Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in
those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side
of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.
Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind
the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them
up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up
a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was
concentrating “hate.”
Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone
messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being
shelled to pieces by long--range howitzers, or from engineers whose
working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from
a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could
not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and
piling up the casualties. It was hard to say: “Sorry!... We've got to go
slow with ammunition.”
That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a
new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal
increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate
the “heavies” had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more
sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields
by day and night.
There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, and no longer
the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for artillery
support. Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the enemy asked
for trouble by any special show of “hate” he got it quickly and with a
double dose.
Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except
in places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down
at them from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every
battery. Going round the salient one day with General Burstall--and a
very good name, too!--who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was
horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our
guns and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.
Here and there our amateur gunners--quick to learn their job--found a
good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and
give praise to the little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later
they were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not
caught too soon.
So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village, where
I went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet Street.
He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it--that was before
his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic
case of shell-shock--and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he
chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His
bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked
in a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant
place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to bits,
except where, on the outskirts, the chateau with its racing-stables
remained untouched--“German spies!” said the boy--and where a little
grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was
battered and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits in the
churchyard and open vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of their
tombs. We walked along a sunken road and then to a barn in open fields.
The roof was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on wet
days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the room above the ladder
where the officers had their mess. There were some home-made chairs up
there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies were tacked up to the
beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace where logs were
burning was a canvas screen to let down at night. A gramophone played
merry music and gave a homelike touch to this parlor in war.
“A good spot!” I said. “Is it well hidden?”
“As safe as houses,” said the captain of the battery. “Touching wood, I
mean.”
There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at
those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and
embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.
“What's happened?” I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.
“Nothing,” said the boy, “except touching wood. The captain spoke too
loudly.”
We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and
found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the
battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the
broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill
showed black as ink.
The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them
through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle
of fire.
“It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench,” said a bright-eyed boy
by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he
became a gunner officer in Flanders). “With any luck we shall get 'em
in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal... And my gun's ready
first, as usual.”
The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery
fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the
staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull
roar of a “heavy.”
A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a
mile away.
Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.
“Repeat!”
“We've got'em,” said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.
The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.
“We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit.”
A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns
fired together. “Repeat!” came the high voice through the megaphone.
The still air was rent again... In a waterlogged trench, which we could
not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.
The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for
the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in
the billet below.
The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially
in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches
slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.
The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it
necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station
from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once
there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from
above or a little mining operation underneath.
He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when
he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman
there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat
there very solitary and watchful.
The rats worried him a little--they were bold enough to bare their teeth
when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called
Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one
night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress
to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to
kill... until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the
boy was broken.
It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer
apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in
evening dress--boiled shirt, white tie, and all--with a bowler hat bent
to the storm.
Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.
“It isn't true,” he said. “I don't believe it... We're mad, that's
all!... The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?”
We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise
of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard
of snow.
A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a
cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.