rhetoric. The pertinence of the experience was entirely in the fact that
I was taking the aerial ferry which sent twenty planes a day to France
on an average and perhaps fifty when the weather had held up traffic the
previous day. I was to buffet the clouds instead of the waves on a
crowded steamer and have a glimpse behind the curtains of military
secrecy of the wonders of resource and organization, which are a
commonplace to the wonder-workers themselves.
It was to be a straight, business flight, a matter of routine, a flight
without any loitering on the way or covering unnecessary distance to
reach the destination. There would be risks enough for the plane when it
crossed into the enemy's area with its machine gun in position. The
gleam of two lines of steel of a railroad set our course. After we had
risen to a height of three or four thousand feet an occasional dash of
rain whipped your face, and again the soft mist of a cloud.
It was real English weather, overcast; and England plotted under your
eye, a vast garden with its hedges, fields and quiet villages, had never
been so fully realized in its rich greens. We overtook trains going in
our direction and passed trains going in the opposite direction under
their trailing spouts of steam. Only an occasional encampment of tents
suggested that the land was at war. The soft light melted the different
tones of the landscape together in a dreamy whole and always the
impression was of a land loved for its hedges, its pastures and its
island seclusion, loved as a garden. In order to hold it secure this
plane was flying and the great army in France was fighting.
After forty minutes of the exhilaration of flight which never grows
stale, the pilot thumped one of the wings which gave out the sound of a
drumhead to attract my attention and indicated an immense white arrow on
a pasture pointing toward the bank of mist that hid the channel. This
was the guide-post of the aerial ferry. He wheeled around it in order to
give me a better view, which was his only departure from routine before,
on the line of the arrow's pointing, he took his course, leaving the
railroad behind, while ahead the green carpet seemed to end in a
vaporish horizon.
Usually as they rose for the channel crossing pilots ascended to a
height of ten thousand feet, in order that they should have range in
case of engine trouble for a long glide which might permit them to reach
shore, or, if they must alight in the sea, to descend close to a vessel.
In both England and France along the established aerial pathway are
certain way stations fit to give rubber tires a soft welcome, with
gasoline in store if a fresh supply is required. It was the pride of my
pilot, who had formerly been in the navy and had come from South Africa
to "do his bit," that in twenty crossings he had never had to make a
stop. To-day the clouds kept us down to an altitude of only four
thousand feet.
Hills and valleys do not exist, all landscape being flat to the
aviator's eye, as we know; but against reason some mental kink made me
feel that this optical law should not apply to the chalk cliffs when we
came to the coast, where only the green sward which crowns them was
visible and beyond this a line of gray, the beach, which had an edge of
white lace that was moving--the surf.
Soldiers who were returning from leave in the regular way were having a
jumpy passage, as one knew by the whitecaps that looked like tiny white
flowers on a pewter cloth; only if you looked steadily at one it
disappeared and others appeared in its place. Otherwise, the channel in
a heavy sea was as still as a painted ocean with painted ships which,
however fast they were moving, were making no headway to us traveling as
smoothly in our 'bus as a motor boat on a glassy lake.
I looked at my watch as we crossed the lace edging on the English side
and again as we crossed it on the French side. The time elapsed was
seventeen and a half minutes, which is not rapid going, even for the
broader part of the channel which we chose. The fastest plane, I am
told, has made it at the narrowest point in eight and a half minutes.
Not going as high as usual, the pilot did not speed his motor, as the
lower the altitude the more uncomfortable might be the result of engine
trouble to his passenger.
Now, however, we were rising midway of the crossing into the gray bank
overhead; one second the channel floor was there and the next it was
not. Underneath us was mist and ahead and behind and above us only mist,
soft and cool against the face. We were wholly out of sight of land and
water, above the clouds, detached from earth, lost in the sky between
England and France.
This was the great moment to me. I was away from the sound of the guns;
from the headlines of newspapers announcing the latest official
bulletins; from prisoners' camps and casualty clearing stations; from
dugouts and trenches and the Ridge. Here was real peace, the peace of
the infinite--and no one could ask you when you thought the war would be
over. You were nobody, yet again you were the whole population of the
world, you and the aviator and the plane, perfectly helpless in one
sense and in another gloriously secure. Even he seemed a part of the
machine carrying you swiftly on, without any sense of speed except the
driving freshness of the air in your face. I felt that I should not mind
going on forever. Time was unlimited. There was only space and the
humming of the motor and the faintly gleaming circle of light of the
propeller and those two rigid wings with their tracery of braces.
We were not long out of sight of land and water, but long enough to make
one wish to fly over the channel again, the next time at ten thousand
feet, when it was a gleaming swath hidden at times by patches of
luminous nimbus.
The engine stopped. There was the silence of the clouds, cushioned
silence, cushioned by the mist. Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan
and when we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet or more,
France loomed ahead with its lacework of surf and an expanse of chalk
cliffs at an angle and landscape rising out of the haze. A few minutes
more and the salt thread that kept Napoleon out of England and has kept
Germany out of England was behind us. We were over the Continent of
Europe.
I had never before understood the character of both England and France
so well. England was many little gardens correlated by roads and lanes;
France was one great garden. Majestic in their suggestion of
spaciousness were those broad stretches of hedgeless, fenceless fields,
their crop lines sharply drawn as are all lines from a plane, fields
between the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, revealing a
land where all the soil is tilled.
Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, straight highways that I
had often traveled in my comings and goings. But how empty seemed the
roads where you were always passing motor trucks and guns! Long, gray
streaks with occasional specks which, as you rose to a greater height,
were lost like scattered beads melting into a ribbon! Reserve trenches
that I had known, too, were white tracings on a flat surface in their
standard contour of traverses. There was the chateau where I had lived
for months. Yes, I could identify that, and there the town where we went
to market.
We flew around the tower of a cathedral low enough to see the people
moving in the streets, and then, in a final long glide, after an hour
and fifty minutes in the air, the rubber wheels touched earth, rose and
touched it again before the steady old 'bus slowed down not far from
another plane that had arrived only a few minutes previously. When a day
of good weather follows a day of bad and the arrivals are frequent,
planes are flopping about this aerodrome like so many penguins before
they are marshaled by the busy attendants in line along the edge of the
field or under the shelter of hangars.
We had had none of those thrilling experiences which are supposed to
happen to aerial joy-riders, but had made a perfectly safe, normal trip,
which, I repeat, was the real point of this wonderful business of the
aerial ferry. I went into the office and officially reported my arrival
at the same time that the pilot reported delivery of his plane.
"Good-night," he said. "I'm off to catch the steamer to bring over
another 'bus to-morrow."
Waiting near by was my car and soldier chauffeur, who asked, in his
quiet English way, if I had had "a good flight, sir;" and soon I was
back in the atmosphere of the army as the car sped along the road, past
camps, villages and motor trucks, until in the moonlight, as we came
over a hill, the cathedral tower of Amiens appeared above the dark mass
of the town against the dim horizon.
XX
THE EVER MIGHTY GUNS
A thousand guns at the master's call--Schoolmaster of the guns--More
and more guns but never too many--The gunner's skill which has life
and death at stake--"Grandmother" first of the fifteen-inch
howitzers--Soldier-mechanics--War still a matter of
missiles--Improvements in gunnery--Third rail of the battlefield--The
game of guns checkmating guns--A Niagara of death--A giant tube of
steel painted in frog patches.
How reconcile that urbane gunner-general, a genius among experts you
were told, as the master of a thunderous magic which shot its deadly
lightnings over the German area! Let him move a red pin on the map and a
tractor was towing a nine-inch gun to a new position; a black pin and a
battery of eighteen pounders took the road. A thousand guns answered his
call with a hundred thousand shells when it pleased him. I stood in awe
of him, for chaos seemed to be doing his bidding at the end of a
pushbutton.
Whirlwind curtains of fire and creeping and leaping curtains were his
familiar servants, and he set the latest fashion by his improvements.
Had the French or the Germans something new? This he applied. Had he
something new? He passed on the method to the French and gave the
Germans the benefit of its results.
Observers seated in the baskets of observation balloons, aeroplanes
circling low in risk of anti-aircraft fire, men sitting in tree-tops and
others in front-line trenches spotting the fall of shells were the eyes
for the science he was working out on his map. Those nests and lines of
guns that seemed to be simply sending shells into the blue from their
hiding-places played fortissimo and pianissimo under his baton. He
correlated their efforts, gave them purpose and system in their roaring
traffic of projectiles.
Where Sir Douglas Haig was schoolmaster of the whole, he was
schoolmaster of the guns. After the grim days of the salient, when he
worked with relics from fortresses and anything that could be improvised
against the German artillery, came the latest word in black-throated,
fiery-tongued monsters from England where the new gunners had learned
their ABC's and he and his assistants were to teach them solid geometry
and calculus and give them a toilsome experience, which was still more
useful.
His host kept increasing as more and more guns arrived, but never too
many. There cannot be too many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest
for a depth of six or eight miles and there would not be enough by the
criterion of the infantry, to whom the fortunes of war increasingly
related to the nature of the artillery support. He must have smiled with
the satisfaction of a farmer over a big harvest yield that filled the
granary as the stack of shells at an ammunition depot spread over the
field, and he could go among his guns with the pride of a landowner
among his flocks. He knew all the diseases that guns were heir to and
their weaknesses of temperament. A gun doctor was part of the
establishment. This specialist went among the guns and felt of their
pulses and listened to accounts of their symptoms and decided whether
they could be cared for at a field hospital or would have to go back to
the base.
Temperament? An old eight-inch howitzer which has helped in a dozen
curtains of fire and blown in numerous dugouts may be a virtuoso for
temperament. Many things enter into mastery of the magic of the
thunders, from clear eyesight of observers who see accurately to
precision of gunner's skill, of powder, of fuse, of a hundred trifles
which can never be too meticulously watched. The erring inspector of
munitions far away oversea by an oversight may cost the lives of many
soldiers or change the fate of a charge.
Comparable only with the surgeon's skill in the skill which has life and
death as the stake of its result is the gunner's. The surgeon is trying
to save one life which a slip of the knife may destroy; the gunner is
trying both to save and to take life. In the gunner's skill life that is
young and sturdy, muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill,
manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little carelessness or the
slightest error and monsters with their long, fiery reach may strike you
in the back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of dead and
wounded and capitulation among smashed dugouts and machine gun positions
you may be received by showers of bombs. No wonder that gunners work
hard! No wonder that discipline is tightened by the screw of fearful
responsibility!
At the front we had a sort of reverence for Grandmother, the first of
the fifteen-inch howitzers to arrive as the belated answer of "prepared
England" who "forced the war" on "unprepared Germany" to the famous
forty-two centimeters that pounded Liège and Maubeuge. Gently
Grandmother with her ugly mouth and short neck and mammoth supporting
ribs of steel was moved and nursed; for she, too, was temperamental.
Afterward, Grandfather came and Uncle and Cousin and Aunt and many grown
sons and daughters, until the British could have turned the city of
Lille into ruins had they chosen; but they kept their destruction for
the villages on the Somme, which represent a property loss remarkably
small, as the average village could be rebuilt for not over two hundred
thousand dollars.
Other children of smaller caliber also arrived in surprising numbers.
Make no mistake about that nine-inch howitzer, which appears to be only
a monstrous tube of steel firing a monstrous shell, not being a
delicately adjusted piece of mechanism. The gunner, his clothes
oil-soaked, who has her breech apart pays no attention to the field of
guns around him or the burst of a shell a hundred yards away, no more
than the man with a motor breakdown pays to passing traffic. Is he a
soldier? Yes, by his uniform, but primarily a mechanic, this man from
Birmingham, who is polishing that heavy piece of steel which, when it
locks in the breech, holds the shell fast in place and allows all the
force of the explosion to pass through the muzzle, while the recoil
cylinder takes up the shock as nicely as on a battleship, with no
tremble of the base set in the débris of a village. He shakes his head,
this preoccupied mechanician. It may be necessary to call in the gun
doctor. His "how" has been in service a long time, but is not yet
showing the signs of general debility of the eight-inch battery near by.
They have fired three times their allowance and are still good for
sundry purposes in the gunner-general's play of red and black pins on
his map. The life of guns has surpassed all expectations; but the
smaller calibers forward and the _soixante-quinze_ must not suffer from
general debility when they lay on a curtain of fire to cover a charge.
War is still a matter of projectiles, of missiles thrown by powder,
whether cannon or rifle, as it was in Napoleon's time, the change being
in range, precision and destructive power. The only new departure is the
aeroplane, for the gas attack is another form of the Chinese stink-pot
and our old mystery friend Greek fire may claim antecedence to the
_Flammenwerfer_. The tank with its machine guns applied the principle of
projectiles from guns behind armor. Steel helmets would hardly be
considered an innovation by mediæval knights. Bombs and hand grenades
and mortars are also old forms of warfare, and close-quarter fighting
with the bayonet, as was evident to all practical observers before the
war, will endure as long as the only way to occupy a position is by the
presence of men on the spot and as long as the defenders fight to hold
it in an arena free of interference by guns which must hold their fire
in fear of injury to your own soldiers as well as to the enemy.
With all the inventive genius of Europe applied in this war, the heat
ray or any other revolutionary means of killing which would make guns
and rifles powerless has not been developed. It is still a question of
throwing or shooting projectiles accurately at your opponent, only where
once it was javelin, or spear, or arrow, now it is a matter of shells
for anywhere from one mile to twenty miles; and the more hits that you
could make with javelins or arrows and can make with shells the more
likely it is that victory will incline to your side. Where flights of
arrows hid the sun, barrages now blanket the earth.
The improvement in shell fire is revolutionary enough of itself.
Steadily the power of the guns has increased. What they may accomplish
is well illustrated by the account of a German battalion on the Somme.
When it was ten miles from the front a fifteen-inch shell struck in its
billets just before it was ordered forward. On the way luck was against
it at every stage of progress and it suffered in turn from nine-inch,
eight-inch and six-inch shells, not to mention bombs from an aviator
flying low, and afterward from eighteen pounders. When it reached the
trenches a preliminary bombardment was the stroke of fate that led to
the prompt capitulation of some two hundred survivors to a British
charge. The remainder of the thousand men was practically all casualties
from shell-bursts, which, granting some exaggeration in a prisoner's
tale, illustrates what killing the guns may wreak if the target is under
their projectiles.
The gunnery of 1915 seems almost amateurish to that of 1916, a fact
hardly revealed to the public by its reading of bulletins and of such a
quantity of miscellaneous information that the significance of it
becomes obscure. At the start of the war the Germans had the advantage
of many mobile howitzers and immense stores of high explosive shells,
while the French were dependent on their _soixante-quinze_ and shrapnel;
and at this disadvantage the brilliancy of their work with this
wonderful field gun on the Marne and in Lorraine was the most important
contributory factor in saving France next to the vital one of French
courage and organization. The Allies had to follow the German suit with
howitzers and high explosive shells and the cry for more and more guns
and more and more munitions for the business of blasting your enemy and
his positions to bits became universal.
The first barrage, or curtain of fire, ever used to my knowledge was a
feeble German effort in the Ypres salient in the autumn of 1914, though
the French drum fire distributed over a certain area had, in a sense, a
like effect. To make certain of clearness about fundamentals familiar to
those at the front but to the general public only a symbol for something
not understood, a curtain of fire is a swath of fragments and bullets
from bursting projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent reserves
from coming to the support of the front line. It is a barrier of death,
the third rail of the battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with
their showers of bullets, while the high explosives heave up the earth
under foot. Shrapnel largely went out of fashion in the period when high
explosives smashed in trenches and dugouts; but the answer was deeper
dugouts too stoutly roofed to permit of penetration and shrapnel
returned to play a leading part again, as we shall see in the
description of a charge under an up-to-date curtain of fire in another
chapter.
Counter-battery work is another one of the gunner-general's cares, which
requires, as it were, the assistance of the detective branch. Before you
can fight you must find the enemy's guns in their hiding-places or take
a chance on the probable location of his batteries, which will
ordinarily seek every copse, every sunken road and every reverse slope.
The interesting captured essay on British fighting methods, by General
von Arnim, the general in command of the Germans opposite the British on
the Somme, with its minutiæ of directions indicative of how seriously he
regarded the New Army, mentioned the superior means of reporting
observations to the guns used by British aeroplanes and warned German
gunners against taking what had formerly been obvious cover, because
British artillery never failed to concentrate on those spots with
disastrous results.
Where aeroplanes easily detect lines, be they roads or a column of
infantry, as I have said, a battery in the open with guns and gunners
the tint of the landscape is not readily distinguishable at the high
altitude to which anti-aircraft gunfire restricts aviators. When a
concentration begins on a battery, either the gunners must go to their
dugouts or run beyond the range of the shells until the "strafe" is
over. If A could locate all of B's guns and had two thousand guns of his
own to keep B's two thousand silenced by counter-battery work and two
thousand additional to turn on B's infantry positions, it would be only
a matter of continued charges under cover of curtains of fire until the
survivors, under the gusts of shells with no support from their own
guns, would yield against such ghastly, hopeless odds.
Such is the power of the guns--and such the game of guns checkmating
guns--in their effort to stop the enemy's curtains of fire while
maintaining their own that the genius who finds a divining rod which,
from a sausage balloon, will point out the position of every enemy
battery has fame awaiting him second only to that of the inventor of a
system of distilling a death-dealing heat ray from the sun.
And the captured gun! It is a prize no less dear to the infantry's
heart to-day than it was a hundred years ago. Our battalion took a
battery! There is a thrill for every officer and man and all the friends
at home. Muzzle cracked by a direct hit, recoil cylinder broken, wheels
in kindling wood, shield fractured--there you have a trophy which is
proof of accuracy to all gunners and an everlasting memorial in the town
square to the heroism of the men of that locality.
In the gunners' branch of the corps or division staff (which may be next
door to the telephone exchange where "Hello!" soldiers are busy all day
keeping guns, infantry, transport, staff and units, large and small, in
touch) the visitor will linger as he listens to the talk of shop by
these experts in mechanical destruction. Generic discussions about which
caliber of gun is most efficient for this and that purpose have the
floor when the result of a recent action does not furnish a fresher
topic. There are faddists and old fogies of course, as in every other
band of experts. The reports of the infantry out of its experience under
shell-bursts, which should be the gospel, may vary; for the infantry
think well of the guns when the charge goes home with casualties light
and ill when the going is bad.
Every day charts go up to the commanders showing the expenditure of
ammunition and the stock of different calibers on hand; for the army is
a most fastidious bookkeeper. Always there must be immense reserves for
an emergency, and on the Somme a day's allowance when the battle was
only "growling" was a month's a year previous. Let the general say the
word and fifty thousand more shells will be fired on Thursday than on
Wednesday. He throws off and on the switch of a Niagara of death. The
infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant demand. It would like a score
of batteries turned on one machine gun, all the batteries in the army
against a battalion front, and a sheet of shells in the air night and
day, as you yourself would wish if you were up in the firing-line.