INTO THE FIRING-LINE
I never come upon the firing-line without a sense of surprise. Upon
eye and imagination alike it breaks with a sudden shock. You emerge
from a long communication trench, driven right through all obstacles,
now across a deserted highway with a vista of grass-grown cobbles
stretching away on either hand; now straight through the vitals of
a stricken farm, where the head is on a level with a floor littered
with rubbish, discarded equipment, rags, or empty ration-tins; through
the silent _basse cour_ with its empty chicken-run, its deserted
pigeon-coop, its barns gaunt and blasted, its forlorn carts and rusting
machinery; through cornfields waist-high in a self-sown crop gay with
poppies and cornflowers.
Up these trenches, you may reflect as you trudge along with what one
might call a rabbit’s-eye view on either side, reliefs and rations go
up at dark, long files of silent men plodding through the summer night
with the frogs croaking in the marshes and the night-jars creaking in
the trees. Down these trenches come the men who have done their spell
of duty in the firing-line, muddy and unshaven and laden with all kinds
of personal belongings from a month-old copy of the _Sketch_ to a
German cooking-pot, silently delighted at the prospect of a few days’
respite from trench mortars and “whizz-bangs” and bullets and vermin.
Here, when fighting is toward, there is a crush in the Strand on a
Saturday night. In one direction go the men bearing boxes of bombs and
ammunition swiftly forward to the firing-line, squeezing themselves
back against the muddy walls on the cry of “Gangway there!” to let
orderlies with messages past; in the other direction the wounded,
roughly bandaged, make their painful way back to the regimental
aid-post or field ambulance. The shells come crashing over in and
around the trench, and the bullets from the front line snap and whinny
and whistle in the air as though to proclaim to all men still alive
that their mission is not yet accomplished. But a little rain, and
these trenches become first quagmires of mud, the sticky whitish clay
of Flanders, of which our men speak with horror, or the browner soil
of France, then stagnant ponds, knee or even waist deep, in which men,
walking alone and struck down by shell or bullet, have been known to
drown before help could reach them.
But sombre thoughts have no place in the communication trenches.
The men you meet, passing up and down, are smiling. The Adjutant,
descending with mud-covered boots and puttees, his stout broomstick in
his hand, from his morning walk round his battalion’s section of the
line, gives you a cheery “Good-day!” after the etiquette of officers
when they meet out here. A working party, laden with spades and saws
and beams, who are marching in Indian file ahead of you, are joking
as they plod. One of them has a mouth-organ, and is softly playing a
little music-hall jingle as he walks:
“I’d like to be, I’d like to be,
I’d like to be right home in Dixie....”
As, with a whistling “whoosh,” a shell comes over from the deep blue
sky ahead, the music stops, the party stops, and the men, turning with
a common movement, crane their heads out of the trench to see where
the shell has fallen. Boom! ... the report comes back, and a cloud of
dense black smoke eddies out above a clump of trees. “My word!” says
the sergeant, “the brigade’s catching it to-day and no mistake!” Then
the party trudges on again down the trench, while the crickets chirp
noisily in the corn, and the musician resumes his little tune:
“I’d like to be, I’d like to be,
I’d like to be right home in Dixie....”
Cheery and confident like all our men, they heed neither the menace
of death which those whistling shells convey nor the grim signs that
meet them on their way of the harvest the Reaper has gathered in those
peaceful cornfields. Here the trench passes a little burial-ground in
an orchard, lying between an old farm-house and its deep broad moat,
the branches of the apple and pear trees leaning down until they
seem to caress with their gnarled fingers the little white crosses
of the graves. Now the trench stops by a sunken ditch, where a faint
and horrible odour speaks of fallen Germans buried in the slime. The
men cross the ditch by its little bridge with exaggerated sounds
expressive of disgust, with a joke, in which horror has no place.
“_Heute Dir, morgen mir_” is the philosophy of the trenches, and a
laughing philosophy it is.
Some day a poet shall sing the song of the communication trench, when
peace has come back to the land and the long grasses, springing up,
have smothered the narrow way that once upon a time led up to the
fiery ordeal of battle. He shall tell of the men who dug the trench
by night, toiling in the silver radiance of the moon among the eerie
shadows flitting in and out of ruined hamlets and deserted farms. He
shall conjure up the hard, black silhouette of the group, standing out
against the light of the German star-shells soaring skyward with a
hissing screech, making the countryside as bright as day.
His verse shall carry in its swing the dull thud of pick and shovel on
the soft ground blending with the hurried gasping of the machine-guns
and the crack of the rifles in the firing-line. He shall sing of the
men who have trodden the marshy bottom of the trench going gladly forth
into battle--of those who went up and came down, of those who went up
and were presently laid to rest in that earth to which, by the Heavenly
Will, all men must return. And for the brave smiles and calm resolution
those narrow ditches have seen, my poet shall sing of them, not as a
place of horror, not as the ante-chamber of death, but as the strait
path that leads to glory.
Imperceptibly the winding course of the communication trench brings
you nearer to noises of which you are aware without seeking to fathom
their meaning. There are sounds like those produced by running a stick
along an iron railing, there are individual, crisp noises like the
smack of a mass of butter on a marble slab, vague echoes in the air
like the rustling of gigantic wings, and here and there explosions, now
loud and insistent and close and terrifying, now distant and muffled
like the bark of an old dog. Then, as you realize with a flash that
these are the sounds of war, and begin to distinguish between the
rap-rap of the machine-gun, the hard crepitation of the rifle-bullet,
and the dull boom of a shell, you find you are in the firing-line.
What the eye focusses is merely a scene of some disorder, where the
communication trench debouches into the open and fades away opposite
a line of sandbags. Here is all the bustle of the bivouac, soldiers
grouped about fires on which pots are simmering, others polishing
accoutrements, “cleaning up,” writing letters. But the eye does not
take in this picture. It is looking farther afield to where, on a low
platform behind a neat row of sandbags, the sentries are standing
immobile beside their rifles. Their bandoliers are strapped across
them, their bayonets are fixed. Their backs are turned to you. They
look forward with an air of strained attention. They are the look-out
men in the fire-trench.
Piles of sandbags and a great deal of timber-work, timber flooring, and
timber supports, as neat and prosaic as a street excavation in London,
is what the eye sees. But my first view of that line of men standing
on guard at the parapet stimulated my imagination more than any other
picture I have seen in this war; for I realized that these quiet
figures behind their stout rampart are the bulwark of our civilization,
an infinitesimal fraction of the line which the Allies have flung from
the Channel to the Alps.
“Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o’erthrown.
There is nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone.”
Here, in the firing-line, one stands on the ruins of that world of
ours, in Kipling’s fine symbolism, that passed away at the menace of
the Hun. The little strip of parapet before us, like all the rest of
the line winding its way from the sands of Nieuport to the frontier of
Switzerland, is the boundary-line between civilization and barbarism,
the bourne which marks the frontier between idealism and materialism.
Beyond the parapet is broken ground, utterly uninteresting, utterly
prosaic, for all that it is the realm of death. Immediately in front
of the trench is barbed wire, new and taut and cleanly grey, fastened
in a perplexing criss-cross work to lines of stout wooden posts driven
deep in the ground; beyond that a stretch of flat field, of corn or
grass or stubble, with a ditch here and a tree there, and maybe a pile
of blackened bricks that once was a farm. Between corn and grass and
stubble the earth has been turned up in places--you may see it brown
or white beneath its cloak of scarlet poppies or azure cornflowers. An
irregular cluster of posts from which hang jagged fragments of barbed
wire, a whitish line in the ground marking an old trench, something
like an old grey coat lying humped up on the grass or a pair of
boots thrust out from a hole in the ground, which, if you have seen
a battlefield before, you know to be unburied corpses--all these are
relics of former fighting.
This sordid patch of ravaged fields is the theatre of war. These
crumbling ditches and broken posts, these obliterated farmsteads,
these lamentable dead, and, always opposite, the long, low line of
sandbags marking the German trenches, make up the setting of so many
great dramas in our history of to-day. On this scene our young men gaze
as they take a final look about them before plunging forward to the
assault that is to lead them to their death. In these surroundings are
performed those great deeds of gallantry which stir our race to the
core. Whether you are in Flanders or the Argonne, in flat or undulating
country, the space between the lines is always the same. It is as dead
as the castle of _la Belle au Bois dormant_, the only truly neutral
ground in Europe to-day.
An extraordinarily untidy-looking jumble of multi-coloured sandbags,
white and blue and green and stripey (like the ticking of a mattress),
marks the German line.
You will be disposed to think that the German trenches must be
ill-constructed until you have seen our line from the outside. Then you
will understand that, under the weight of the parapet and the influence
of the wet, sandbags get squeezed out of their regular line, many
besides being constantly ripped open by the bullets plunging through
their canvas into the mud within with a sharp smack.
The German trench-line looks old and untidy and weather-beaten. The
only neat thing about it are the dark grey steel plates let in at
intervals all along the line. These are the plates with a loophole that
may be opened or shut for firing purposes.
The trench-line is finite. Here England, the Empire, ends. Up to the
line, by grace of the A.S.C., you may live your life as an Englishman,
eat your bully beef and drink your dixie of tea, receive your two posts
a day and your newspaper, and enjoy the safety of the strong iron ring
which the Grand Fleet has thrown about our vast possessions. Beyond
the line the _Polizei-Staat_ very soon begins. Behind the parapet
across the intervening space framed in the little loophole of our
firing-plate everything is _feldgrau_. As regular and universal as the
drab grey uniform of the German hordes is the mentality of that people
moving like one man to the wires pulled in Berlin--wires that stretch
from the ugly yellow building of the _Grosser General Stab_, by the
Koenigsplatz, to this narrow ditch in Flanders.
It is overwhelming, this first glance into the enemy’s country. Spires
and towers, mine-shafts and chimney-stacks, are as fingers beckoning
to the Allies, pointing to them the path of duty and honour. A forest
of tall factory chimneys, seen cold and smokeless in the blue of the
horizon, mark where Lille waits feverishly the hour of her deliverance.
From all parts of our line I have gazed long into the zone of the
German Army, from the banks of the Yser Canal in the north, down to the
heart of the Artois country in the south, and woven for myself mental
pictures of the life of the Germans in the field, with only a hundred
yards or so separating them from our lines, nearer than most of them
have ever been to England or, please God, ever will be. Did ever, in
the whole course of history, a hundred yards bridge a gulf so vast as
that existing here--between individual liberty and chivalry and mutual
forbearance, on the one hand, and, on the other, a police-controlled
mentality, a blind adoration of brute force, and a cynical disregard of
the teachings of Christ?
With the combatants on both sides securely hidden from view deep in the
ground, there is little opportunity in this siege warfare of seeing
the daily life of the German at the front. A French General who had
been in the field since last October jubilantly informed a friend of
mine one day this summer that he had that morning seen a German for
the first time. I may therefore, I presume, esteem myself fortunate to
have seen quite a number of Germans in their lines in the course of my
journeyings up and down the front.
I shall never forget the first German I saw. It is true that he was not
in the German lines, but in the British military hospital installed in
the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles. It was in September, and the
army was on the Aisne. This German was lying in a tent in the beautiful
garden of the hotel abutting on the park of Versailles. He was dying of
gangrene, and his condition made it impossible to keep him indoors in a
ward with the other wounded. His bed had therefore been moved into this
tent--a large, airy place. With him there was another gangrene victim,
a British soldier.
It was a grim and poignant meeting. A civilian doctor, who was with
me, whispered, directly he saw the man and breathed the air of that
tent, that the case was hopeless. The German was a thick-set, bearded
Landsturm man, nearing the fifties. His face was very bronzed, and
looked almost black beside the whiteness of his pillow. He was fiercely
and bitterly hostile, and his eyes, already dulling with the shadow of
approaching death, blazed for a moment with unconcealed enmity as he
looked at the Englishman by his bedside.
I spoke to him in German. He never took his eyes off my face as he
heard again the familiar sounds of his mother-tongue. I asked him his
name. He told me. I have forgotten it, but I remember he said he was
a farmer from near Hanover. His voice was very, very weak, and the
intonation was indescribably sad. I asked him how he felt. “_Es geht
mit mir zu Ende!_” (I am all but finished), he replied slowly.
I asked him if he was in need of anything. He shook his big brown head,
and answered: “_Man ist sehr gut zu mir_” (They are very good to me).
Had he relatives? I asked. Could I write to anybody for him? “_Ich habe
niemand_,” came the reply in his sad voice.
A widower, all his children dead, this old German had left his farm on
being mobilized, and had gone all through Belgium with the German Army
until they had abandoned him, wounded, on the retreat from the Marne.
When I left him, with a phrase about keeping a good heart, for he would
soon be well (how senseless it must have sounded to that man who for
days had seen the Black Angel hovering at his bedside!), he shook
his head, and said: “_Ich glaub’ es nicht!_” I never saw him again
or learnt his fate, for I left Paris that same afternoon. But I have
often thought since then of the peaceful life of that humble Hanoverian
farmer sacrificed to the insensate arrogance of the neurasthenic who
wears the purple of the Hohenzollerns.
Apart from prisoners, the first German I encountered at the front in
this war was in the space between the lines. His work for “_Kaiser und
Reich_” was done. With hundreds of his fellows he lay stiff and stark
in the moonlight before our trenches at Neuve Chapelle. He looked like
a waxen image as he lay on his back in the grass, in his grey uniform
all splashed with mud, his helmet, clotted with blood (I have it as a
memento of that night), still on his head, his rifle with its rusting
bayonet grasped in one hand flung wide. All around him lay his comrades
as the machine-guns of the Indians had mowed them down. By the light of
the flares I could see the grass dotted with these sprawling figures,
so inert and limp that one would have said it was a group in a wax-work
show rather than an actual picture of war.
I have looked down on the villages of Messines and Wytschaete, built
upon the slope of the ridge that bears their names, where the Germans
dwell in desolate cities and in houses which no man inhabiteth, which
are ready to become heaps. I have seen the smoke of their _Mittagessen_
rising into the air from the cellars and dug-outs in which they live by
day, and once I caught a glimpse of a figure, grey against a red wall,
slipping in and out of the ruins.
Looking out over the German lines with a telescope one day, my Ross
focussed suddenly and surprisingly a portly German, a little forage cap
on his head, absorbed in the preparation of something in a little pot.
Presently he dipped down and disappeared, but almost the next moment
two other grey figures came bobbing along down the trench. They were
out of range of our rifles, and, with ammunition a luxury, not worth
wasting a shell on.
More than once I have watched Germans at work behind their lines. One
summer afternoon, in particular, I had a regular surfeit of Germans.
First a cart appeared, slowly descending a field. As I followed it
with my glass until it stopped, my eye caught two diminutive figures
digging. In another part of my field of vision I saw two German
officers out riding, the one on a bay, the other on a white horse.
They galloped across a field, then walked their horses, to cool them,
alongside the fringe of a belt of black forest. They were engaged in
animated conversation, and as I watched I wondered what their feelings
would have been had they known that two artillery officers at my side
were discussing whether it was worth while putting a shell over at
them. The verdict was against a shot, so the two officers continued
their ride undisturbed.
There is nothing more thrilling than to watch the discovery and
shelling of a working party by our guns. I was present one day when a
detachment of Germans were made out digging on a road behind a screen
of trees. I saw four of them myself quite distinctly, working busily
in their white shirts, their tunics discarded. A few brief directions
about angle and direction and shell went over the telephone to the
battery behind us. Then I glued my eye to the glass and waited.
The four men worked on. I could see the flash of their shirt-sleeves
behind the trees. One man had a loose sleeve which kept coming
unrolled, and which he kept rolling up again. A loud explosion ... a
rushing noise ... the telephone orderly’s voice, “First gun fired,
sir!” ... three more explosions, and three more shells cleaving
the air, and, almost simultaneously, as it seemed, a pear-shaped
ball of white smoke, then another and another and another ... four
detonations--boom! bum-bum-bum! Between the appearance of the first
white pear-drop and the second there was a flash of white cloth between
the trees ... then all was quiet. And presently I heard the telephone
orderly slowly dictating a report to the Brigade ... “dispersed a
German working-party on the ---- road.”
The men love to get these glimpses of the Germans. When the line is
quiet, and the messages, “Nothing to report,” accumulate in piles on
the table in the Operations Section of the General Staff, sniping is a
welcome break in the monotony of trench life. I was in the trenches of
the Leinster Regiment one day and presently found myself in an outpost
established in the ruins of a farm which was only some 15 yards from
the enemy. As it was not desired that the Germans should know the farm
was occupied, the men in the outpost had strict injunctions that they
were not to fire except in case of an attack. The men squatting in a
narrow trench--to have raised oneself to one’s full height would have
meant instant death--showed me the German trench a stone’s-throw away
in a periscope. “’Tis a pity we mayn’t shoot now,” they whispered to
me. “D’ye see that bit of tree beyond there? Sure, the Allemans is
always potterin’ about there. There’s a fine big fellow with great
whiskers on him comes out of that sometimes. Faith! you couldn’t miss
him!” They spoke with such regret that I almost laughed.
The Leinsters had given all the German snipers names. One, believed to
be established in a tree, was known as Peter Weber, another was Hans,
another Fritz. One of the Leinsters, an excellent marksman, spent the
whole of his spare time sniping. He had his little corner, and when
he came back he used to regale his friends with fabulous stories of
old Germans with long white beards that he had seen. He had “got”
an officer the morning of the day I was in those trenches, and the
“frightfulness,” which always follows after a sniper’s bullet has found
its billet, went on with great regularity all through the afternoon in
the shape of half-hourly salvoes of whizz-bangs.
The sniper’s job is no sinecure. Both sides are always engaged in
trying to locate snipers, and once a sniper’s nest is discovered, a
few rounds with a machine-gun will generally bring him down, however
well concealed he may be. A sniper never knows but that an enemy
marksman has found him out, and is waiting, finger on trigger, for the
slightest movement on his quarry’s part to pick him off.
Sniping is an integral part of trench warfare. The Germans attach
so much importance to it that they have not hesitated to issue
expensive telescopic-sight rifles to their picked marksmen. They keep
machine-guns and clamped rifles trained on certain spots, and a man
always ready to open fire immediately a movement becomes visible over
a certain measured space with a good background. A certain amount of
wastage from sniping is inevitable. The trench lines wind so much that
it is not always possible to make trenches secure from every angle of
fire. We have to buy our experience, and I have passed in our trenches
many a newly heightened parapet or freshly constructed traverse, the
price of which was a man’s life.
As far as sniping is concerned, I believe that the British soldier
holds the mastery. In our Regular army, the private cannot reach the
maximum of pay until he has passed as a first-class shot, with the
result that almost all our Regulars are fair marksmen, and some are
very fine shots indeed. Of the Territorials, probably the London
battalions contain the best riflemen. There are some very good snipers
among the Indians and also the Canadians, as both possess in their
ranks a good percentage of hunters.
[Illustration: IN A GERMAN TRENCH.
One soldier watches the periscope and the other attends to the
telephone.]
I have been in several German trenches, and they were all well
constructed. The Germans are the beavers of trench warfare. They
were quick to recognize the rôle that heavy artillery was destined
to play in deciding the fortunes of the war of positions. Their aim
has therefore been to construct dug-outs, proof, if possible, even
against hits with high-explosive shells, in which their men can take
shelter during an artillery bombardment, and emerge, when the guns lift
and the infantry assault, to defend the trench with machine-guns, many
of which are made to sink at will into specially constructed cement
shelters.
The Germans work with antlike industry. Thus, in the eight days that
elapsed between the loss of the trenches round and about the château of
Hooge, on the Ypres-Menin road, on July 30, and their recapture by our
infantry on August 9, they constructed an amazing network of trenches
and dug-outs. The vast mine-crater (caused by the mine we exploded here
on July 19 when we reoccupied it) resembled an amphitheatre with its
tiers of bomb proof shelters scooped out of the crumbling sides of the
chasm, and shored up with tree-trunks. The dug-outs in the trenches
took a diagonal plunge downwards, were most solidly constructed, and
afforded accommodation for four or five men at a time. They were,
like all German dug-outs, quite comfortably furnished with beds and
furniture from the abandoned cottages in the vicinity.
There are known to be trenches in the German lines which are lit by
electric light from Lille, but I have not seen any of these. Apropos of
the Lille electric-light supply, it is a fact that for many weeks after
the Germans had occupied Lille, Armentières, the important industrial
centre which is in our lines and which received its electric current
from Lille, only five miles or so away, continued to draw its electric
power as before. The joke was too good to last, and one day without
warning the current was cut off. It is believed that a spy revealed
to the Germans the fact that they were lighting the operations of the
Allies.
What has struck me particularly about the German trenches I have been
in is the extraordinary collection of objects of all kinds that the
men have accumulated there. The German soldier resembles the magpie
in his pilfering and hoarding habits. Psychologists must explain the
mental state of a man who will go into action with articles of ladies’
underwear in his haversack, or who will take ladies’ boots, a feather
boa, or a plush-covered photograph-album with him into the trenches.
Their predilection for looting ladies’ _lingerie_ gave rise to a legend
which in its numerous versions resembles the story of the Russians or
the Bowmen of Mons. This story, which was generally current after Neuve
Chapelle, was to the effect that the infantry on entering the village
had found some girls, half demented with fright, hiding in a cellar.
The theory was that they had been carried off by the German troops for
their own base uses.
When going round the battalions collecting material for the story of
Neuve Chapelle which I was writing--it was the first newspaper message
of the kind to be written from the British front in France in this
war--I came upon this tale of the women of Neuve Chapelle in every
imaginable form. Now the victims were peasant women, now they were
beautifully dressed _demimondaines_ from Lille, or, again, they were
little more than children. Finally I reached the Rifle Brigade, the
regiment that was first to enter the village, and heard the truth.
In one of the cellars in which some German officers had been living a
quantity of ladies’ undergarments were found. The sight of these lying
on the ground outside the cellar apparently gave rise to a story that
was firmly believed at the time right through the army.
I saw these German trenches at Neuve Chapelle within ten days of the
battle. They showed many grim traces of the fighting in the shape of
dismembered bodies, blood-stained parts of uniform, and discarded
equipment. I must say I was surprised to find that the trenches were
extremely filthy. The straw in the dug-outs was old and malodorous,
and must have been crawling with vermin. I believe that the plague
of lice from which everybody in the trenches, be he never so cleanly
in his personal habit, suffers more or less, was introduced by the
German soldiers who had been brought from Poland, notoriously the most
vermin-ridden country in the world. There were an extraordinary number
of letters, documents, books, and newspapers scattered about. In some
places the flooring of the trench disappeared under the litter. Our
Intelligence must have spent weeks in going over this material. Such
labours are well expended, however. Has not Von der Goltz himself, in
his book on War, told us of the value of such captures of letters and
documents to the Intelligence branch of the army?
The _Volkscharakter_, as the Germans say, finds very definite
expression in the trenches constructed by the Germans, the French, and
the British. I do not propose to make comparisons, which are always
invidious, and which, moreover, might involve me in paths where I
should find the blue pencil of the Censor blocking my passage. The
German, with his craze for organization and his love of bodily ease,
builds a solid trench, admirably suited, one must admit, to the
purposes of this war. But I am one of those who contend that there is
such a thing as over-organization, and I am inclined to believe that
the German, with all his elaborations of trench warfare, his cemented
trenches, his “super-barbed-wire,” his iron-doored ammunition stores,
overlades his organization with detail.
The exquisite neatness of the French mind shows itself clearly in
the perfect orderliness of the French trenches, with tidily bricked
flooring, the sides lined with plaited branches or rabbit netting.
The French trenches contain the largest dug-outs to be found on this
front--deep subterranean caves, tremendously solid in construction,
with sometimes as many as three or four layers of massive tree-trunks
laid across the roof. I think that the perfect network of communication
and support trenches, which are always found about trench-lines
constructed by the French, denote a certain æstheticism in the French
mind.
The British trenches are the least elaborate of the trenches of the
three belligerents. Nothing that would make for efficiency in them is
sacrificed to comfort, and the striving, first and last, is to evolve a
defence work that not only affords adequate protection to the men, but
is equally well suited for an offensive as well as a defensive. Both
the Germans and the French, thanks to the universal service system,
have large stocks of workmen--navvies, carpenters, engineers, and the
like--who have been called to the colours, who, though not first-class
fighting-men, can be usefully employed in squads on trench work. We,
on the other hand, with our army recruited haphazard, must take our
resources as we find them. The pioneers, who have done magnificently
in this war, cannot be expected to do all the digging and construction
work that trench warfare demands; their efforts must be supplemented by
the soldiers themselves, some of whom, by chance, may be labourers with
their hands, many of whom, however, are not.
But we can never regard the training of our army as finished. We
started the war with the merest skeleton of an army, so that we were
compelled, even while we fought, to expand it into a great Continental
force. Therefore, it often happens that the British soldier is more
usefully employed in practising bombing, or taking a machine-gun
course, or learning to manipulate a trench mortar, than in adding
to his bodily comfort in a trench which already fulfils its primary
object--that of affording him shelter, or enabling him to beat off
an assault, and of being easy to get out of in the attack. These are
considerations which should be borne in mind when one hears invidious
comparisons between the comfort of the German trenches and the more
Spartan simplicity of ours.
Not that there are not many very comfortable dug-outs and shelters in
our trenches. I dined in the officers’ mess in some trenches in the
Ypres salient one night in a dug-out furnished with cushioned seats,
a trap in the wall with a practicable glass window through to the
“kitchen” (a fire contained between six bricks in the open behind the
trench!), where the dishes were handed through, excellent lighting in
the shape of an acetylene lamp, and, by way of table decorations, some
beautiful roses, fresh from the ruined gardens of Ypres, in 18-pounder
shell-cases. The menu was as _soigné_ as the dining-room. Here it is:
Soup
Pork Chops.
Haricots Verts.
Potatoes.
Stewed Pears and Cream.
Coffee.
_Wines._
Red Wine of the Country.
Armentières Beer.
Black and White Whisky.
_Liqueurs._
Ration Rum.
Benedictine.
Kümmel.
After dinner we retired to the company commander’s dug-out, which I
found to be as comfortable as the mess-room. It was sunk to one-half
below the ground level; it had a boarded floor, a brass bedstead with
a spring mattress, a wash-hand stand, a large mirror and a big settee.
Like the mess-room, it was lit by acetylene.
The Captain was musical, and it was with tears in his voice that he
related to me the tragedy of the piano. It appears that in the only
room remaining in a ruined house on one of the roads leading out of
Ypres he had located a piano, a cottage piano, sadly out of tune, it
is true, from its long exposure to the weather, but otherwise sound
in wind and limb. The Captain, a practical man, found no difficulty
in procuring a cart and some willing hands to cart the piano by night
up to his dug-out in the support trench. Everything was ready for the
transfer when disaster, in the shape of a German shell, overtook the
plan. Three German shells fell into the ruins of the house containing
the piano, and of those three shells one went into the very vitals of
the instrument. When the musical-minded Captain visited the spot, he
found house and garden strewn with pieces of piano.
You must picture the trenches as deep, rather narrow gangways, which
are much more like street excavations than anything else one can
imagine. Some are dug down in the soil, but many of them are only a
foot or two in the ground, the parapet being built up with sandbags, as
in many parts of our line, especially in Flanders, the water lies too
close to the surface to allow of deep digging. The bottom of the trench
has a wooden flooring composed of “grids,” as they are called, footways
made of short pieces of wood nailed laterally on planks placed edgeways.
A deep broad step is cut in the parapet and boarded over. It looks
like a deep window-seat. This is the “fire-stand,” where the look-out
men are posted at the loopholes to fire at the enemy. In most parts of
the line there is but little rifle-fire by day, save for sniping, as
neither side can expose its men by daylight, even for a momentary shot,
without grave risk.
Round and about the fire-stand the whole life of the soldier in the
trenches centres. While his comrade takes his turn of duty at the
parapet he sleeps on the fire-stand, or cooks his food over fires,
or cleans his rifle, or writes a letter home. Shelters, that the
men call “funk-holes”--long holes scraped out of the side of the
trench and holding two or three men--give him a dry place to sleep in
and protection from the rain. But should the funk-holes be full in
rainy weather, the soldier has his waterproof sheet, issued with his
equipment, and thus covered he will not hesitate to lie down and sleep
in the wet.
What with traverses and communication trenches and outposts, what with
second and third lines and support trenches, the firing-line is such
a winding maze that it is utterly impossible to get a comprehensive
view of it as a whole. A walk round the trenches of a single company,
which will take you a good half-hour, leaves you with a confused mass
of impressions: of rather grimy figures, looking very business-like
with their bandoliers strapped crosswise over their overcoats, their
rifles by their sides, standing at the parapet; of men in all stages of
undress, cooking, eating, washing, writing, in the narrow trench; of
faces seen white against the dark background of a dug-out, strained to
a telephone which wails fretfully with a puny whine like the toot of a
child’s trumpet; of officers in shirt-sleeves and trench boots going
their rounds or writing reports amid thousands of flies in a shelter....
You walk up a trench and down a trench, you see the angular outline of
machine-guns under their canvas covers in their emplacements, you are
shown case upon case of ammunition, bombs, and grenades, large and
small, and rocket-like cartridges which are flare-lights.
It is so unutterably strange to find all this life, this vast
preparation and organization, going forward in the open country where,
but a twelvemonth back, the peasants were gathering the harvest, to
know that it was going forward before you came, and will go forward
after you have left. With such feelings of bewilderment, I fancy, must
the traveller, in the early days of gold-mining, have come upon the
mining-camps that sprang up in a day in the midst of barren wastes, and
stood, in incredulous amazement, watching the ceaseless activity of a
great host of humans returned to the era of the troglodyte.
Neither by day nor by night are the trenches restful. Seldom a day or
a night goes by without the “whoosh” of a shell or the clumsy rush of
a trench-mortar bomb. The hollow reports of the rifles never cease.
Scarcely an afternoon passes, should the weather not be misty, but the
firmament quakes with the rapid reverberations of the anti-aircraft
guns. “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” is their note, sharp and unmistakable,
as they throw circles of snow-white smoke-puffs about the aeroplanes
soaring high in the sky.
The firing-line by night is restless as a storm-tossed sea. One dark
and starless night in June I climbed a commanding height which afforded
a wonderful view of a great part of our line. A thin crescent of yellow
moon hung low on the skyline. A cold east wind rustled through the
trees. Far below me in the plain a never-ceasing spout of brilliant
green-white star-shells marked the winding course of the British and
German lines.
It was an unforgettable picture. For one brief moment a desolate
ridge, broken with the jagged silhouette of ruined houses, stood out
hard and clear before my eyes, and then was blotted out as a flare
fell earthward and died. The ragged outline of a shattered belfry was
revealed for a fraction of time, black and sinister as a Doré glimpse
of Hell, and then melted away into the surrounding darkness. The soft
soughing of the wind in the trees was mingled with an incessant dull
thrumming from the plain. Now it rose in a swelling burst of sound,
from the right, from the left, from the centre, of the darkness at my
feet; now it died away into single blows that echoed noisily in their
isolation.
Sometimes the spout of star-shells ran dry, and for a minute or two all
the plain lay swathed in its pall of darkness. Then silently, swiftly,
a flare would wing its way aloft, and once more unbare the plain of
death to view.
Guns boomed now and then from the distance. Along the blurred line of
the horizon fitful bursts of light blazed up and died, like lightning
in a summer sky. Sometimes the blaze was orange, sometimes yellow, and
the air throbbed to the ear.
So the night dragged on towards the lemon dawn, with star-shells and
distant shell-bursts and the throb of musketry in the plain. With
the coming of the light the flares were seen no more, but the angry
drumming of rifles never ceased. Daybreak showed the crumbling towers
of Ypres, with the smoke of shell-bursts encircling them like a funeral
wreath, but the morning mists enshrouded the trenches in the plain.