deck. Many officers arrive under orders simply to “proceed overseas.”
At the “A. M. L. O. Office” they receive, through the Assistant
Military Landing Officer, exact orders where to go and what to do. The
men on the lower deck disembark by a second gangway and the boat is
cleared in a few minutes.
[Illustration]
LV
SLEEPING WOUNDED FROM THE SOMME
Every soldier on active service has more or less of deferred sleep, as
well as deferred pay, due to him. If he be wounded he usually recovers
a large instalment of both--the former during his first nights and days
in hospital, the latter when he leaves the convalescent hospital for
the ten days’ sick leave given to all wounded or sick men who have been
sent to England for treatment.
[Illustration]
LVI
DISTANT AMIENS
As you walk southward from Amiens, across meadows and cornfields, the
ground rises more gently than the immediate south bank of the Somme, on
which the Cathedral and the City stand. Thus the city sinks gradually
out of sight until nothing is left but the thin Cathedral spire,
looking like the mast of a sunken ship. Mr. Bone’s drawing was done
from a point, about a mile south of the city, at which the Cathedral
roof, the tower of Saint Martin’s Church, and one or two factory
chimneys are still unsubmerged.
[Illustration]
LVII
SCOTTISH SOLDIERS IN A FRENCH BARN
A typical billet for troops on the march or enjoying a “Divisional
rest” between two turns of duty in the trenches. An average-sized barn
at a French farm will house about thirty men. If the straw be deep
and the roof sound it makes better quarters than anything but a good
bedroom. Its chief drawback in the men’s eyes is that smoking has to be
forbidden because of the straw. In the winter evenings the men usually
cross the farmyard to the kitchen, where they smoke and make friends
with the farmer, and buy coffee, at a penny a bowl, from his wife.
[Illustration]
LVIII
WELSH SOLDIERS
Characteristic trench attitudes, two of the men with their heads well
down, the cheek cuddling the small of the butt, while the N.C.O. beyond
directs their fire, with his head a little free. There is just the same
soldierly combination of “much care and valour” in the typical Welshman
in France to-day as there was in Shakespeare’s Fluellen.
[Illustration]
LIX
A BRITISH RED CROSS DEPOT AT BOULOGNE
Dead low water in Boulogne Harbour, and a slack time for the motor
ambulances parked on the quay above. The work of the R.A.M.C.
inevitably comes in rushes, with lulls in between. The great thing
is, when a rush comes, to treat every case with a rapidity exactly
proportioned to its urgency, removing instantly to the base hospitals
or to England every serious case which will be the better, or none the
worse, for a slight delay in operation. To work this system perfectly
there must always be in readiness, at every point where wounded are
entrained or transhipped, a supply of ambulances equal to the maximum
call.
[Illustration]
LX
INDIAN CAVALRY
Our Indian Cavalry on the Somme were given a chance of showing their
quality at the Bois de Foureaux on July 17th, 1916. They used it. Apart
from other soldierly qualities, the grave dignity of their bearing
impresses all foreign visitors to the battlefield. They always salute a
passing officer as if they were Kings and he an Emperor.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE UPPER HAND
In these better days it is no harm to speak of the time when the Marne
had been won and yet our Army in France was within an inch of its life.
The thread of its fate had frayed very thin; only one strand remained;
at last, not even that--what had taken its place was a gallant sham, a
last forlorn bluff, scarcely a hope. And then came the ancient reward
of those who fight on without hope. Like a storm that had blown itself
out, the strain was suddenly gone. The strong had not known all their
strength, the weak had steadfastly hidden their weakness, and they had
worn out the strong.
That extreme peril has never recurred. But there were months in 1915
when men in our trenches still felt that the upper hand was not theirs.
What would happen was this. Once or twice in the day the Germans, after
their meals, would spray a piece of our trench with trench-mortar
bombs and rifle-grenades. As a rule they did not mean to attack, in
the fuller sense. The piece was not an overture; it was complete in
itself; a sort of isolated _pas d’intimidation_. Not many men on our
side would be killed. But, while the shower went on, everyone on duty
in our firing trench felt with crystal clearness that he was on the
defensive. At each fresh discharge he would plaster himself upon the
front wall of the trench and gaze upwards for the coming evil. If he
saw the approaching waddle of a trench-mortar bomb, wagging its tail
through the air, he would judge it like a catch in the long field, only
with an ardent desire to miss it; and to this end he would jump round
corners of trench and put solid angles of earth between him and the
large muted sound like “pfloonk” that was to ensue. If what he heard
was the thin hiss or spit of a rifle grenade, then he knew that it
could not be seen, and he kept his head down and wondered how near the
venomous little metallic smash of the burst would be. In any case he
was bespattered, throughout the bombardment, with little falling bits
of earth, warm metals and products of combustion; the tinkling of this
hail on his helmet deepened his rueful sense of resemblance to a hen
crouching under the lee of a hedge in bad weather. And, all this time,
our own mortars and guns would be silent or--almost worse than silence
itself--would reply with the mildness of Sterne’s patient ass. “Please
do not shell our front trench. But, if you want to, you may,” so they
seemed to be saying.
From these mortifications the men in the firing trench, and the gunners
who had endured the sharper torment of not being able to help them,
were saved by the women, whom Mr. Bone shows us working at home,
arming their knights for battle in a sense more valid than any known
to Froissart or Malory. There came a time, most moving and memorable
to all who were then in our trenches, when any German attempt to gall
them began to evoke new, heart-warming sounds. All the upper air, over
the place where the pelted sentries were crouching, seemed to have come
to life on our side. At last our own trench mortars were answering,
not in a few grudged monosyllables, but volubly, out of the fulness of
the dump. Higher up also, there rose arch over arch, as it were, of
audible, reassuring protection--first the low-pitched bridges of sound
traced by the whizz of our field guns, and then the vast rainbow curve
of our heavier shells making wing, high over head, with a more august,
leisurely waft that sounded divinely. It was a changed and cheered
world to be living in. We had the upper hand now, and every woman
turning a shell or driving a crane in England had helped us to have it.
We have it now still more securely. Since that time we have learnt the
technique of attack--how to keep what we take and how to take what we
want at no more than it need cost in lives. We have won, in hard fight,
the best of all posts of observation--the sky, so that during the great
engagements last year on the Somme there was not a German aeroplane
to be seen in the air while ours were ranging everywhere over the
battlefield, each with its eyes on the enemy’s lines and its voice at
the ear of our guns. Our men and the gunners have now crossed bayonets
so often that all the old awe in which Europe held the men of Sedan and
Sadowa is gone; boys from Wiltshire and Worcestershire farms, recruits
of a few months before, have chased Prussian guardsmen uphill out of
their trenches and then held these ruined defences against all that
those picked products of intensive military culture could do to regain
them.
All this turning of tables has been brought about by one cause, in the
sense that if that cause had been absent, the care and skill of the
finest leaders, the daring of all our airmen, the staunchness of all
our infantry would have been strength to no purpose. Munition workers
have woven the curtain of smoke that our gunners now draw between our
advancing troops and the eyes of their enemy. It is munitions that,
thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire
on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men
were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to
dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back
the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass
as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without
reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front
are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. They are
drawings of victory in the making, and of the saving of hundreds of
thousands of British lives.
G.H.Q., FRANCE,
_March, 1917_
LXI
MOUNTING A GREAT GUN
One of the largest guns viewed from the breech. However many large guns
may have been turned out by the same men before, a glow of pride is
always felt in a gun shop when one more masterpiece like this is ready
at last to go out to its work in the field.
[Illustration]
LXII
ERECTING AEROPLANES
A great contrast to the scenes in the gun shop. Here everything is
light and delicate, the bright, varnished wood curved to delicate
shapes like violins, the women flitting with their needlecraft around
the wide, dazzling planes and the brilliant pigmy engines shining like
jewels--all seem gay and exhilarating after the sombre company of the
guns. There is even a lightsome airiness about the thought that these
delicate creations _fly_ away from their makers’ hands when completed
and do not burden any railway with their transit.
[Illustration]
LXIII
AN AEROPLANE ON THE STOCKS
Another view of the same shop. Close to, the propeller seems a great
thing, wonderfully subtle in its graceful curves.
[Illustration]
LXIV
THE GIANT SLOTTERS
These machines are among the largest of their kind. A row of them,
jutting colossally forward like the heads of Egyptian sculptured lions,
make an impressive feature in the spacious avenues of a great machine
shop. The nearer machine is at work on part of a big gun mounting.
[Illustration]
LXV
NIGHT WORK ON THE BREECH OF A GREAT GUN
The breech is open: underneath it, hidden from sight, the mechanics
are at work. Such a scene has a special appeal to those who loved the
stories of Jules Verne in their youth. These largest of all guns seem
as if they could fulfil the hopes of Verne’s sanguine President of
the Gun Club and justify his fervid belief in ballistics as your only
science.
[Illustration]
LXVI
THE HOWITZER SHOP
Howitzers of various calibres are in the background; in the foreground,
guns of lighter types. Guns are like ships; each piece seems endowed
with a personality which endears it to its creators. The soldiers to
whose keeping they are sent feel a similar tenderness towards their own
special charge. They express it by giving them fond names like “Saucy
Sue,” “Sweet Seventeen,” “Jill Johnson,” “Our Lizzie,” and “’Ria.”
[Illustration]
LXVII
THE NIGHT SHIFT WORKING ON A BIG GUN
“A scene,” the artist writes, “so romantic in its mingling of grimness
and mystery that one thinks with compunction of the long line of
romantic artists whose lot it was not to have seen it!” The work on
hand seems carried on by noiseless ghosts, so completely is the noise
of their labours drowned by the incessant hum of machines.
[Illustration]
LXVIII
SOME GREAT GUNS
A sketch in the heavy gun bay. The size of these unmounted guns may be
judged by the figures at work near them.
[Illustration]
LXIX
MOVING HEAVY GUN TUBES
This is a corner in the gun shop where heavy gun forgings of all sorts
lie about, awaiting their turn on the machines. The overhead crane is
lifting one of the guns. Many of these cranes are being driven by women.
[Illustration]
LXX
A CORING MACHINE AT WORK ON A BIG GUN TUBE
The big gun tube is rotating slowly while the tool inside scoops out
long shavings of the metal like cheese parings. The mounting heaps of
the metal shavings are constantly cleared away. The iridescent colours
of these shavings (showing the different temperings of the steel)
present surprisingly beautiful effects to the eye, tired with the
bewildering rotations of the immense gun tubes on their machines.
[Illustration]
LXXI
RUINS NEAR ARRAS
Landscape near Arras is like the biblical vine hanging over a
wall--“All the archers have shot at her.” Injured, but not yet
destroyed, the woods seem like creatures scared, as if the trees
themselves were possessed with the disquiet of dryads crouching
somewhere in hiding. Many different parts of the front have their
own almost personal expression, but it is seldom one of fear. At and
around Arras this expression of alarm is so curiously strong that, if
he transgressed prose, the visitor might fancy the taut bulrushes were
nature’s hair standing on end, and a slight stir in the poplars her
shudder. By some means, which a layman cannot mark down, Mr. Bone has
suffused his drawing with his own sense of the tragic queerness of this
vacuous and unnerved landscape.
[Illustration]
LXXII
ON THE SOMME: IN THE OLD NO MAN’S LAND
High ground near “King George’s Hill,” whence the King viewed the
main battlefield of 1916; the drawing shows this in the distance. The
foreground was won last July by the Manchesters. They found in No
Man’s Land the bodies of many Frenchmen killed in earlier fighting,
and buried them beside their own dead. Not all the bodies could
be identified: Some of the crosses shown in the drawing bear such
inscriptions as “In honoured Memory of Two Unknown French Soldiers,
buried here.”
[Illustration]
LXXIII (a and b)
A ROAD NEAR THE FRONT
The canvas screen on the left remains from a time when this stretch of
road was under enemy observation. The battle of the Somme has left it
far behind the front. From a point just beyond the trees indicated upon
the skyline on the right every detail of a part of the fighting on July
1st, 1916, could be seen.
[Illustration]
A TRAIN OF LORRIES
Whether on the road between a rail-head and the front, or during a halt
by the way, or at rest in their own park, the lorries of a Division
keep their proper distance or interval from each other, like men on
parade. If one falls lame it is taken in tow; if disabled past towing,
it falls out and waits for a first-aid mobile workshop to come and
repair it. The scene here is one of the two chief roads to the Somme
front. In July and August, 1916, the procession of lorries along it was
often unbroken for several miles. Field railways have much lightened
its traffic since then.
[Illustration]
LXXIV
ON THE SOMME. R.F.C. MEN BUILDING THEIR WINTER HUT
To most English soldiers it is one of the compensations, and not of the
hardships, of active service that they so often have to do work which
is not their own trade nor a regular part of all soldiering. They find
a flavour of the sport of peace-time camping-out in the work of making
or finding their own shelter from the weather. Sometimes it is done,
as here, with excellent materials, sometimes with hardly any at all,
and the man who has built himself a rain-proof hut, for one, out of a
few old biscuit tins, some sticks and a waste piece of corrugated iron
enjoys a special thrill of triumphant ingenuity.
[Illustration]
LXXV
MARICOURT: THE RUINS OF THE VILLAGE
Near Maricourt the British line ended, and the French began, during
the battle of the Somme. Blue and khaki were equally blended in the
endless lines of traffic passing both ways through Maricourt and
raising a barrage of dust all along the road to Bray-sur-Somme. At
Maricourt crossroads there was a doubled post of military police, one
man British and one French, ready with rebuke or instruction in either
tongue. The place is now several miles behind the British front, and
its old animation is gone. It and the woods near it are less completely
destroyed than most of the neighbouring villages. Many walls are
standing; even a few roofs remain.
[Illustration]
LXXVI
ON THE SOMME, NEAR MAMETZ
The German front line, until July 1st, 1916, run a few yards on the
spectator’s side of the two dismounted figures in the foreground. In
the background are the bare poles of Mametz Wood. The nearest figure
can be known for an Australian, by his hat.
[Illustration]
LXXVII
A MARKET PLACE. TRANSPORT RESTING
After work the divisional motor transport lorries return methodically
to their own parks. During long journeys they rest now and then, tucked
into the right of the road or standing in a market place, while the
men eat their haversack rations. Mixed with the lorries here are their
seniors, the covered vans of French country carriers and, still older,
the long, low, French farm wagons now drawn by horses, but built, as
is shown by the very low pole, for draught oxen. In the market place
there wait also the cars of British staff officers visiting the town.
The handsome building in the background has its red-brick façade set
off with alternating square bosses of white stone, on each side of the
windows, after the custom of 17th and early 18th century builders.
[Illustration]
LXXVIII (a and b)
THE “BLIGHTY BOAT” AND A HOSPITAL SHIP
Leaving a French base port. The artist has contrived to suggest in
his drawing of the homeward hastening leave-boat the happy eagerness
with which the eyes and minds of all on board are turned westward.
The slower hospital ship is just leaving the harbour. There is no
possibility of any honest failure to distinguish, by day or night,
the black painted lightless transport from the hospital ship with its
gleaming white and light-green paint and its festal-looking tiers and
crosses of scores of brilliant green and red lamps.
[Illustration]
SCOTTISH TROOPS ON A TROOPSHIP
There are some Scottish soldiers on all troopships. On this one there
were no others. The Highlanders on the drawing have the good fortune to
be on deck and also not to be crowded. On most troopships the men, if
on deck, look, at a little distance, like a solid brown mass.
[Illustration]
LXXIX
TROOPS RETURNING FROM THE ANCRE
A unit coming back from the trenches to rest is unlike anything ever
seen at home. Everyone is dead tired; everyone, though washed and
shaved, has caked mud on his uniform; most of the men are stooping to
get well under the weight of their packs and so ease the cut of the
straps on their shoulders; cooks and a few footsore men trail behind
the transport wagons and field kitchens, taking a tow with one hand.
Odds and ends of light baggage are carried in little, almost toy-like
hand-carts, the men pulling them by many ropes and pushing them from
behind. Some men, perhaps, are wearing German helmets. Everyone’s face
has a look of contented collapse, the restful reaction of senses and
nerves relaxed after many days of strained attention and short sleep.
The weary and happy procession serpentines slowly across the chalk
downs, carried along by the rhythm of the swing it has learnt from
months of route marching in England.
[Illustration]
LXXX
A HOSPITAL SHIP AT A BASE
The ship’s large wooden Red Cross, to be illuminated at night with
electric lights, is seen near the centre of the drawing.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
THE BRITISH NAVY AND THE WESTERN FRONT
Our Western front is a line that does not really end at the sea. If
it did, then its left flank might be turned. But its real left flank
is not there. It is somewhere far out on a line that runs north-west
of Nieuport, through and beyond the North Sea. The British soldier in
Belgium or France may not see much of the Navy itself. But every day
brings him some proof that the Navy is holding its part of the line.
His letters never go wrong, and he knows that, but for the Fleet, they
would have to make their way to him like swimmers across a bay full of
sharks. It is faith in the Navy that makes the men going on leave laugh
when obeying the order to put on lifebelts on leaving harbour. In the
soldier’s mind that long left flank of our line is not forgotten but
rather written off, once for all, as unbreakable. He puts much the same
sort of trust in the power of the Fleet as he puts in the affection
of friends at home. To him it is one of the things that need never be
feared for; it cannot fail.
This is not to say that soldiers underrate the hardness of the Navy’s
task. A few sailors visit the front from time to time and hold curious
arguments with the soldiers, each side being deeply convinced that the
other has the harder time of it. The soldier’s imagination is struck by
the large proportion of deaths among the casualties of naval war and
by visions of night duty on vessels at sea in bad winter weather. What
strikes the sailor, in presence of the imperfections of dug-outs, is
the soldier’s hardship of not being able to “go below” into some small
cubic space of warmth and dryness when action is over or a watch is
through. When a naval officer, who visited the Somme front last summer,
and saw a fight near Martinpuich, rejoined the ship that he commanded,
he paraded his whole ship’s company and spent two hours in telling
them what a rough time the soldiers had, and what fine work they
were doing. The generosity of the praise made his soldier guide feel
almost ashamed, remembering the almost instant fate of the “Cressy,”
“Aboukir,” and “Hogue,” and the obedience of the “Theseus” to the
heart-breaking order to abandon her sinking consort.
Few officers or men from the western front can visit the Fleet; but
the winds of chance, which blow casualties and convalescents all about
Great Britain, drop a few of them down in spots where the Fleet, as
Mr. Bone draws it, is under their eyes. Drawings like those of “A
Fleet Seascape” (LXXXIX) and “A Line of Destroyers” (LXXXVI) awake
recollections of guard duty in a small Scotch fishing village; of
the majestic seaward procession through the midsummer night, before
the battle of Jutland; of the return from the fight, the destroyers
streaming tranquilly back to their moorings under the hill, with the
great searchlight wheeling to and fro along the sea outside them, like
a sentry moving alertly on his post; a few wounded ships steaming in
more sedately, or taking a tow, one with a couple of funnels knocked
out of the straight, another with a field-dressing of bedding stuffed
into a hole in her side, and the whole wound, apparently, smeared with
red paint, as the surgeons smear flesh wounds with yellow; and then of
the coming ashore, the men triumphant and happy, the officers learning
with astonishment and indignation that people at home had heard more of
losses than of the victory.
Mr. Bone’s drawings give an insight into the world of the Navy to which
these random glimpses can add nothing. “H.M.S. ‘Lion’ in dry dock”
(LXXXIII) is wonderful, technically--if a layman may judge--and in
spirit. A whole aspect of modern naval life is lit up by “A boiler-room
on a battleship” (XCIII). For, to the astonished landsman visiting a
man-of-war, the sailors of to-day seem to work and eat and sleep in a
variety of engineering laboratories, surrounded by countless wheels,
handles, buttons and bells for the evocation or dismissal of the genies
of steam, petrol and electricity. Nothing could be more unlike the
lower decks of seventeenth and eighteenth century battleships as we
imagine them. The only things which have not changed, from the days of
Drake to those of Hawke, and from Nelson’s time to Beatty’s, are the
hereditary instinct for the sea and the fine fighting temperament of
officers and men.
G. H. Q., FRANCE,
_April, 1917_
LXXXI
“OILING”: A BATTLESHIP TAKING IN OIL FUEL AT SEA
Viewed from the bridge. A large oil “tanker” is alongside. Unseen, but
very fast, the oil fuel is running into the battleship. How great a
boon this new fuel is can be understood, at any rate partly, by those
who have endured the coaling of a great ship in the old way. The scene
shown in the drawing was animated by the changeful gleam of the gay
signal flags flapping in the foreground and by the flashing of the
wings of innumerable hungry gulls.
[Illustration]
LXXXII
ON A BATTLE-CRUISER (H.M.S. “LION”)
The ship’s funnel behind and the sailor’s figure on the left help to
give the scale of the great gun.
[Illustration]
LXXXIII
H.M.S. “LION” IN DRY DOCK