the battle line; and there is another which may be on your side or on
the other side of the battle line. It is the location of the second line
that tells who has the mastery of the air. A word of bare and impressive
meaning this of mastery in war, which represents force without
qualification; that the other man is down and you are up, the other
fends and you thrust. More glorious than the swift rush of destroyer to
a battleship that of the British planes whose bombs brought down six
German sausage balloons in flames before the Grand Offensive began.
I need never have visited an aerodrome on the Somme to know whether
Briton and Frenchman or German was master of the air. The answer was
there whenever you looked in the heavens in the absence of iron crosses
on the hovering or scudding or turning plane wings and the multiplicity
of bull's-eyes; in the abandoned way that both British and French
pickets flew over the enemy area, as if space were theirs and they dared
any interference. If you saw a German plane appear you could count three
or four Allied planes appearing from different directions to surround
it. The German had to go or be caught in a cross fire, and manoeuvered
to his death.
Mastery of the air is another essential of superiority for an
offensive; one of the vital features in the organized whole of an
attack. As you press men and guns forward enemy planes must not locate
your movements. Your planes with fighting planes as interference must
force a passage for your observers to spot the fall of shells on new
targets, to assist in reporting the progress of charges and to play
their proper auxiliary part in the complex system of army intelligence.
Before the offensive new aerodromes began to appear along the front at
the same time that new roads were building. An army that had lacked both
planes and guns at the start now had both. Every aviator knew that he
was expected to gain and hold the mastery; his part was set no less than
that of the infantry. Where should "the spirit that quickeneth" dwell if
not with the aviators? No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to
crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in
mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, the golden youth of
adventure.
He leaves a comfortable bed, with bath, a good breakfast, the
comradeship of a pleasant mess, the care of servants, to mount his
steed. When he returns he has only to step out of his seat. Mechanics
look after his plane and refreshment and shade in summer and warmth in
winter await alike the spoiled child of the favored, adventurous corps
who has not the gift and never quite dares the great hazards as well as
the one who dares them to his certain end. All depends on the man.
Rising ten or fifteen thousand feet, slipping in and out of clouds, the
aviator breathes pure ozone on a dustless roadway, the world a carpet
under him; and though death is at his elbow it is no grimy companion
like death in the trenches. He is up or he is down, and when he is up
the thrill that holds his faculties permits of no apprehensions. There
is no halfway business of ghastly wounds which foredoom survival as a
cripple. Alive, he is nearer immortality than any other living man can
be; dead, his spirit leaves him while he is in the heavens. Death comes
splendidly, quickly, and until the last moment he is trying to keep
control of his machine. It is not for him to envy the days of cavalry
charges. He does not depend upon the companionship of other men to carry
him on, but is the autocrat of his own fate, the ruler of his own
dreams. All hours of daylight are the same to him. At any time he may be
called to flight and perhaps to die. The glories of sunset and sunrise
are his between the sun and the earth.
You expect the British to be cool aviators, but with their phlegm, as we
have seen, goes that singular love of risk, of adventure, which sends
them to shoot tigers and climb mountains. Indeed, the Englishman's
phlegm is a sort of leash holding in check a certain recklessness which
his seeming casualness conceals. After it had become almost a law that
no aviator should descend lower than twelve thousand feet, British
aviators on the Somme descended to three hundred, emptied their machine
guns into the enemy, and escaped the patter of rifle fire which the
surprised German soldiers had hardly begun before the plane at two miles
a minute or more was out of range.
When Lord Kitchener was inspecting an aerodrome in France in 1914 he
said: "One day you will be flying and evoluting in squadrons like the
navy;" and the aviators, then feeling their way step by step, smiled
doubtfully, convinced that "K" had an imagination. A few months later
the prophecy had come true and the types of planes had increased until
they were as numerous as the types of guns.
The swift falcon waiting fifteen thousand feet up for his prey to add
another to his list in the _communiqué_ is as distinct from the one in
which I crossed the channel as the destroyer is from the cruiser and
from some still bigger types as is the cruiser from a battleship. While
the enemy was being fought down, bombs were dropped not by pounds but by
tons on villages and billets, on ammunition dumps and rail-heads, adding
their destruction to that of the shells.
There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of
observation, for it affected the enemy's _morale_. A soldier likes to
see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away. The
aerial influence on his psychology is enormous, for he can watch the
planes as he lies in a shell-crater with his machine gun or stands guard
in the trench; he has glimpses of passing wings overhead between the
bursts of shells. To know that his guns are not replying adequately and
that every time one of his planes appears it is driven to cover takes
the edge off initiative, courage and discipline, in the resentment that
he is handicapped.
German prisoners used to say on the Somme that their aviators were
"funks," though the Allied aviators knew that it was not their
opponents' lack of courage which was the principal fault, even if they
had lost _morale_ from being the under dog and lacked British and French
initiative, but numbers and material. It was resource against resource
again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufacture of the
fragile framework, of the wonderful engines with their short lives, and
of the skilled battalions of workers in factories. The Germans had to
bring more planes from another front in order to restore the balance.
The Allies foreseeing this brought still more themselves, till the
numbers were so immense that when a battle between a score of planes on
either side took place no one dared venture the opinion that the limit
had been reached--not while there was so much room in the air and
volunteers for the aviation corps were so plentiful.
XXIII
A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE
Thiepval again--Director of tactics of an army corps--Graduates of
Staff Colleges--Army jargon--An army director's office--"Hope you
will see a good show"--"This road is shelled; closed to vehicles"--A
perfect summer afternoon--The view across No Man's Land--Nests of
burrowers more cunning than any rodents--men--Tranquil preliminaries
to an attack--The patent curtain of fire--Registering by practice
shots--Running as men will run only from death--The tall officer who
collapsed--"The shower of death."
"We had a good show day before yesterday," said Brigadier-General Philip
Howell, when I went to call on him one day. "Sorry you were not here.
You could have seen it excellently."
The corps of which he was general staff officer had taken a section of
first-line trench at Thiepval with more prisoners than casualties, which
is the kind of news they like to hear at General Headquarters. Thiepval
was always in the background of the army's mind, the symbol of rankling
memory which irritated British stubbornness and consoled the enemy for
his defeat of July 15th and his gradual loss of the Ridge. The Germans,
on the defensive, considered that the failure to take Thiepval at the
beginning of the Somme battle proved its impregnability; the British,
on the offensive, considered no place impregnable.
Faintly visible from the hills around Albert, distinctly from the
observation post in a high tree, the remains of the village looked like
a patch of coal dust smeared in a fold of the high ground. When British
fifteen-inch shells made it their target some of the dust rose in a
great geyser and fell back into place; but there were cellars in
Thiepval which even fifteen-inch shells could not penetrate.
"However, we'll make the Germans there form the habit of staying
indoors," said a gunner.
Howell who had the Thiepval task in hand I had first known at Uskub in
Macedonia in the days of the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was
juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy--days which seem far
away. A lieutenant then, Howell had an assignment from _The Times_,
while home on leave from India, in order to make a study of the Balkan
situation. In our walks around Uskub as we discussed the politics and
the armies of the world I found that all was grist that came to his keen
mind. His ideas about soldiering were explicit and practical. It was
such hard-working, observant officers as he, most of them students at
one time or another at the Staff College, who, when the crisis came, as
the result of their application in peace time, became the organizers and
commanders of the New Army. The lieutenant I had met at Uskub was now,
at thirty-eight, the director of the tactics of an army corps which was
solving the problem of reducing the most redoubtable of field works.
Whenever I think of the Staff College I am reminded that at the close of
the American Civil War the commanders of all the armies and most of the
corps were graduates of West Point, which serves to prove that a man of
ability with a good military education has the start of one who has not,
though no laws govern geniuses; and if we should ever have to fight
another great war I look for our generals to have studied at Leavenworth
and when the war ends for the leaders to be men whom the public did not
know when it began.
"We shall have another show to-morrow and I think that will be a good
one, too," said Howell.
All attacks are "shows;" big shows over two or three miles or more of
front, little shows over a thousand yards or so, while five hundred
yards is merely "cleaning up a trench." It may seem a flippant way of
speaking, but it is simply the application of jargon to the everyday
work of an organization. An attack that fails is a "washout," for not
all attacks succeed. If they did, progress would be a matter of
marching.
"Zero is at four; come at two," Howell said when I was going.
At two the next afternoon I found him occupied less with final details
than with the routine business of one who is clearing his desk
preparatory to a week-end holiday. Against the wall of what had been
once a bedroom in the house of the leading citizen of the town, which
was his office, he had an improvised bookkeeper's desk and on it were
the mapped plans of the afternoon's operation, which he had worked over
with the diligence and professional earnestness of an architect over his
blue prints. He had been over the ground and studied it with the care of
a landscape gardener who is going to make improvements.
"A smoke barrage screen along there," he explained, indicating the line
of a German trench, "but a real attack along here"--which sounded
familiar from staff officers in chateaux.
Every detail of the German positions was accurately outlined, yard by
yard, their machine guns definitely located.
"We're uncertain about that one," he remarked, laying his pencil on the
map symbol for an M.G.
Trench mortars had another symbol, deep dugouts another. It was the
business of somebody to get all this information without being
communicative about his methods. Referring to a section of a hundred
yards or more he remarked that an eager company commander had thought
that he could take a bit of German trench there and had taken it, which
meant that the gunners had to be informed so as to rearrange the barrage
or curtain of fire with the resulting necessity of fresh observations
and fresh registry of practice shots. I judged that Howell did not want
the men to be too eager; he wanted them just eager enough.
This game being played along the whole front has, of course, been
likened to chess, with guns and men as pieces. I had in mind the dummy
actors and dummy scenery with which stage managers try out their acts,
only in this instance there was never any rehearsal on the actual stage
with the actual scenery unless a first attack had failed, as the Germans
will not permit such liberties except under machine gun fire. A call or
two came over the telephone about some minor details, the principal ones
being already settled.
"It's time to go," he said finally.
The corps commander was downstairs in the dining-room comfortably
smoking his pipe after tea. There would be nothing for him to do until
news of the attack had been received. "I hope you will see a good show,"
he remarked, by way of _au revoir_.
How earnestly he hoped it there is no use of mentioning here. It is
taken for granted. Carefully thought out plans backed by hundreds of
guns and the lives of men at stake--and against the Thiepval
fortifications!
"Yes, we'll make it nicely," concluded Howell, as we went down the
steps. A man used to motoring ten miles to catch the nine-thirty to town
could not have been more certain of the disposal of his time than this
soldier on the way to an attack. His car which was waiting had a right
of way up to front such as is enjoyed only by the manager of the works
on his own premises. Of course he paid no attention to the sign, "This
road is shelled; closed to vehicles," at the beginning of a stretch of
road which looked unused and desolate.
"A car in front of me here the other day received a direct hit from a
'krump,' and car and passengers practically disappeared before my eyes,"
he remarked, without further dwelling on the incident; for the Germans
were, in turn, irritated with the insistence of these stubborn British
that they could take Thiepval.
Three prisoners in the barbed-wire inclosure that we passed looked
lonely. They must have been picked up in a little bombing affair in a
sap.
"I think that they will have plenty of companions this evening," said
Howell. "How they will enjoy their dinner!" He smiled in recollection
as did I of that familiar sight of prisoners eating. Nothing excites
hunger like a battle or gives such zest to appetite as knowledge that
you are out of danger. I know that it is true and so does everybody at
the front.
As his car knew no regulations except his wishes he might take it as far
as it could go without trying to cross trenches. I wonder how long it
would have taken me if I had had a map and asked no questions to find my
way to the gallery seat which Howell had chosen for watching the show.
After we had passed guns with only one out of ten firing leisurely but
all with their covers off, the gunners near their pieces and ample
ammunition at hand, we cut straight up the slope, Howell glancing at his
wrist watch and asking if he were walking too fast for me. We dropped
into a communication trench at a point which experience had proven was
the right place to begin to take cover.
"This is a good place," he said at length, and we rubbed our helmets
with some of the chalk lumps of the parapet, which left the black spot
of our field glasses the only bit of us not in harmony with our
background.
It was a perfect afternoon in late summer, without wind or excessive
heat, the blue sky unflecked; such an afternoon as you would choose for
lolling in a hammock and reading a book. The foreground was a slope
downward to a little valley where the usual limbless tree-trunks were
standing in a grove that had been thoroughly shelled. No one was in
sight there, and an occasional German five-point-nine shell burst on the
mixture of splinters and earth.
On the other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the
British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see.
Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where grass and weeds had grown wild
for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-craters and the remains of
the dead from the British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed. On
the other side of this was two hundred yards of desolate stretch up to
the wavy, chalky excavation from the deep cutting of the German
first-line trench, as distinct as a white line on dark-brown paper.
There was no sign of life here, either, or to the rear where ran the
network of other excavations as the result of the almost two years of
German digging, the whole thrown in relief on the slope up to the bare
trunks of two or three trees thrust upward from the smudge of the ruins
of Thiepval.
Just a knoll in rolling farm country, that was all; but it concealed
burrows upon burrows of burrowers more cunning than any rodents--men.
Since July 1st the Germans had not been idle. They had had time to
profit from the lesson of the attack with additions and improvements.
They had deepened dugouts and joined them by galleries; they had Box and
Cox hiding-places; nests defensible from all sides which became known as
Mystery Works and Wonder Works. The message of that gashed and spaded
hillside was one of mortal defiance.
Occasionally a British high explosive broke in the German trench and all
up and down the line as far as we could see this desultory shell fire
was proceeding, giving no sign of where the next attack was coming,
which was part of the plan.
"It's ten to four!" said Howell. "We were here in ample time. I hope we
get them at relief," which was when a battalion that had been on duty
was relieved by a battalion that had been in rest.
He laid his map on the parapet and the location and plan of the attack
became clear as a part of the extensive operations in the
Thiepval-Mouquet Farm sector. The British were turning the flank of
these Thiepval positions as they swung in from the joint of the break of
July 1st up to the Pozières Ridge. A squeeze here and a squeeze there;
an attack on that side and then on this; one bite after another.
"I hope you will like our patent barrage," said the artillery general,
as he stopped for a moment on the way to a near-by observation post. "We
are thinking rather well of it ourselves of late." He did not even have
to touch a pushbutton to turn on the current. He had set four as zero.
I am not going to speak of suspense before the attack as being in the
very air and so forth. I felt it personally, but the Germans did not
feel it or, at least, the British did not want them to feel it. There
was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field
than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific
tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for shell-bursts, and
their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that
battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme
offensive had begun. One could ask nothing better than that the
tranquillity should put the Germans to sleep. To the staff expert,
however, the dead world lived without the sight of men. Every square rod
of ground had some message.
Of course, I knew what was coming at four o'clock, but I was amazed at
its power and accuracy when it did come--this improved method of
artillery preparation, this patent curtain of fire. An outburst of
screaming shells overhead that became a continuous, roaring sweep like
that of a number of endless railroad trains in the air signified that
the guns which had been idle were all speaking. Every one by scattered
practice shots had registered on the German first-line trench at the
point where its shell-bursts would form its link in the chain of
bursts. Over the wavy line of chalk for the front of the attack broke
the flashes of cracking shrapnel jackets, whose bullets were whipping up
spurts of chalk like spurts of dust on a road from a hailstorm.
As the gun-blasts began I saw some figures rise up back of the German
trench. I judged that they were the relief coming up or a working party
that had been under cover. These Germans had to make a quick decision:
Would they try a leap for the dugouts or a leap to the rear? They
decided on flight. A hundred-yard sprint and they would be out of that
murderous swath laid so accurately on a narrow belt. They ran as men
will only run from death. No goose-stepping or "after you, sir" limited
their eagerness. I had to smile at their precipitancy and as some
dropped it was hard to realize that they had fallen from death or
wounds. They seemed only manikins in a pantomime.
Then a lone figure stepped up out of a communication trench just back of
the German first line. This tall officer, who could see nothing between
walls of earth where he was, stood up in full view looking around as if
taking stock of the situation, deciding, perhaps, whether that smoke
barrage to his right now rolling out of the British trench was on the
real line of attack or was only for deception; observing and concluding
what his men, I judge, were never to know, for, as a man will when
struck a hard blow behind the knees, he collapsed suddenly and the earth
swallowed him up before the bursts of shrapnel smoke had become so thick
over the trench that it formed a curtain.
There must have been a shell a minute to the yard. Shrapnel bullets were
hissing into the mouths of dugouts; death was hugging every crevice,
saying to the Germans:
"Keep down! Keep out of the rain! If you try to get out with a machine
gun you will be killed! Our infantry is coming!"
XXIV
WATCHING A CHARGE
The British trench comes to life--The line goes forward--A modern
charge no chance for heroics--Machine-like forward movement--The most
wicked sound in a battle--The first machine gun--A beautiful
barrage--The dreaded "shorts"--The barrage lifts to the second
line--The leap into the trenches--Figures in green with hands
up--Captured from dugouts--A man who made his choice and paid the
price--German answering fire--Second part of the program--Again the
protecting barrage--Success--Waves of men advancing behind waves of
shell fire--Prisoners in good fettle--Brigadier-General Philip
Howell.
Now the British trench came to life. What seemed like a row of
khaki-colored washbasins bottom side up and fast to a taut string rose
out of the cut in the earth on the other side of the valley, and after
them came the shoulders and bodies of British soldiers who began
climbing over the parapet just as a man would come up the cellar stairs.
This was the charge.
Five minutes the barrage or curtain of fire was to last and five minutes
was the allotted time for these English soldiers to go from theirs to
the German trench which they were to take. So many paces to the minute
was the calculation of their rate of progress across that dreadful No
Man's Land, where machine guns and German curtains of fire had wrought
death in the preceding charge of July 1st.
Every detail of the men's equipment was visible as their full-length
figures appeared on the background of the gray-green slope. They were
entirely exposed to fire from the German trench. Any tyro with a rifle
on the German parapet could have brought down a man with every shot. Yet
none fell; all were going forward.
I would watch the line over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in
front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts
of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of
observation in the concrete.
The average layman conceives of a charge as a rush. So it is on the
drill-ground, but not where its movement is timed to arrival on the
second before a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must not be
winded when there is hot work awaiting them in close encounters around
traverses and at the mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead of
his companions; no one crying, "Come on, boys!" no one swinging his
steel helmet aloft, for he needed it for protection from any sudden
burst of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, keeping line and
intervals except where they had to pass around shell-craters.