bulletins, intermittent newspapers, and trench gossip (personified in
the American Expeditionary Force by a supposititious individual of great
erudition but small reliability, whose Christian name is “Joe”)—our cause
is prospering from the North Sea to the Alps. Germany shot her bolt with
her third great offensive on the twenty-seventh of May, when German arms
once more crossed the Marne and penetrated to within twenty-eight miles
of Paris. There they were stayed, in a battle where at least one third
of the Allied troops were American, and where the young American Army
got its first real chance, and took it. In this operation the Second and
Third American Divisions were sent to stiffen the French line. Of these,
the Third successfully held a vital bridge-head opposite Château Thierry:
the Second captured Bouresches, Belleau Wood, and Vaux.
So much we know for certain, for these things happened before we left
England, and official information was available. The work of the Marines,
in the Second Division, has already passed into American history. But
for news of subsequent happenings we have had to depend too much upon
our friend Joe. All we know for certain is that on the fifteenth of July
the enemy launched just one more offensive—his fourth and as it proved,
his very last. This time, so far as we can gather, the Allies, instead
of contenting themselves with defensive tactics, took the business into
their own hands and bit suddenly and deeply into the side of the huge,
distended, pocketful of Germans which hung down from Soissons over Paris.
The pocket promptly contracted itself: the enemy disgorged himself from
its mouth, and began to retreat. From all accounts he has been retreating
ever since.
French, British, and American troops were all engaged in this, the final
and triumphant redressing of the balance. And each were represented by
their best. One of our liaison officers tells us of a memorial set up by
French soldiers in honour of the dead of the famous Fifty-first Division
of the British Army—the Highland Territorials—and of an inscription
carved thereon which proclaimed that hereafter the Thistle of Scotland
would forever flourish beside the Lilies of France. In that great fight
not merely unity of command, but unity of sentiment, seem to have come to
their own at last.
The Allied counter-attack struck deep along the whole line. Soissons and
Montdidier, we hear, are once more in our hands; while farther north, in
Flanders, the British Third and Fourth Armies are sweeping forward for
the last time in the blood-soaked valley of the Lys.
As for the American share, we have not heard too much, but what we have
heard is enough to make us tingle. We hear of great work by the Regulars
of the First, Second, and Third Divisions; by the Twenty-sixth—the
Yankees of New England—and by the Forty-second Rainbow Division, from
Yaphank. It is also reported that other American Divisions made no
small impression upon Brother Boche—the Fourth, the Twenty-eighth; the
Thirty-second, and the Seventy-seventh.
The Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth, we understand, are somewhere with the
British opposite the Hindenburg Line near Cambrai. Doubtless we shall
hear something of them too, in due course. Great days, great days! But to
what a fever of exasperation are we aroused, who are not there ourselves!
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHASING MONOTONY
At present the authorities are engaged in impressing upon us the truth
of the maxim which says that you must not run before you can walk. Our
immediate duty is to show that we can stand the test of ordinary trench
warfare.
First, such every-day nuisances as the German sniper. And here we have a
pleasant little success to record.
When we took over these trenches, snipers were numerous and vigilant.
If you raised your head above the parapet, one of two things happened.
Either you heard a sound like the crack of a whip-lash close to your ear;
or you did not. If you did, you were lucky. If you did not, you were
buried at dusk.
There is one piece of slightly rising ground in the enemy’s line which
commands an oblique view of a stretch of our front trenches. For a
week we have been pestered by a sniper concealed somewhere along this
eminence, about three hundred yards away, on our right front. We have
scrutinized its whole expanse with periscopes and through loopholes,
but there is no sign of trench or emplacement where the sniper might be
concealed.
Yesterday that untutored but resourceful fire-eater, Eddie Gillette,
turned his attention to the matter, the urgency of which had been
impressed upon him by the fact that a sniper’s bullet, travelling
sidewise down the trench, had chipped a groove in Eddie’s own “tin derby”
that very morning, Eddie’s head being inside at the time.
“We got to locate that lobster,” he observed. And he did.
In a field behind the support line there grows, or rather, rots, a
crop of derelict and much-bombarded turnips. Last night Eddie, after a
conference with his officer, Boone Cruttenden, and the top machine-gun
sergeant, disappeared for an hour into the _hinterland_, and brought
back with him an armful of selected esculents. The largest of these
he proceeded this morning to spear upon a flat lath of wood. Upon the
top of this eminence he perched his own steel helmet, at a jaunty
angle. Attended by a respectfully interested cohort of disciples, or
rubbernecks, he next selected a suitable spot in the front-line trench,
and with the help of a length of rope and a little ingenuity succeeded in
lashing the turnip-laden lath to the revetment of the parapet in such a
fashion as to make it possible to slide the lath up and down.
It was a still, sunny, September morning, and the whole line was quiet,
except for an occasional rifle-shot, and the intermittent boom of
artillery beyond the next hill-crest to the south. Eddie’s preliminary
adjustments were barely completed when Boone Cruttenden arrived, carrying
a periscope and attended by the machine-gun sergeant.
“Got everything fixed, Gillette?” enquired Boone.
“Yes, _sir_,” replied Eddie, ignoring the cynical smiles of Joe McCarthy,
who was present in the capacity of dramatic critic.
“Right,” said Boone. “Go to it!”
The inventor cautiously slid the lath up in its groove, until the
helmet-crowned turnip stood some six inches above the parapet, offering
a goodly mark against the sky. Then crouching down, he waited. The
spectators, with remarkable unanimity, followed his example.
_Crack!_
A bullet shaved the top sandbag and buried itself with a vicious thud in
the back wall of the trench.
“Missed!” announced Gillette calmly. “We better let him try again.”
“Lower the turnip a couple of minutes first,” advised Boone. “A real man
wouldn’t keep his head up there all the time—unless it was a bone one!”
Gillette complied, and waited.
“What’s the big idea, Ed?” enquired Al Thompson respectfully.
“The big idea,” replied Eddie, “is first of all to let that Dutchman over
there drill a hole in this turnip. Then, if we peek through the hole, we
shall be looking along the track of the bullet—at this range it would
travel on a pretty-nigh flat line—and we shall see the exact place the
bullet started from, which is what we are after. In case we don’t get the
exact location, we will put up another turnip some other place in the
trench, and get a cross-bearing from that. That’s the big idea, boys!”
“And who,” enquired the grating voice of Mr. Joe McCarthy, “is the poor
fish who’s gonna put his bean up above the parapet and peek through the
hole?”
Eddie Gillette forbore to reply, but resumed his operations with added
dignity, sliding his turnip-head once more into the enemy’s view. There
was another crack, and the steel helmet oscillated sharply.
“Right through the nose!” announced Eddie, with ghoulish satisfaction.
“Now, Captain—quick!”
Already Boone Cruttenden, crouching low, was applying his periscope to
the hole in the back of the turnip. The machine-gun sergeant, stationed
at a tiny observation loophole in a steel plate close by, waited eagerly
for instructions.
Boone, with his magnifying periscope, took a rapid observation of the
constricted field of view afforded by the narrow tunnel through the
turnip; then another, over the open parapet this time; then another,
through the turnip again. He spoke rapidly.
“Sergeant, do you see two stunted willows on the sky-line, half-right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Below them, a single small bush?”
“Yes, sir. I got it.”
“Well, lay a machine gun to cover the ground about five yards to the
right of that. Call the range three-fifty. I guess he is somewhere around
there. I can’t see any loophole or anything, but maybe he is lying right
out in the open, covered in grass, or—”
_Crack!_ The conscientious artist over the way was growing restive at his
own want of success. This time he chipped the top of the steel helmet.
“That will do,” said Boone. “Lower away that turnip, Gillette, and we’ll
take a second bearing farther along.”
Mr. Gillette collected his paraphernalia with the solemn dignity of an
acolyte taking part in a mystery. But he unbent to human level for a
moment.
“You see,” he observed caustically, “we don’t require no poor fish here,
Joe McCarthy!”
In due course a second turnip was hoisted and perforated, a second
bearing taken, and another machine gun laid. The machine-gun teams took
station; the first cartridges were fed into the chambers.
“Let ’em go the moment he snipes again,” was Boone’s order.
A third spot was selected, and a third turnip exposed. This time it
wagged itself provokingly, and the sniper responded at once. It was a
beautiful shot, but it was his last. Next moment two converging streams
of machine-gun bullets were spattering his lair. What happened we shall
never know, but we were never again troubled from that particular
locality.
“We certainly got to hand it to you, Ed,” announced Joe McCarthy, in an
unusual fit of self-abasement.
Next, artillery fire. The Boche bombards our trenches twice a day,
and searches the back areas with shrapnel at night. He is not very
persistent, and a little sharp retaliation from our gunners usually
brings his performance to a conclusion. Still, it is unpleasant while it
lasts.
To be shelled for the first time must fairly rank with the first
cigarette, the first shave, and the first kiss as one of the
unforgettable experiences of life. Opinions vary as to the best place to
be during a bombardment—assuming that one has to be anywhere at all. Jim
Nichols considers a shell-hole a good place.
“It is well known,” he points out, “that no two bullets ever hit the same
spot. Nelson, or some other historical gink, once said that the safest
place for a man to put his head during a sea-fight was a hole made in a
ship’s side by a cannon-ball. Me for a shell-hole, every time!”
Boone Cruttenden thinks an ordinary trench dugout would be best. Else
what are dugouts for?
“It depends on who made them,” replies the veteran Major Powers. “The
German officer’s idea is all right. He turns on a squad of men, and they
construct for him a combined club and restaurant somewhere near the
centre of the earth. But even that is liable to have its exits blocked.
Personally, if I were under bombardment, I should stay out in the trench.
I am more likely to be hit, but less likely to be buried; and I don’t
intend to go putting the cart before the horse at _my_ funeral!”
All had an opportunity to test their theories—and their nerve—the first
afternoon after taking over the trenches. Boone and Jim shared a dugout
in the front line, sunk below the forward parapet, under the sandbags.
Having contracted the British habit of afternoon tea, they were occupied
towards five o’clock in brewing that beverage in a mess-tin, when
suddenly, with a whizz and a rush, a German shell passed over the trench
and burst amid a cloud of flying clods fifty yards beyond it.
“This is the afternoon bombardment that we were warned about,” said Jim,
pouring out two cups of tea. “Now we shall know whether we are shell-shy
or not!”
Boone took his aluminum teacup in his hand, and held it to his lips.
Simultaneously another shell landed outside—fifty yards short of the
parapet this time. The earth shook. Fragments of dirt and grit fell from
the sandbag ceiling into the tea. Boone regarded the hand which was
holding the teacup. He noted with secret satisfaction that though his
heart was bumping slightly, the hand was as steady as a rock.
“That is what is known as ‘bracketing,’ I guess,” said Nichols. “The next
shell will strike an average between the ranges of the first two and get
this happy home of ours just where the cork got the bottle.”
He was right—or nearly. Next moment, with a triumphant shriek, a shell
landed fairly in the trench, fifteen yards to their right. They felt
little concussion, for the trench was provided with stout earthen
traverses, which limited the radius of the explosion and blanketed its
force.
“The question before the House,” said Boone, “is whether we stay where we
are or go away from here. Hallo, what’s that?”
A hoarse cry was passing down the trench from mouth to mouth—a cry which
never fails to tug at a soldier’s heart, for he knows not what comrade
may be involved:
“Stretcher-bearers!”
Both officers scrambled out of their shelter. Three men, crouching
inside the entrance to a neighbouring dugout, had been hit by fragments
of shell—all in the legs. In due course the stretchers arrived, and
the trio—our first actual casualties—were borne off upon that long and
tortuous journey which starts in a communication-trench and ends possibly
at Home. They were followed by the mingled chorus of sympathy and
congratulation always accorded in these days to those who are taken, by
those who are left.
More German shells arrived. The parapet was hit in two places, and burst
sandbags flew in the air. But it was not “heavy stuff”—so the artillery
officer remarked, busy in his forward observing-station with periscope
and telephone—and the actual damage was slight.
“I am calling for retaliation now,” he explained to Boone and Jim. He
gabbled a formula to the telephone orderly, who repeated it into a
portable instrument before him. Presently the man looked up.
“Battery fired!” he announced. And a few moments later—
_Whish!_ _Whish!_ _Whish!_ _Whish!_
Four hissing streaks of sound passed over the trench from the rear. Next
moment four heavy detonations shook the earth. A hundred pairs of eager
eyes, peeping cautiously over the parapet, observed four fountains of
earth and smoke spring up in No Man’s Land.
“Short!” muttered the gunner officer, and issued a corrective order.
So the duel went on. It was a typical artillery fight, in that each
side endeavoured to dissuade its opponent from further participation by
bombarding, not one another, but one another’s friends in the trenches.
The German fire did not slacken; if anything it increased. Probably
Brother Boche was well aware that a fresh division had taken over the
line, and desired to make a good first impression. But there were no more
casualties.
“I’m tired of this. What about finishing our tea?” enquired Boone
Cruttenden of Jim Nichols.
“Sure thing,” said Jim. “Come on!”
* * * * *
But no. As they rounded the traverse leading into their own particular
bay, there came a roar and a bang—and their home was not. When the smoke
cleared away they saw, instead of a rugged and workmanlike parapet, a
jumbled heap of disintegrated sandbags and twisted timber-work.
Jim Nichols turned to his companion, with his slow smile.
“There!” he said. “Do you still hold that the best place during a
bombardment is a dugout?”
“I’m stung, I admit,” said Boone. “But now you can test _your_ theory.
You can sit in the middle of that mess that the shell has made. It’s in
full view of the enemy, but of course you’ll be safe!”
The rival theorist smiled again.
“I confess I have died on that proposition,” he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AN EXCURSION AND AN ALARUM
We now regard ourselves, justifiably, as initiated.
We have been bombarded fairly regularly. We do not like it, but we can
stand it, which is all that matters—as eels probably remark while being
skinned. We are getting used, also, to the sight of sudden death and
human blood. These things affect us less than we expected. It is all a
matter of environment. If you were to see a man caught and cut in two
between a street-car and a taxi-cab in your own home town, the spectacle
would make you physically sick and might haunt you for weeks, because
such incidents are not part of the recognized routine of home town life.
But here, they are part of the day’s work: we are prepared for them: they
are what we are in the War for. And, curiously and providentially, it
seldom occurs to any of us to suspect that it may be his turn next. Thus
all-wise Nature maintains our balance for us.
We have made another interesting discovery about Nature, and that is
that habit can be stronger than instinct, and pride than either. The
first law of Nature is said to be the instinct of self-preservation. Yet
the average soldier, even in the inferno of modern warfare, gives less
trouble to his leaders when under shell-fire than when his dinner does
not come up to the usual standard, or he has run out of cigarettes.
Pride, again. This morning, two machine-gunners, namely, one Sam Gates
and our old friend Miss Sissy Smithers, observed through their loophole a
derelict German helmet lying amid the hedge of rusty barbed wire outside
the trench. The passion for souvenirs is inborn in the human race, but
most strongly developed in soldiers taking their first turn in the
trenches.
“Me for that lid!” announced Sissy.
“How are you gonna get it?” enquired his friend.
“The only way I know of. Going over the top and fetching it.”
Sam stared meditatively through the loophole, and remarked carelessly:
“You’ll wait till it gets dark, I guess.”
Human nature is a curious thing. Sissy Smithers was reckoned a quiet
youth. In civil life he earned a romantic but unheroic livelihood by
selling ladies’ hosiery. But his friend’s perfectly casual and reasonable
observation stung him to the roots of his being. His face flamed. Without
a word he scrambled upon the firing-step, heaved himself over the
parapet, walked quite deliberately to the barbed wire, and brought back
the helmet. The helmet had a chip in it. The chip was made by a German
sniper as Sissy lifted the helmet out of the wire.
The Boche employs other vehicles of frightfulness besides artillery. The
Flying Pig, for example. This engaging animal is really an aerial mine,
about six feet long. It appears suddenly high in the air above No Man’s
Land, propelled thither by some invisible and inaudible agency behind
the German line, and descends upon us in a series of amusing somersaults.
Having reached its destination it explodes, with results disastrous
to the landscape. A single Flying Pig can do more damage than a whole
artillery bombardment. But it possesses one redeeming feature. _You can
see it coming._ When you do, the correct procedure is to decide quickly
where it is going to come down, and then go somewhere else. It is an
exhilarating pastime, but attended by complications when played by a
large number of persons in a narrow trench—especially when differences of
opinion exist as to where the animal really intends to alight.
Then there is gas. But gas is more of a nuisance than a danger in these
days, since we are all—even the horses—equipped with a special breathing
apparatus, and carry the same night and day. Our newest mask, too, is
a great advance on its predecessors. The chief trouble about gas-masks
hitherto has been the formation of mist on the inside of the goggles.
Now, by the happy inspiration of some nameless benefactor in the Service
of Supply, the breathing tubes are so arranged that the filtered air,
when it arrives, passes right over the inner surface of the eye-pieces,
clearing the glass at every intake of breath.
Mustard gas is another story, because it attacks the skin—unless you
happen to be a coloured gentleman, and then apparently you do not mind so
much.
But our busy time is at night. Supplies come up; casualties go back.
Trench repairs have to be executed in places inaccessible by daylight.
Sandbags innumerable have to be filled and set in position.
“This yer War,” observes Joe McCarthy, bitterly, “will be finished when
all the dirt in France has been shovelled into sandbags—by you an’ me!
Then they’ll have to quit, or fall through!”
But the most thrilling experiences of trench warfare are trench raids.
These are not necessarily elaborate affairs. Some of them are quite
informal. Their objects are twofold—the first, to keep the enemy
guessing, the second, to obtain information. The second is the most
important. It is vitally necessary to know just where every one of your
enemy’s Divisions is located. The simplest method of finding out is to
send over armed deputations in the dead of night, with instructions
to bring back a few assorted Germans. These, when they arrive, are
interrogated, and their equipment and shoulder-straps are examined,
for clues as to their identity. In this way it is usually possible to
discover what Divisions are in station opposite, and how much front each
holds. If a Division is spread out widely, you may be tolerably sure
that the enemy has no serious designs upon your sector of the line. But
if Divisions are “distributed in depth”—that is, with narrow fronts and
long tails—the wise commander begins to accumulate ammunition and draft
reserves into his back areas. Before the great German drive in March,
against the attenuated British line at St. Quentin, Sir Douglas Haig was
made aware, by this and other means, of the cheering intelligence that
he had opposite to a comparatively short sector of his front sixty-four
German Divisions—or six more Divisions than there were British Divisions
in the whole of France and Belgium! That was a case in which nothing
could be done except put up the best defence possible with the troops
available, for equally overwhelming odds were being massed against the
rest of the British line. But in normal cases, to be forewarned is to be
forearmed.
Trench raids are intermittent affairs. Patrols, on the other hand,
must be organized every night. These excursions are not necessarily
belligerent. Their main object is to collect information, and to make
sure that the enemy keeps to his own side of the street. If two patrols
do meet, and feel constrained to “start something,” the one thing no one
ever does is to pull a gun or throw a bomb. To do so would be to invite
impartial participation in the game by the machine guns of both sides.
It must be cold steel or nothing. As often as not, it is nothing. Two
patrols may meet, and cut one another dead, like rival beauties on Fifth
Avenue.
One night Boone Cruttenden found himself detailed for patrol duty, with a
sergeant and four men. The party were to scale the parapet, pass through
a gap in the wire, and make a tour of a certain section of No Man’s Land.
The whole operation, which was by this time a familiar one, was expected
to occupy about an hour. Orders were given to the trench garrison that
there must be no firing during this period.
Just before midnight, in the soft September darkness, Boone led his
followers over the sandbags. It was a quiet night—suspiciously quiet—and
there was little to be heard save some impatient rips of machine-gun
fire farther south, and the soft explosion of the Verey pistols on both
sides. There are three impressions of nocturnal trench warfare which
never fade from the memory of those who have served their apprenticeship
therein—one, the endless vista of bursting star-shells sinking from the
sky along that tortuous, dolorous way that calls itself No Man’s Land;
two, the eternal _plop-plop!_ of the Verey pistols; three, the mingled
smell of fresh earth, decaying matter, and disinfectants.
Boone’s first objective was a deep shell-crater some fifteen yards
outside the wire. He had discovered it two nights previously, and it
had struck him as a useful location for an advanced patrolling base. He
gathered his henchmen around him and addressed them in a low voice.