With steel helmets on and gas masks over our shoulders, we would leave
our car at the dead line and set off to "see something," when now the
fighting was all hidden in the folds of the ground, or in the woods, or
lost on the horizon where the front line of either of these two great
armies, with their immense concentration of men and material and roads
gorged with transport and thousands of belching guns, was held by a
few men with machine guns in shell-craters, their positions sometimes
interwoven. Old hands in the Somme battle become shell-wise. They are
the ones whom the French call "varnished," which is a way of saying
that projectiles glance off their anatomy. They keep away from points
where the enemy will direct his fire as a matter of habit or scientific
gunnery, and always recollect that the German has not enough shells to
sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.
It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite safe within a couple
of hundred yards of an artillery concentration. That corner of a
village, that edge of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that
sunken road--keep away from them! Any kind of trench for shrapnel; lie
down flat unless a satisfactory dugout is near for protection from
high explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at the front and a
curtain of fire is put behind you, wait until it is over or go around
it. If there is one ahead, wait until another day--provided that you
are a spectator. Always bear in mind how unimportant you are, how small
a figure on the great field, and that if every shell fired had killed
one soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in uniform left alive
on the continent of Europe. By observing these simple rules you may see
a surprising amount with a chance of surviving.
One day I wanted to go into the old German dugouts under a formless
pile of ruins which a British colonel had made his battalion
headquarters; but I did not want to go enough to persist when I
understood the situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout--and I
always like to be within striking distance of one--was a cave twenty
feet deep with a roof of four or five layers of granite, rubble and
timber; but now I feel more safe if the fragments of a town hall are
piled on top of this.
The Germans were putting a shell every minute with clockwork regularity
into the colonel's "happy home" and at intervals four shells in a
salvo. You had to make a run for it between the shells, and if you did
not know the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting
for it some time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both
going and coming and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe
twenty feet underground with the matting of débris including that of
a fallen chimney overhead, but he was a most unpopular host. The next
day he moved his headquarters and not having been considerate enough to
inform the Germans of the fact they kept on methodically pounding the
roof of the untenanted premises.
After every battle "promenade" I was glad to step into the car waiting
at the "dead line," where the chauffeurs frequently had had harder luck
in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet I know of no worse
place to be in than a car when you hear the first growing scream which
indicates that yours is the neighborhood selected by a German battery
or two for expending some of its ammunition. When you are in danger you
like to be on your feet and to possess every one of your faculties. I
used to put cotton in my ears when I walked through the area of the
gun positions as some protection to the eardrums from the blasts, but
always took it out once I was beyond the big calibers, as an acute
hearing after some experience gave you instant warning of any "krump"
or five-point-nine coming in your direction, advising you which way to
dodge and also saving you from unnecessarily running for a dugout if
the shell were passing well overhead or short.
I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite behind and was
over the hills in peaceful country. But one never knew. Fifteen miles
from the front line was not always safe. Once when a sudden outburst
of fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of a town to cover and
scattered fragments over the square, one cut open the back of the
chauffeur's head just as we were getting into our car.
"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became an inquiry in the mess on
the order of "Are you going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?"
The only time I felt that I could claim any advantage in phlegm over
my comrades was when I slept through two hours of aerial bombing with
anti-aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I explained, was
no more remarkable than sleeping in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled
surface cars and motor horns screeching under your window. A subway
employee or a traffic policeman in New York ought never to suffer from
shell-shock if he goes to war.
The account of personal risk which in other wars might make a magazine
article or a book chapter, once you sat down to write it, melted away
as your ego was reduced to its proper place in the cosmos. Individuals
had never been so obscurely atomic. With hundreds of thousands
fighting, personal experience was valuable only as it expressed that of
the whole. Each story brought back to the mess was much like others,
thrilling for the narrator and repetition for the polite listener,
except it was some officer fresh from the communication trench who
brought news of what was going on in that day's work.
Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents of a kind like the
product of some mighty mill. The public, falsely expecting that the
line would be broken, wanted symbols of victory in fronts changing on
the map and began to weary of the accounts. It was the late Charles A.
Dana who is credited with saying: "If a dog bites a man it is not news,
but if a man bites a dog it is."
Let the men attack with hatchets and in evening dress and this would
win all the headlines in the land because people at their breakfast
tables would say: "Here is something new in the war!" Men killing men
was not news, but a battalion of trained bloodhounds sent out to bite
the Germans would have been. I used to try to hunt down some of the
"novelties" which received the favor of publication, but though they
were well known abroad the man in the trenches had heard nothing about
them.
Bullets, shells, bayonets and bombs remained the tried and practical
methods there on the Ridge with its overpowering drama, any act of
which almost any day was greater than Spionkop or Magersfontein which
thrilled a world that was not then war-stale; and ever its supreme
feature was that determination which was like a kind fate in its
progress of chipping, chipping at a stone foundation that must yield.