secure, besides having the interest of leading through the old German
front line. This was then in the occupation of our reserves, and had
consequently been considerably tidied up, but large parts of it were
still completely broken down, showing the effect of our bombardment.
The shooting had been distinctly good, very few shell-craters were
far from the trenches, and a large proportion of the projectiles had
either fallen into them or blown in the parapet. But here again the
dug-outs must have afforded very excellent protection. Wide shafts,
driven straight down from the front wall of the trench at an angle of
forty-five degrees with the horizontal, led into hollowed-out chambers
twenty feet below the surface that would easily accommodate a couple
of dozen men. Each dug-out had more than one shaft, to reduce the
chances of men being buried by an explosion filling in the only means
of exit. The trenches were everywhere revetted with timber or hurdles,
and had a false bottom of wooden gratings to keep the men's feet as dry
as possible. If only from the point of view of comfort they contrasted
very favourably with our own, through which the homeward track next lay.
Loos, City of the Dead! If in years to come you are ever rebuilt, a
task that to the observer of your utter destruction and desolation
seems impossible, what strange and gruesome relics will your workmen
find! Surely the Spirit of Carnage will for ever haunt those narrow
streets and open widespread fields, surely your inhabitants of the
future will wake in terror in the September nights to hear ghostly
echoes of the then-forgotten struggle, the unceasing whistle and
roar of the shells, the rushing footsteps of the charging men, the
despairing cries of the bombed wretches in the cellars! And if timid
eyes dare lift the curtain to peep fearfully through the windows, will
they not see a blood-red moon shining upon streets through which pour
the serried columns of the victors, and scent the night air tainted
with a faint sickening odour of slaughter? But not alone shall Loos
bear its burden of horror, for in how many towns and villages must
these scenes be repeated before Peace comes again!
VIII
IN FRENCH TERRITORY
At the beginning of October our battery, owing to reasons of
strategy and convenience, changed its position by a matter of about
a mile-and-a-half, and by so doing entered an area where the right
of the British line joined the left of the French line. The actual
point of junction of the lines varies from time to time, as much owing
to the two armies' requirements in the matter of billets as for any
other reason, and, as it happened, on the very day we moved into our
new position, this point was in process of being moved a mile or so
northwards. We saw, therefore, the familiar khaki give place to the
looped-up blue greatcoat, and when, the desperate struggle to get the
battery in order in the minimum time being over, we had time to look
round and take note of our surroundings, we found ourselves in French
Territory.
I think that the weeks we spent there were the happiest we have ever
known, although the life of a gunner is a rough paradise for a man with
health and strength--plenty of work, plenty of sport, and complete
freedom from the cares of an artificial existence, there being nothing
artificial about war. Our position was amongst ruined _corons_, not
so badly damaged but that they could with very little trouble be made
into very comfortable billets, and owing to the fact that it was in
French territory, was immune from the visits of predatory "brass
hats." Further, in our group commander we had a strong buckler against
interference and aggression, and one in whom we all placed implicit
confidence. His kindness to us all will be amongst the most precious
memories of those happy days.
We found the change of tenants in the villages round us extremely
advantageous in many ways, not the least of which was the amount of
loot we acquired. It seems curious that the British Army, equipped as
it is with a more copious transport than has ever before been imagined,
should invariably leave in its wake enormous quantities of perfectly
serviceable stores. On this particular occasion we found abandoned
more than enough overcoats and waterproof capes to fit out the whole
battery, and collected from the billets into which we moved over a
hundred thousand rounds of small-arm ammunition alone. Although these
matters were reported, no steps were ever taken to remove the stores,
and subsequent discoveries of hundreds of boxes of unused bombs met
with the same indifference. What wonder that the thrifty French regard
it as the best fortune that can befall them to take over any part of
our line, or that French officers to whom I have spoken are inclined
to base their opinions of our conduct of the war upon such indications
of our national habits. "No army before has ever wasted as you waste,"
said one to me; "the food you reject would feed half the French Forces,
the rifles you failed to collect after Loos would equip many battalions
of your New Army. What is your proverb--'Straws show which way the wind
blows'--is it not?" Nor did the British troops leave only stores behind
in their evacuation. Two days after the exchange, an officer arrived in
the battery with a strange tale of woe. He was in command of a picquet
in a certain village, from where he had watched his own people depart
and the French arrive, expecting every moment to be relieved. Since
that time he had received neither orders nor rations, and he and his
men had lived upon the charity of a French regiment. We fed him and
sent him back to his lonely vigil with an armful of provisions and
a promise to report his troubles through our headquarters. I heard
subsequently that his patrol had been forgotten and never missed, so
presumably he might have been there now but for his own action.
The first and greatest Commandment when on active service is this,
"Thou shalt covet thy neighbour's goods, and if he doesn't keep his eye
on them, thou shalt possess them." Nationality seems to have no effect
upon the speed with which the soldier assimilates this doctrine. The
French _piou-piou_ is as great a follower of it as the British Tommy,
but his native politeness lends to the act a more distinguished air. Of
course, British troops with their wasteful ways are to him lawful game,
and the first couple of days in his company taught our people habits
of carefulness that were never learnt before. Our most experienced
marauders returned empty-handed from raids into the French lines, and
this bred a respect for our Allies that rapidly blossomed into genuine
friendship. And undoubtedly the French soldier, taking him all round,
is a most charming person and an almost perfect fighting man. He takes
life very seriously, and is frequently scandalized by our behaviour,
not quite understanding that a mask of frivolity may be only the result
of a desire to make light of difficulties and to hearten others, hiding
in reality an immovable determination to do one's duty. "Pour vous,
la guerre n'est pas sérieuse," said a big Breton to me once, and I,
knowing the melancholy tendencies of his race, knew not what to reply.
But next day a party of which he formed one, doubled past the battery.
"Que faites-vous?" I called as he passed. With a face wreathed in
smiles he replied, "Nous allons donner aux Bosches un petit coup de
fusil, ça sera très amusant, hein?"
Of the picturesque appearance of these French troops a few words may
be said. There is an entry in my diary about this time, "Walked down
to headquarters this morning. Saw two Frenchmen dressed alike." And to
the eyes of those accustomed to unvarying khaki, the extraordinary
kaleidoscopic effect of steel helmet, képi, coats of all conceivable
colours, breeches and trousers likewise, putties that shame the
rainbow, and an increasing note of khaki with a dash of colour on the
collar or sleeve, strikes very strangely. Even the men of the same
regiment do not seem to wear the same kit. One will be met in steel
helmet, dark blue coat and red trousers, the next in képi, light blue
coat and breeches, and grass-green putties. The authorities knew better
than to waste the stocks of clothing that they already had on hand.
It would be impertinent to discuss the fighting qualities of these
superb troops. The English Tommy, invariably a keen and usually a
perspicacious critic of everything that comes into his range of vision,
is apt to comment unfavourably upon what appears to his eye as an
undisciplined mob strolling along the roads. But his eyes are gradually
opened as first of all he discovers that these men, laden with a far
greater weight than he is ever called upon to carry, are travelling
quite as fast as he cares to, and then, at the end of the day, he finds
that they have made themselves thoroughly comfortable and are enjoying
a good meal long before he has thought of anything but the contents of
his water-bottle. After that the revelation of their fighting qualities
does not come as such a shock to him. Who that has seen them at work,
for instance round Souchez or in their magnificent attack on the Double
Crassier on October 11, can refrain from blessing our historic national
luck for the Allies it has brought us?
And throughout his nature runs the Frenchman's traditional love for the
turning of an honest penny. No sooner were we settled in our position
than a bearded French soldier, probably a newsvendor in civil life,
saw his golden opportunity. In his hours off duty he used to walk back
many miles from the position, and return with an armful of English
newspapers of the day before. How he procured them was a mystery we
never solved, for he always arrived with them hours before we could
obtain them anywhere ourselves. "Délé peppers!" he would cry, and the
whole battery turned out as one man to greet him and buy his wares,
which, by the way, he sold cheaper than their price in the neighbouring
towns. How much English he understood I never knew; he would talk it
freely with the men, but never with the officers--"Non compris" and
a shake of the head was his invariable reply to our advances in this
direction. But he always knew the contents of the papers he sold,
especially the _Daily Mail_. Certainly his ideas occasionally got a
little mixed. I am convinced, for instance, that he was under the
impression that Lord Northcliffe was either Dictator of England or had
changed places with Lord Kitchener. "Monsieur Lor' Notcliffe il va bien
ce matin!" he would say with great satisfaction, "il va finir la guerre
sur-le-champ." His politics swayed him to the extent that he always
refused to bring us French dailies. "Mais non, je vous dis, monsieur.
Vous aimez les journaux français? Bien, demain je vous apporterai
peut-être _La Vie Parisienne_, _Le Rire_, ce que vous voulez. Mais _Le
Temps_, _Le Matin_? Ceux sont les organes honteuses des capitalistes.
_L'Homme Enchaîné_, si vous voulez----"
He or one of his assistants (for it always seemed to me that half the
French Army helped to carry his papers round for him) it was that
first introduced us to the fascinations of the ring-making industry.
It appears that an industrious Frenchman, one supposes a jeweller
by trade, early in the war hit upon the idea of collecting the fuses
of hostile shells that fell near him, melting down the aluminium of
which they are largely made, and casting it into rings, which he
ornamented by letting in pieces of brass or copper, also components
of the fuse. The practice spread like wildfire through the French
troops, it gave a congenial occupation to their busy fingers, and
brought them a gratifying increase of income. Our men were at first
ready customers--there was little enough for them to spend money upon,
the inhabitants had been cleared out of the surrounding villages, and
no civilian population means no _estaminets_. But some of the more
commercially-minded among us--the whole story is as a microcosm of
our commercial supremacy as a nation--loath to see this profitable
trade passing them by, determined to enter into competition. The first
experiments were dramatic enough. A band of telephonists collected a
large store of wood torn from ruined houses, and of coal, fetched at no
small risk from a mine that was usually under fire, in the observation
post, which happened then to be a fairly large house well back from
the hostile lines, so that a fire was allowed in the telephonists'
room. Here one evening they collected, like a band of alchemists for
the fusion of the Philosopher's Stone, and here I chanced upon them,
the room lit only by the glare of a huge fire, around which they all
crouched, their eyes fixed upon a saucepan that held in its depths
one small fuse, which the Master of the Black Arts periodically poked
enquiringly with the point of his bayonet. I believe that attempt ended
in the necessity for a sudden and disastrous quenching, brought about
by the fact that the house itself showed ominous signs of catching
fire. After many vicissitudes the art became centred in the battery
cooks, who, having the unfair advantage that in the natural course of
events they worked by a fire all day, formed a sort of Guild of Ring
Makers, and some very creditable work was produced. Their first step
was to undersell the French, and they succeeded to such an extent
that the cook-house became a miniature Birmingham, and orders had to
be placed early to secure delivery. Souvenirs these rings became in a
land where everybody seems to ask everybody else for a "souvenir," a
term that has become so wide that it covers everything portable. One
day I was standing in a doorway when surely the youngest soldier in
the French army--he could not have been more than fourteen; I suppose
he was a drummer boy, but how he reached so close to the firing line
has always puzzled me--passed me and saluted gravely. My smile must
have reassured him, for he stopped and after some hesitation looked at
me and saluted again. "Souvenir, monsieur!" he blurted out at last.
"Souvenir?" said I, "Quelle espèce de souvenir désirez-vous?" With a
grin that threatened to sever the top of his head from the rest of his
body, he replied, "Souvenir de bully-beef, monsieur!" He got it.
The flies that marred the soothing ointment of this position were
certain mysterious bullets that flew about at strange hours of the
night and day. Nobody was ever actually hit, but people strolling
about between the guns heard a whirr overhead that made then duck
involuntarily, and heated officers would dash into the mess swearing
that they had seen bullets flatten themselves against brick walls
within an inch of their noses. Scepticism, or even a suggestion
that they were spent bullets from the firing line, was treated as
insubordination. A sniper it must be, a snark who crept into our
lines, shot his bolt, then softly and silently vanished away. One
evening the combined patience of the battery could bear it no longer--I
think somebody had staggered into the mess in a condition of collapse,
and upon being revived with a rum ration, proceeded to explain how
his cigarette had been shot out of his mouth by a bullet that passed
between his teeth. At all events, it was decided to inform the French
and request them to take steps to abate the nuisance. They, in the
expressive jargon of the day, were all over it. Parties of men from
their lines and our own crept out in the dusk to hunt the sniper--what
a glorious opportunity of winning fame by returning with his scalp,
or one of his ears, or whatever part of a sniper one does bring back
as a trophy! Dozens of parties, each more subtle than the other in
their proposed methods of action, crept out in the rapidly-falling
dusk, and with them the greater number of our officers, armed with
looted rifles and more subtlety than all the rest of the parties put
together. Then night fell dark and moonless, and the fun began. Each
party, busily engaged in its own game of blind-man's-buff, caught sight
of some other party, and opened a hot and furious fire upon them.
The remaining parties, seeing the flashes, emptied their magazines in
their direction. By an hour or so after dark, the battle was in full
swing. At ten o'clock such of the battery as were not engaged in the
chase were cowering in their dug-outs and there was not a whole pane of
glass for miles around. At half-past ten, a telephonist going to the
O.P. to relieve his comrade was forced to take shelter in a disused
communication trench, and to remain there all night, any attempt on
his part to climb out being met by rapid fire from every direction
at once. At eleven, a mitrailleuse was dragged up by an excited knot
of men, and opened fire in the direction from which there seemed to
come most noise. At half-past, fire had become general all along
the line, everybody, supposing that his neighbour knew what he was
aiming at, firing in the same direction as he did. At midnight the
Germans, thinking it a shame to be left so long out of the picture,
and possibly tired of being kept awake, opened with a field battery,
an inconsiderate action that effectually damped the proceedings. By
one o'clock all was quiet again, and, much to my astonishment, every
one returned whole, each man having seen the sniper and had at least
a dozen shots at him, every one of which by his own account must have
been fatal. Subsequent inquiries revealed the amazing fact that the
French also had suffered no casualties. Yet alas! no more, apparently,
had the sniper, for the bullets continued to whizz and valuable
officers to have hair-breadth escapes until the time came for us to
leave the place.
On the next night we were shelled, probably by way of retaliation
for the disturbance of the previous night. The enemy seemed to know
our approximate position, and "searched and swept" all round us with
heavy shell, but never contrived to burst one within twenty yards of
the guns. It happened to be my business to walk about the battery,
exhorting men to keep under cover. In the middle of it all a party
of French soldiers walked nonchalantly through our lines. "Prenez
garde," I shouted, "Il y a des obus qui tombe par ici, descendez dans
les abris!" They thanked me and ran into the dug-outs. The next shell
burst pretty close, covering everything with fragments. Out dashed my
Frenchmen, and in answer to my expostulations, "Nous en voulons un
souvenir," they replied, and forthwith began to hunt for the fuse.
Magnificent as are the French infantry, their artillery far surpass
them. To those who have any knowledge of artillery work, the French
appear as performers of miracles. Their equipment, their incomparable
_soixante-quinze_, is a frail-looking cheaply constructed affair,
giving the impression of weakness and inefficiency. Their _personnel_
seems utterly inadequate, both in men and officers, their methods of
ammunition supply are rudimentary. But a French battery will come into
action in an inconceivably short time, and will continue in action
night and day at a rate of fire that is unbelievable to one who has
not heard it. Minor technical details, such as sights, are far in
advance of our own, even in the case of some old heavy pieces, whose
mirror sight utterly shames by its convenience and simplicity our
extraordinary device for the same purpose. And the officers, how keen
they were! Scarcely a day passed but some two or three came into the
battery and courteously enquired if they might examine _les pièces_.
Of course they could, we were only too happy to exhibit them, and
then what explanations and comparisons between theirs and ours! "Ce
frein-ci n'est pas mal, mais pourquoi les ressorts sont-ils d'une telle
longueur?" or "Mon dieu, que cet appareil de portage est compliqué!"
Keen men and keen critics, equally eager to show us their weapons and
to hear our criticisms upon them. Their colonel included us in his
command at such times as we supported the French batteries, which
was fairly frequently. A spare figure in a close-fitting jacket, a
bullet-shaped head set with a pair of piercing eyes that discovered
everything without the assistance of the tongue, he was the ideal of
an artillery officer. He had the scientific mind that absorbs every
detail and stores it away in a pigeon-hole ready for immediate use.
Never once after the first time that I was introduced to him, did he
fail, wherever we met, to stop, shake hands and address me by name. In
a hurried quarter of an hour I once recited to him all the technical
details of the howitzer with which we were armed. Weeks afterwards I
heard him repeat faultlessly all the details, with others which he had
noticed for himself. If he be a type of the senior artillery officer,
happy are our Allies in the possession of such men.
Another incident that occurred to us will show the unvarying
promptitude and courtesy with which the French treated us. It happened
that close to the battery and in the middle of the French infantry
billets was a ruined church tower, of which a certain portion still
stood, enough, we discovered, to make it worth our while to build a
series of ladders within it, and to use the bell-beam as an emergency
observation post. But Monsieur le Poilu thought that this was a capital
spot into which to climb, and from thence to wave his képi to his
friends and generally to behave in such a manner as to attract the
attention of hostile observers, with the not unnatural result that one
fine evening the enemy fired a few rounds at it, narrowly missing our
senior subaltern, and, which was a matter for far deeper concern, the
ration lorry. Complaint being made to the colonel, he, after several
complimentary remarks as to our skill in using so unfavourable a place,
promised that there should be no repetition of the offence. Ever
afterwards an armed guard was posted at the base of the tower, with
orders to admit no one but ourselves.
Those French soldiers, what children they were, as their behaviour
in the tower showed! Whenever we were in action, a crowd of them
would gather behind the guns to watch the shell in its flight, as is
perfectly easy with any low-velocity howitzer. "Venez voir l'obus!"
they would cry, and, as the gun fired, "Le voila, voyez, voyez! ah, il
tombe----" and a shriek of delight would almost drown one's subsequent
orders. What children and what men! Perfect fighters, eager to rush
to the attack, yet patient under the iron discipline of the trenches,
easily moved to a wild display of nervous energy, possessing creative
imagination, yet stoical under agony to a surpassing degree. And not
the men only, but every class--peasants, doctors, priests, each in
his own sphere, are imbued with the highest spirit of which man can
boast, the spirit of self-sacrifice. I hold no brief for any form of
doctrine, being one of those who hold that all religions are nothing
but quibbles round a central truth that no sane man denies, but the
devotion of the French priest strikes me with the deepest admiration.
I have seen a battery heavily shelled and suffer many casualties, so
that the detachments were forced to take to their dug-outs. The doctor
galloped up on horseback, but the priest on foot, running with his
soutane tucked up round his waist, was there first, out in the open
administering extreme unction to the mortally wounded, helping others
to a place of safety. "Greater love hath no man than this----"
IX
CHANGING POSITION