boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel
which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part
in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while
the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their
charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the
days of the cave-dwellers.
There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It would
have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The battery
commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns
without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he was too busy
to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a
telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew
whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree
to make in the next if it were not; or if the word came to shift the
point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake the enemy up here
and there along a certain length of trench.
At another wire-end some one was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in
the kind of place where I once found an observer, who was sitting upon
a cushion looking out through a chink broken in a wall, with a signal
corps operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to
allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision;
and even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the
chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in
uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies within
your own lines, looking for such holes.
From this post I could make out the German and the British trenches in
muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields, and
the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge
and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had language for
him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was no telling
when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a hole for
his remains. If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk pit,
as the gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move
on with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in
another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which
suited his taste better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in
that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually
in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches, are
set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to locate
the other’s eyes, the other’s guns and troops, and the least movement
which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.
“Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the
sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery
officers.
Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust
and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from the
orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was
to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing
in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show
firing, this that we watched from an observing station, but part of
the day’s work for the guns and the general. First; the map; “here and
there,” as an officer’s finger pointed; and then one looked across the
fields, green and brown and golden with summer crops.
Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm.
We were going to put some “heavy stuff” in there and some “light
stuff,” too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a
certain tree.
Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in
a certain building. “Heavy stuff” exclusively for this.
No enemy’s wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather
without interruption; and no German working party ought to be allowed
to build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the
monotony of their drudgery.
Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high
explosives which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth
large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals.
Frequently, not only the number of shells to be fired, but also the
intervals between them is given by the artillery commander, as a part
of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and
it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans.
One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By the
effect of the enemy’s shells you judge what the effect of yours must
be. Months of experience have done away with all theory and practice
has become much the same with either adversary. For example, let a
German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the
enemy’s guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines, if
he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the
neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any rate,
you may kill a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on one
side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There is no
sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being
killed.
By the scream of a shell the practised ear of the artilleryman can tell
whether it comes from a gun with a low trajectory or from a howitzer,
whose projectile rises higher and falls at a sharper angle which
enables it to enter the trenches; and he can even tell approximately
the calibre.
A scream sweeping past from our rear, and we knew that this was for
the redoubt, as that was to have the first turn. A volume of dust and
smoke breaking from the earth short of the redoubt; a second’s delay of
hearing the engine whistle after the burst of steam in the distance on
a winter day, and then the sound of the burst. The next was over. With
the third the “heavy stuff” ought to be right on.
But don’t forget that there was also an order for some “light
stuff,” identified as shrapnel by its soft, nimbus-like puff which
was scattering bullets as if giving chase to that working party as
it hastened to cover. There you had the ugly method of this modern
artillery fire: death shot downward from the air and leaping up out
of the earth. Unhappily, the third was not on, nor the fourth--not
exactly on. Exactly on is the way the British gunners like to fill an
order f.o.b., express charges prepaid, for the Germans.
Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting. It was not very good
in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in
developing accuracy. At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards’
range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where
they should.
No, not very good; the general murmured as much. He did not need to say
so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for the shooting, who was
in touch with his batteries by wire. The officer knew it. He was the
high-strung, ambitious sort. You had better not become a gunner unless
you are. Any good-enough temperament is ruled off wasting munitions.
Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his
hair. To have this happen in the presence of that quiet-mannered
general, after all his efforts to remedy the error in those guns!
But the general was quite human. He was not the “strafing” kind.
“I know those guns have an error!” he said, as he put his hand on the
officer’s arm. That was all; but that was a good deal to the officer.
Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men. The officer had
suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.
Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep
any general from being down-hearted. Neither guns, nor the powder
which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the
gunner, nor the adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the
first shot, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose
from the target.
“Right on!”
And again and again--right on!
The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its
heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane’s
conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much
wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the
operators was one hundred per cent.
“Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general. “It’s always
hard to hold gunners down when they are on the target like that.”
He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the
temptation himself. The Germans got two extra for full measure.
Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been
enough. Conservation of shells has become a first principle of the
artillerists’ duty. The number fired by either side in the course of
the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising. Economy
would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-breech.
The men in the trenches are always calling for shells. They want a tree
or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men
at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that
is with commanders who know the situation.
“The _Boches_ will be coming back at us soon, you will see!” said one
of the officers at our observation post. “They always do. The other day
they chose this particular spot for their target”--which was a good
reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.
Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is
a you-hit-me-and-I’ll-hit-you character to siege warfare. Gun-fire
provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It
was not long before we heard the whish of German shells passing some
distance away.
They say the sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling
and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the
object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and
watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the
Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing
to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports’ Club shooting at
clay pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain,
however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets for the
instant that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points
being scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and
fortitude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of
material.
You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of
humanity and of that quiet, kindly general and the things that he and
the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the
British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad
when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for
keeping an army’s artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals
of your Varsity football team, which any one instinctly keeps--the
reason of a world cause.
Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane assisting a battery by spotting
the fall of its shells, which is engrossing, too, and amazingly simple.
Of course, this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each
battery commander will tell you that one of the British planes has
flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery.
If the plane does locate it, there is more work due in “make-up” to
complete the disguise. Competition among batteries is as keen as among
battleships of the North Atlantic.
Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely
at home as a first-class Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery
had a dugout for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their
bed, right between two gun-emplacements.
“We found the mother wild out there in the woods,” one of the men
explained. “She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home
destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn’t let us approach her, and
we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups
will bring us luck. We’ll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots,
eh?”
On our way back to the general’s headquarters we must have passed
other batteries hidden from sight only a stone’s throw away; and yet
in an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced
on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy
but engaged in destroying all the enemy’s batteries, according to the
account. Eleven months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about
gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.
Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in
answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station. They
had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we passed
through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower and three
holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the
pavement. A shopkeeper across the street was engaged in repairing a
window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.
There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard
of an old peasant, who asked a British soldier if he could not get
permission for the old man to wear some kind of an armband which both
sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between
the trenches. Why not? Wasn’t it his wheat? Didn’t he need the crop?
The Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children
there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German
lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and
children. So British gunners avoid the towns--which is, in one sense,
a professional handicap.
XIX
ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER
The anti-aeroplane gun--Tricks of the trade--The vagabond of the
army lines--Before the days of Archibald--Pie for the Taube--
“Swaggerest” of the gun tribe--Sport of war--Puffs in the
blue--Difficulty of accuracy--“Sending the prying aerial eye
home”--The business of planes.
There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a
chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field
piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its
scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German lines,
goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against
the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.
At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost
stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety
miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it
is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new
trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport in some
new direction, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator
three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few
signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he
indicated.
If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all
that was going on in an enemy’s lines. They must keep up so high that
through the aviator’s glasses a man on the road is the size of a
pin-head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over
the parapet of a trench when the enemy’s trench is only a hundred yards
away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.
Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over
it as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a
noon-day cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of
seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred
yards behind the Taube. A soft thistleblow against the blue it seems
at that altitude; but it wouldn’t if it were about your ears. Then it
would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and
you would hear the whiz of scores of bullets and fragments.
The smoking brass shell-case is out of Archibald’s steel throat and
another shell-case with its charge slipped into place and started on
its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.
He knows that one means many, once he is in range.
Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to
sidestep. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the
German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if
they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled
landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of
ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator’s eye.
Archibald’s propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond
of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night
finds him and the day’s duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps
regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and
small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or
day. Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up,
Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first
flush of dawn, on the lookout for game with the avidity of a pointer
dog; for aviators are also up early.
Why he was named Archibald nobody knows. As his full name is Archibald
the Archer, possibly it comes from some association with the idea
of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the
British army, every one would be known as Archibald. When the British
Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All the British
could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of rounds of
rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the field
guns.
It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range
of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not
know the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their
own fault. Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to
Archibald. When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his
practice, to get a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the
field guns to try to get one.
Archibald, who is quite the “swaggerest” of the gun tribe, has his own
private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry’s former part
as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy’s scouts. Do
you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre of
France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be lacking? You
will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have pride, _élan_,
alertness, pepper, and all the other appetisers and condiments. They
are as neat as a private yacht’s crew and as lively as an infield of
a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally bound to think
rather well of themselves.
Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their shells
after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the lot to tip
over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board, or any of
the other paraphernalia assisting the man who is looking through the
sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers softly to his
touch.
Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target--
which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed and
taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a bird,
a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are clustered
around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession, for more
than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eyes.
You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For
the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator? He
is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the
experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of
the escaped prisoner, who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag
course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns
to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if
one comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next
shell fired at the same point will be wide of the target.
Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is
the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the shell to travel to
the range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he
can spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute.
Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the
plane has travelled from the time the shell left the gun-muzzle till
it burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator’s speed and
guessing from experience which way he will turn next.
That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises.
Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the
Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent
gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says.
But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance.
Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.
But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to
bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It
is amazing how much shell-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are
accustomed to the whiz of shell-fragments and bullets and to have
their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out of
commission, and frequently though the men be wounded, they are able to
volplane back to the cover of their own lines.
To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular
bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German, have,
to escape anti-aircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the
first shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose
of his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.
A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in
the imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for
observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their
news.
XX
TRENCHES IN SUMMER
General Mud “down and out”--“What hopes!”--Heroes in khaki--
“Tickets to England”--Coddling at home--Comradeship among the
men--The uses of barbed wire--“Your hat, sir!”--Sniping--
Sentimental Mr. Atkins--Exchange of pleasantries--A “Boche”
joke--A mine explodes--Wasting the Kaiser’s powder--A maze of
trench “streets”--A soldier cook--And cook stoves--Officers’
mess--Fresh from Sandhurst--“When do you think the war will
be over?”--_Strafing_ the chicken--From favourite actors to
military methods--A night crawl between trenches--An alarm--In
the midst of barbed-wire--Crawling patrols in the wheat field--
A narrow escape--A trench cot--The “morning hate”--A memory of
cheerful hospitality.
It was the same trench in June, still a relatively “quiet corner,”
which I had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its
location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place
that had been so wet could become so dry.
This time the approach was made in daylight through a long
communication ditch, which brought us to a shell-wrecked farmhouse.
We passed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep
traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then behind walls of
earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little
shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought, on the
table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the
trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appetites are
less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with
the general, who had accompanied me this far; and he glanced up at a
sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a
post of his dugout.
“I wanted to see if it were time to make another report,” he said. “We
are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to
some one else knows what is happening in his subordinate’s department.”
Then in and out in a maze, between walls with straight faces on the
hard, dry earth, testifying to the beneficence of summer weather in
constructing fastnesses from artillery fire, until we were in the
firing-trench, where I was at home among the officers and men of a
company. General Mud was “down and out.” He waited on the winter
rains to take command again. But winter would find an army prepared
against his kind of campaign. Life in the trenches in summer was not so
unpleasant but that some preferred it, with the excitement of sniping,
to the boredom of billets.
* * * * *