

other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing

range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a

truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies

have been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them.

Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally

on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.

The Germans were as busy as beavers dam-building. They had a lot

of work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard

them driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches

of sentences intelligible, and occasionally the energetic, shouted,

guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never

heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The orders

were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable

kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men

showed for Captain P------, and I was beginning to appreciate that it

was not a particular instance.

"What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?" I

asked.

"He wouldn't have it; he'd get rebellious," was the reply. "No, you

mustn't yell at Tommy. He's a little temperamental about some things

and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine."

Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier. Discipline

means that the officer knows his men, and British discipline, which

bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that the man likes to

follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves his officers. Each

army and each people to its own ways.

Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking

ready at a trigger's pull should life show itself! When daylight comes

the British sing out their "Good-morning, Germans!" and the Germans

answer, "Good-morning, British!" without adding, "We hope to kill

some of you to-day!" Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest

and grim defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they

are within such easy hearing distance of each other; but always from

a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint

across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is,

perhaps, better than the Briton.

Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy

fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk that

is getting "jumpy." The Germans in front roared out their contempt in

a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans

also became "jumpy" and began tearing the air with bullets, firing

against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made

some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when

he is played on the music-hall stage. Possibly he feels the

inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as

his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of

analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a

philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain's professional fighting man, who was

the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might

be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing

flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with

the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that

night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German

dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a

heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the

spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of

deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and

scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell,

and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned

toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of

machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and

well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that

charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated

in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew

that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man's flesh is

soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its

burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to

have gone home. It was: "Why don't you stop singing and bury your

dead?" But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times

when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The

dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans. The discomfort

would be in British and not German nostrils. And the dead cannot

fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland; and the

time is A.D. 1915. Two or three thousand German dead altogether,

perhaps--not many out of the Kaiser's millions. Yet they seemed a

great many to one who saw them lying there.

We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers'

diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for

a few cents, each one telling the dead man's story and revealing the

monotony of a soldier's existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of

war had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The

last notes were when orders came entraining them. They did not

know that they were to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover

Neuve Chapelle out of those woods in the test of all their drill and

waiting. A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in

that charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted

optimism and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not

know what he was going against? that only the German general

knew? Neither he nor his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen

seconds. The thing was so splendidly foolhardy that in some little war

it might have become the saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads

and paintings. In this war it was an incident heralded for a day in one

command and forgotten the next.

"Good-night!" called the Irish.

"Good-night and good luck!"

"Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!"

"Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye fall

into a gold mine!"

We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the

men remained up around the braziers.

The hours of duty of the few on watch do not take many of the

twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he chooses in the little

houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into day and day into

night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire. By-and-by it is your

turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out of your clothes--for there

are no pyjamas for officers or men in these "crawls," as they are

sometimes called. Boots off is the only undressing; boots off and

puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes, by-and-by the march

back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with hot water and an

outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to do but rest and

sleep.

"How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?" officers have

been asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the

porous mud and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.

You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied

only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you

know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the

daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin;

then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.

No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British

lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army

comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps

himself so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part,

at least, of the mud off his uniform. This care makes him feel more as

if he were "at home" in barracks.

From the breastworks, Captain P------and I went for a stroll in the

Village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional

singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick

stuck into the wall of his earth-roofed house and suggested a nap. It

was three o'clock in the morning. Now I could see that my rubber

boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the soil

of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the over-

bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud

poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I tried

scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to

reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.

"Don't try!" said the captain. "Lie down and pull your boots off in the

doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak."

Sleep! Does a débutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such

good company, the company of this captain who was smiling all the

while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the

trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest who had been with armies

before!

It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the first

time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in a

kind of promenade. On this account I was in the family. If it is the right

kind of a family, that is the way to get a good impression. There would

be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.

So Captain P------ and I lay there talking. I felt the dampness of the

earth under my body and the walls exuded moisture. The average

cellar was dry by comparison. "You will get your death of cold!" any

mother would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such

cold, wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet,

peculiarly enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets

colds from draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it

was not raining; it had been raining most of the winter in the flat

country of Northern France and Flanders.

"It is very horrible, this kind of warfare," said the captain. He was

thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. "All war is

very horrible, of course." Regular soldiers rarely take any other view.

They know war.

"With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave," I

suggested.

"Oh, that arm is all right!" he replied. "This is what I am paid for"--

which I had heard regulars say before. "And it is for England!" he

added, in his quiet way. "Sometimes I think we should fight better if

we officers could hate the Germans," he went on. "The German idea

is that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can't hate."

Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from

the lips of Cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists

in war.

"Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?"

"No. We must win by fighting," he replied. This was in March, 1915.

"You know," he went on, taking another tack, "when one gets back to

England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very

nice."

"Yes. I've found the same after roughing it," I agreed. "One is most

particular that he has every comfort to which civilization entitles him."

We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will

not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing,

and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm

had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or

three minutes and the firing died down to silence.

Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when

danger of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his

sleep. I was leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet

ground without a blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up

for the breastworks than to have blankets; and as the men had not

yet received theirs, he had none himself.

"It's not fair to the men," he said. "I don't want anything they don't

have."

No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He

spoke not in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the

comradeship of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage

of his soldiers who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against

German charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of

war may have departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and

dangers shared.

What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me;

one of the most memorable of my life.

"I was glad you could come," he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if

he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.

Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a

lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky, leaving

the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four hundred

yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen

us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets

came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some

trees.

In a few minutes I was again entering the peasant's cottage that was

battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped by

bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just

getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real

trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with some

surprise, that I had not washed my face.

"The food was just as good, wasn't it?" remarked the major. "We get

quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been

up all night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre

supper."

With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like

by daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one

bombardment, for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off

and on all winter. Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison.

All writers have used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle.

An earthquake merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a

good deal more than that. They had crushed the remains of the

houses as under the pestle-head in a mortar; blown walls into dust;

taken bricks from the east side of the house over to the west and

thrown them back with another explosion. Neuve Chapelle had been

literally flailed with the high explosive projectiles of the new British

artillery, which the British had to make after the war began in order to

compete with what the Germans already had; for poor, lone,

wronged, bullied Germany, quite unprepared--Austria with her fifty

millions does not count--was fighting on the defensive against wicked,

aggressive enemies who were fully prepared. This explains why she

invaded France and took possession of towns like Neuve Chapelle to

defend her poor, unready people from the French, who had been

plotting and planning "the day" when they would conquer the

Germans.

Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family

pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been

cut in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted

into a spool of wire, the other simply smashed.

Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his

name still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who

had played in the littered square in front of the church, with its

steeples and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers'

benches? Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on

the roads if strong enough, helping France in any way they could, not

murmuring, even smiling, and praying for victory, which would let

them return to their homes and daily duties. To their homes!

XVII

With The Guns

It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards

of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and to mines laid

under the enemy's trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch

down to three-inch and machine-guns; a war of machinery, with man

still the pre-eminent machine.

Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh

at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who

demand passes of all other travellers. Anyone who tried to keep out

of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all

a matter of chance with long odds or short odds, according to the

neighbourhood you are in. If shells come, they come without warning

and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at

least, I am.

"Gawd! Wat a 'ole!" remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of

an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.

It is only eighteen years since I saw, at the battle of Domoko in the

Greco-Turkish war, half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the

plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open, and discharge salvos with

black powder, in the good, old battle-panorama style. One battery of

modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only

ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of

shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of

Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by

impact on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked:

"There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!"

He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché. But the

Allies might also make guns and go on making them till they have

enough. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In

some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports

from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the

next day.

"No, not very heavy. No attack," a division staff officer explained.

"The Boches had been building a redoubt, and we turned on some

h.e.s."--meaning high explosive shells.

Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been

labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They

had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth

softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the

redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the

view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of

modern war.

What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane

had been watching them day by day, and that the spot was nicely

registered on a British gunner's map. On this map it was a certain

numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with

a shell at that point. And the gunners waited till the house of cards

was up before knocking it to pieces.

Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without

getting a single shell. Then it may get a score of shells in ten minutes;

or it may be shelled regularly every day for ensuing weeks. "They are

shelling X again," or, "They have been leaving Z alone for a long

time," is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud

of having escaped altogether, and proud of the number and size of

the shells received.

"Did you get any?" I asked the division staff officer who had told me

about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common

question that, at the front, "Did you get any?" (meaning Germans). A

practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or

any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with

casualties.

"Yes, quite a number," said the officer. "Our observer saw them lying

about."

The guns are watching for the targets at all hours--the ever-hungry,

ever-ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically-calculating,

marvellously-accurate and also the guessing, wondering, blind,

groping, helpless guns, which toss their steel messengers over

streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for unseen prey in a wide

landscape.

Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a

trench wall or huddle in a dug-out as you hear an approaching

scream and the earth trembles and the air is wracked by a

concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very

accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand

yards distant, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when,

before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to

bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of

chaos that they seem to possess when the firing-trench and the dug-

outs and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are

beaten as flour is kneaded!

Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a

field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be

worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the

amount of damage they have done is all guesswork; and helpless

without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers

to see for them.

One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long

reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a

visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an

enemy's demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception,

with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army

guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were

made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a

glance from the enemy's eye, instead of having barrels of the

strongest steel that can be forged.

Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the

amount of hell sent by the enemy's which you have tasted. After you

have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing

with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are

convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the

attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say,

"Nice old demon!" and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into

the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so

quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German

gunners take too much personal interest in you.

You must have someone to show you the way or you would not find

any guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week

on the gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate

half the guns. He might miss "Grandmother" and "Sister" and "Betsy"

and "Mike" and even "Mister Archibald," who is the only one who

does not altogether try to avoid publicity.

When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as

high ground as possible for a bird's-eye view of battle, all that you see

is the explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are

firing. In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground

over the British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded

wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar.

Tugging at its moorings, it turns this way and that with the breeze.

The speck directly beneath it through the glasses becomes an

ordinary balloon basket and other specks attached to a guy rope play

the part of the tail of a kite, helping to steady the type of balloon which

has taken the place of the old spherical type for observation. Anyone

who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how difficult it

is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because of the jerking

and pitching and trembling due to the envelope's response to air-

movements. The new type partly overcomes this drawback. To

shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper drum-head to

a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when shells were

bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their commanders

seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery's reach.

Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range; and five

minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No balloon

observer hopes to see the enemy's guns. He is watching for shell-

bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether they are on the

target or not.

Riding along the roads at the front one may know that there is a

battery a stone's throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-

muzzle warns him of its presence. It is wonderful to me that the

artillery general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns

were, let alone the enemy's. I imagine that he could return to a field

and locate a four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll.

His dogs of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which

wise old father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I

shall not be surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven,

or from under grandfather's chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in

a garret. Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and

one may be there; think of the most likely place and one may be

there. You might be walking across the fields and minded to go

through a hedge, and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun's

crew grinning behind it. They would grin because you had given proof

of how well their gun was concealed. But they wouldn't grin as much

as they would if they saw the enemy plunking shells into another

hedge two hundred yards distant, where the German aeroplane

observer thought he had seen a battery and had not.

"I'll show you a big one, first!" said the general.

We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all

about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer

led me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is

one foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I

shall not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so

audacious that it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to

know and we don't want them to know. A little pencil-point on their

map for identification, and they would send a whirlwind of shells at

that gun.

And then?

Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not

know the location of any of the guns of the German battery which had

concentrated on their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did

not, they ought to be court-martialled for needlessly risking the

precious lives of trained men. They would make for the "funk-pits," as

they call the dug-outs, just as the gunners of any other Power would.

The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.

Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for

big guns have pretty thick cuticles. When the storm was over, the

gunners would move their treasure to another hiding-place; which

would mean a good deal of work, on account of its size.

It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock out

gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of pitched-

battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from

walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still

go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done

against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a

view to demoralizing the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will

demolish an enemy's trench and let your infantry take possession of

the wreckage remaining; but then the enemy's artillery concentrates

on your infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.

Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a field

near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending all the

power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and one

looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which caught

the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in its

long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its

parabola, its nose struck building, earth, or pavement and it exploded.

Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with

figures, and other scales which play between the map and the

gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind-variation, all worked out

with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a

battleship where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it

seemed a matter of book-keeping and trigonometry rather than war.

If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and

Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a

hundred men. If it went into the dug-out of a support trench it would

get everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into

the open field, it would probably get nobody. "Cover!" someone

exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and everybody promptly

got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German aeroplane was

cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of men standing

about he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless word to send

in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners' map

was ours.

These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could

put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and the

labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love their

gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw that

day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their masters.

These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days. They

had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners

had drilled in England, and they had tried their "eight-inch hows" out

on the target range and brought them across the Channel and

nursed them along French roads, and finally set them up in their

hidden lair. Now they waited for observers to assist them in

registration.

When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard;

but the general stopped that. At the front there is an end of the

ceremoniousness of the barracks. Military formality disappears.

Discipline, as well as other things, is simpler and more real. The men

went on with their recess playing football in a near-by field.

The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they had not

yet the veteran's manner. It was clear that they had done everything

required by the textbook of theory--the latest, up-to-date textbook of

experience at the front as taught in England. When they showed us

how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a shot by the

enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the latest

directions, though there was some difference among military experts

on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the beginner to

do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order makes him

do otherwise. The general had a suggestion about the application of

the method. He had little to say, the general, and all was in the spirit

of comradeship and quite to the point. Not much escaped his

observation.

It seems fairly true that one who knows his work well in any branch of

human endeavour makes it appear easy. Once a gunner always a

gunner is characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life

with guns. He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff

specialists responsible to a corps commander for the work of the

guns on a certain section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire

when it was required in the commander's plans.

If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial they

had qualified; and sometimes newcomers shoot quite as well as

veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for the

general who is in charge of an expanding plant. The war will be

decided by gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill

when the war began.

"Here are some who have been in France from the first," said the

general, when we came to a battery of field guns; of the eighteen-

pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the "hell-

for-leather" guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the

eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the

pitched-battle conditions before armies settled down in trenches and

growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns

of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast

fortifications.

These are called "light stuff" and "whizz-bangs" now, in army

parlance. They throw only an eighteen-pound shell which carries

three hundred bullets, but so fast that they chase one another

through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of

heavy guns, you might think that eighteen-pounders were too small

for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones

which could gallop on the heels of the infantry.

They are the boys who weave the "curtain of fire" which you read

about in the official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which

demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get

into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of

the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is

sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced-

water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder

crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The

gun itself seems to possess intelligence.

There was the finesse of gunners' craft worthy of veterans in the way

that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put

some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.

They did not change the location of their battery and their judgment

that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another

object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention the nature of

their "funk-pits," which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For

the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye

to the protection which comes of experience with German high

explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of the

business had been fought into them for over a year.

Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.

Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front

the German staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at

all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they

might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.

It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the

comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden, tables

and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New

England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies

forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then

you know how scrupulous they were about litter.

For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German

aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their weekly laundry,

taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every

day they received the London papers and letters from home. When

they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip

a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the

Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty's expense in the

pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of

sod over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from

the gun-muzzles.

It was when leaving another battery that out of the tail of my eye I

caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-

piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when

a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the

report, where we stepped through undergrowth among the busy

group around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger

calibres.

An order for some "heavy stuff" at a certain point on the map was

being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the

shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that

seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package

of concentrated destruction, and closing the door. All that detail of

range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen

target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as

an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as

practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds

of appearances in the same act on the stage.

All ready, the word given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw

a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky,

which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of

water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to

its zenith and then descending, till it passed out of sight behind a

green bank of foliage on the horizon.

After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint,

thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of

steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the

gunners' part in chessboard war, where the moves are made over

signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches

and fight in their charges in the traverses of trenches at as close

quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.

There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It

would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The

battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me

his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he

was too busy to tell about his battery. In about the time that it took a

telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew

whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of

degree to make in the next if it were not; or, if the word came, to shift

the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake up the enemy

here and there along a certain length of trench.

At another wire-end someone was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he

was in the kind of place where I found one observer, who was sitting

on a cushion looking out through a chink in a wall, with a signal corps

operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the

lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even

then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink

was removed, though there could not have been any German in

uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies

within your own lines, looking for such holes.

From this post I could make out the British and the German trenches

in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields,

and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and

hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had

language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was

no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a

hole for the burial of his remains.

If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk-pit, as the

gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on

with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in

another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which

suited his purpose better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in

that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually

in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches,

are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to

locate the other's eyes, the other's guns and troops and the least

movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.

"Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer

the sun by which you correct your figures," said one of the artillery

officers.

Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust

and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from an

orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to

see the guns fire and the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely

be seen at the same time. It was not show firing this that we watched

from an observing station, but part of the day's work for the guns and

the general. First, the map, "Here and there," as an officer's finger

pointed; and then one looked across fields, green and brown and

golden with the summer crops.

Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm.

We were going to put some "heavy stuff" in there and some "light

stuff," too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a

certain tree.

Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in

a certain building. "Heavy stuff" exclusively for this. No enemy's

wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without

interruption; and no German working-party ought to be allowed to

build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the

monotony of their drudgery.

Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives

which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for

a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only

the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them

is given by the artillery commander, as part of his plan in his

understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear

that the system is the same with the Germans.

One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By

effect of the enemy's shells you judge what the effect of yours must

be. Months of experience have done away with all theories and

practice has become much the same by either adversary. For

example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft

gun-fire and the guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own

lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in

the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any

rate, you may get a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on

one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There

is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being

killed.

By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell

whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer,

whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which

enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately

the calibre.

A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for

the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and

smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt, and after the

second's delay of hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam

in the distance on a winter day, came the sound of the burst. The

next was over. With the third the "heavy stuff" ought to be right on.

But don't forget that there was also an order for some "Right stuff,"

identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which was

scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working-party as it

hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern

artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out of

the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not exactly

on. Exactly on is the way that British gunners like to fill an order

f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.

Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very

good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in

developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards'

range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where

they should.

No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need

to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting,

who was in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He

was the high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a

gunner unless you are. Any "good-enough" temperament is ruled off

wasting munitions. Red was creeping through the tan from his throat

to the roots of his hair. To have this happen in the presence of that

veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those

guns!

But the general was quite human. He was not the "strafing" kind.

"I know those guns have an error!" he said, as he put his hand on the

officer's arm. That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer.

Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer

had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep

any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder

which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the

gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the

first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from

the target. "Right on!"

And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging,

dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the

same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless

station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for

the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always

hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like

that."

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the

temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra shells for full

measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had

been enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of

the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of

the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.

Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-

breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They

want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked

down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but

the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

"The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!" said one

of the officers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The

other day they chose this particular spot for their target"--which was a

good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is

a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire

provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was

not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some

distance away.

They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and

horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of

the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching

to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on

the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the

spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay

pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however,

the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that

men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in

a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fortitude of man

and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.

You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of

humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the

army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the

British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad

when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason

for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the

signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively

keeps--the reason of a world cause.

Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting

the fall of its shells, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly

simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of

concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British

plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his

battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to

complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as

among battleships of our North Atlantic fleet.

Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely

at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other

battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for

their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.

"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men

explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home

destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and

we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups

will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots,

eh?"

On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have passed

other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in

an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced

on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but

engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the

account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas

about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.

Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in

answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.

They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we

passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower,

and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth

about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a

window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.

There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of

an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get

permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which

both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat

between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need

the crop?

And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and

children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in

the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are

women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one

sense, a professional handicap.

XVIII

Archibald The Archer

There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves

a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field

piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its

scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German

lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your

hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.

At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost

stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety

miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a

sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new

trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport, and where

our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth

has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his

wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.

If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that

was going on in an enemy's lines. They must keep up so high that

through the aviator's glasses a man on the road is the size of a pin-

head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over

the parapet of a trench when the enemy's trench is only a hundred

yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.

Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it

as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a

noonday cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of

seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred

yards behind the Taube. A soft thistledown against the blue it seems

at that altitude; but it would not if it were about your ears. Then it

would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer

and you would hear the whizz of scores of bullets and fragments.

The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald's steel throat, and

another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its

way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.

He knows that one means many, once he is in range.

Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to side-

step. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the

German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if

they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled

landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of

ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator's eye.

Archibald's propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond

of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night

finds him and the day's duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps

regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and

small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day.

Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up,

Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of

dawn, on the look-out for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for

aviators are also up early.

Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is

Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with

the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the

British army, every one would be known as Archibald.

When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All

the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of

rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the

field guns.

It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range

of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know

the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault.

Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald.

When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get

a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to

get one.

Archibald, who is quite the "swaggerist" of the gun tribe, has his own

private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry's former part

as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy's scouts.

Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre

of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be

lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have

pride, élan, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetizers and

condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht's crew, and as lively

as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally

bound to think rather well of themselves.

Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their

shells after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the

lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board,

or any of the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking

through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers

softly to his touch.

Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target

--which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed

and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a

bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are

clustered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession,

for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eye.

You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For

the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator?

He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the

experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of

the escaped prisoner who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag

course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns

to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one

comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next shell

fired at the same point will be wide of the target.

Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is

the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to the

range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can

spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute.

Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the

plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till it

burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator's speed and

guessing from experience which way he will turn next.

That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises.

Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the

Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent

gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says.

But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance.

Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.

But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to

bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is

amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are

accustomed to the whizz of shell-fragments and bullets, and to have

their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out

of commission, and frequently though the man be wounded, they are

able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.

To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular

bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German have,

to escape antiaircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first

shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of

his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.

A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the

imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for

observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their

news.

XIX

Trenches In Summer

It was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I

had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had

not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that

had been so wet could become so dry.

This time the approach was made in daylight through a long

communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked

farmhouse. We passed through this and stepped down at the back

door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then

behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters

in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had

brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right

gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when

appetites are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel

conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he

glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day,

pinned to a post of his dug-out.

"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We

are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior

to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's

department."

Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces of the

hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in

constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the firing-

trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a

company. General Mud was "down and out." He waited on the winter

rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared

against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not

so unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of

sniping, to the boredom of billets.

"What hopes!" was the current phrase I heard among the men in

these trenches. It shared honours with strafe. You have only one life

to live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig,

and set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--

what hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for

babes, but better than "K.K." bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins,

British regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come--

shells, bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.

There is much to be thankful for. The King's Own Particular Fusiliers,

as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On

every man's cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from

the storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history;

but no battle honours equal that of the regiment's part in the second

battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment's story, whom you

picture in imagination with haloes of glory in the wish that you might

have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of

these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A.D. 1915, whom

anyone may meet.

But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the

evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses of the action. To remark

that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down

hill. It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave. Why talk about it?

One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather

expects to be killed. The other two "got tickets to England," as they

say. My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and

afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her

own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef

and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my!

What hopes!

Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such

treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady

that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it,

he has. My lady's patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins

knows it will be; and she will wonder if the "stick it" quality of the

British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has

more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses,

and he is having the time of his life in more respects than

strawberries and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and

hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any

pretence to bravery.

If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and

says, "How are you?" and, "Are you going to Berlin?" and, "Are you

comfortable?" etc., Tommy Atkins will say, "Yes, sir," and "Very well,

sir," as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know

him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are

shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.

Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into

that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner; and the old,

care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is

found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars

on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and

comradeship and "joshing" are here among men to whom wounds

and death are a part of the game. One may challenge high

explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot. Settle down

behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry

without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less

than in a shop or a factory.

Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from

Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction, which,

to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any

stranger.

"All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear," says Mr.

Atkins. "Put it down in the guidebooks."

Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some

farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in

head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of

sandbags which is the enemy's line. It was late June at its loveliest;

no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away

and an occasional sniper's bullet. One cracked past as I was looking

through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the

German trenches.

"Your hat, sir!"

Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had

come down and the head under it, most expeditiously. Up to eight

hundred yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs,

even wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained

shots, an angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on

buildings, which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a

shell. The foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.

"Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the

big one at the right?"

In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or it

might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle-barrel. Perhaps

sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the

limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the

patience of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.

"It's about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of fungus,

from a machine-gun!"

A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own

sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.

"Not giving you much excitement!" said Tommy.

"I suppose I'd get a little if I stood up on the parapet?" I asked.

"You wouldn't get a ticket for England; you'd get a box!"

"There's a cemetery just behind the lines if you'd prefer to stay in

France!"

I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way

to the trench. These tenderhearted soldiers who joked with death had

placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought

elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is

another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes,

he's loaded with sentiment, but not for the "movies."

"Keep your head down there, Eames!" called a corporal. "I don't want

to be taking an inventory of your kit."

Eames did not even realize that his head was above the parapet. The

hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep

iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That

morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways

behind the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it

was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned

and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward

for his patience.

The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German

who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was

walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men

took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was

convincing.

As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses I saw a wisp

of flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags

are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of

the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds, and I saw that it was

the tricolour of France.

"A Boche joke!" Tommy explained.

"Probably they are hating the French to-day?"

"No, it's been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag

of our ally. They'd get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of

humour."

"If it were a German flag?" I suggested.

"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain!"

Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all

the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on

top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you

walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was

so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the

trenches opposite.

"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor

in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,"

said a soldier, and another corrected him:

"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up

flares!"

"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"

"And singing the hymn of hate!"

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion

and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of

smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.

"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"

"Ours or the Boches'?"

"Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!"

"No, theirs!"

Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was,

which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both

sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were

Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots

and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.

"Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced

Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.

The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division

commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who

passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards

short of the British trench.

"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The

Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them

yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've

awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was

engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread

surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the

company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.

"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the

cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the

maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is His Majesty's

army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you

think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at

printing?"

The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No

thoroughfare!" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves

rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He

was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a

small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not?

The line had been in the same position for six months.

"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.

The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall,

bought at a shop in the nearest town.

When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill

anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with

boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth

set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying

potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as

flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.

The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same

fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a

table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or

squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition

boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet

by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the

wheatfield. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight

in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with

trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep

by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help

eat the chicken and to spend the night.

Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to

the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about

forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the

twenties.

Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were

back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands

where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and

danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who

gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed

an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was not right to ask the

youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to

start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift

tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.

"Has anyone asked him it yet?" one inquired, referring to some

question to the guest.

"Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be

over?"

It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world.

We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast

chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.

Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the

honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said:

"I will! I will strafe the chicken!" 'Gott strafe England!' Strafe has

become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of

greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the

Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers. "Won't you

strafe a little for us?" Tommy sings out to the German trenches when

they are close. What hopes? That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in

the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from

the bones without landing a leg in anybody's lap or a wing in

anybody's eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had

dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of

his execution. He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls

that came to table.

Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London

to the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and

military methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had

been dining in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in

pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were

worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger. Isn't it better that way?

Would not the parents prefer it that way? Wasn't it the way of the

ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day?

With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to

circumstances. In their lightheartedness they made war seem a keen

sport. They lived war for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves

their efficiency is spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable

man in the trenches. Youth's resources defy monotony and death

at the same time.

An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous

night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up

and piling sandbags in the wheatfield. The plan was to slip out as

soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get

behind the Germans' own sandbags, and give them a perfectly

informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.

Before dinner, however, J------, who was to be the general of the

expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or

more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in

that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain

death to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him

back. If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.

J----had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in

summer. He wore shorts with his knees bare. When he had to do a

"crawl" he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees. He

and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the

attention of the enemy's sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like

boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in

the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them. A matter of the

commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in

suspense. There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the

sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and-

seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young

men.

They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain

parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the

turtles' heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be

too young and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer

just out of school is in his element, with an advantage over older

officers. That pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their

heads up long. They knew just how far they might expose

themselves. They passed out of sight, and reappeared and slipped

back over the parapet again without the Germans being any the

wiser. Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that

the patrol which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern

that they were old and must have been there for some time.

"I'll take the machine-gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,"

said J------. For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no

telling what risks youth might take with machine-guns.

We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a

soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in

the wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no

one in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal

vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling its

brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If one side

succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No international

into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert, rifles laid

on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have been seen.

"Who are you? Answer, or we fire!" called the ranking young

lieutenant.

If any persons present out in front in the face of thirty rifles knew the

English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation,

they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an

unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through

the wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks.

The order was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.

"Enough! Cease fire!" said the officer. "Nobody there. If there had

been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the

wheat stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover."

This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a

fusillade in this kind of a test.

After dinner J------rolled his puttees up around his bare knees again,

for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine-gun

expedition. J------'s knees were black and blue in spots; they were

also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the

trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in

the faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of

turning a machine-gun on them before they turn one on you!

"One man hit by a stray bullet," said J------on his return.

"I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his leg,"

said the other officer.

"Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first

time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got

about the only shot fired at us."

"Need a stretcher?"

"No."

Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication

trench, seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is

not a bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.

Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more

interesting and death more likely.

"It's dark enough, now," said one of the youngsters who was out on

another scout. "We'll go out with the patrol."

By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly

detected. Light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect

them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what

mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear

rather than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes

out of his burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides

are on the prowl.

"Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,"

said the young officer. "They would be more useful than aeroplanes

in locating the enemy's gun-positions. A properly reliable owl would

come back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheatfield at

such a point and a machine-gun would wipe out that patrol."

We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out

of the front trench toward the Germans.

"Anybody out?" he asked a soldier who was on guard at the end of it.

"Yes, two."

Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed

wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the

starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge,

as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol

returned it closed the gate again.

"Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We've everything to

keep the Boches off our front lawn except 'Keep off the grass!' signs."

It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat's-paw of

breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from

the German trenches swept the brilliant sputter of red light of a

German flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been

aimed at us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in

head between the trenches.

"Down flat!" whispered the officer.

It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no

firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between

the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German

army in France except that flare. However, if a guide who knows as

much about war as this one says you are to prostrate yourself when

you are out between two lines of machine-guns and rifles--between

the fighting powers of England and Germany--you take the hint. The

flare sank into earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling

of sparks in our faces.

"What if we had been seen?"

"They'd have combed the wheat in this part thoroughly, and they

might have got us."

"It's hard to believe," I said.

So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing. Always hard

to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf came; until

after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed to the watching

enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a crackling chorus

of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night by concentrating

on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a part of the minute,

painstaking economy of war.

We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought

up behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire

instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but to

shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer spoke

to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say that

they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was

out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on

the job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine.

We did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by

any German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and

overheard by us.

Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was

war. You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising

your head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our

backs faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the

talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both sides,

like that around some camp-fire on the plains.

It seemed quite within the bounds of possibility that you might have

crawled on up to the Germans and said, "Howdy!" But by the time

you reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could

present your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of

holes. That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for

which the Germans were looking. "Well, shall we go back?" asked the

officer. There seemed no particular purpose in spending the night

prone in the wheat with your ears cocked like a pointer-dog's.

Besides, he had other duties, exacting duties laid down by the colonel

as the result of trench experience in his responsibility for the

command of a company of men.

It happened as we crawled back into the trench, that a fury of shots

broke out from a point along the line two or three hundred yards

away; sharp, vicious shots on the still night air, stabbing, merciless

death in their sound. Oh, yes, there was war in France; unrelenting,

shrewd, tireless war. A touch of suspicion anywhere and the hornets

swarmed.

It was two a.m. From the dug-outs came unmistakable sounds of

slumber. Men off duty were not kept awake by cold and moisture in

summer. They had fashioned for themselves comfortable dormitories

in the hard earth walls. A cot in an officer's bedchamber was

indicated as mine. The walls had been hung with cuts from illustrated

papers and bagging spread on the floor to make it "home-like." He lay

down on the floor because he was nearer the door in case he had to

respond to an alarm; besides, he said I would soon appreciate that I

was not the object of favouritism. So I did. It was a trench-made cot,

fashioned by some private of engineers, I fancy, who had Germans

rather than the American cousin in mind.

"The wall side of the rib that runs down the middle is the comfortable

side, I have found," said my host. "It may not appear so at first, but

you will find it works out that way."

Nevertheless, I slept, my last recollection that of sniping shots, to be

awakened with the first streaks of day by the sound of a fusillade--the

"morning hate" or the "morning strafe" as it is called. After the vigil of

darkness it breaks the monotony to salute the dawn with a burst of

rifle-shots. Eyes strained through the mist over the wheatfield

watching for some one of the enemy who may be exposing himself,

unconscious that it is light enough for him to be visible. Objects which

are not men but look as if they might be in the hazy distance, called

for attention on the chance. For ten minutes, perhaps, the serenade

lasted, and then things settled down to the normal. The men were

yawning and stirring from their dug-outs. After the muster they would

take the places of those who had been "on the bridge" through the

night.

"It's a case of how little water you can wash with, isn't it?" I said to

the cook, who appreciated my thoughtfulness when I made shift

with a dipperful, as I had done on desert journeys. We were in a trench

that was inundated with water in winter, and not more than two miles

from a town which had water laid on. But bringing a water supply in

pails along narrow trenches is a poor pastime, though better than

bringing it up under the rifle-sights of snipers across the fields back

of the trenches.

"Don't expect much for breakfast," said the strafer of the chicken. But

it was eggs and bacon, the British stand-by in all weathers, at home

and abroad.

J------was going to turn in and sleep. These youngsters could sleep at

any time; for one hour, or two hours, or five, or ten, if they had a

chance. A sudden burst of rifle-fire was the alarm clock which always

promptly awakened them. The recollection of cheery hospitality and

their fine, buoyant spirit is even clearer now than when I left the

trench.

A School In Bombing

It was at a bombing school on a French farm, where chosen soldiers

brought back from the trenches were being trained in the use of the

anarchists' weapon, which has now become as respectable as the

rifle. The war has steadily developed specialism. M.B. degrees for

Master Bombers are not beyond the range of possibilities.

Present was the chief instructor, a Scottish subaltern with blue eyes,

a pleasant smile, and a Cock-o'-the-North spirit. He might have been

twenty years old, though he did not look it. On his breast was the

purple and white ribbon of the new order of the Military Cross, which

you get for doing something in this war which would have won you a

Victoria Cross in one of the other wars.

Also present was the assistant instructor, a sergeant of regulars--and

very much of a regular--who had three ribbons which he had won in

previous campaigns. He, too, had blue eyes, bland blue eyes. These

two understood each other.

"If you don't drop it, why, it's all right!" said the sergeant. "Of course,

if you do------"

My Year of the War Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form · 第 8 / 11 题

"You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every