DIGGING IN
A winter compounded of rain and fire had settled down heavily over the
Aisne Valley and the plain of Champagne, from Rheims to Verdun. The
chalky soil oozed gray and--red.
Deadlocked, their grip at each other's throats, German and Frenchman
watched each other across a narrow, noisome waste, now and forever
to become the symbol of all that is most horrible, most deadly, most
pitiable:
No Man's Land!
Tens of thousands of men waited for the word of command which should
bid them expose themselves to the unsated appetite of hungry slaughter,
tens of thousands of men waited inactive while death and mutilation
chose them, one by one.
A gray soil, a gray sky, and a gray doom.
The only thing that moved was the shuddering skin of the earth as the
bullets flayed it in streaks or the shells dug deep holes like the
festering sores of a foul disease. Not a blade of grass, not a weed,
not a shrub remained; where leafy woods once had been, now only a few
scarred and slivered stumps pointed accusing fingers upward. It was
Chaos come again.
Where were the shouting hosts charged with valor, such as those who had
driven forward at La Fère Champenoise, when Foch's army saved France?
Gone!
Where were the gallant fights to save the guns, when men met in open
combat under the open sky?
Gone!
Where were the cavalry charges when squadrons with saber or with lance
clashed in a deadly but glorious shock?
Gone!
Where were the armies that had fought hand to hand in the streets of
Charleroi; that had snatched at and escaped from death alternately in
the great retreat; that had hurled themselves at each other with equal
fury in the attack or the defense of Paris; that had charged up the
slopes of Le Grand Couronne and the bluffs of the Aisne with equal
gallantry, and, dying, still had shaken their fists in the face of
Slaughter?
Gone, all gone!
Aye, gone indeed, but where?
Dug in!
Horace, off duty for a few hours from his post as military telephonist,
for which he had fitted himself to qualify when his work as a motor
cyclist was done, looked at the smitten world. He tried to compare the
war before him with the war to which for one brief, wild month he had
been so close. There was no comparison.
To nothing that the world has ever seen could the War of the Trenches
be compared.
It was a cold, invisible inferno, which, every morning and evening,
spewed up its ghastly tale of dead and wounded; which, every evening
and morning, yielded up its line of staggering, weary, war-dulled
figures, glad to exchange the peril of death for the miserable
existence which was all that was possible behind the trenches in the
plain of Champagne that first fearful winter.
The war of men was over, only a war of murderous moles remained.
In a rickety hovel behind the lines, which, as Horace's companion in
the telephone work declared, was "weather-proof only when there wasn't
any weather to put it to the proof," the boy had puzzled over this
new warfare. At last, one day, the opportunity serving, he hunted up
his friend the veteran--now a sergeant-major--and learned the causes
and the methods of the ditch-born strife.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of "Le Miroir."_
THE VALLEY OF THE DEAD.
Bombardment of shrapnel and high explosive shell, forming a barrage
fire through which the men seen in the trench are about to plunge.]
"Modern fighting," said the veteran, as he cleaned his rifle, a daily
task in that rust-devouring atmosphere, "is the result of modern
weapons. Whereas a musket would take two minutes to load and had a
range of only a couple of hundred yards, a modern rifle will fire
thirty shots a minute and over, and has a good killing range at an
almost flat trajectory of a thousand yards. Suppose it takes a charging
force of infantry six minutes to run a thousand yards, where a musket
would get in three shots a modern rifle would put in from 180 to 300
shots, and would be firing almost continuously."
"Men would have to be under cover to face that fire," agreed Horace.
"More murderous than the rifle," the veteran continued, "is the
machine-gun, which fires 600 shots a minute and can be operated by two
men. It is estimated as being equal to fifty men, but, in reality, its
destructiveness in the hands of a good gunner is far higher. It's easy
to handle, too, the Maxims weighing sixty pounds and our Hotchkiss
fifty-three pounds, because the English weapon is water-cooled and ours
is air-cooled."
"Which is best?"
"Ours," replied the veteran promptly, "because a Maxim, when it's
firing steadily, gets so hot that it boils the water and the enemy can
see the steam. Then he knows where you are and concentrates his fire
and--you tuck in your toes and no one will ever wake you up."
"Invisibility counts," said the boy.
"It's the difference between life and death!" was the reply. "That's
where the value of the trenches becomes evident. Since both rifles and
machine-guns have a flat trajectory, when they do strike the ground,
they do it at a very slight angle. If your head is ten inches below the
level of the ground, a thousand men can fire at you with rifles and
machine-guns a hundred yards away, and you can smoke a pipe comfortably
and listen to the song of the bullets overhead.
"Shrapnel, especially when handled by the 'Soixante-Quinze,' which, in
addition to being the best field-gun in the world, has the best shell
with the best time-fuse, is more destructive against advancing troops
than machine-gun and rifle-fire combined, when it is rightly timed.
Of course, it is far harder to aim exactly and to time to the second.
A shrapnel shell holds 300 bullets and a 'Soixante-Quinze' can fire
fifteen shells a minute. That means that one gun can send 4500 bullets
a minute into an advancing enemy, the bullets scattering in a fan shape
from the burst of the shell. The Boches, by the way, waste a tremendous
amount of ammunition in bursting their shrapnel too high. I got hit,
myself, with three balls from a shell which had burst too far away and
they didn't even make a hole in my trousers; bruised me a bit, that was
all.
"But you can see, my boy, when you've got rifle fire, machine-gun fire
and shrapnel all looking for a different place to put a hole through
you, a trench is the loveliest thing in the world, no matter if it's
wet and slimy, full of smells and black with dried blood. The worst
pool of filth would be a haven of refuge if only you could drop your
body in it a few inches below the zone of certain death. If one gets
caught once in the open, one never grumbles again about the labor of
digging a trench."
"But why are trenches so twisty?" asked Horace. "One misty day, when it
was safe, an aviator took me up a little way, and I had a chance to
look down on our trenches. I was only in the air a few minutes and we
didn't go very high, but, although I know this section pretty well, I
couldn't make head or tail out of our lines. They looked like a sort of
scrawly writing, or a spider's web stretched out and tangled up."
"That's not a bad description," said the veteran thoughtfully, "they
do look a little like that, with the communication trenches for the
cross-threads. But there are a good many reasons why the trenches are
made 'twisty' as you call it.
"In the first place, a trench is made zigzag, so that, if the enemy
should make a sudden raid and seize a section of the trench, he can't
fire along it and enfilade you. Then a trench that wavers in long
uneven lines is much safer against shell-fire, for, supposing that the
enemy does get the range of a piece of trench, his range will be wrong
for the same trench ten yards farther on, the shells falling harmlessly
in the ground before it or behind it.
"Besides that, a thin wavy line is much more difficult to see from an
aëroplane than a straight line, because there are no straight lines in
nature. That's why we've had to stop putting straw in the trenches,
the line of yellow was too easy to see from overhead."
"Is that why trenches are made so narrow?" the boy asked. "I've often
thought it silly to make them so that two people can hardly squeeze
past each other. The stretcher-bearers growl about it all the time."
"The ideal fire-trench," the veteran answered, "should be only about
eighteen inches wide and not quite four feet deep, the upthrown earth
forming a parapet. It should be recessed here and there, and traversed.
To pass a man, you have to slide sideways. The communicating trench
should be about fifteen yards to the rear. It should be seven feet deep
and about three feet wide.
"Twenty-five yards in the rear is the cover trench, sixteen feet
deep, and wide enough to allow troops to march in single file. The
communication trenches from one line to another are always best as
tunnels, though sometimes they are open. Our trenches here are open,
but," the veteran nodded sagely, "I don't think they ought to be. This
is a chalk soil, and the whitish soil underneath shows too clearly when
you throw it up."
"The trenches wouldn't be so bad," said the lad, "if they weren't
always wet."
"You can't change that," the veteran responded grimly, "unless you can
find some way to make water run up-hill. It stands to reason that if
you dig holes in the ground and it rains--as it does nearly all the
time in this wretched northern country--the water is going to run into
those holes. If you bale it out by day, the Boches see you, and if you
pump at night, they hear you. If it rains, the trenches are going to be
knee-deep in water and you can't help it."
"But how can you find your way, when one trench looks exactly like
another and they're all twisting and turning like so many snakes trying
to get warm?"
"You can't, unless you know the plans," the sergeant-major answered.
"You've no idea of the amount of work that our draughtsmen have to
do, in mapping out these underground cities and thousands of miles of
ditch-streets. I know my little section, of course, and each officer
has learned the tangle of trenches in which his command is likely
to operate. But the officers have to know the tangle of the enemy's
trenches, too, and, what's more, when we attack, they have to be in the
front and guide us. An assault isn't just a blind drive over the top,
it must have a definite goal and has to be reached a certain way. The
officers have got to know the Boche roads as well as our own."
"But how can they find that out?"
"Aeroplanes with photographers and draughtsmen," came the reply.
"You've heard the story of the tattooed draughtsman?"
"No," answered Horace, "I haven't."
"He was a young fellow," the veteran began, "who was assigned to the
job of making a plan of the enemy's trenches opposite his part of the
line. The Boche lines were on a little higher ground than ours at that
point, so that nothing could be seen from the fire trench. The young
draughtsman went up in a machine several times, but there was a very
efficient battery of anti-aircraft guns a little back of their lines
and the Archies would not let our Farman aëroplane come down low enough
for a photograph to show anything definite.
"This chap got desperate. He was bound to succeed, no matter what
happened to him. At last, one night, we caught a Boche patrol on No
Man's Land and wiped them out. As soon as the return fire slackened,
the draughtsman, who had been in one of the dug-outs, crawled out,
and, wriggling flat to where the Boches had fallen, he grabbed one of
the dead men by the ankle and dragged him to our trench.
"Then, unobtrusively and to our open-mouthed astonishment, the young
draughtsman dressed himself in the dead man's uniform, read carefully
all the papers in the pockets, so that he might learn who it was he was
counterfeiting and bade us good-bye.
"'There's just about one chance in a million,' he said, 'that I don't
get found out right away. If I am, then--' He clicked his tongue like a
trigger. 'If I'm not caught and can manage to go back with the relief
and return again,' he said, 'as soon as I get to the trench I'll bolt
out of it, holding my left arm stretched out straight. You'll know by
that, it's me. They'll pot me from behind, of course, but I may get
half-way over No Man's Land before they do. If I drop, just smother the
place where I fell with bullets so that the Boches don't have a chance
to sneak out and get me.'
"'But that'll cut you to ribbons,' I said to him.
"He shrugged his shoulders.
"'I'll be dead, probably,' he said, 'and if I'm not and you kill me,
then it's only five minutes' difference, anyway.
"'Then, when it's night, let some of the fellows go out and drag me in.
I've got an indelible pencil, and you'll find a map of the trenches on
my chest.'"
"Did he go?"
"He did," the veteran answered. "We watched close all that night, all
the next day and all the next night, till we were sure that he had been
nabbed.
"Then, suddenly, one of our chaps called,
"'Here he comes!'
"Sure enough, just as it was getting light enough to see, a figure
dressed like a Boche came jumping out of the trench holding his left
arm stretched out straight and began a bolt across No Man's Land. He
was running like a hare, but three or four rifles spoke. He dropped,
wounded, and began to crawl, inch by inch, to our lines. Then they got
a machine-gun full on him and began to spray him with bullets, like you
sprinkle a flower-bed in summer.
"He didn't wriggle very far.
"We answered them hot and heavy. We didn't leave room for a worm to
crawl up to him, much less a man. Then, when night came, some of our
fellows drove a sap to where he lay and hooked down the body."
"And the map?"
"Scrawled on his bare chest, the way he said it would be," the veteran
answered, "and underneath was written in the same smeared violet marks
the word:
"'Victory!'"
"You can't beat France when it comes to heroism!" declared Horace.
"The English are just as nervy," answered the veteran. "Even in the
trenches, though, they fight differently. They make far fewer night
attacks than we do, and far more mines. There's few nights that the
British haven't got a listening patrol out somewhere on the line."
"I hear every one talking of a 'listening patrol,'" put in the lad;
"tell me, Sergeant, just what a listening patrol is for."
"To listen," answered the veteran laconically.
"Of course, but for what?"
The answer came, sinister,
"Mines!"
"Ah!" Horace had seen the effects of those most terrible of all weapons
of trench warfare.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."_
LISTENING PATROL TRAPPED BY A STAR-SHELL.]
[Illustration: _Courtesy of "Illustrated London News."_
LOCATING ENEMY SAPPERS ON A LISTENING PATROL.]
"You see," the veteran explained, "when trenches are well and solidly
dug, especially the way the Germans build them; when solid machine-gun
emplacements are made and properly manned with plenty of ammunition;
when there is a concentration of artillery to support the trenches on
both sides, nobody can do much. Of course, they shell us all the time,
and we shell them. They send over rifle-bombs and we shoot ammonal and
vitriol grenades. Once in a while, if they're lucky, they'll land a
'Minnenwerfer' in one of our trenches and then there's a little work
for the doctor and a lot for the grave-digger."
"What's a 'Minnenwerfer'?"
"A pleasant little toy the Germans have invented, which looks like
a rubber ball at the end of a stick. Its right name is the 'Krupp
trench howitzer.' It weighs only 120 pounds--at least one of them that
we captured, weighed that--and can be handled by a couple of men.
Although it has a caliber of only 2.1-inch it throws a shell of 16-inch
diameter."
"How on earth can it do that?" asked the boy. "You can't squeeze a
16-inch shell down a 2.1-inch muzzle!"
"That's what the stick is for," came the reply. "The shell is round,
like one of the old-fashioned cannon-balls you see piled up in village
squares beside antiquated cannon. It weighs 200 pounds and has a
bursting charge of 86 pounds of tri-nitro-toluol. The shell is bored to
the center. You shove one end of the iron rod into the gun so that it
sticks out about eight inches beyond the muzzle. Then you put the shell
on the rod by the hole bored to the center. It looks like a toy balloon
at the end of a child's toy cannon. Then you fire it, the iron rod is
shot out, driving the bomb ahead of it and off she goes."
"Will it go far?"
"Far enough," the veteran said. "At an angle of projection of 45
degrees with the low muzzle velocity of 200 feet per second, the range
of the bomb is 1244 feet and it takes eight seconds to come. That's the
only good thing about it, sometimes you can hear it coming soon enough
to dodge into a dug-out. But neither Minnenwerfers, nor the 5.6-inch
nor even the 8.4-inch howitzers will win a trench. It takes mines to do
that.
"So, in order to gain an advantage, one side or the other burrows
deep tunnels in the earth, sometimes 16 feet down, sometimes 60, all
depending on the soil and the plan. The men work underground like
moles and they drive a long subterranean gallery until they come right
below an important point, maybe an officers' dug-out or a grenade
depot. Then they burrow upwards a bit, and put in a tremendous charge
of explosive, melinite or something like that, and fix an electric
wire. The earth is then rammed back into the gallery, an electric
contact is made and whiz! bang! about forty tons of mixed heads, legs,
bits of bomb-proof and earth go flying into the air, leaving a hole big
enough to build a bungalow in and never see the roof.
"Then it's our turn. While the section of the Boche line is in
confusion we dash across, while our artillery, behind us, smothers the
rest of the line. We settle in the big hole and build our trenches from
it and we've gained a hundred yards and can pepper the Boche trenches
from their rear. A mine's a great thing, although, sometimes, it costs
more men to consolidate and hold a place like that than to take it.
The British have beaten us all at that game. They've got small armies
of Welsh miners, doing nothing but that all day and all night long.
They're used to it, it's their trade and they don't mind.
"Now, a listening patrol, which is what I began to tell you about,
is a patrol generally consisting of four men, under an officer, which
creeps out on No Man's Land during the night. By approaching near the
enemy trenches, listening with their ears to the ground, the men can
hear if there is any one at work under them. The earth--as you ought to
know, being a telephonist--is a good conductor of sound, and if there's
any tricky business going on, a listening patrol can find it out."
"What good does it do to know that some one is driving a mine under
you? Do you desert the trench, then, until they blow it up?"
The veteran almost growled.
"Does a Frenchman desert a trench!" he said. "No, we find out exactly
where they're digging, and start a tunnel from our side, right below
the other. Then, when they're working busily, a little explosion
below them smashes their tunnel into soup and they're all dead--and
buried--without troubling any one."
"I shouldn't think a listening patrol would be so dangerous, then,"
said the boy, "if you've only got to crawl out and listen."
"But there's others listening, too! If they hear a move, or think that
they hear a move, up goes a star shell, bright as day, to show you
sprawled on the ground. Your only chance is to lie still, like a dead
man. But, lots of times, even if they think you're dead they'll turn a
machine-gun on you, just to make sure. You don't have to imitate being
dead any more, then. I know of six officers, right in this sector, who
have been killed in listening-patrol work, and I couldn't count how
many men."
He leaned forward and stared out into space gloomily.
"I don't call this--war," he said in a lower voice. "I can't call it
war when a soldier's chief weapons are a pickax and a spade for digging
trenches--and graves. And--I wanted to be an officer!" He stared out
upon the faded world and repeated slowly, "I wanted to be an officer! I
wanted to lead men into--that!"
"You lead men now!" said the boy.
The fire of responsibility and pride flashed back into the dull eyes
and involuntarily the veteran stood up.
"I lead men now," he cried, "and I'll lead them till we drive the
Germans back from the last foot of the soil of France!"
He strode off to his multifarious duties with swing and determination
in his step.
It was three days after that when Horace, who was gradually
acclimatizing to the nerve-racking cannonade of the battlefield, became
conscious that it was steadily increasing in intensity. The clouds hung
low, muffling the resonance and emphasizing the sharp reports of the
cannon. The moist, sluggish air, full of unimaginable odors, became
pungent with sulphur, powder, the burnt smell of calcined soil and the
fumes of charred wool arising from the ignited clothing of the unburied
dead on No Man's Land.
Significant, too, that evening, was the appearance of wagon-loads of
wire. One of the men groaned aloud as he saw it,
"Zut! That means some dodging of bullets to-night!"
Never, till Time has ceased to be, will any man calculate the number of
deaths which have been caused by that entrapment born in the brain of
some fiend--wire entanglement.
Wire! The strangler!
Wire! The man-trap!
Wire! That grips a soldier with malicious glee and holds him fast to an
immediate or a lingering death.
Wire! Which lies before every heroic effort, which throws its snaky
coils around the feet and around the nerves of the bravest.
Embodiment of hate, of diabolic trickery, of malign expectancy,
arch-creator of despair--Wire!
For every mile of fighting front, there are a thousand miles of wire,
with a weight of 110 tons. For every mile of front, 12,000 standards
and 12,000 pickets must be used. Withal, that thousand miles of wire
has cost a thousand lives to put it up and keep it in repair, that,
when the time may come, it may cost the lives of two thousand of the
enemy.
Just as the character of the fighting shows the nature of troops, so
does the wire that they use. The German wire is put up by machinery.
It is a harder, tougher wire than is used by the Allies, with curved
barbs, altogether a more efficient thing in itself. But, by reason of
that very solidity, it affords greater resistance to shell-fire, and
therefore, under heavy bombardment, funnels of passage can be driven
through it, by which troops may assault the trenches it is designed to
protect.
British wire is thinner, lighter, sharper. It is irregularly
constructed, with pitfalls. It is largely put up by knife-rests,
afterwards staked to the ground. It stretches over a wide space,
as a rule, with the result that while shell-fire beats it down and
explosions may uproot the stakes, the ground remains a hideous tangle
of treachery for the feet.
A form of wire used on the French front consists of two spiral
coils, four feet in diameter, wound loosely in opposite directions
and entangled. It is so loose and yields so little resistance that
shell-fire, however much it may blow the coils into the air, only
entangles it the more. The spiral coils retain their form. Moreover,
most important of all, it cannot be crossed by throwing planks upon it,
for the coils give way and the plank drops in between. Nothing but a
bridge of hurdles--or the bodies of dead men--will serve for passage
over it.
Well the soldiers knew what the strengthening of wire under an
increased bombardment implied.
The Germans were preparing to assault.
If further assurance were needed, Horace found it in the tramping of
feet as reënforcements came rolling up from the rear. What men were
these?
These were the unafraid!
These were the terror of the enemy!
The Moroccan Division! Chosen for the moments of danger, picked for
occasions when savage ferocity is required, the Africans wait for the
word of command.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of "The Sphere."_
FRENCH TANK CUTTING WIRE.
Note the lower lines and greater speed of the French design compared
with the British, more mobile but less powerful.]
"They march past," said Henri Barbusse, describing them at the front,
"with faces red brown, yellow or chestnut, their beards scanty and
fine, or thick and frizzled, their greatcoats yellowish-green, and
their muddy helmets displaying the crescent instead of our grenade.
From flat or angular faces, burnished like new coins, one would say
that their eyes shine like balls of ivory and onyx. Here and there in
the file, towering above the rest, comes the impassive black face of a
Senegalese sharpshooter. The red flag with a green hand in the center
goes behind the company.
"These demon-men, who seem carved of yellow wood, of bronze or of
ebony, are grave and taciturn; their faces are disquieting and secret,
like the threat of a snare suddenly found at your feet. These men are
drunk with eagerness for the bayonet and from their hands there is no
quarter. The German cry of surrender, 'Kamerad!' they answer with a
bayonet thrust, waist-high."
Their presence, also, told its story.
A counter-assault was planned.
Rarely do the Moroccans hold the trenches. It is not their kind of
fighting, nor would their bodies, used to the sun of North Africa,
endure the cold and wet of the muddy trench. They are the troops of the
advance. There are no prisoners, no wounded, after they have leaped
into a trench. Their trail is the trail of savage death.
All the next day the bombardment increased in violence, and Horace,
at his military switchboard, plugged calls to distant quarters for
reënforcements. Everywhere along the line, when the early dusk fell,
men were standing to arms or marching to the threatened sector.
One section of trench was wiped out with the concentration of high
explosive shells; wire, fire trench, communication trench and their
living defenders being blown into an unrecognizable, pockmarked mass.
Another trench was hastily dug behind and craftily wired. There the
assault would come.
The noise was deafening, maddening. One felt the slow approach of
insanity. Men sprang up here and there with frantic cries that the
appalling nerve-racking din might cease, even for a second. A few went
mad, and their hands were bound by their comrades until the crisis was
past.
A gray, evil earth; a gray, evil sky, with bomb-dropping aeroplanes
overhead like vultures waiting to swoop down upon their carrion prey.
Upon that scene night fell.
On that small section of the trenches not less than 50,000 projectiles
had fallen that evening. The shrill whistling of bullets, the baby's
wail of falling torpedoes, the spattering "whit" "whit" of ricochetting
fuses, the six-fold squall of the 77's, the whine of the small
howitzers, and the roar of large shell formed a shrieking arch in the
tortured and glutted air.
Nor was the French artillery silent. The batteries of "Soixante-Quinze"
replied incessantly. From time to time the bellow as of a prehistoric
bull told that the 8.2-inch gun was bodily tearing holes and men in
the enemy's trenches. The long thin Rimailho sent its 5.9-inch shell
with the swift flight of a vengeful meteor and the new great 10-inch
howitzer looped its 240-pound shell upon the dug-outs where the men
were sheltering. There is neither shelter nor men after that shell has
fallen.
The guards in the advance trenches were redoubled. Extra supplies of
bombs and hand-grenades were served out.
Under arms, silent, expectant, grim, stood the Moroccan brigade. Their
turn was coming, soon.
The night dragged on. No one went to sleep, for sleep was impossible
under the fury of noise.
The Germans, systematic in everything, over-systematic in everything,
never commence an assault before midnight. At half-past eleven o'clock,
Horace plugged in for the order to be given for the barrage fire to
begin.
The whirlwind of vertically-falling flame shut off the German lines in
a tawny curtain of annihilation.
Now and then rockets shot up, red, green and white, writing artillery
messages on the sky.
The calcium whiteness of star shells illuminated the gruesome zone of
No Man's Land, void, deserted and desolate.
On its horrid bleakness, nothing moved. Its pallid stillness
intensified the menace.
Officers and men glanced anxiously at the watches fastened on their
wrists.
Behind, the Moroccan brigade stood motionless. They even laughed in
eagerness. It was a jangling laugh. White men who heard it, shivered.
It was not yet midnight, but, suddenly, a vicious crackle of rifles far
to the left suggested that there, the moment was at hand.
Not yet the attack, it was a patrol of German wire-cutters, trying to
sneak up under cover to make an opening.
"Cr-a-a-a-a-ck!"
A machine-gun spoke. The wire-cutters pitched headlong. The young
officer, wounded, tried to crawl back to the lines.
"Crack!"
One rifle spoke. Even at night a sharpshooter does not miss. The figure
of the German officer moved no more.
The German bombardment, hitherto directed against the batteries far to
the rear, began to draw forward. It approached the rear of the trenches
where the dug-out for the telephone was situated.
"Afraid?" the officer asked Horace.
"Yes," the boy answered, "but game!"
A shell fell a dozen yards away. The burst smashed in the roof of the
dug-out. A flying piece of concrete grazed the officer's cheek. It bled
freely.
"Hit, sir?" the boy asked anxiously.
"Nothing! My cheek!"
He telephoned an order.
The Moroccans, unwillingly, take cover in a shelter-trench. They
dislike the underground, but it is no use to stand and be shot down
uselessly.
Bombs and grenades fall like a hail of fire.
The telephone bell rings continuously. Every one of the seventeen wires
running to the switchboard is working. Horace is on the alert, his
fingers as electric as the wires he is handling.
A growing nervousness runs through the lines, making the whole army
tingle like a single human organism vibrant with life.
All the world is in activity or in readiness.
Medical troops pass by, carrying out the wounded from the bombardment.
An enemy patrol dashes forward to destroy the wire, knowing that it
will never return alive. It is met by a storm of rifle-fire, but those
who survive, cut. A hole is made. The last German falls.
A French patrol rushes out to mend the gap, throwing coils here and
there and is, in its turn, wiped out by grenadiers.
The hateful eyes of searchlights peer over the zone of destruction. It
is deserted--as yet.
What is that--a shout?
Midnight!
There is one last furious burst from trench mortars, howitzers and guns.
The white lights, with all the accusing whiteness of the fingers of a
thousand dead, cease their groping and point to the farther side of No
Man's Land.
They come!
Black in the whiteness of that intense light, the wave rolls up.
The silent plain crawls with running, staggering, falling, crawling
men. The gray-white expanse speckles rapidly with its spotting of dead.
Into the barrage of fire the wave plunges. It is the end, surely,
nothing can get through.
The miracle of escape is demonstrated again. If the masses be large
enough, you cannot kill them all. With two-thirds dead, ten thousand
men break through. They plunge forward with lowered heads and bristle
of bayonets. Every third man is a bomb-thrower.
"Let them come nearer, boys!"
Every man holds his breath.
"Fire!"
A solid blast of flame outlines the fire trench. In the white glare
of searchlights and star-shells illumining the scene as though by a
continuous river of lightning, the wave is seen to waver. Some fall
flat, others sink down quietly, others, again, drop to hands and
knees and crawl on, yet others, clutched by the wounded in their
death-grip, free themselves with a bayonet thrust--their brothers,
their comrades!--and rush on.
The machine guns claim their prey by scores, by hundreds every minute.
It does not stop the wave.
Their eyes fixed and staring, as though they were figures in their own
nightmares, they leap into the trench, hurling a last shower of hand
grenades as they come.
It is the butt and the steel now.
They have reached the trench but they have not won it.
Around each machine gun a special fight gathers.
Another wave is coming. It passes through the barrage fire again and
dashes for the trench, already half taken.
Ah! What is that?
The 75's!
The strident roar of unnumbered batteries, with shells timed to the
second, breaks loose behind the French lines. The second wave meets
that wall of lead. It does not waver, it collapses.
A third wave--how they are driven on to death, those Germans!
The first wave is nearly gone now, the hand to hand struggle in the
trench is nearly over and the reserves are creeping in.
But the third wave?
Four mines explode simultaneously. Scores of bodies are thrown in the
air. Dozens are thrown down by the sheer impact of the air.
The moment has come.
"Africans! On!"
There is no shouting as they leap over the parapet, but the glitter of
their eyes suffices.
The third wave breaks and flees.
"Forward, my children, forward!"
The cry of the officers runs along the line.
The men do not need to be told. The Germans have failed. Now is the
counter-assault. Now they have a taste of their own medicine.
"Forward, my children, forward!"
But they, too, have machine guns; they, too, have rifles; they, too,
have shrapnel and their wire entanglements stretch before us. The
French fall as their men fall, but the French commanders will not waste
life like theirs.
"Fall back, my children, they have had enough!"
Slowly the bombardment dies down to a watchful fire against a
repetition of the assault. With countless false alarms the hours of
the night pass by.
The gray day breaks slowly.
The trenches are full of dead and No Man's Land is a sight of redoubled
horror.
Full daylight comes and shows the scene as desolate as ever, the long
line of trenches stretching unbroken from Switzerland to the sea.
All the heroism, the courage, the mad endeavor, the agony, the
slaughter, what has it brought to either side?
Nothing.
All that the official communiqués can say, whether sent out from Berlin
or from Paris, will be:
"The enemy's attack was repulsed."
Has nothing been gained?
Yes! The French trenches are still French. From this much of French
soil the foreigner's foot is banished. Aggression, greed, and hate
have made another violent effort to win a strip of territory for their
befouling and blackening touch, have tried--and the motionless figures
on No Man's Land are France's answer.
Yesterday's clouds have fled and the golden sunshine floods the ravaged
fields; it pours into the windows of field hospitals on the French and
German sides alike, it blesses with the hope of the future the soldier
who will recover and eases the pain of him who looks upon his last sun;
it shows the African sharpening his steel for the next charge, and the
general planning the next assault; it shines into distant countries
whence men are coming to take the places of those that have gone before.
Heroes all!
Yet the communiqué says only:
"The enemy made a violent assault and was repulsed."