TROMMELFEUER
_France, August 21st._
The Germans call it _Trommelfeuer_--drum fire. I do not know any better
description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some
quarter of this wide battlefield. You will be sitting at your tea, the
normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer
positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute. Suddenly, from
over the distant hills, to left or right, there breaks out the roll of a
great kettledrum, ever so far away. Someone is playing the tattoo softly
and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it
sounds as if he played it on an iron ship's tank instead.
That is _Trommelfeuer_--what we call intense bombardment. When it is
very rapid--like the swift roll of a kettledrum--you take it that it
must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a
French assault. But it is often our own guns after all--I doubt if
there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of
them.
Long afterwards--perhaps in the grey of the next morning--one may see
outside of some dug-out, in a muddy wilderness of old trenches and
wheel-tracks, guarded by half a dozen Australians with fixed bayonets, a
group of dejected men in grey. The cold Scotch mist stands in little
beads on the grey cloth--the bayonets shine very cold in the white light
before the dawn--the damp, slippery brown earth is too wet for a
comfortable seat. But there is always some Australian there who will
give them a cigarette; a cheery Melbourne youngster or two step down
into the crowd and liven them with friendly chaff; the blue sky begins
to show through the mist--the early morning aeroplane hums past on its
way to the line, low down, half hidden in the wrack. The big bushman
from Gippsland at a neighbouring coffee stall--praise heaven for that
institution--gives them a drink of the warm stuff. And I verily believe
that at that moment they emerge for the first time out of a frightful
dream.
For they are the men who have been through the _Trommelfeuer_.
Strong men arrive from that experience shaking like leaves in the wind.
I have seen one of our own youngsters--a boy who had fought a great
fight all through the dark hours, and who had refused to come back when
he was first ordered to--I have seen him unable to keep still for an
instant after the strain, and yet ready to fight on till he dropped;
physically almost a wreck, but with his wits as sharp and his spirits as
keen as a steel chisel. I have seen other Australians who, after doing
glorious work through thirty or forty hours of unimaginable strain,
buried and buried and buried again and still working like tigers, have
broken down and collapsed, unable to stand or to walk, unable to move an
arm except limply, as if it were string; ready to weep like little
children.
It is the method which the German invented for his own use. For a year
and a half he had a monopoly--British soldiers had to hang on as best
they could under the knowledge that the enemy had more guns and more
shell than they, and bigger shell at that. But at last the weapon seems
to have been turned against him. No doubt his armaments and munitions
are growing fast, but ours have for the moment overtaken them. And hell
though it is for both sides--something which no soldiers in the world's
history ever yet had to endure--it is mostly better for us at present
than for the Germans. I have heard men coming out of the thick of it
say, "Well, I'm glad I'm not a Hun."
Now, here is what it means. There is no good done by describing the
particular horrors of war--God knows those who see them want to forget
them as soon as they can. But it is just as well to know what the work
in the munition factories means to _your_ friends--_your_ sons and
fathers and brothers at the front.
The normal shelling of the afternoon--a scattered bombardment all over
the landscape, which only brings perhaps half a dozen shells to your
immediate neighbourhood once in every ten minutes--has noticeably
quickened. The German is obviously turning on more batteries. The light
field-gun shrapnel is fairly scattered as before. But 5.9-inch howitzers
are being added to it. Except for his small field guns, the German makes
little use of guns. His work is almost entirely done with howitzers. He
possesses big howitzers--8-inch and larger--as we do. But the backbone
of his artillery is the 5.9 howitzer; and after that probably the 4.2.
The shells from both these guns are beginning to fall more thickly. Huge
black clouds shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground,
and slowly drift away across the hill-top. Suddenly there is a
descending shriek, drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly
near; a crash far louder than the nearest thunder; a colossal thump to
the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its
base; a scatter of flying bits and all sorts of under-noises, rustle of
a flying wood splinter, whir of fragments, scatter of falling earth.
Before it is half finished another shriek exactly similar is coming
through it. Another crash--apparently right on the crown of your head,
as if the roof beams of the sky had been burst in. You can just hear,
through the crash, the shriek of a third and fourth shell as they come
tearing down the vault of heaven--_crash--crash_. Clouds of dust are
floating over you. A swifter shriek and something breaks like a glass
bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low
overhead. It bursts like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, _smash, smash,
smash_, with one or two more of the heavier shells punctuating the
shower of the lighter ones. The lighter shell is shrapnel from field
guns, sent, I dare say, to keep you in the trench while the heavier
shell pounds you there. A couple of salvos from each, perhaps twenty or
thirty shells in the minute, and the shrieks cease. The dust drifts
down the hill. The sky clears. The sun looks in. Five minutes later down
comes exactly such another shower.
That is the beginning. As the evening wears on, the salvos become more
frequent. All through the night they go on. The next morning the
intervals are becoming even less. Occasionally the hurricane reaches
such an intensity that there seems no interval at all. There is an
easing in the afternoon--which may indicate that the worst is over, or
merely that the guns are being cleaned, or the gunners having their tea.
Towards dusk it swells in a wave heavier than any that has yet come. All
through the second night the inferno lasts. In the grey dawn of the
second day it increases in a manner almost unbelievable--the dust of it
covers everything; it is quite impossible to see. The earth shakes and
quivers with the pounding.
It is just then that the lighter guns join in with the roll as of a
kettledrum--_Trommelfeuer_. The enemy is throwing out his infantry, and
his shrapnel is showering on to our lines in order to keep down the
heads of our men to the last moment. Suddenly the whole noise eases. The
enemy is casting his shrapnel and big shell farther back.
The chances are that most men in those racked lines do not know whether
the enemy ever delivers the attack or not. Our artillery breaks the head
of it before it crosses No Man's Land. A few figures on the skyline,
hopping from crater to crater, indicate what is left of it. As soon as
they find rifle fire and machine-guns on them the remnant give it up as
hopeless. They thought our men would have run--and they found them still
at their post; that is all.
And what of the men who have been out there under that hurricane, night
and day, until its duration almost passed memory--amidst sights and
sounds indescribable, desperately tried? I was out there once after such
a time as that. There they were in their dusty ditch in that blasted,
brown Sahara of a country--Sydney boys, country fellows from New South
Wales, our old friends just as we knew them, heavy eyed, tired to death
as after a long fight with a bush fire or heavy work in drought
time--but simply doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary
Australian way. And that is all they had been doing and all they wished
anyone to believe they had been doing.
But what are we going to do for them? The mere noise is enough to break
any man's nerves. Every one of those shrieking shells which fell night
and day might mean any man's instant death. As he hears each shell
coming he knows it. He saw the sights around him--he was buried by earth
and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn. What can we do
for him? I know only one thing--it is the only alleviation that science
knows of. (I am talking now of the most modern and heaviest of battles,
and of the thick and centre of it; for no men have ever been through a
heavier fight than Pozières.) We can force some mitigation of all this
by one means and one alone--if we can give the Germans worse. The chief
anxiety in the mind of the soldier is--have we got the guns and the
shells--can we keep ahead of them with guns and our ammunition? That
means everything. These men have the nerve to go through these infernos,
provided their friends at home do not desert them. If the munition
worker could see what I have seen, he would toil as though he were
racing against time to save the life of a man.
I saw yesterday a letter picked up on the battlefield--it was from an
Australian private. "Dear Mother, sisters, brothers and Auntie Lill," it
said. "As we are about to go into work that must be done, I want to ask
you, if anything should happen to me, not to worry. You must think of
all the mothers that have lost ones as dear to them. One thing you can
say--that you lost one doing his little bit for a good cause.
"I know you shall feel it if anything does happen to me, but I am
willing and prepared to give my life for the cause."
Such lives hang from hour to hour on the work that is done in the
British factories.