battalion headquarters; this time by daylight. Its walls were chipped
by bullets that had come over the breastworks. The major was just
getting up from his blankets in the cellar. By this time I had a real
trench appetite. Not until after breakfast did it occur to me, with
some surprise, that I had not washed my face.
“The food was just as good, wasn’t it?” remarked the major. “We get
quite used to such breaches of convention. Besides, you had been up all
night, so your breakfast might be called your after-the-theatre supper.”
With him I went to see what the ruins of Neuve Chapelle looked like by
daylight. The destruction was not all the result of one bombardment,
for the British had been shelling Neuve Chapelle off and on all winter.
Of course, there is the old earthquake comparison. All writers have
used it. But it is quite too feeble for Neuve Chapelle. An earthquake
merely shakes down houses. The shells had done a good deal more than
that. They had crushed the remains of the houses as under the pestle
head in a mortar; blown walls into dust; taken bricks from the east
side of the house over to the west and thrown them back with another
explosion.
Neuve Chapelle had been literally flailed with the high explosive
projectiles of the new British artillery, which the British had to
make after the war began to compete with what the Germans already
had; for poor, lone, wronged, bullied Germany quite unprepared--
Austria with her fifty millions does not count--was fighting on the
defensive against wicked, aggressive enemies who were fully prepared.
This explains why she invaded France and took possession of towns like
Neuve Chapelle to defend her poor, unready people from the French, who
had been plotting and planning “the day” when they would conquer the
Germans.
Bits of German equipment were mixed with ruins of clocks and family
pictures and household utensils. I noticed a bicycle which had been cut
in two, its parts separated by twenty feet; one wheel was twisted into
a spool of wire, the other simply mashed.
Where was the man who had kept the shop with a few letters of his name
still visible on a splintered bit of board? Where the children who had
played in the littered square in front of the church, with its steeples
and walls piles of stone that had crushed the worshippers’ benches?
Refugees somewhere back of the British lines, working on the roads if
strong enough, helping France any way they could, not murmuring, even
smiling, and praying for victory, which would let them return to their
homes and daily duties. To their homes!
XVIII
WITH THE GUNS
A war of explosions--And machines--Battle-panorama style--Value
of surprise--Ever hungry guns--Accurate or blind and groping
guns--Demon guns--Balloon observations--Finding the guns--
Ingenious concealments--“Funk pits”--Mechanism--Bookkeeping
and trigonometry--“Cover!”--The German aeroplane--New
howitzers and their crews--The general--A gun specialist--
The “hell-for-leather” guns--The “curtain of fire”--In
operation--Spotting the targets--How the system works--A
chagrined gunner--A bull’s eye!--The Germans retort--Horrible
fascination of war--A queer “refugee”--“Besides, they are women
and children.”
It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards
of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and mines laid
under the enemy’s trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to
three-inch and machine guns; a war of machinery, with man still the
pre-eminent machine.
Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at
the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand
passes of all other travellers. Any one who tried to keep out of range
of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all a matter
of chance, with long odds or short odds, according to the neighbourhood
you are in. If shells come, they come without warning and without
ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is--at least, I am.
“Gawd! W’at a ’ole!” remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of
an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.
It is only eighteen years ago that, at the battle of Domoko in the
Greco-Turkish war, I saw half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on
the plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open and discharge salvos with
black powder, in the good, old, battle-panorama style. One battery
of modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes.
Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud
of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of
Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact
on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked:
“There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!”
He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché. The voices of
the guns along the front seem never silent. In some direction they are
always firing. When one night the reports from a certain quarter seemed
rather heavy, I asked the reason the next day.
“No, not very heavy. No attack,” a division staff officer explained.
“The _Boches_ had been building a redoubt and we turned on some
h. e. s.”--meaning high explosive shells.
Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been
labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They had
kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly
and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was
placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the
British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of modern war.
What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane had
been watching them day by day and that the spot was nicely registered
on a British gunner’s map. On this map it was a certain numbered point.
Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at
that point. The gunners waited till the house of cards was up before
knocking it to pieces.
Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without
getting a single shell. Then it may get a score in ten minutes; or it
may be shelled regularly every day for weeks. “They are shelling X
again,” or, “They have been leaving Z alone for a long time,” is a part
of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud of having escaped
altogether and proud of the number and size of the shells received.
“Did you get any?” I asked the division staff officer, who had told me
about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common question
that, at the front, “Did you get any?” (meaning Germans). A practical
question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit
of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with
casualties.
“Yes, quite a number,” said the officer. “Our observer saw them lying
about.”
The guns are watching for targets at all hours--the ever hungry,
ever ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically calculating,
marvellously accurate, and also the guessing, wondering, blind,
groping, helpless, guns, which toss their steel messengers over
streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for their unseen prey in a
wide landscape.
Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall
or huddle in a dugout as you hear an approaching scream, and the earth
trembles, the air is wracked by a concussion, and the cry of a man a
few yards away tells of a hit. Very accurate when still others, sent
from muzzles six or seven thousand yards away, fall in that same line
of trench! Very accurate when, before an infantry attack, with bursts
of shrapnel bullets they cut to bits the barbed-wire entanglements in
front of a trench! The power of chaos that they seem to possess when
the fighting-trench and the dugouts and all the human warrens which
protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!
Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in
a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not
be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the
amount of damage they have done is guesswork; and helpless without the
infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for
them.
One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach,
their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible
arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an enemy’s
demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all
resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards
its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of
some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the
enemy’s eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can
be forged.
Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the
amount of hell sent by the enemy’s which you have tasted. After you
have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing
with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are convinced
that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the attitude
of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say, “Nice old
demon!” and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into the German
lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so quickly
develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take
too much personal interest in you.
You must have some one to show you the way or you would not find any
guns. A man with a dog trained to hunt guns might spend a week on the
gun-position area covering ten miles of the front and not locate half
the guns. He might miss “Grandmother” and “Sister” and “Betsy” and
“Mike” and even “Mister Archibald,” who is the only one who does not
altogether try to avoid publicity.
When an attack or an artillery bombardment is on and you go to as high
ground as possible for a bird’s-eye view of battle, all you see is the
explosion of the shells; never anything of the guns which are firing.
In the distance over the German lines and in the foreground over the
British lines is a balloon, shaped like a caterpillar with folded
wings--a chrysalis of a caterpillar. Tugging at its moorings, it
turns this way and that with the breeze. The speck directly beneath it
through the glasses becomes an ordinary balloon basket and other specks
attached to a guy rope play the part of the tail of a kite, helping
to steady the type of balloon which has taken the place of the old
spherical type for observation.
Any one who has been up in a captive spherical balloon knows how
difficult it is to keep his glasses focussed on any object, because
of the jerking and pitching and trembling due to the envelope’s
response to air-movements. The new type partly overcomes this
drawback. To shrapnel their thin envelope is as vulnerable as a paper
drum-head to a knife; but I have seen them remain up defiantly when
shells were bursting within three or four hundred yards, which their
commanders seemed to understand was the limit of the German battery’s
reach. Again, I have seen a shrapnel burst alongside within range;
and five minutes later the balloon was down and out of sight. No
balloon observer hopes to see the enemy’s guns. He is watching for
shell-bursts, in order to inform the guns of his side whether or not
they are on the target.
Riding along the roads at the front, one may know that there is a
battery a stone’s throw away only when a blast from a hidden gun-muzzle
warns him of its presence. It was wonderful to me that the artillery
general who took me gun-seeing knew where his own guns were, let alone
the enemy’s. I imagine that he could return to a field and locate a
four-leafed clover that he had seen on a previous stroll. His dogs
of war had become foxes of war, burrowing in places which wise, old
father foxes knew were safest from detection. Hereafter, I shall not be
surprised to see a muzzle poking its head out of an oven, or from under
grandfather’s chair or a farm wagon, or up a tree, or in a garret.
Think of the last place in the world for emplacing a gun and one may be
there; think of the most likely place and one may be there.
You might be walking across the fields and minded to go through a hedge
and bump into a black ring of steel with a gun’s crew grinning behind
it. They would grin because you had given proof of how well their gun
was concealed. But they wouldn’t grin as much as they would if they
saw the enemy plunking shells into another hedge two hundred yards
distant, where the German aeroplane observer thought he had seen a
battery and had not.
“I’ll show you a big one, first!” said the general.
We left the car at a cottage and walked along a lane. I looked all
about the premises and could see only some artillerymen. An officer led
me up to a gun-breech; at least, I know a gun-breech when it is one
foot from my nose and a soldier has removed its covering. But I shall
not tell how that gun was concealed; the method was so audacious that
it was entirely successful. The Germans would like to know and we don’t
want them to know. A pencil-point on their map for identification, and
they would send a whirlwind of shells at that gun.
And then?
Would the gun try to fire back? No. Its gunners probably would not know
the location of any of the German batteries which had concentrated on
their treasure. They would desert the gun. If they did not, they ought
to be court-martialed for needlessly risking the precious lives of
trained men. They would make for the “funk pits,” just as the gunners
of any other power would.
The chances are that the gun itself would not be hit bodily by a shell.
Fragments might strike it without causing more than an abrasion; for
big guns have pretty thick cuticle. When the storm was over, the
gunners would move the gun to another hiding-place; which would mean a
good deal of work on account of its size.
It is the inability of gun to see gun, and even when seen to knock
out gun, which has put an end to the so-called artillery duel of
pitched-battle days, when cannon walloped cannon to keep cannon from
walloping the infantry. Now when there is an action, though guns still
go after guns if they know where they are, most of the firing is done
against trenches and to support trenches and infantry works, or with a
view to demoralising the infantry. Concentration of artillery fire will
demolish an enemy’s trench and let your infantry take possession of the
wreckage remaining; but then the enemy’s artillery concentrates on your
infantry and frequently makes their new habitation untenable.
Noiselessly except for a little click, with chickens clucking in a
field near by, the big breech-block which held the shell fast, sending
all the power of the explosion out of the muzzle, was swung back and
one looked through the shining tube of steel, with its rifling which
caught the driving band and gave the shell its rotation and accuracy in
its long journey, which would close when, descending at the end of its
parabola, its nose struck brick or earth or pavement and it exploded.
Wheels that lift and depress and swing the muzzle, and gadgets with
figures on them, and other scales which play between the map and the
gadgets, and atmospheric pressure and wind variation, all worked out
with the same precision under a French hedge as on board a battleship
where the gun-mounting is fast to massive ribs of steel--it seemed a
matter of bookkeeping and trigonometry rather than war.
If a shell from this gun were to hit at the corner of Wall Street and
Broadway at the noon hour, it would probably kill and wound a hundred
men. If it went into the dugout of a support trench it would get
everybody there; but if it went ten yards beyond the trench into the
open field it would probably get nobody.
“Cover!” some one exclaimed, while we were looking at the gun; and
everybody promptly got under the branches of a tree or a shed. A German
aeroplane was cruising in our direction. If the aviator saw a group of
men standing about, he might draw conclusions and pass the wireless
word to send in some shells at whatever number on the German gunners’
map was ours.
These gunners loved their gun; loved it for the power which it could
put into a blow under their trained hands; loved it for the care and
the labour it had meant for them. It is the way of gunners to love
their gun, or they would not be good gunners. Of all the guns I saw
that day, I think that two big howitzers meant the most to their
masters. These had just arrived. They had been set up only two days.
They had not yet fired against the enemy. For many months the gunners
had drilled in England, and had tried their “eight-inch hows” out on
the target range, and brought them across the Channel, and nursed them
along the French roads, and finally set them up in their hidden lair.
Now they waited for observers to assist them in registration.
When the general approached there was a call to turn out the guard; but
he stopped that. At the front there is an end of the ceremoniousness
of the barracks. Military formality disappears. Discipline, as well
as other things, is simpler and more real. The men went on with their
recess, playing football in a nearby field.
The officers possibly were a trifle diffident and uncertain; they
had not yet the veterans’ manner. It was clear that they had done
everything required by the text-book of theory--the latest, up-to-date
text-book of experience at the front as taught in England. When they
showed us how they had stored their stock of shells to be safe from a
shot by the enemy, one remarked that the method was according to the
latest directions, though there was some difference among military
experts on the subject. When there is a difference, what is the
beginner to do? An old hand, of course, does it his way until an order
makes him do otherwise.
The general had a suggestion about the application of the method.
He had little to say, the general, and it all was in the spirit of
comradeship and much to the point. Few things escaped his observation.
It seems fairly true that one who knows any branch of human endeavour
well makes his work appear easy. Once a gunner always a gunner is
characteristic of all armies. The general had spent his life with guns.
He was a specialist visiting his plant; one of the staff specialists
responsible to a corps commander for the work of the guns on a certain
section of map, for accuracy and promptness of fire when it was needed
in the commander’s plans.
If the newcomers put their shells into the target on their first trial
they had qualified; and sometimes new-comers shoot quite as well as
veterans, which is a surprise to both and the best kind of news for
the general who is in charge of an expanding plant. New guns are just
beginning to come; England is only beginning to make war. It takes time
to make a gun and time to train men to fire it. The war will be won by
gunners and infantry that knew nothing of guns or drill when the war
began.
“Here are some who have been in France from the first,” said
the general, when we came to a battery of field-guns; of the
eighteen-pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the
hell-for-leather guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into
the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the
pitched-battle conditions, before armies settled down in trenches and
growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of
calibres which we associate with battleships and coast fortifications.
These are called “light stuff” and “whiz-bangs” now, in army parlance.
They throw an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets,
and so fast that one chases another through the air. There has been
so much talk about the need of heavy guns that you might think
eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German
line broken, these are the ones which could follow as rapidly as the
engineers could lay bridges for them to cross.
They are the boys who weave the “curtain of fire” which you read about
in the French official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which
demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get
into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of
the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is
sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced
water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder crew
in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The gun itself
seems to possess intelligence.
There was the finesse of gunners’ craft, worthy of veterans, in the
way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put
some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands.
They did not change the location of their battery, and their judgment
that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another
object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention their “funk
pits,” which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For the veterans
knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye to the protection
which comes of experience with German high explosives. Their expert
knowledge of all the ins and outs of their business had been fought
into them for eleven months.
Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard.
Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front
the German Staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at all
the orchards, one by one, they might locate it--and then again they
might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.
It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the
comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden and tables and
chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England
sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to
remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how
scrupulous they were about litter.
For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German
aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their week’s washing, taking
care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every day
they received London papers and letters from home. When they were
needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip a shell in
the breech and send it with their compliments to the Germans. They were
camping out at His Majesty’s expense in the pleasant land of France in
the joyous summer time; and on the roof of sods over their guns were
pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from the gun-muzzles.
It was when leaving another battery that, out of the tail of my
eye, I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp,
ear-piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when
a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the
report, where, through undergrowth, we stepped among the busy groups
around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres.
An order for some “heavy stuff” at a certain point on the map was
being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the shade
of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that
seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of
concentrated destruction, and closing the door again. All that detail
of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen
target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically
as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as
practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of
appearances in the same act on the stage.
All ready, the word given, a crack, and through the air in front you
saw a wingless, black object rising in a curve against the soft blue
sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of
water through a break in the garden hose, multiplied by ten, rising
to its zenith and then descending till it passed out of sight behind a
green bank of foliage on the horizon.