THE GERMANS
_France, May._
The night air on every side of us was full of strange sound. It was not
loud nor near, but it was there all the time. We could hear it even
while we talked and above the sound of our footsteps on the cobbles of
the long French highway. Ahead of us, and far on either side, came this
continuous distant rattle. It was the sound of innumerable wagons
carrying up over endless cobble stones the food and ammunition for
another day.
A cart clattered past from the front with the jingle of trace chains and
hammer of metal tyres upon stones. So one driver had finished his job
for the night. Farther on was a sound of voices and a chink of spades;
some way to our left across a field we can make out dark figures--they
may be stunted willows along the far hedge, or they may be a working
party going up, with their spades and picks over their shoulders, to
one of those jobs which in this flat country can only be done by night.
Twenty miles behind the lines, or more, you can see every night along
the horizon in front of you a constant low flicker of light--the flares
thrown up by both sides over the long ribbon of No Man's Land--the
ribbon which straggles without a break from one end of France to the
other. We were getting very close to that barrier now--within a couple
of miles of it; and the pure white stars of these glorified Roman
candles were describing graceful curves behind a fretwork of trees an
inch or two above the horizon. Every five or six seconds a rifle cracked
somewhere along the line--very different from the ceaseless pecking of
Gallipoli. Then a distant German machine-gun started its sprint,
stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther
down the line caught it up, and the two ran along in perfect step for a
while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its
mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself,
catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it,
too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I
suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've seen a patrol out in
front of the lines, or a party digging in the open somewhere behind the
trenches." You can't help crediting the Germans--at first, when you come
to this place as a stranger--with being much more deadly than the Turks
both with their machine-guns and their artillery. But you soon learn
that it is by no means necessary that anyone is dying when you hear
their machine-guns sing a chorus. They may chatter away for a whole
night and nobody be in the least the worse for it. Their artillery can
throw two or three hundred shells, or even more, into one of its various
targets, not once but many times, and only a man or two be wounded;
sometimes no one at all. War is alike in that respect all the world
over, apparently; which is comforting.
Presently the road ends and the long sap begins. You plunge into the
dark winding alley much as into some old city's ugly by-lane. It is
Centennial Avenue. There is room in it to pass another man even when he
is carrying a shoulderful of timber. But you must be careful when you do
pass him, or one of you will find yourself waist deep in mud. I have
said before that you do not walk on the bottom of the trench as you did
in Gallipoli, but on a narrow wooden causeway not unlike the bridge on
which ducks wander down from the henhouse to the yard--colloquially
known as the "duck-boards." The days have probably passed when a man
could be drowned in the mud of a communication trench. But it is always
unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the
enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it
is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed
trench you are almost sure to flounder.
A party of men loaded with new duck-boards is blocked ahead of you. As
you stand there talking to another wayfarer and waiting for the unknown
obstacle to move, a bullet flicks off the parapet a few feet away. It
was at least a foot above the man's head and was clearly fired from some
rifle laid on the trench during the daytime. Every now and then the
parapet on one side becomes dense black against a dazzling white sky,
and the trench wall on the other side becomes a glaring white background
on which the shadow of your own head and shoulders sail slowly past you
in inky black silhouette. The sharp-cut shadow gradually rises up the
white trench wall, and all is black again until the enemy throws
another flare.
As you talk there comes suddenly over the flats on your left a brilliant
yellow flicker and a musical whine: "Whine--bang, whine--bang,
whine--bang, whine--bang," just like that spoken very quickly.
"That's right over the working party in Westminster Abbey," says the
last man in the procession. "Some bally fool lit a pipe, I suppose."
The man next him reckons it was about Lower George Street that got it
that time. "They been registerin' that place all day on an' off," he
says.
There was just that one swift salvo, and nothing more. Presently, when
the procession moved on, we came across men who had a shower of earth
thrown down their backs by the burst of those shells. Just one isolated
salvo in the night on one particular spot. Goodness knows what the
Germans saw or thought they saw. No one was hit, nothing was interfered
with. But it is a great mistake to think it all foolishness. The most
methodical soldier in the world is behind those other sandbags, and he
doesn't do things without reason.
Farther on we came through a series of hovels, more like dog
kennels than the shelters of men, to the dark parapet where men
are always watching, watching, across a hundred yards or so of
green pasture, the dark mud parapet on the other side. Here and
there over a dug-out there fidgets a tiny toy aeroplane such as
children make, or a miniature windmill. The aeroplane propeller is
revolving slowly, tail away from the enemy, clicking and rattling as
it turns. "Just-a-perfect-night-for-gas"--that is what the aeroplane
propeller is saying.
Once only in the night there is a clatter opposite--one machine-gun
started it, then two together, then forty or fifty rifles. Perhaps they
think they saw a patrol. The Turks used to get precisely similar
nerve-storms on Russell's Top. Nobody even troubles to remark it. Dawn
breaks over the watching figures without one incident to report.
It is after the light has grown and become fixed that you will notice,
if you look carefully for it, a thin film of blue smoke floating upwards
from behind the sandbags on the other side of No Man's Land. Only a
hundred and fifty yards away from you the German cook must be fitting
his old browned and burned dixies and kerosene tins over their early
morning fire.
We had our early morning coffee, too. And as we walked homewards we
found that from a particular point we were looking straight at a distant
barn roof which is in German territory. Near it, towards his trenches,
ran a road. Of curiosity we turned our telescopes on to that path, and
while we watched there strolled along it two figures in grey--grey
tunics, grey loose trousers, little grey buttony caps, walking down the
path towards us, talking, at their ease. Twenty seconds later along came
another pair.
Clearly they had said to themselves, "We must not walk about here except
in twos or threes or we shall draw a shell from one of those Verfluchte
British whizz-bangs."
And so those Germans strolled--as we did--from their breakfast to their
daily work.