labour and considerable time, if anything more elaborate than mere
screening from view is attempted. Deep pits must be dug for the guns,
and slopes cut into these pits by which the said guns may be hauled
in and out. These pits must be floored with an elaborate platform,
their sides must be revetted, that is to say that boards, corrugated
iron or some similar substance must be fixed against them to prevent
their falling in, and, most difficult feat of all, they must be roofed
over with as much earth as such roof beams as can be procured can be
made to bear. When the pits are completed, deep caverns must be dug
and prepared to serve as refuges for the detachments in case of the
battery being shelled. Other shelters must be provided as magazines
for ammunition, as a room for the telephone and its operators, as
a refuge for the section commanders. Billets must be found for the
men and officers, if no billets are available dug-outs must be made.
Places must be found for cook-houses, washing-places, work-shops,
stores. A battery position prepared for lengthy occupation is a most
elaborate work, and one does not light-heartedly desert it for an open
plain where everything remains to be done. But sooner or later the
dread message comes: "The battery will be prepared to move at 6 p.m.
to-morrow. An officer will proceed forthwith to such-and-such a place
where he will be shown the new position selected." Off goes the officer
in the car, he meets some deputy from headquarters, and the two trudge
off together through the ever-present mud. "Here you are," says the
deputy cheerfully; "how does this suit you? Splendid place. Look at
that orchard; you could hide the guns under the trees." The battery
officer stares glumly at a dozen apple trees, each of which is of a
size to flourish contentedly in a fair-sized flower-pot, and makes some
dubious reply. "I never knew such difficult fellows to please as you
siege battery fellows are in my life! Well, come and look over here.
There's a natural pit, ready dug for you; it'll hold all the battery
easily." With this the guide indicates with no little pride a gully, at
the bottom of which stagnates rather than flows a greenish liquid with
an odour of the most clinging type. "Yes, it might be a bit difficult
to get the guns in and out, certainly. What about concealment behind
that hedge?" But the hedge proves to be separated from the only road
by an impassable morass. At last the orchard is selected as the least
impossible under the circumstances, and the officer returns to his
battery thoroughly convinced that he has selected the worst possible
position on the whole front, and wondering what on earth will be said
to him when he exhibits it to the rest of the battery.
Or else the proposed site is in the middle of a village, a place with
a reputation for being shelled that is notorious from Ypres to Loos. A
fabulous arc of fire is demanded from the battery, and weary hours are
spent looking for a more or less concealed spot that will allow of the
trajectory clearing houses and trees in all the required directions.
At last it is found, the necessary measurements made and found
satisfactory, when an officer strolls up. "Good-afternoon. You're
not going to stop here long, are you? Going to put a battery here! I
wouldn't be you for something, then. I've been about here for weeks,
and they always strafe the schoolhouse there every day about this time.
Look out, here she comes----" and a "woolly bear" or a "whizz-bang"
or some other fiendish and aptly named projectile bursts neatly over
the building that one had appropriated in one's mind's eye for a mess.
Wearily the search begins again--this might do, perhaps--but by now
the "evening hate" is in full swing, and a heavy shell settles with a
self-satisfied "crrrump!" in the middle of one's oasis, digging one's
gun-pits before one's eyes, as it were.
On one occasion the position chosen for us was the really beautiful
garden of a medium-sized château. The front was a well-planned mass of
shrubbery, intersected with paths and flower-beds, the back a walled
vegetable garden, most scrupulously maintained, planted with every
sort of vegetable and fruit and provided with a good range of glass.
The owner of the place lived in the château, and his gardener worked
on the premises. The dismay of these good people when they were told
that the place was to be turned into a battery and the men billeted
in the château can better be imagined than described. The owner was
a philosopher, and took matters calmly. "Enfin, c'est la guerre, que
voulez-vous?" he said sadly as we expressed our horror at the necessity
of ruining this little paradise. The gardener was no philosopher, and
when I look back upon the mutilated shrubberies, the trodden-down grass
plots, the hotbeds with their boarding torn up for revetment, the old
wall breached in many places for easy access, the broken panes in the
greenhouses and, worst of all, four yawning chasms where once the
asparagus, the strawberries and the artichokes dwelt together in amity,
I do not wonder at the hostile spirit he displayed. I can see him
now dancing round the sergeant-major, an imperturbable person of few
words in his own tongue, and of none in French, whom he found cutting
a few cabbages for the sergeants' dinner. "Sacré nom d'un cochon,
regardez-là le voleur qui arrache mes petits choux! Ah, les anglais
sont incroyables!" "No compree," says the sergeant-major, and goes on
with his garnering. The gardener got something of his own back that
night, however, for the garden had a very complete system of hydrants
all over it, which same hydrants our friend stealthily visited with
the turn-key, which he then disposed of and departed. It was pitch
dark and we were all busy working, so that it was some time before we
noticed the gathering floods, and the whole place was inches deep in
mud and water by the time that we had discovered how to turn it off
again. We never brought the crime home to the criminal, but a certain
hidden gleam of triumph in that gardener's wholly disapproving eye has
always convinced me of his guilt.
We had much to contend with in occupying that position. Several times
we were held up in our work, first by somebody who said the situation
was too exposed and that it was sheer suicide to occupy a house that
was conspicuous for miles round; then by the urgent representations
of a French officer who commanded a battery near by, and who declared
that we should draw down fire upon the devoted heads of his people;
and finally by a conference who debated for some time whether we were
really required in that sector at all. However, we got all these
matters satisfactorily settled at last, and set to work in earnest. And
digging pits by night in the light of a few hurricane lamps is work
indeed, especially if it rains persistently, as it almost invariably
does. Unskilful wielders of the pick are apt to drive their lethal
weapons into everything but the ground they mean to excavate, their
favourite targets being such parts of their neighbours as get in
their way. This leads to acrimonious wrangling and consequent delay.
Better this, however, than the adventure of one lusty champion, who
with a mighty effort drove his pick clean through the cast-iron main
that supplied the delinquent hydrants, whereby he converted, in an
incredibly short space of time, that half-completed pit into a sea of
mud and water some four feet deep. To any one who expresses a fondness
for bathing I recommend the plugging of a four-inch main, with a good
pressure behind it, lying at the bottom of four feet of a cream-like
mixture of chalk, clay and water at three o'clock on an autumn morning.
Geology, we are told, is the science that deals with the constitutents
of the earth. A new chapter should be written to the text-books, a new
branch of the science has been rendered necessary by the war, the study
of the properties of mud. Mud is now elevated to the dignity of a
fifth element, but surpasses the other four by its perpetual presence,
equalled only by that of the ether which pervades everything we know.
Mud shares its motto with the Royal Regiment of Artillery, one lives
in it, sleeps in it, and not infrequently eats it--indeed, competent
experts with carefully trained palates are said to be able to tell
from the flavour of the bacon at breakfast the exact part of the line
in which it has been rolled before issue. Surely in all the ancient
mythologies some student may find for mud some presiding deity that we
may suitably propitiate?
Nor were such more or less natural phenomena our only hindrances.
No sooner were the pits completed, than somebody more perspicacious
than his fellows discovered that we had been ordered to lay them out
in the wrong direction, and they had to be cut out still further to
allow the platforms to be slewed round through the required angle.
This order reached us one evening just as we were promising ourselves
a night in bed after our strenuous labours, and the despair of all
ranks spread like a mephitic vapour over the country-side in a mist of
strange profanity. The men, however, whose spirits are proof against
continued despondency under the most depressing circumstances, set to
work with a will, and the tedious digging was finished at last. Then
came the far more interesting business of revetting and roofing. Now,
obviously revetting and roofing require planks, beams, iron sheets,
and material of that nature, and equally obviously the department that
professes to provide stores of this description, and whose imagination
rarely soars above the level of sandbags, is utterly unable to supply
such things. The only course left is to find them for oneself, and
fortunately a row of houses whose inhabitants had been evicted stood
on this occasion near at hand, and these we gutted. Doors, shutters,
floor-boards, rafters, everything but the bricks themselves, we
contrived to utilize, until we had everything we could desire except
girders for our roofs, which were to be of earth. Now a fifteen-foot
span of earth two feet in thickness requires a good deal of supporting,
and after several experiments with rafters, experiments that sometimes
had unpleasant results for those who conducted them, we decided that
something stronger was required. Here, again, almost in the manner of
the Swiss Family Robinson, we found what we required at our very door,
but not before one adventurous spirit had invited an early death (from
which may he long be spared!) by driving a particularly noisy lorry
into a coal mine overlooking the German lines in search of pit-props.
Our discovery was due to an eagle eye that discovered a notice-board
bearing the words "Défense de circuler sur la voie," whose owner,
realizing that there could be no temptation to circulate on the line
if there was no line upon which to circulate, investigated further and
found a grass-grown colliery siding. Here were our long-sought girders,
and with their discovery our troubles were practically over. Certainly
the guns had yet to be lowered into the pits, and hauling heavy guns
over soft garden mould on a dark night is an undertaking to try the
most angelic patience, but on this occasion, for the first and last
time, the Mud-god smiled upon us, and that midnight we knew the true
happiness that comes of the successful completion of strenuous labour.
Here we remained for some weeks, until again disturbed by the order to
change position. Again everything has to be done by night, the guns
hauled out of the pits, the thousand and one small stores necessary to
the interior economy of the battery packed each in its proper place,
the heavy platforms raised and loaded into the lorries. The ease with
which any particular article can be mislaid under those circumstances
is incredible. Relative weight or importance seems to have no bearing
on the matter at all, one is just as likely, upon arriving at dawn
in some unknown land, to discover that one has left behind a spare
wheel or a handcart or even a battery quartermaster-sergeant, as
one is to find a small screwdriver missing. After a while the whole
business becomes a nightmare in which one is condemned eternally to
spend one's time counting handspikes and lorries and men, and to make
the total utterly different every time. And then the line of march!
A procession of heavy lorries, some drawing the guns, the rest laden
with men, stores and ammunition, looking for all the world like some
huge travelling circus, sets off upon a dark foggy night, carrying of
course no lights, over roads already laden to their utmost capacity
with troops and supply columns, and plentifully besprinkled with shell
holes. At the head of the procession rides a group of officers in a
car, one of whom has possibly been over the road once by daylight,
and about the length of the convoy are scattered here and there men
wrestling with recalcitrant motor-bicycles, which they vainly try to
restrict to the speed of the column, perhaps four or five miles an
hour. Much can happen under these circumstances. Perhaps the rearmost
lorry has to stop for adjustment, and by the time the word has passed
along the line the car at the head is far away, and the column strung
out over a mile or so of road. Or the foremost lorry commences to
boil frantically and slows down, whereupon the remainder tread upon
one another's heels, until it stops altogether, when the column forms
a compact mass that nothing can attempt to pass. Or the geographical
instinct of the leader of the expedition fails at a cross-roads, and
recourse has to be had to the sentry who stands there. One of two
things then happens. Either the man does not know the way and says so,
or he does not know the way and with the utmost positiveness declares
the route to be by the first road that strikes his fancy. Those to
whom the former of these certainties happens are by far the most
fortunate, for the attempt to turn a column of lorries on a narrow
road, especially if it consists, as it usually does, of a central
strip of pavé bordered by fathomless mud, is certain to be fraught with
disaster. A fully-loaded ammunition lorry stuck in a ditch is a most
heartbreaking sight, particularly (if the bull may be forgiven) if the
night is so dark that one cannot see it. It must be unloaded, dragged
out by the help of another lorry, which sometimes slides into the
ditch itself in the process, and then loaded up again, usually to the
accompaniment of uncomplimentary observations from the traffic that it
is holding up.
Certainly the accidents that may happen to mechanical transport are
many and various, but there are some to which it is not liable. One
of the first messages that we received upon our arrival in a certain
new position ran as follows, "Report at once all cases of glanders
occurring amongst your transport." One has trouble enough without
infectious disease to contend with. A motor lorry is a capital thing
on a road, even if that road is in a very bad state, but, once take it
on to soft or slippery ground, and its imperfections become manifest.
First of all its wheels start to slip, and chains are fixed round the
felloes to give them a grip. This answers for a while, but suddenly
the wheels begin to revolve at a terrific speed, and the chains fly
hurtling through the air to the obvious disadvantage of any one who
gets in their way. A few men with lamps are sent to look for these,
whilst the rest endeavour to give the lorry a start by pushing behind.
Start she does, with a sudden leap, and, before she can be stopped,
finds the softest part of the whole field and sinks gently but firmly
into it until supported on her axles. By this time the search party,
having taken all the lanterns with them, is far away, and you feel the
lorry sinking without a possibility of doing anything by the light of
the one match that the battery possesses. The only thing left to do is
to dig her out, support her wheels on planks, and haul her on to the
road again with ropes.
But the march ends at last, usually at about two o'clock in the
morning, and one arrives tired, cold and very sleepy, in the unknown
land. This village is the place we were told to stop at, and the men's
billets are said to be somewhere over there. Glad of a walk, I set
out to find them, and find in succession a row of tents knee-deep in
mud, apparently completely surrounded by barbed wire entanglements,
a barn without a roof, and a shed tenanted by two inquisitive and
particularly skittish cows. I return to the lorries and find the men
drawn up at the side of the road. Having explained the situation, I
call for volunteers to spend the night with the cows. The country-bred
members of the battery fall out and are marched off to deal with
the fierce beasts as best they can. The remainder are carefully
shepherded into the roofless barn and the bottomless tents. Judging
by the language that arises, this latter party are foiled in their
first attack by the wire. But the gunner is an adaptable person, and
all contrive to settle themselves as comfortably as possible in a
wonderfully short time, leaving me free to find the officer's billet,
which turns out to be the drawing-room of a small miller's house. The
only corner left is under the grand piano, and there I lay out my
valise and am soon fast asleep. Let the troubles of the morning care
for themselves!
X
TELEPHONES
The Field Telephone system, that is to say a series of portable
telephone instruments connected by a wire laid as required, forms the
nervous system of every battery, without which it is useless, or at all
events so heavily handicapped that it might as well be out of action.
The observing officer depends upon it to transmit his orders to the
guns, the group or brigade commander transmits his instructions to
his battery commander by its means, and in the battery itself it is
used for intercommunication between the control station, the section
commanders, billets and other points. All these various lines must be
laid as soon as the battery comes into position, and once laid they
must be kept under constant supervision. The test of the efficiency
of any battery is first the accuracy of its shooting, and second its
ability to bring fire to bear upon any point in its area immediately
it is ordered to do so. And experience shows that failure in either
of these respects can be traced in nearly every case to some factor
connected with the telephone system, an instrument or line being
out of order at the critical moment, or an inattentive or careless
telephonist. It is easy to realize, therefore, the importance of the
part played by this instrument in modern artillery practice, and some
account of its habits may not be out of place as throwing light upon a
particularly interesting phase of life in the zone of war.
The line between the battery and the observation post is the most
important of the whole system, for, without it, properly directed fire
is impossible. It is also, from the fact that the observation post
is usually close to the front line, the most exposed, and therefore
most liable to accident. To lay a wire between two given points may
seem to be the simplest thing in the world, as indeed it is, but so
to lay that wire that it will not constantly be cut is a fine art.
There are two ways of laying it, overhead amongst trees and other
supports, or underground, digging a narrow trench in which to bury
it. The first method is the quickest, and if a line is required for
use immediately, the best plan is to lay it overhead, and bury it
subsequently if required. But many perils lie in wait for an overhead
line. Lay it by any route you will, some wandering shrapnel will burst
near by, and one of the bullets, singling out the wire as though it
were its especial target, will cut it neatly through, for preference
at its most inaccessible point. But the enemy is by no means its
greatest danger. There are roads to cross, along which come heavy
lorries laden high with stores of all kinds. Put the line up as high
as you think absolutely safe, and sooner or later an extra tall load
brings it down. Or natural support, such as trees or houses, fails,
and at considerable pains you plant a row of light posts. The next
party of wire layers that comes along, finding these convenient to
their purpose, lay their own line on them in addition. So the process
continues, until the light posts, that you designed to carry one wire
only, collapse under the strain, and down comes the whole tangle. Worst
of all are the unpardonable crimes of some miscreants, who, running
short of wire, cut off as much from your line as they require, leaving
the cable with a yawning gulf in the middle, or, as a variation, tap
their own instruments on to the wire, when the unfortunate observation
officer is left to play a maddening game of cross questions and crooked
answers with some strange unknown battery. If, on the other hand, the
wire is laid underground, a high-explosive shell is sure to find it
and make a neat crater in the middle of it, or else the infantry dig a
communication trench across it, or its insulation breaks down late one
evening and the ensuing night is spent digging it up and looking for
the fault.
The best method of ensuring unbroken communication between two points
is, of course, to lay more than one line, but wire is usually scarce,
and this course is not always possible. Even if this is done, there
must be places where the lines run close together, and these are
just the places where the shells are sure to drop. During the Four
Days' bombardment we had three lines between the battery and our
observation post, and on two separate occasions all three were cut at
the same time by shell-fire. The quiet deeds of heroism performed by
artillery telephonists that are never heard of would fill a volume by
themselves. There is very little of the excitement and emulation that
makes many a man in the midst of his comrades the hero of a glorious
moment, none of the intoxication of battle that banishes all thought
of personal safety, in the experiences of a man who goes out to repair
a wire under fire. He has plenty of time to think of the dangers he is
running, to anticipate the fall of every shell without being able to
get out of its way, to wonder what it feels like to lie in agony on the
ground, torn by a splinter. Slowly and alone he must follow the track
of the wire until he finds the break, and having found it he must set
to work to repair it where it lies, a proceeding that may often take a
very considerable time. And it is more than probable that nobody but
himself and his chum ever knows anything about it. Yet there is never
the least hesitation on his part to go out; on one of the occasions
mentioned when our lines were cut, the linesman picked up his tools and
started along the line as a matter of course, although the determined
nature of the hostile shelling was plainly visible, and some of the
projectiles were charged with gas. He finished his job and came back
to us full of his adventures, which seemed to afford him immense
amusement; indeed, I think he was one of those who have learnt that the
surest safeguard against fear is a sense of humour, and that danger, if
treated as a huge joke, ceases to have any terrors.
And quite apart from actual danger, the linesman's life is a troubled
one. As one never knows when the lines may not be required in a hurry,
telephonists and linesmen relieve one another day and night. Every
few minutes the stations ring one another up, and if no reply can be
obtained, the linesman at the calling station starts along the line
to find the fault and repair it. It may be that the wire has been
cut by shell-fire, or by accidents inherent to its nature, or by the
sinful practices of others. Or again, it may sometimes happen that
the linesman proceeds on his way, testing as he goes, and finding all
correct, until at last he reaches the other station, to discover that
the operator there has for some reason disconnected his instrument
and forgotten to connect it up again, in which case a lurid and fiery
scene takes place, consisting of picturesque recrimination on the part
of the outraged linesman, and no less picturesque expostulation on
the part of the telephonist, to the effect that it was somebody else's
fault. The acrimony displayed varies directly as the temper of the
disputants and the distance between the two stations.