shell-storms that visit them.”
]
It must be borne in mind that the task of the artillery is far easier in
hilly or mountainous country, such as is found along the Aisne and in
the Vosges and Alsace, where the movements of the enemy can be observed
with comparative facility and where both observers and gunners can
usually find a certain degree of shelter, than in Artois and Flanders,
where the country is as flat as the top of a table, with nothing even
remotely resembling a hill on which the observers can be stationed or
behind which can be concealed the guns. In the flat country the guns,
which in all cases are carefully masked with branches from detection by
hostile aircraft, take position at distances varying from two thousand
to five thousand yards from the enemy’s trenches. Immediately in the
rear of each gun is a subterranean shelter, in which the gunners can
take refuge in case a German battery locates them and attempts to shell
them out. An artillery subaltern, known in the British service as the
“forward observing officer,” goes up to the infantry trenches and
chooses a position, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in a shattered
church-tower, sometimes in a sort of dug-out, from which he can obtain
an unobstructed view of his battery’s zone of fire. He is to his battery
very much what a coach is to a football team, giving his men directions
by telephone instead of through a megaphone, but, unlike the coach, he
is stationed not on the side-line but on the firing-line. Laid on the
surface of the ground, connecting him with the battery, is the
field-telephone. As wires are easily cut by bursting shells, they are
now being laid in a sort of ladder formation so that a dozen wires may
be cut without interrupting communication. When the noise is so
deafening that the voice of the observing officer cannot be heard on the
field-telephone communication is carried on in the Morse code by means
of a giant buzzer. Amid all the uproar of battle the observing officer
has to keep careful track, through his glasses, of every shell his
battery fires, and to inform his battery commander by telephone of the
effect of his fire. He can make no mistakes, for on those portions of
the battle-line where the trenches are frequently less than a hundred
yards apart the slightest miscalculation in giving the range might land
the shells among his own men. The critical moment for the observing
officer is, however, when the enemy makes a sudden rush and swarms of
helmeted, gray-clad figures, climbing out of their trenches, come
rolling forward in a steel-tipped wave, tripping in the barbed wire and
falling in ones and twos and dozens. Instantly the French trenches
crackle and roar into the full blast of magazine fire. The rattle of the
machine-guns sounds like a boy drawing a stick along the palings of a
picket fence. The air quivers to the incessant crash of bursting
shrapnel. “Infantry attack!” calls the observation officer into the
telephone receiver which is clamped to his head. “Commence firing!” and
his battery, two or three miles in the rear, begins pouring shrapnel on
the advancing Germans. But still the gray figures come on, hoarsely
cheering. “Drop twenty-five!” he orders. “Careful with your
fuse-setting ... very close to our trenches.” The French shrapnel sprays
the ground immediately in front of the French trenches as a street
cleaner sprays the pavement with a hose. The gray line checks, falters,
sways uncertainly before the blast of steel. Men begin to fall by dozens
and scores, others turn and run for their lives. With a shrill cheer the
French infantry spring from their trenches in a counter-attack. “Raise
twenty-five! ... raise fifty!” telephones the observing officer as the
blue figures of his countrymen sweep forward in the charge. And so it
goes, the guns backing up the French attacks and breaking the German
ones, shelling a house or a haystack for snipers, putting a machine-gun
out of business, dropping death into the enemy’s trenches or sending its
steel calling-cards across to a German battery whose position has been
discovered and reported by wireless by a scouting French aeroplane. And
all the time the youngster out in front, flattened to the ground, with
glasses at his eyes and a telephone at his lips, acts the part of
prompter and tells the guns when to speak their parts.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
An observing officer directing the fire of a French battery three
miles behind him.
“Flattened to the ground, with glasses at his eyes and a telephone at
his lips, he acts the part of prompter and tells the guns when to
speak their parts.”
]
In reading accounts of artillery fire it should be remembered that there
are two types of shell in common use to-day—shrapnel and high
explosive—and that they are used for entirely different purposes and
produce entirely different results. Shrapnel, which is intended only for
use against infantry in the open, or when lightly intrenched, is a shell
with a very thin steel body and a small bursting charge, generally of
low-power explosive, in the base. By means of a time-fuse the projectile
is made to burst at any given moment after leaving the gun, the
explosion of the weak charge breaking the thin steel case and liberating
the bullets, which fly forward with the velocity of the shrapnel,
scattering much as do the pellets from a shot-gun. At a range of 3500
yards the bullets of a British 18-pound shrapnel, 375 in number, cover a
space of 250 yards long and 30 yards wide—an area of more than one and a
half acres. Though terribly effective against infantry attacks or
unprotected batteries, shrapnel are wholly useless against fortified
positions, strongly built houses, or deep and well-planned
intrenchments. The difference between shrapnel and high explosive is the
difference between a shot-gun and an elephant rifle. The high-explosive
shell, which is considerably stronger than the shrapnel, contains no
bullets but a charge of high explosive—in the French service melinite,
in the British usually lyddite (which is picric acid melted with a
little vaseline), and in the German army trinitrotoluene. The effect of
the high explosive is far more concentrated than that of shrapnel,
covering only one-fifteenth of the area affected by the latter. Though
shrapnel has practically no effect on barbed-wire entanglements or on
concrete, and very little on earthworks, high-explosive shells of the
same caliber destroy everything in the vicinity, concrete, wire
entanglements, steel shields, guns, and even the trenches themselves
disappearing like a dynamited stump before the terrific blast. The men
holding the trenches are driven into their dug-outs, and may be reached
even there by high-explosive shells fired from high-angle howitzers.
The commanding importance of the high-explosive shell in this war is due
to the peculiar nature of the conflict. Instead of fighting in the open
field, the struggle has developed into what is, to all intents and
purposes, a fortress warfare on the most gigantic scale. In this warfare
all strategic manœuvres are absent, because manœuvres are impossible on
ground where every square yard is marked and swept by artillery fire.
The opposing armies are not simply intrenched. They have protected
themselves with masses of concrete and steel armor, so that the
so-called trenches are in reality concrete forts, shielded and casemated
with armor-plate, flanked with rapid-firers and mortars, linked to one
another by marvellously concealed communicating trenches which are
protected in turn by the fire of heavy batteries, guarded by the most
ingenious entanglements, pitfalls, and other obstructions that the mind
of man has been able to devise, and defended by machine-guns, in the
enormous proportion of one to every fifty men, mounted behind steel
plates and capable of firing six hundred shots a minute. In these
subterranean works dwell the infantry, abundantly provided with
hand-grenades and appliances for throwing bombs and flaming oil, their
rifles trained, day and night, on the space over which an enemy must
advance. That is the sort of wall which one side or the other will have
to break through in order to win in this war. The only way to take such
a position is by frontal attack, and the only way to make a frontal
attack possible is by paving the way with such a torrent of high
explosive that both entanglements and earthworks are literally torn to
pieces and the infantry defending them demoralized or annihilated. No
one before the war could have imagined the vast quantity of shells
required for such an operation. In order to prepare the way for an
infantry attack on a German position near Arras, the French fired two
hundred thousand rounds of high explosive in a single day—and the scouts
came back to report that not a barbed-wire entanglement, a trench, or a
living human being remained. During the same battle the British, owing
to a shortage of high-explosive ammunition, were able to precede their
attack by only forty minutes of shell-fire. This was wholly insufficient
to clear away the entanglements and other obstructions, and, as a
result, the men were literally mowed down by the German machine-guns.
Even when the storming-parties succeed in reaching the first line of the
enemy’s trenches and bayonet or drive out the defenders, the opposing
artillery, with a literal wall of fire, effectively prevents any
reinforcements from advancing to their support. Shattered and exhausted
though they are, the attackers must instantly set to work to fortify and
consolidate the captured trenches, being subjected, meanwhile, to a much
more accurate bombardment, as the enemy knows, of course, the exact
range of his former positions and is able to drop his shells into them
with unerring accuracy. It is obvious that such offensive movements
cannot be multiplied or prolonged indefinitely, both on account of the
severe mental and physical strain on the men and the appalling losses
which they involve. Neither can such offensives be improvised. A
commanding officer cannot smash home a frontal attack on an enemy’s
position at any moment that he deems auspicious any more than a surgeon
can perform a major operation without first preparing his patient
physically. Before launching an attack the ground must be minutely
studied; the position to be attacked must be reconnoitred and
photographed by aviators; advanced trenches must be dug; reserve troops
must be moved forward and batteries brought into position without
arousing the suspicions of the enemy; and, most important of all,
enormous quantities of projectiles and other material must be gathered
in one place designated by the officer in charge of the operations. The
greatest problem presented by an offensive movement is that of
delivering to the artillery the vast supplies of shells necessary to
pave the way for a successful attack. To give some idea of what this
means, I might mention that the Germans, during the crossing of the San,
_fired seven hundred thousand shells in four hours_.
There are no words between the covers of the dictionary which can convey
any adequate idea of what one of these great artillery actions is like.
One has to see—and hear—it. Buildings of brick and stone collapse as
though they were built of cards. Whole towns are razed to the ground as
a city of tents would be levelled by a cyclone. Trees are snapped off
like carrots. Gaping holes as large as cottage cellars suddenly appear
in the fields and in the stone-paved roads. Geysers of smoke and earth
shoot high into the air. The fields are strewn with the shocking remains
of what had once been men: bodies without heads or arms or legs; legs
and arms and heads without bodies. Dead horses, broken wagons, bent and
shattered equipment are everywhere. The noise is beyond all
description—yes, beyond all conception. It is like a close-by clap of
thunder which, instead of lasting for a fraction of a second, lasts for
hours. There is no break, no pause in the hell of sound, not even a
momentary diminution. The ground heaves and shudders beneath your feet.
You find it difficult to breathe. Your head throbs until you think that
it is about to burst. Your eyeballs ache and burn. Giant fingers seem to
be steadily pressing your ear-drums inward. The very atmosphere
palpitates to the tremendous detonations. The howl of the shell-storm
passing overhead gives you the feeling that the skies are falling.
Compared with it, the roar of the cannon at Gettysburg must have sounded
like the popping of fire-crackers.
Inconceivably awe-inspiring and terrifying as is a modern artillery
action, one eventually becomes accustomed to it, but I have yet to meet
the person who would say with perfect truthfulness that he was
indifferent to the fire of the great German siege-cannon. I have three
times been under the fire of the German siege-guns—during the
bombardments of Antwerp, of Soissons, and of Dunkirk—and I hope with all
my heart that I shall never have the experience again. Let me put it to
you, my friends. How would _you_ feel if you were sleeping quite
peacefully in—let us say—the Waldorf-Astoria, and along about six
o’clock in the morning something dropped from the clouds, and in the
pavement of Fifth Avenue blew a hole large enough to bury a horse in?
And what would be your sensations if, still bewildered by the suddenness
of your awakening, you ran to the window to see what had happened, and
something that sounded like an express-train came hurtling through the
air from somewhere over in New Jersey, and with the crash of an
exploding powder-mill transformed Altman’s store into a heap of
pulverized stone and concrete? Well, that is precisely what happened to
me one beautiful spring morning in Dunkirk.
To be quite frank, I didn’t like Dunkirk from the first. Its empty
streets, the shuttered windows of its shops, and the inky blackness into
which the city was plunged at night from fear of aeroplanes, combined to
give me a feeling of uneasiness and depression. The place was about as
cheerful as a country cemetery on a rainy evening. From the time I set
foot in it I had the feeling that something was going to happen. I found
that a room had been reserved for me on the upper floor of the local
hostelry, known as the Hôtel des Arcades—presumably because there are
none. I did not particularly relish the idea of sleeping on the upper
floor, with nothing save the roof to ward off a bomb from a marauding
aeroplane, for, ever since I was under the fire of Zeppelins in Antwerp,
I have made it a point to put as many floors as possible between me and
the sky.
It must have been about six o’clock in the morning when I was awakened
by a splitting crash which made my bedroom windows rattle. A moment
later came another and then another, each louder and therefore nearer
than the one preceding. All down the corridor doors began to open, and I
heard voices excitedly inquiring what was happening. I didn’t have to
inquire. I knew from previous experience. A German _Taube_ was raining
death upon the city. Throwing open my shutters, I could see the machine
quite plainly, its armor-plated body gleaming in the morning sun like
polished silver as it swept in ever-widening circles across the sky.
Somewhere to the east a pompom began its infernal triphammer-like
clatter. An armored car, evidently British from the “R. N.” painted on
its turret, tore into the square in front of the hotel, the lean barrel
of its quick-firing gun sweeping the sky, and began to send shell after
shell at the aerial intruder. From down near the water-front came the
raucous wail of a steam-siren warning the people to get under cover. A
church-bell began to clang hastily, insistently, imperatively. It seemed
to say: “To your cellars! To your cellars! Hurry!... _Hurry!_... HURRY!”
From the belfry of the church of St. Eloi a flag with blue and white
stripes was run up as a warning to the townspeople that death was
abroad. Suddenly, above the tumult of the bells and horns and hurrying
footsteps, came a new and inconceivably terrifying sound: a low,
deep-toned roar rapidly rising into a thunderous crescendo like an
express-train approaching from far down the subway. As it passed above
our heads it sounded as though a giant in the sky were tearing mighty
strips of linen. Then an explosion which was brother to an earthquake.
The housetops seemed to rock and sway. The hotel shook to its
foundations. The pictures on the wall threatened to come down. The glass
in the windows rattled until I thought that it would break. From beyond
the housetops in the direction of the receiving hospital and the
railway-station a mushroom-shaped cloud of green-brown smoke shot
suddenly high into the air. Out in the corridor a woman screamed
hysterically: “My God! My God! They’ve begun again with the big cannon!”
I heard the clatter of footsteps on the stairs as the guests rushed for
the cellar. I began to dress. No fireman responding to a third alarm
ever dressed quicker. Just as I was struggling with my boots there came
another whistling roar and another terrific detonation. High in the air
above the quivering city still circled the German aeroplane, informing
by wireless the German gunners, more than a score of miles away across
the Belgian border, where their shells were hitting. Think of it! _Think
of bombarding a city at a range of twenty-three miles and every shot a
hit!_ That is the marvel of this modern warfare. Imagine the Grand
Central Station in New York, the Presbyterian Hospital, the Metropolitan
Life Building, and the City Hall being blown to smithereens by shells
fired from Rahway, N. J. And it was not a 42-centimetre siege-gun
either, but a 15-inch naval gun which the Germans had brought from Kiel
and mounted behind their lines in Flanders. Though French and British
aviators made repeated flights over the German lines for the purpose of
locating the gun and putting it out of business, their efforts met with
no success, as the ingenious Teutons, it seems, had dug a sort of tunnel
into which the gun was run back after each shot and there it stayed, in
perfect security, until it was fired again. Is it any wonder that the
Germans are so desperately anxious to reach Calais, with the
fort-crowned cliffs of Dover rising across the channel less than twenty
miles away?
Descending to the cellars of the hotel, I found that there was
standing-room only. Guests, porters, cooks, waiters, chambermaids,
English Red Cross nurses, and a French colonel wearing the Legion of
Honor were shivering in the dampness amid the cobwebs and the
wine-bottles. Every time a shell exploded the wine-bottles in their bins
shook and quivered as though they, too, were alive and frightened. I lay
no claim to bravery, but in other bombarded cities I have seen what
happens to the people in the cellar when a shell strikes that particular
building, and I had no desire to end my career like a rat in a trap.
Should you ever, by any chance, find yourself in a city which is being
bombarded, take my advice, I beg of you, and go out into the middle of
the nearest open square and stay there until the bombardment is over. I
believe that far more people are killed during bombardment by falling
masonry and timbers than by the shells themselves. As I went upstairs I
heard a Frenchwoman angrily demanding of the chambermaid why she had not
brought her hot water. “But, madame,” pleaded the terrified girl, “the
city is being bombarded.” “Is that any reason why I should not wash?”
cried the irate lady. “Bring my hot water instantly.”
At eight o’clock the general commanding the garrison hurried in. He had
invited me to lunch with him. “I am desolated that I cannot have the
pleasure of your company at _déjeuner_, Monsieur Powell,” said he, “but
it is not wise for you to remain in the city. I am responsible to the
Government for your safety, and it would make things easier for me if
you would go. I have taken the liberty of sending for your car.” You can
call it cowardice or timidity or anything you please, but I am not at
all ashamed to admit that I was never so glad to have an invitation
cancelled. I have had a somewhat extensive acquaintance with
bombardments, and I have always found that those who speak lightly of
them are those who have never seen one.
In order to get out of range of the German shells my driver, acting
under the orders of the commandant, turned the bonnet of the car toward
Bergues, five miles to the southward. But we found that Bergues had not
been overlooked by the German gunners, having, indeed, suffered more
severely than Dunkirk. When we arrived the bombardment was just over and
the dust was still rising from the shattered houses. Twelve
38-centimetre shells had landed in the very heart of the little town,
sending a score or more of its inhabitants, men, women, and children, to
the hospital and a like number to the cemetery.
[Illustration:
_From a photograph by Meurisse._
The mass before the battle.
There are said to be upward of twenty thousand priests fighting in the
armies of France.
]
A few hours before Bergues had been as quaint and peaceful and contented
a town of five thousand people as you could have found in France.
Because of its quaint and simple charm touring motorists used to go out
of their way to see it. It is fortified in theory but not in fact, for
its moss-grown ramparts, which date from the Crusades, have about as
much military significance as the Battery in New York. But the
guide-books describe it as a fortified town, and that was all the excuse
the Germans needed to turn loose upon it sudden death. To-day that
little town is an empty, broken shell, its streets piled high with the
brick and plaster of its ruined homes. One has to see the ruin produced
by a 38-centimetre shell to believe it. If one hits a building that
building simply ceases to exist. It crumbles, disintegrates, disappears.
I do not mean to say that its roof is ripped off or that one of its
walls is blown away. I mean to say that the whole building crashes to
the ground as though flattened by the hand of God. The Germans sent only
twelve of their shells into Bergues, but the central part of the town
looked like Market Street in San Francisco after the earthquake. One of
the shells struck a hospital and exploded in a ward filled with wounded
soldiers. They are not wounded any longer. Another shell completely
demolished a three-story brick house. In the cellar of that house a man,
his wife, and their three children had taken refuge. There was no need
to dig graves for them in the local cemetery. Throughout the bombardment
a _Taube_ hung over the doomed town to observe the effect of the shots,
and to direct by wireless the distant gunners. I wonder what the German
observer, peering down through his glasses upon the wrecked hospital and
the shell-torn houses and the mangled bodies of the women and children,
thought about it all. It would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it?
[Illustration:
_From a photograph copyright by M. Rol._
What a 38-centimetre shell, fired from a gun twenty-three miles away,
did in Dunkirk.
“When one of these shells hits a building, that building simply ceases
to exist.”
]
II
ON THE BRITISH BATTLE-LINE