meet Captain P---- and the stranger civilian. They had to come out,
as there was no room to take us inside; and sometimes they talked shop
together after I had answered the usual question, “Is America against
us?” There seemed to be an idea that we were, possibly because of the
prodigious advertising tactics of a minority. But any feeling that we
might be did not interfere with their simple courtesy, or lead them to
express any bitterness or break into argument.
“How are things going on over your side?”
“Nicely.”
“Any shelling?”
“A little this morning. No harm done.”
“We cleaned out one bad sniper to-day.”
“Ought to have some sandbags up to-night.”
“It’s a bad place there. They’ve got a machine gun trained which has
quite a sweep. I asked if the artillery shouldn’t put in a word, but
the general didn’t think it worth while.”
“You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every time.
We’re gradually getting shipshape, though.”
Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid no
attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet
you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a way
of picking off tall officers, who are standing up among their houses.
In the course of their talk they happened to mention such an instance,
though not with reference to the two bullets I have mentioned.
“Poor S---- did not last long. He had been out only three weeks.”
“How is J----? Hit badly?”
“Through the shoulder; not seriously.”
“H---- is back. Recovered very quickly.”
Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has
hit--another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this
group of officers might be gone to-morrow.
“I have one, sir,” said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned
past his station. “Bullet went right through the head and came out the
peak!”
It was time that Captain P---- was back to his own command. As we came
to his company’s line word was just being passed from sentry to sentry:
“Not firing. Patrols going out.”
It was midnight now.
“We’ll go in the other direction,” said Captain P----, when he had
learned that there was no news.
This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had something
to say.
XVII
WITH THE IRISH
The Irish have something to say!--The Irish in America--The
misguided Germans--The American’s visit an event--Veterans of
Mons--Eggs in the trenches!--Irish hospitality--A dum-dum
souvenir--A memorable drink--Sixty yards from the Germans--The
Germans at work--British discipline, a comparison--A vision
of the German dead--German diaries--Pawns of war--A heaven
of soap and hot water--In the captain’s “house”--Soldier shop
talk--Trench appetite--A village literally flailed--Pity the
refugees.
Here, not the Irish Sea lay between the broad _a_ and the brogue, but
the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets
fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their
owners’ hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped
from England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would
have something to say was correct. They had; for that matter, there
are always individual Irishmen in the English regiments, lest English
phlegm should let conversation run short.
The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in height,
with a heavy moustache, and the ear-pieces of his cap tied under his
chin though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly in front
of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he looked a cowled
and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I certainly did
not want any physical argument with a man of his build.
“Who are you?” he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the
veranda window with a jimmy.
For the nearer you get to the front, the more you feel that you are in
the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight.
Every one is doing something definite as a part of the machine except
yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self-conscious
conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown.
Captain P---- was a little way back in another passage. I was alone
and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and
rifles.
“A German spy! That’s why I am dressed this way, so as not to excite
suspicion,” I was going to say, when a call from Captain P----
identified me, and the sentry’s attitude changed as suddenly as if the
inspector of police had come along and told a patrolman that I might
pass through the fire-lines.
“So it’s you, is it, right from America?” he said. “I’ve a sister
living at Nashua, New Hampshire, U. S. A., with three brothers in the
United States army.”
Whether he had or not you can judge as well as I by the twinkle in his
eye. He might have had five, and again he might not have one. I was a
tenderfoot seeing the trenches.
“It’s mesilf that’s going to America when me sarvice in the army is up
in one year and six months,” he continued. “That’s some time yet. I’m
going if I’m not killed by the Germans. It’s a way that they have, or
we wouldn’t be killing them.”
“What are you going to do in America? Enlist in the army?”
“No. I’m looking for a better job. I’m thinking I’ll be one of your
millionaires. Shure, but that would be to me taste.”
“What do you think of the Germans?”
“It’s little thinking we’re doing and more shooting. Now do ye know our
opinion of them?”
“Some of the Irish in America are pro-German.”
“Now will ye listen to that! Their words come out of their mouths
without acquainting their heads and hearts with what they are saying.
Did you ever find nine Irishmen on the right side without one doing
the talking for the divil for the joy of argument? It’s the Irish that
would be at home in the German army doing the goose-step and taking
orders from the Kaiser, is it not, now?”
“And what about the Germans--are they winning?”
“They started out strong, singing and goose-stepping high, for the
Kaiser had told them that if they died for him they could burgle the
world, and they thought it a grand idea. Shure, we accommodated them.
There’s plenty of them dead, and some of them are wondering if, when
they’re all dead, the Kaiser will have any more of the world than when
he started, which makes them sorry for him and they give him another
‘Hoch’! ’Tis the nature of them, because they’ve never been told
different.”
Not one Irishman was speaking really, but a dozen. They came out of
their little houses and dugouts to gather around the brazier; and for
every remark I made I received a fusillade in reply. It was an event,
an American appearing in that trench in the small hours of the morning.
“I’ve a brother in Oklahoma!” said one.
“Is he a millionaire yet?” I asked.
“If he is he’s keeping it a secret!”
Some of them had been at Mons; a few of them had gone through the whole
campaign without a scratch; more had been wounded and returned to the
front. I like to ask that question, “Were you at Mons?” and get the
answer, “Yes, sir, I was; I was through it all!” without boasting--a
Mons veteran need not boast--but in the spirit of pride. To have been
at Mons, where that hard-bought retreat of one against five began, will
ever be enough glory for English, Scotch, Irish, or Welsh. It is like
saying, “I was in Pickett’s charge!”
A trench-toughened, battle-toughened old sergeant was sitting in the
doorway of his dugout, frying a strip of bacon over one rim of the
brazier and making tea over the other. The bacon sizzled with an
appetising aroma and a bullet sizzled harmlessly overhead. Behind that
wall of sandbags all were perfectly safe, unless a shell came. But
who worries about shells? It is like worrying about being struck by
lightning when clouds gather in a summer sky.
“It looks like good bacon,” I remarked.
“It is that!” said the sergeant. “And the hungrier ye are the better.
It’s your nose that’s telling ye so this minute. I can see that ye’re
hungry yoursilf!”
“Then you’re pretty well fed?”
“Well fed, is it? It’s stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the
paté what-do-you-call-it? Eating is our pastime. We eat when we’ve
nothing else to do and when we’ve got to do something. We get eggs up
here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the
trenches!”
When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some eggs
in evidence.
“And if ye’ll not have the bacon, ye’ll have a drop of tea. Mind, now,
while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your
tongue a liar!”
Irish hospitality responded to the impulse of a warm Irish heart.
Wouldn’t I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles and
officers’ whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and German
diaries.
“It’s easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!”
I was told. “And will ye look at this and take it home to give your
pro-German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at
the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German.”
He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of
the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German bullet
is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end thrust
against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five hundred
yards, which is more than the average distance between German and
British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of a dum-dum
and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread through
the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm thus hit must
almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting that this is a
regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what wickedness is
in the power of the sinister one.
“But ye’ll take the tea,” said the sergeant, “with a little rum hot in
it. ’Twill take the chill out of your bones.”
“What if I haven’t a chill in my bones?”
“Maybe it’s there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before
an hour longer--or afther ye’re home between the sheets with the
rheumatiz, and ye’ll be saying, ‘Why didn’t I take that glass?’ which
I’m holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk.”
Held out by a man who had been at Mons and “through it all”! It was
a memorable drink. Champagne poured out by a butler at your elbow is
insipid beside it. Snatches of brogue followed me from the brazier’s
glow when I insisted that I must be going.
Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to the
German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had “dug in” after
the counter-attacks which had followed the battle had been checked.
Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers
become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build your
dam against another flood.
“We are within about sixty yards of the Germans,” said Captain P----,
at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the
braziers well behind.
Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct
in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about
twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an
Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the
homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty
yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have
been as close as five yards--only a wall of earth between them. Where
a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one
side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.
The Germans were as busy as beavers dam building. They had a lot of
work to do before they had their new defences right. We heard them
driving stakes and spading; we heard their voices with snatches of
sentences intelligible and occasionally the energetic, shouted,
guttural commands of their officers. All through that night I never
heard a British officer speak above a conversational tone. The
orders were definite enough, but given with a certain companionable
kindliness. I have spoken of the genuine affection which his men showed
for Captain P----, and I was beginning to appreciate that it was not a
particular instance.
“What if you should shout at Tommy in the German fashion?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t have it; he’d get rebellious,” was the reply. “No, you
mustn’t yell at Tommy. He’s a little temperamental about some things
and he will not be treated as if he were just a human machine.”
Yet no one will question the discipline of the British soldier.
Discipline means that the officer knows his men, and British
discipline, which bears a retreat like that from Mons, requires that
the man likes to follow his officers, believes in his officers, loves
his officers. Each army and each people to its own ways.
Sixty yards! And the dead between the trenches and death lurking ready
at a trigger’s pull should life show itself! When daylight comes the
British sing out their “Good morning, Germans!” and the Germans answer,
“Good morning, British!” without adding, “We hope to kill some of
you to-day!” Ragging banter and jest and worse than jest and grim
defiance are exchanged between the trenches when they are within such
easy hearing distance of each other; but always from a safe position
behind the parapet which the adversaries squint across through their
periscopes. The thing was ridiculous.
At the gibe business the German is, perhaps, better than the Briton.
Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy
fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk, that
is getting “jumpy.” The Germans in front roared out their contempt
in a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans
also became “jumpy” and began tearing the air with bullets, firing
against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made some
characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when he is
played on the music hall stage. Possibly he feels the inconsistency of
laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as his officers say,
he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of analysing his
emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a philosopher is Mr.
Atkins, Britain’s professional fighting man, who was the only kind of
fighting man she had ready for the war.
Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be
given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares
till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with
the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that
night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German
dead.
You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a heavy
rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the spots
where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of deeper
water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and scattered dead,
with arms outstretched or under them as they fell, and faces white
even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned toward you in the
charge that failed under the withering blasts of machine guns, ripping
out two or three hundred shots a minute, and well-aimed rifle bullets,
each bullet getting its man. Threatening that charge would have seemed
to a recruit, but measured and calculated in certainty of failure in
the minds of veteran defenders, who knew that the wheat could not stand
before their mowers. Man’s flesh is soft and a bullet is hard and
travels fast.
One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its
burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to have
gone home. It was: “Why don’t you stop singing and bury your dead?” But
the Germans, having given no armistice in other times when British dead
lay before the trenches, asked for none here. The dead were nearer to
the British than to the Germans. The discomfort would be in British and
not German nostrils. And the dead cannot fight; they can help no more
to win victory for the Fatherland. And the time is A. D., 1915. Two or
three thousand German dead altogether, perhaps--not many out of the
Kaiser’s millions. Yet they seemed a great many to one who saw them
lying there.
We stopped to read by the light of a brazier some German soldiers’
diaries that the Irishmen had. They were cheap little books, bought for
a few cents, each one telling the dead man’s story and revealing the
monotony of a soldier’s existence in Europe to-day. These pawns of war
had been marched here and there, they never knew why. The last notes
were when orders came entraining them. They did not know that they were
to be sent out of those woods yonder to recover Neuve Chapelle--out of
those woods in the test of all their drill and waiting.
A Bavarian officer--for these were Bavarians--actually rode in that
charge. He must have worked himself up to a strangely exalted optimism
and contempt of British fire. Or was it that he, too, did not know what
he was going against? that only the German general knew? Neither he nor
his horse lasted long; not more than a dozen seconds. The thing was so
splendidly foolhardy that in some little war it might have become the
saga of a regiment, the subject of ballads and paintings. In this war
it was an incident heralded for a day in one command and forgotten the
next.
“Good night!” called the Irish.
“Good night and good luck!”
“Tell them in America that the Irish are still fighting!”
“Good luck, and may your travelling be aisy; but if ye trip, may ye
fall into a gold mine!”
We were back with the British regulars; and here, also, many of the
men remained up around the braziers. The hours of duty of the few on
watch do not take many of the twenty-four hours. One may sleep when he
chooses in the little houses behind the breastworks. Night melts into
day and day into night in the monotony of mud and sniping rifle-fire.
By-and-by it is your turn to go into reserve; your turn to get out
of your clothes--for there are no pajamas for officers or men in
these “crawls,” as they are sometimes called. Boots off is the only
undressing; boots off and puttees unloosed, which saves the feet. Yes,
by-and-by the march back to the rear, where there are tubs filled with
hot water and an outfit of clean clothes awaiting you, and nothing to
do but rest and sleep.
“How soon after we leave the trenches may we cheer?” officers have been
asked in the dead of winter, when water stood deep over the porous mud
and morning found a scale of ice around the legs.
You, nicely testing the temperature of your morning tub; you, satisfied
only with faucets of hot and cold water and a mat to stand on--you
know nothing about the joy of bathing. Your bath is a mere part of the
daily routine of existence. Try the trenches and get itchy with vermin;
then you will know that heaven consists of soap and hot water.
No bad odour assails your nostrils wherever you may go in the British
lines. Its cleanliness, if nothing else, would make British army
comradeship enjoyable. My wonder never ceases how Tommy keeps himself
so neat; how he manages to shave every day and get a part, at least, of
the mud off his uniform. It makes him feel more as if he were “at home”
in barracks.
From the breastworks, Captain P---- and I went for a stroll in the
village, or the site of the village, silent except for the occasional
singing of a bullet. When we returned he lighted the candle on a stick
stuck into the wall of his little earth-roofed house and suggested
a nap. It was three o’clock in the morning. Now I could see that my
rubber boots had grown so heavy because I was carrying so much of the
soil of Northern France. It looked as if I had gout in both feet--the
over-bandaged, stage type of gout--which were encased in large mud
poultices. I tried to stamp off the incubus, but it would not go. I
tried scraping one foot on the other, and what I scraped off seemed to
reattach itself as fast as I could remove it.
“Don’t try!” said the captain. “Lie down and pull your boots off in the
doorway. Perhaps you will get some sleep before daybreak.”
Sleep! Does a débutante go to sleep at her first ball? Sleep in such
good company, the company of this captain, who was smiling all the
while with his eyes; smiling at his mud house, at the hardships in the
trenches, and, I hope, at having a guest, who had been with armies
before!
It was the first time that I had been in the trenches all night; the
first time, indeed, when I had not been taken into them by an escort in
a kind of promenade. On this visit I was in the family. If it is the
right kind of a family that is the way to get a good impression. There
would be plenty of time to sleep when I returned to London.
So Captain P---- and I lay there talking. One felt the dampness of the
earth under his body and the walls exuded moisture. The average cellar
was dry by comparison. “You will get your death of cold!” any mother
would cry in alarm if her boy were found even sitting on such cold,
wet ground. For it was a clammy night of early spring. Yet, peculiarly
enough, few men get colds from this exposure. One gets colds from
draughts in overheated rooms much oftener. Luckily, it was not raining;
it had been raining most of the winter in the flat country of Northern
France and Flanders.
“It is very horrible, this kind of warfare,” said the captain. He was
thinking of the method of it, rather than of the discomforts. “All war
is very horrible, of course.” Regular soldiers rarely take any other
view. They know war.
“With your wounded arm you might be back in England on leave,” I
suggested.
“Oh, that arm is all right!” he replied. “This is what I am paid for”--
which I had heard regulars say before. “And it is for England!” he
added, in his quiet way. “Sometimes I think we should fight better if
we officers could hate the Germans,” he went on. “The German idea is
that you must hate if you are going to fight well. But we can’t hate.”
Sound views he had about the war; sounder than I have heard from the
lips of cabinet ministers. For these regular officers are specialists
in war.
“Do you think that we shall starve the Germans out?”
“No. We must win by fighting,” he replied. This was in March, 1915.
“You know,” he went on, taking another tack, “when one gets back to
England out of this muck he wants good linen and everything very nice.”
“Yes. I’ve found the same after roughing it,” I agreed. “One is most
particular that he has every comfort to which civilisation entitles
him.”
We chatted on. Much of our talk was soldier shop talk, which you will
not care to hear. Twice we were interrupted by an outburst of firing,
and the captain hurried out to ascertain the reason. Some false alarm
had started the rifles speaking from both sides. A fusillade for two or
three minutes and the firing died down to silence.
Dawn broke and it was time for me to go; and with daylight, when danger
of a night surprise was over, the captain would have his sleep. I was
leaving him to his mud house and his bed on the wet ground without a
blanket. It was more important to have sandbags up for the breastworks
than to have blankets; and as the men had not yet received theirs, he
had none himself.
“It’s not fair to the men,” he said. “I don’t want anything they don’t
have.”
No better food and no better house and no warmer garments! He spoke not
in any sense of stated duty, but in the affection of the comradeship
of war; the affection born of that imperturbable courage of his
soldiers, who had stood a stone wall of cool resolution against German
charges when it seemed as if they must go. The glamour of war may have
departed, but not the brotherhood of hardship and dangers shared.
What had been a routine night to him had been a great night to me; one
of the most memorable of my life.
“I was glad you could come,” he said, as I made my adieu, quite as if
he were saying adieu to a guest at home in England.
Some of the soldiers called their cheery good-byes; and with a
lieutenant to guide me, I set out while the light was still dusky,
leaving the comforting parapet to the rear to go into the open, four
hundred yards from the Germans. A German, though he could not have seen
us distinctly, must have noted something moving. Two of his bullets
came rather close before we passed out of his vision among some trees.