MIDSUMMER CALM
During our first summer in the trenches there were days, sometimes weeks
at a time, when, in the language of the official bulletins, there was
"nothing to report," or "calm" prevailed "along our entire front." From
the War Office point of view these statements were, doubtless, true
enough. But from Tommy Atkins's point of view, "calm" was putting it
somewhat mildly. Life in the trenches, even on the quietest of days, is
full of adventure highly spiced with danger. Snipers, machine gunners,
artillerymen, airmen, engineers of the opposing sides, vie with each
other in skill and daring, in order to secure that coveted advantage, the
morale. Tommy calls it the "more-ale," but he jolly well knows when he
has it and when he hasn't.
There were many nights of official calm when we machine gunners crept out
of the trenches with our guns to positions prepared beforehand, either in
front of the line or to the rear of it. There we waited for messages from
our listening patrols, who were lying in the tall grass of "the front
yard." They sent word to us immediately when they discovered enemy
working parties building up their parapets or mending their barbed-wire
entanglements. We would then lay our guns according to instructions
received and blaze away, each gun firing at the rate of from three
hundred to five hundred rounds per minute. After a heavy burst of fire,
we would change our positions at once. It was then that the most exciting
part of our work began. For as soon as we ceased firing, there were
answering fusillades from hundreds of German rifles. And within two or
three minutes, German field artillery began a search for us with
shrapnel. We crawled from one position to another over the open ground or
along shallow ditches, dug for the purpose. These offered protection from
rifle fire, but frequently the shell fire was so heavy and so well
directed that we were given some very unpleasant half-hours, lying flat
on our faces, listening to the deafening explosions and the vicious
whistling of flying shrapnel.
We fired from the trenches, as well as in front and to the rear of them.
We were, in fact, busy during most of the night, for it was our duty to
see to it that our guns lived up to their reputation as "weapons of
opportunity and surprise." With the aid of large-scale maps, we located
all of the roads, within range, back of the German lines; roads which we
knew were used by enemy troops moving in and out of the trenches. We
located all of their communication trenches leading back to the rear; and
at uncertain intervals we covered roads and trenches with bursts of
searching fire.
The German gunners were by no means inactive. They, too, profited by
their knowledge of night life in the firing-line, their knowledge of
soldier nature. They knew, as did we, that the roads in the rear of the
trenches are filled, at night, with troops, transport wagons, and fatigue
parties. They knew, as did we, that men become so utterly weary of living
in ditches--living in holes, like rats--that they are willing to take big
risks when moving in or out of the trenches, for the pure joy of getting
up on top of the ground. Many a night when we were moving up for our week
in the first line, or back for our week in reserve, we heard the far-off
rattle of German Maxims, and in an instant, the bullets would be
zip-zipping all around us. There was no need for the sharp word of
command. If there was a communication trench at hand, we all made a dive
for it at once. If there was not, we fell face down, in ditches, shell
holes, in any place which offered a little protection from that terrible
hail of lead. Many of our men were killed and wounded nightly by
machine-gun fire, usually because they were too tired to be cautious.
And, doubtless, we did as much damage with our own guns. It seemed to me
horrible, something in the nature of murder, that advantage must be taken
of these opportunities. But it was all a part of the game of war; and
fortunately, we rarely knew, nor did the Germans, what damage was done
during those summer nights of "calm along the entire front."
The artillerymen, both British and German, did much to relieve the
boredom of those "nothing to report" days. There were desultory
bombardments of the trenches at daybreak, and at dusk, when every
infantryman is at his post, rifle in hand, bayonet fixed, on the alert
for signs of a surprise attack. If it was a bombardment with shrapnel,
Tommy was not greatly concerned, for in trenches he is fairly safe from
shrapnel fire. But if the shells were large-caliber high explosives, he
crouched close to the front wall of the trench, lamenting the day he was
foolish enough to become an infantryman, "a bloomin' 'uman ninepin!"
Covered with dirt, sometimes half-buried in fallen trench, he wagered his
next week's tobacco rations that the London papers would print the same
old story: "Along the western front there is nothing to report." And
usually he won.
Trench mortaring was more to our liking. That is an infantryman's game,
and, while extremely hazardous, the men in the trenches have a sporting
chance. Every one forgot breakfast when word was passed down the line
that we were going to "mortarfy" Fritzie. The last-relief night sentries,
who had just tumbled sleepily into their dugouts, tumbled out of them
again to watch the fun. Fatigue parties, working in the communication
trenches, dropped their picks and shovels and came hurrying up to the
first line. Eagerly, expectantly, every one waited for the sport to
begin. Our projectiles were immense balls of hollow steel, filled with
high explosive of tremendous power. They were fired from a small gun,
placed, usually, in the first line of reserve trenches. A dull boom from
the rear warned us that the game had started.
"There she is!" "See 'er? Goin' true as a die!" "She's go'n' to 'it!
She's go'n' to 'it!" All of the boys would be shouting at once. Up it
goes, turning over and over, rising to a height of several hundred feet.
Then, if well aimed, it reaches the end of its upward journey directly
over the enemy's line, and falls straight into his trench. There is a
moment of silence, followed by a terrific explosion which throws dirt and
débris high in the air. By this time every Tommy along the line is
standing on the firing-bench, head and shoulders above the parapet, quite
forgetting his own danger in his excitement, and shouting at the top of
his voice.
"'Ow's that one, Fritzie boy?"
"Gooten morgen, you Proosian sausage-wallopers!"
"Tyke a bit o' that there 'ome to yer missus!"
But Fritzie could be depended upon to keep up his end of the game. He
gave us just as good as we sent, and often he added something for full
measure. His surprises were sausage-shaped missiles which came wobbling
toward us, slowly, almost awkwardly; but they dropped with lightning
speed, and alas, for any poor Tommy who misjudged the place of its fall!
However, every one had a chance. Trench-mortar projectiles are so large
that one can see them coming, and they describe so leisurely an arc
before they fall that men have time to run.
I have always admired Tommy Atkins for his sense of fair play. He enjoyed
giving Fritz "a little bit of all-right," but he never resented it when
Fritz had his own fun at our expense. In the far-off days of peace, I
used to lament the fact that we had fallen upon evil times. I read of old
wars with a feeling of regret that men had lost their old primal love for
dangerous sport, their naïve ignorance of fear. All the brave, heroic
things of life were said and done. But on those trench-mortaring days,
when I watched boys playing with death with right good zest, heard them
shouting and laughing as they tumbled over one another in their eagerness
to escape it, I was convinced of my error. Daily I saw men going through
the test of fire triumphantly, and, at the last, what a severe test it
was! And how splendidly they met it! During six months continuously in
the firing-line, I met less than a dozen natural-born cowards; and my
experience was largely with plumbers, drapers' assistants, clerks, men
who had no fighting traditions to back them up, make them heroic in spite
of themselves.
The better I knew Tommy, the better I liked him. He hasn't a shred of
sentimentality in his make-up. There is plenty of sentiment, sincere
feeling, but it is admirably concealed. I had been a soldier of the King
for many months before I realized that the men with whom I was living,
sharing rations and hardships, were anything other than the healthy
animals they looked. They relished their food and talked about it. They
grumbled at the restraints military discipline imposed upon them, and at
the paltry shilling a day which they received for the first really hard
work they had ever done. They appeared to regard England as a miserly
employer, exacting their last ounce of energy for a wretchedly inadequate
wage. To the casual observer, theirs was not the ardor of loyal sons,
fighting for a beloved motherland. Rather, it seemed that of
irresponsible schoolboys on a long holiday. They said nothing about
patriotism or the duty of Englishmen in war-time. And if I attempted to
start a conversation along that line, they walked right over me with
their boots on.
This was a great disappointment at first. I should never have known, from
anything that was said, that a man of them was stirred at the thought of
fighting for old England. England was all right, but "I ain't goin' balmy
about the old flag and all that stuff." Many of them insisted that they
were in the army for personal and selfish reasons alone. They went out of
their way to ridicule any and every indication of sentiment.
There was the matter of talk about mothers, for example. I can't imagine
this being the case in a volunteer army of American boys, but not once,
during fifteen months of British army life, did I hear a discussion of
mothers. When the weekly parcels from England arrived and the boys were
sharing their cake and chocolate and tobacco, one of them would say,
"Good old mum. She ain't a bad sort"; to be answered with reluctant,
mouth-filled grunts, or grudging nods of approval. As for fathers, I
often thought to myself, "What a tremendous army of posthumous sons!"
Months before I would have been astonished at this reticence. But I had
learned to understand Tommy. His silences were as eloquent as any
splendid outbursts or glowing tributes could have been. Indeed, they were
far more eloquent! Englishmen seem to have an instinctive understanding
of the futility, the emptiness, of words in the face of unspeakable
experiences. It was a matter of constant wonder to me that men, living in
the daily and hourly presence of death, could so surely control and
conceal their feelings. Their talk was of anything but home; and yet, I
knew they thought of but little else.
One of our boys was killed, and there was the letter to be written to his
parents. Three Tommies who knew him best were to attempt this. They made
innumerable beginnings. Each of them was afraid of blundering, of causing
unnecessary pain by an indelicate revelation of the facts. There was a
feminine fineness about their concern which was beautiful to see. The
final draft of the letter was a little masterpiece, not of English, but
of insight; such a letter as any one of us would have wished his own
parents to receive under like circumstances. Nothing was forgotten which
could have made the news in the slightest degree more endurable. Every
trifling personal belonging was carefully saved and packed in a little
box to follow the letter. All of this was done amid much boisterous
jesting. And there was the usual hilarious singing to the wheezing
accompaniment of an old mouth-organ. But of reference to home, or
mothers, or comradeship,--nothing.
Rarely a night passed without its burial parties. "Digging in the garden"
Tommy calls the grave-making. The bodies, wrapped in blankets or
waterproof ground-sheets, are lifted over the parados, and carried back a
convenient twenty yards or more. The desolation of that garden, choked
with weeds and a wild growth of self-sown crops, is indescribable. It was
wreckage-strewn, gaping with shell holes, billowing with innumerable
graves, a waste land speechlessly pathetic. The poplar trees and willow
hedges have been blasted and splintered by shell fire. Tommy calls these
"Kaiser Bill's flowers." Coming from England, he feels more deeply than
he would care to admit the crimes done to trees in the name of war.
Our chaplain was a devout man, but prudent to a fault. Never, to my
knowledge, did he visit us in the trenches. Therefore our burial parties
proceeded without the rites of the Church. This arrangement was highly
satisfactory to Tommy. He liked to "get the planting done" with the least
possible delay or fuss. His whispered conversations while the graves were
being scooped were, to say the least, quite out of the spirit of the
occasion. Once we were burying two boys with whom we had been having
supper a few hours before. There was an artillery duel in progress, the
shells whistling high over our heads, and bursting in great splotches of
white fire, far in rear of the opposing lines of trenches. The
grave-making went speedily on, while the burial party argued in whispers
as to the caliber of the guns. Some said they were six-inch, while others
thought nine-inch. Discussion was momentarily suspended when a trench
rocket shot in an arc from the enemy's line. We crouched, motionless,
until the welcome darkness spread again.
And then, in loud whispers:--
"'Ere! If they was nine-inch, they would 'ave more screech."
And one from the other school of opinion would reply:--
"Don't talk so bloomin' silly! Ain't I a-tellin' you that you can't
always size 'em by the screech?"
Not a prayer; not a word, either of censure or of praise, for the boys
who had gone; not an expression of opinion as to the meaning of the great
change which had come to them and which might come, as suddenly, to any
or all of us. And yet I knew that they were each thinking of these
things.
There were days when the front was really quiet. The thin trickle of
rifle fire only accentuated the stillness of an early summer morning. Far
down the line Tommy could be heard, singing to himself as he sat in the
door of his dugout, cleaning his rifle, or making a careful scrutiny of
his shirt for those unwelcome little parasites which made life so
miserable for him at all times. There were pleasant cracklings of burning
pine sticks and the sizzle of frying bacon. Great swarms of bluebottle
flies buzzed lazily in the warm sunshine. Sometimes, across a pool of
noonday silence, we heard birds singing; for the birds didn't desert us.
When we gave them a hearing, they did their cheery little best to assure
us that everything would come right in the end. Once we heard a skylark,
an English skylark, singing over No-Man's-Land! I scarcely know which
gave me more pleasure, the song, or the sight of the faces of those
English lads as they listened. I was deeply touched when one of them
said:--
"Ain't 'e a plucky little chap, singin' right in front of Fritzie's
trenches fer us English blokes?"
It was a sincere and fitting tribute, as perfect for a soldier as
Shelley's "Ode" for a poet.
Along the part of the British front which we held during the summer, the
opposing lines of trenches were from less than a hundred to four hundred
and fifty or five hundred yards apart. When we were neighborly as regards
distance, we were also neighborly as regards social intercourse. In the
early mornings when the heavy night mists still concealed the lines, the
boys stood head and shoulders above the parapet and shouted:--
"Hi, Fritzie!"
And the greeting was returned:--
"Hi, Tommy!"
Then we conversed. Very few of us knew German, but it is surprising how
many Germans could speak English. Frequently they shouted, "Got any
'woodbines,' Tommy?"--his favorite brand of cigarettes; and Tommy would
reply, "Sure! Shall I bring 'em over or will you come an' fetch 'em?"
This was often the ice-breaker, the beginning of a conversation which
varied considerably in other details.
"Who are you?" Fritzie would shout.
And Tommy, "We're the King's Own 'Ymn of 'Aters"; some such subtle
repartee as that. "Wot's your mob?"
"We're a battalion of Irish rifles." The Germans liked to provoke us by
pretending that the Irish were disloyal to England.
Sometimes they shouted:--
"Any of you from London?"
"Not arf! Wot was you a-doin' of in London? Witin' tible at Sam Isaac's
fish-shop?"
The rising of the mists put an end to these conversations. Sometimes they
were concluded earlier with bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire. "All
right to be friendly," Tommy would say, "but we got to let 'em know this
ain't no love-feast."