THE ARMY'S PAIR OF EYES
The aeroplane has become so much a necessity to the army that it is
difficult to imagine how wars were ever fought without them. I
remember reading a statement by a military observer with the Japanese
army that, if the Russians had had a single aeroplane, they could have
annihilated the Japs more than once. Of the army's pair of eyes the
airman is the sharper, but the old-time scout is not by any means
superseded, though his methods have changed. Just as there is much
behind the enemy lines that only the aeroplanes can see, there are some
things that cannot be discovered except from the level of the ground
along which the scout crawls. The airman makes the enemy's plans an
open book, for he observes him as soon as he moves, but the airman
travels on a different plane from the infantry soldier, and it is the
infantry man who fights out the final phase of the battle. The ground
has an altogether different aspect from the air, and aeroplane
photographs sometimes mislead. The scout, however, goes ahead on the
same ground that the infantry have to travel, and he can bring back
news of exactly what is there. The airmen do not help us much in
determining the condition of the enemy's barbed wire, and nothing is so
fatal for an attack as being held up on the wire. "Streamer" wire
cannot be seen a few yards away, and only by sending out advance
scouting-parties can a commander know whether the wire has been
sufficiently destroyed to allow an easy passage for his troops. As an
attack is always planned to take two or three of the enemy's lines,
these scouts have to find out the condition of the wire in front of the
second or third line trenches as well.
Crawling in No Man's Land and behind the German lines is not as
dangerous as it sounds. The greatest cause of casualties is shell-fire
and the scout is safe from this, for, naturally, no enemy shells fall
near him in enemy territory, and he has previously arranged with his
own artillery to withhold fire from the sector in which he is working.
He runs little risk even from machine-guns or rifles, for the ground is
so honeycombed with shell-holes that he is nearly all the time in good
cover. The only danger that he runs is that of discovery, and for a
properly trained scout such is inexcusable.
The general idea the stay-at-home has of the trenches is that every
yard contains a man who is watching out for signs of the enemy. But a
trench is serrated with bays containing half a dozen men who are cut
off from sight of their neighbors. Of these half-dozen men one or, at
most, two are on the lookout while the others are sleeping, and a
well-placed hand-grenade will put the whole six of them out of action.
Experience has shown that where there has been much shell-fire the
sentry's observation is very lax, as men will not stick their heads
above the trenches any more than they can help and at night periscopes
are not much use. I have repeatedly come back into our own trenches
from a night's excursion without being seen by our own sentries, and on
two occasions, in the daytime. There are some sectors that are only
held by battle outposts with gaps of fifty and a hundred yards without
them. Of course, it is an easy matter to get past in these places.
We have sometimes to get the artillery to make a way for us. We will
have them bombard a hundred yards of German trench very heavily for
about ten minutes while we lie within fifty yards waiting for the
prearranged second when we will scuttle across; the enemy having been
compelled to vacate that sector during the bombardment, it is some
minutes before they realize that the shelling has ceased and return.
Once behind the German front trench, the work is easy, for they never
look behind or imagine that any of their enemies could be in their
rear, and there is no observation from the second or third line
trenches. On other occasions we do without the help of the artillery,
bombing a gap for ourselves. We arrange to have rifle-grenades fired
along three hundred yards of trench except for fifty yards where is our
gateway. Here we sneak up and carefully roll hand-grenades into two or
three bays. The Germans on either side do not take any notice of these
explosions as the same thing is happening all along the line, and the
Germans _in the bays_ are not in condition to take much notice either.
We may have to administer the "coup-de-grace" with our hand-bayonets.
Getting back is fairly easy, for the sentry's back is toward us, and a
scout should never have to strike twice. He may leave a Mills grenade
with the pin out as a gift to the sleeping men in the bay. He only has
a two or four-foot-wide trench to cross, and even if the alarm be given
he is back among the million and two shell-holes of No Man's Land
before any action can be taken: even though they bomb their front
thoroughly the chances are in the scout's favor; though they make No
Man's Land bright as day with star-shells and flares there are plenty
of shell-holes deep enough to completely hide him from view.
There is other important information that only the scout can obtain as
when we once found a dummy trench filled with barbed wire and
controlled by machine-guns. Had our men gone forward in the attack
without the knowledge of this they would have jumped down into it to be
massacred like rats in a trap. Machine-gun positions are also
generally indistinguishable to the airman's glass or camera. I used an
instrument of my own construction which would give me the map reference
of any object that I observed in relation to any other two objects the
position of which I knew on the map. At night I would have the two
known positions marked by distinguishing lights or have colored flares
sent up from them at regular intervals.
The training of our scouts is very severe. For in this work men have
to have complete confidence in their own superiority to the German
soldier, and must be able to depend entirely on their own resources as
they generally have to work singly or in pairs. It is necessary that
they be picked men with unusual keenness of observation. They are
trained for work in the dark by being made to go through the ordinary
soldier's exercises blindfolded. In this way they get the extra sense
that a blind man has. A blind man will not put his weight onto his
foot until he has felt if it is on firm ground; and by habit he does
this without hesitating. Our scouts are able after a while to walk
along using their eyes for observation all the time not needing to
watch where they are stepping. We also train them to have complete
control over their muscles and among the final tests for first-class
scouts are to remain an hour without showing any movement whatsoever
and to take half an hour in getting from the prone or lying position to
standing upright on their feet. These two last ideas were borrowed
from the Zulu who has no equal in the world in escaping observation.
They are also taught many methods for finding directions as a compass
is unreliable where there is so much unidentified iron lying about.
We have abundantly demonstrated in several sectors on the western front
that it is always possible for properly trained men to surprise the
enemy. As a matter of fact the Germans have carried out surprise raids
on us, and I am quite satisfied that it is never possible completely to
guard against surprise. In one sector I had trip wires in No Man's
Land connected with buzzers in our own trench so arranged that I would
know if there were any one out there and to within fifty yards of where
they were. But this was only possible on a quiet front where there was
no actual offensive taking place, and not many shells falling in No
Man's Land. I even placed buttons in the German wire so as to be sure
that our patrols did not just go outside our own trench and lie in a
shell-hole until it was time to return, for they had to signal by
pressing these buttons at intervals. They had to repair any of these
wires they found severed, and this somewhat elaborate scheme was the
means of our capturing some German patrols and gave us entire control
of No Man's Land.
We also took advantage of every possible means to make Fritz's sentries
jumpy. We would have our snipers on certain days smash all their
periscopes. I myself have shot down sixty in an afternoon when the sun
was shining on them. This made them afraid that they would not have
any left for emergencies and gave them a wholesome respect for our
shooting so that they were very shy of exposing themselves. We would
also set a rifle to fire exactly into a loophole so that when it opened
we had only to pull the trigger to send a bullet through the brain of
the man using it. There were other dodges that it is not wise to speak
of just yet.
This may be a good place to describe the two kinds of raids. In a raid
with artillery support the artillery cut out a sector of the enemy
trench with a "box barrage" which means that they fire on three lines
of a square leaving the open side for our troops to enter. They also
put a barrage on this side until the prearranged moment when the
attackers go forward. This leaves the raiders to deal with the troops
within that box preventing any others coming in to support them. The
weakness of this method is that it lets the whole German line know what
we are doing, and the raiding-party frequently gets cut up badly by the
enemy's artillery when they are returning across No Man's Land.
The most successful raid is always the silent one if you have
dependable troops. The chief obstacle is the enemy wire, but
beforehand the artillery can cut this in many places, and machine-guns
can be ranged on these gaps to prevent their being repaired. The enemy
does not know, even if he suspects a raid, exactly where it will come.
It is even a good idea if you only have a small party to enter one of
these gaps, crawl down fifty yards inside the wire before attacking,
and, when finished, come out through another gap lower down, but every
man of the party needs to scout over the ground beforehand so there
will be no confusion during the attack. We have carried out successful
raids in this manner when none but the Germans who were attacked knew
anything of what was going on until we were back in our own trenches,
and rarely were there any of these who could give evidence except by
means of their dead bodies. I remember that one of our men, who was
champion wood-chopper of Australia before the war, drove his bayonet
through a German and six inches into a hardwood beam, and as he could
not withdraw it had to unship it, leaving the German stuck up there as
a souvenir of his visit. Probably not another man in the army could
have done it, but it no doubt added to the reputation of the
Australians, as these Fritzes must have thought us a race of Samsons.
There is a strong bond between us and the airmen, and the army's pair
of eyes are focussed together, for the information from both sources is
co-ordinated. Our trench maps are constructed chiefly from aeroplane
photographs, and it was only occasionally that some object would be
seen in the photograph that could not be identified; when we scouts
would have to crawl over to it and find out its family-tree.
All our intelligence officers are given schooling in aerial
observation, and I have been several times over the German lines with a
pilot, and have a very high admiration for these birdmen who are not
merely the bravest of the brave but princes of good fellows. I had
some wonderful aeroplane photographs of some of our attacks wherein I
could recognize the stages of our progress, and so expert has this work
become that a German soldier can hardly even brush away a fly without a
permanent record of it being obtained. Probably the greater number of
our aeroplanes on the battle-front are engaged in ranging for the
artillery, and in actual offensive warfare, but their greatest value is
in reconnoissance, and so it will always be.
"Airman" and "scout"--one flies, the other crawls, yet both seek
information from the enemy, and are the twin eyes of the army. There
is a romance about the work of both that attracts adventurous youth,
and neither is as dangerous as it appears to a layman. In the element
of the airman he is a difficult target to hit, and it is estimated that
it takes thirty thousand anti-aircraft shells to bring him down. And
his machine is now so perfect that peace flying will be much safer than
motoring.
In No Man's Land, the hunting-ground of the scout, shells only fall by
accident, and he is camouflaged to defy detection. A black crawling
suit is used at night, with hood and mask, but the most important thing
is to break the outline of the head, so the hood has several peaks and
corners. A human head on the sky-line cannot be mistaken for anything
else, except maybe a pumpkin or melon, but in these hoods it appears
like a large lump of dirt, and should the scout chance to move suddenly
while in such a position, the likelihood is he would be dirt in a
second or so.
"All day long when the shells sail over
I stand at the sand-bags and take my chance;
But at night, at night I'm a reckless rover,
And over the parapet gleams Romance." [1]
[1] Robert W. Service.