Frances. “They call it a salient,” she added professionally. “Why, if
there aren’t some of our boys at last! There … crossing that bridge!”
She was right. As she spoke, two khaki-clad figures emerged from the
woods upon the opposite side of the stream below them and trotted
briskly across the pontoon bridge, in single file a few yards apart.
Once across, they joined forces, and began to climb the hill in a more
leisurely fashion. But it was noticeable that instead of coming up the
road they kept a course roughly parallel to its direction—perhaps a
hundred yards away.
“Why should they go hiking through that mushy long grass, wetting
themselves, when there is a good road right here? Aren’t men just
_children_?” observed Miss Ryker.
“Perhaps they don’t know about the road,” said Miss Lane charitably,
“We’ll call them. Oh—Boys!”
Her syren call had the desired effect—as well it might. The gentlemen
addressed, both of whom were labouring up the slippery slope with bent
heads, stopped suddenly, and looked about them. Next moment they were
doubling heavily through the long grass in the direction of the road,
making signals as they ran. They appeared agitated about something.
“Come off that road!” shouted one of them, who was leading by ten
yards, to the two female figures in the mist. “_Quittez le chemin!
C’est dangereux!_ Beat it for here! _Dépêchez-vous!_ As hard as
you—well—I’ll—be—” he swallowed something—“_Frances Lane?_”
With a final bound, Boone Cruttenden, with a steel helmet on his head,
a gas apparatus slung on his chest, and acute fear in his eyes, landed
squarely in the ditch; then scrambled out upon the road.
“Why—Boone?” began Frances affably. But, a grasp of iron fastened on her
arm just above the elbow, and a badly frightened young man proceeded to
propel her, without ceremony, across the ditch and away from the road.
“You fetch the other one, Major!” he called over his shoulder.
“I shall be charmed,” replied an unmistakable English drawl.
“Boone, listen!” protested Miss Lane breathlessly, as she was towed
sideways across the hillside. “What are you—?”
But her escort merely muttered to himself, as they ran:
“Can you beat it? Can you _beat_ it?”
Presently, having placed a distance of more than a hundred yards between
itself and the road, the panting convoy was permitted to halt.
“We will now continue our excursion up the hill,” announced the English
Major. “But we will keep off the road, if you ladies don’t object. It is
registered from top to bottom, you know.”
“Just what does that mean?” enquired Miss Lane, whose natural curiosity
was coming back with her breath.
“It means,” replied the Major, removing a shining monocle from his
right eye and wiping it with a khaki handkerchief, “that the Boche has
the range to every yard of it. As he usually searches it with H.E. and
shrapnel every few hours, it is healthier to keep on the grass when
going up and down this hill. Are we far enough away now, do you think,
Cruttenden?”
“Ye-es. But it would be better to split into two parties, I should say.
Less conspicuous—eh?”
The Major readjusted his monocle, and replied solemnly:
“By all means. This young lady and I will extend another hundred yards
to the left. Cruttenden, considering your tender years, you display a
promising acquaintance with tactics. Also diplomacy. So long!”
So by force of tactical exigency, Frances Lane and Boone Cruttenden
walked up the hillside in the rain together. Major Floyd and Miss Ryker
were discernible in the failing daylight, keeping station on the left
flank.
“Now, tell me!” Boone and Frances began together. Then they stopped.
Boone smiled.
“Ladies first!” he said.
But for once Frances preferred to be a listener.
“No, Boone Cruttenden—you!” she said. “Tell me what you are doing here,
anyway.”
“I got a chance,” explained Boone, “to come here with Major Floyd—he’s
our liaison officer with the British Mission back of the line—and have a
look at this sector. The regiment may take it over next month. The Major
knows the ground, and he took me down there”—he pointed backwards over
his shoulder—“to see our advanced posts.”
“Where are the trenches?”
“Trenches? There are none. This is open warfare. The Yanks and the Huns
are mixed up together in those woods, watching one another like cat and
dog. We hold the stream, and some of the ground beyond. That pontoon
bridge is covered by a concealed machine-gun post of ours, in case the
Hun tries to rush it. It’s probable he had direct observation on it: that
is why the Major and I did not linger much as we came across. We’re in a
sort of pocket here. The German line bends around us. Some of their posts
up in the woods have a clear view of the road, all the way up. Luckily
visibility is bad to-day, or you might have been spotted. Now tell me
what _you_ are doing here!”
Frances told him—as much as she thought he need know.
“And where is your hospital located?” demanded Boone.
Miss Lane informed him.
“That is more than thirty miles back!” cried Boone.
“About that,” agreed Miss Lane meekly.
“Does any one know you are here?”
“I hope not! I mean, no one—except you, Boone,” replied Frances softly.
The conscientious Boone made a last effort to maintain a judicial
attitude.
“Do you know you have committed a serious military offence?” he demanded
fiercely. “Trying to get past sentries, and traffic police! Did you know
that no women are allowed anywhere in the battle zone?”
“Yes,” said Miss Lane demurely. “That was why we came—to break a record!”
“And do you know that all this valley is liable to be searched with gas,
and you have no gas-mask?”
“I didn’t know that,” confessed the delinquent, “but I might have guessed
it, I suppose. But I was dead tired of that old hospital, Boone, and I
was just crazy to see the fighting!”
“Crazy? That’s just the word. You crazy, crazy child!” said Boone
affectionately. “Didn’t you know the chances you were taking?”
“Yes,” said Frances Lane. “But”—her eyes were raised to his for one
devastating moment—“I knew I was safe the moment I saw _you_, Boone!”
“Oh, _Francie_!” murmured that utterly demoralized youth.
* * * * *
“And where are your headquarters located, Major?” enquired Miss Ryker
brightly. The conversation had harped so far upon her own misdemeanours,
and she was anxious to introduce a fresh topic.
“I live chiefly with the Division holding this sector,” replied Major
Floyd. “I am liaison officer.”
“Don’t drop those cups. Just what does a liaison officer do?”
“I act as bell-hop between the local British Mission and the Americans. I
go around paging Generals and Staff Officers—and everything,” replied the
Major.
“There are no Generals here,” Miss Ryker pointed out.
“No. To-day I am having a vacation. Boone Cruttenden’s Division are in
Corps Reserve near by, so I undertook to bring him up here and give him
his first view of the Line.”
“How did you get here?” enquired Miss Ryker, who had not initiated the
present conversation for nothing.
“On a Staff car.”
“An automobile?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“Behind that wood at the top of the hill.”
“Then,” announced Miss Ryker, coming to the point, “you will be able to
give us two poor girls a ride home.”
“It’s—it’s twenty-five miles out of our way,” said Floyd feebly.
“Besides, Boone and I have our reputations to consider. He is young, and
might live it down, but think of me! People would say I was old enough to
know better.”
“Think of _us_!” countered Miss Ryker; “if we can’t get back, and the
Matron finds that Frances and I have been playing hookey!” She followed
up her appeal by a faint sob.
Major Floyd dropped the teacups and raised his hands above his head.
“Kamerad!” he groaned.
_Whoo-oo-oo-oo-UMP!_
A long overdue shell from a German field battery came shrieking over the
tree-tops behind them and landed squarely in the road, two hundred yards
to their right.
“You’re quite safe,” announced the Major, patting four fingers which he
had suddenly discovered on the sleeve of his Burberry. “That one is too
far away to hurt us. There will probably be more, but Fritz won’t shell
away from the road. His imagination is not elastic.”
“What about Frances and Captain Cruttenden?” said Helen. “They are nearer
the road than we are. Would that shell be able—?”
Major Floyd rubbed his misty monocle and examined the two figures to his
right.
“They don’t appear to have heard it,” he announced, and shook his head
mournfully.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE LINE
Most of us in our extreme youth, before we leave home and adventure upon
the Great Unknown of school life—the most formidable ordeal, by the way,
that the majority of us ever have to face—endeavour to prepare ourselves
for what we imagine lies before us by a course of study.
We devour stories about schools and schoolboys, with an application
most unusual in the young. We have all the tenderfoot’s fear of being
considered a tenderfoot, so we take pains to acquire the schoolboy tone;
schoolboy atmosphere; schoolboy slang. The exploits of the hero after he
becomes “Cock of the School”—whatever that may be—and leads the football
team to victory, are dismissed by us as too lofty and distant for our
achievement. We are much more interested—more painfully interested—in his
experiences as a freshman or fag. We endeavour to pick up tips as to what
a boy entering school for the first time should do, and more particularly
what he should not do, in order to avoid being tossed in a blanket or
sent to Coventry, or labelled “sissy,” or “cry-baby”—and all the other
vague terrors which have kept prospective Cocks of the School awake at
night since the dawn of Education.
This intensive course of self-preparation has one drawback. None of
the things described in the books ever happen at the school to which
we are ultimately sent. We have plenty of surprises, plenty of rough
experiences; but none quite of the kind anticipated.
American soldiers, arriving on the Western Front in the fourth year
of the War, feel themselves in very much the same position as the
self-conscious adventurer described above.
Ever since—in some cases, before—our country came in, we have been
schooling ourselves for the day when we should find ourselves Over
Here, among veteran soldiers. Methods have varied, of course. Some of
us have followed every turn of the operations in official summaries
and technical articles. To such, the War has been a glorified game,
we will say, of scientific football. Others—Miss Sissy Smithers, for
instance—have educated themselves upon more popular lines—from the Sunday
newspapers, or illustrated magazines of the domestic variety, in which
healthy patriotism and “heart interest” are not fettered by any petty
considerations of technical possibility.
Over here, Disillusionment awaits both these enthusiasts. The student
of tactics soon realizes the difference between fighting a battle in
imagination and in reality. Imagination cannot bring home to any human
brain the extent to which the chess-board dispositions of modern strategy
are tempered by the actualities of modern fighting—in other words, by the
strain upon the human machine. All the five senses are affected—hearing,
by the appalling din; seeing, by the spectacle of a whole group of human
beings blown to shreds; smelling, by the reek of gas and explosives;
touching, by the feel of dead men’s faces everywhere under your hand in
the darkness; and tasting, by the unforgettable flavour of meat in the
mouth after forty-eight hours’ continuous fighting in an atmosphere of
human blood. The War is going to be won, not by the strategists, but by
the man who can endure these things most steadfastly.
Miss Sissy Smithers need not be taken so seriously. He may be
disappointed at first to find that Red Cross nurses follow their calling
in Base Hospitals and not in No Man’s Land; and that performing dogs,
loaded with secret despatches and medical comforts, are not such a
prominent feature of modern warfare as the lady novelist would have us
believe. But no enterprise, however grim, was ever the worse for a touch
of glamour. Sissy will soon settle down.
Still, we have come to school knowing more than most new boys—far more,
indeed, than our seasoned French and British companions knew when they
embarked upon their martial education. The American soldier takes
the field to-day, thanks to the recorded experiences of others, with
a serviceable knowledge of the routine of trench warfare. Gas is no
surprise to him, and he is familiar with the tactical handling of bombs,
machine guns, and trench-mortars.
Up to date, however, we have not by any means drunk deep of warlike
experience, for the good reason that the authorities are breaking us in
by degrees. We are now in trenches, holding what is described as a quiet
sector of the Line, recently taken over from the French, and hitherto
very lightly held.
For the past two years, the Intelligence people tell us, the trenches
opposite have been manned by only one German to every four yards of
front. Eddie Gillette has already announced that when he has finished
doing what he came out here to do the number of Germans opposite may be
the same, but the method of distribution will be different. “Not one
Dutchman to four yards,” he explains, “but a quarter of a Dutchman to
every one yard. Yes, _sir_!”
Every Army has its own system of conducting trench warfare, founded
largely upon national characteristics. The Germans, it used to be said,
hold their trenches with machine guns, the British with men, the French
with artillery. Certainly in nineteen-fifteen, when stationary warfare
was the order of the day upon the Western Front, the Germans kept few
men in the front trenches—except perhaps at night—leaving the line very
much to the protection of barbed wire and machine guns, the latter laid
and trained in such a fashion as to create if need be a continuous and
impenetrable horizontal lattice-work of bullets in front of every section
of the line. The British, having at that time more men than munitions—a
battalion was lucky if it possessed four Vickers guns and a single
trench-mortar—filled their trenches with as many defenders as they would
hold, and trusted, not altogether vainly, to the old British tradition
of rapid rifle fire and close work with the bayonet to keep the line
intact.
The French temperament called for more elasticity than this. The one
thing a Frenchman hates to do in warfare is keep still. He prefers active
counter-measures to dogged resistance. So in nineteen-fifteen, whenever
a sector of the French trenches was heavily bombarded, the garrison was
promptly withdrawn to a position of comparative safety—where, the story
goes, they seized the opportunity to cook an extra-elaborate dinner. If
the Germans followed up their bombardment with an infantry attack, that
attack was met mainly with an intensive barrage from that amazingly rapid
and accurate piece of scrap-iron, the _soixante-quinze_ field gun. When
the German attack fizzled out, as it usually did, the incident ended,
and the French infantry returned to their place in the line. But if it
penetrated the barrage and occupied the French trenches, the Frenchman
finished his coffee, adjusted Rosalie, his bayonet, and prized Brother
Boche out of his new quarters.
But all that was in nineteen-fifteen. In warfare your best teacher
is your opponent. Nowadays we have, on each side of No Man’s Land,
assimilated one another’s methods. Moreover, trench warfare of to-day
has developed into a fluid affair. For one thing, trench-mortars, tanks,
and intensive artillery bombardments can make hay of the most elaborate
defensive works. You can no longer surround yourself with barbed wire and
go comfortably to bed, secure in the knowledge that your opponent cannot
possibly get at you without a long and laborious artillery preparation.
In nineteen-sixteen, before the First Battle of the Somme, British and
French guns pounded the German trenches night and day for three weeks.
It was a great pounding, but it cannot be said that the subsequent
attack came as a surprise to the enemy. Under such prolonged and pointed
attentions even a German is apt to suspect that something is in the wind.
But to-day we have other methods. Three minutes of pandemonium from
massed trench-mortars—a rush of tanks—and your defences are gone and the
Philistine is upon you.
So in nineteen-eighteen we live perpetually upon the _qui vive_, and
our methods have been elaborated and standardized to the common measure
of our joint experience. Our artillery has the whole front registered.
At a given signal it can let down a barrage—a Niagara of shrapnel and
high-explosive—upon the strip of earth that separates the enemy’s front
line from our own. This can be stationary, to annihilate an enemy attack,
or “creeping,” to form a protective screen for an attack of our own. We
have machine guns too, set, _à la_ Boche, at fixed angles to maintain a
continuous band of fire along each line of our trenches—more especially
along the second line; for it is a waste of life and energy to-day to
treat the front trench as anything more than a close chain of outposts,
screening the real dispositions behind.
And the rifle and bayonet have come back to their own. Two years ago
they were in danger of being discarded as obsolete. Every one was bomb
mad. It was claimed that a rifle and bayonet are useless against an
experienced opponent feeling his way along a zigzag trench in your
direction. True; but a bomb is equally useless—or rather, equally
dangerous—in the presence of an opponent rushing upon you in the open. So
now we have adjusted our perspectives, and each device of war is put to
its proper use.
So much for what the author of that little classic, “Dere Mable,” would
describe as “Tecknickle stuff.”
Needless to say, we are burning to play with all these new toys
simultaneously, like a small boy on Christmas morning. But we have had
little opportunity so far. To vary the metaphor, we must eat up our bread
and butter before we are allowed cake. We are busy at present learning
trench routine. Taking over trenches from another unit, for instance.
This is a complicated and exasperating pastime. It usually has to be
performed in the dark; otherwise enemy aeroplanes might observe unusual
activity behind our line, and advise their artillery to that effect. This
involves much night-marching along roads pitted with shell-holes; and
the trouble about a shell-hole three feet deep is that in wet weather it
looks like a perfectly innocent puddle. Frequently, to avoid congested
wheel traffic, we have to march across country in single file, under the
leadership of a faltering guide. Not a light must be shown, not a word
spoken. Each man, loaded with rifle, equipment, gas apparatus, and a few
extra and unauthorized comforts, has to follow the ghostly form of the
man immediately in front of him. It is discouraging work, for the simple
reason that if you set one hundred men to march in single file in the
dark, though the leader may be groping his way forward at the rate of one
mile per hour, the last man in the _queue_ is always running, and _has_
to run if he is not to be left behind. No one knows why this should be
so, but the uncanny fact remains.
Once you have descended into the communication trenches it is less easy
to lose yourself—unless the guide sets the example—but your progress
becomes slower than ever. Possibly—probably—you meet a procession going
in the opposite direction—a ration-party, maybe, or stretcher-bearers
with their patient, cheery freight. The fact that they have no right to
be there at all—practically all communication-trenches here are supposed
to be one-way thoroughfares—makes matters no easier, though it affords
relief in the form of argumentative profanity as you struggle together in
the constricted fairway like stout matrons loaded with market-produce in
a street-car.
Arrived in the actual trenches, the congestion is even greater, for now
there are just twice as many men in the trench as it was constructed
to hold, and the outgoing party must never budge until the incoming
party have arrived and “taken over.” Taking over is no mere formality
either. Officers, machine-gunners, bombers, chemical experts, and
other specialists must seek out their “opposite numbers” in the gross
darkness and take receipt in due form of ammunition, observation-posts,
gas-alarms, and situation reports, amid the crackling of rifle-fire and
the sputtering of the illuminating flares.
At last the relief is complete. The word is passed along. The outgoing
unit, after communicating sundry items of information as to the habits
and customs—mostly unpleasant—of the local Boche, coupled with sundry
warnings as to his favourite targets and own tender spots, fades
away down the communication-trenches, with whispered expressions of
good-will—and you are left alone, wondering what would happen if the
enemy were to make a surprise attack _now_.
Trench life is never comfortable at any time, but the first night in
a strange trench is the most uncomfortable of all. For one thing, the
trench feels unnaturally crowded. Moreover, we are young troops—the
youngest troops in the world to-day—and that means much. We have no
Mulvaneys or Learoyds among us. If we had, we should be taught a number
of things—how to boil a canteen over a couple of glowing chips; how to
hollow out a bed in hard soil; where to find water in an apparently dry
trench—trifles small in themselves, but making all the difference between
misery and comfort.
But that by the way. With daylight comes a new spirit—or rather, the old
spirit—of confidence. Eager persons peer over the parapet, to observe
where the enemy is, and what he is like. They see little enough. Two
hundred yards away an irregular ripple of sandbags—some white, some
black—looking like a dirty wave-crest on a brown sea, marks the position
of the German fire-trenches. This mixture of colours is thoughtful. If
the sandbags were all of one tint, like our own, loopholes would be hard
to conceal: under the German system, you never know at a distance whether
you are looking at a loophole or merely a black sandbag. The intervening
space is a wilderness of shell-holes, splintered tree-stumps, and rusty
barbed wire. Further observation is cut short by a sniper’s bullet, which
travels past enquiring heads with a vicious crack. We have learned our
first lesson. In trench warfare, by daylight at least, curiosity must be
satisfied through peepholes or periscopes.
In the trench itself there is plenty to occupy us. There are watches
to be kept and manual work to be done. A trench system is eternally
throwing out annexes and undergoing repairs, for the artillery on the
other side is always busy. There are supplies to be brought up. There is
cooking to be done: that occupies much time, for firing-trenches to-day
are equipped, like the fashionable lady’s vanity-bag, with everything
except the kitchen stove. And no bad thing either. Trench life has been
described by competent authorities as “Weeks of Monotony tempered by
Half-Hours of Hell.” Nothing dispels monotony like the necessity of
practising the primitive domestic virtues. At home we hire expensive
menials—or expect our wives—to light our fires and cook our dinners,
because we are too busy or too civilized to do it ourselves. Over here
we like doing it, because it is our actual instinct to do so, and also
passes the time.
As for the Half-Hours of Hell, these mainly take the form of short,
furious bombardments and midnight raids. But the German artillery is not
very busy in this sector. Guns, and more guns, are urgently required
farther north, where the Allied line, after stretching back and back
during those anxious days in the spring of the year, has now reacted like
a released bowstring and has shot the Boche back to the Meuse.