trenches. It shared honours with _strafe_. You have only one life to
live and you may lose that any second--what hopes! Dig, dig, dig, and
set off a mine that sends Germans skyward in a cloud of dust--what
hopes! Bully beef from Chicago and Argentina is no food for babes,
but better than “K.K.” bread--what hopes! Mr. Thomas Atkins, British
regular, takes things as they come--and a lot of them come--shells,
bullets, asphyxiating gas, grenades, and bombs.
There is much to be thankful for. The King’s Own Particular Fusiliers,
as we shall call this regiment, had only three men hit yesterday. On
every man’s cap is a metal badge crowded with battle honours, from the
storming of Quebec to the relief of Ladysmith. Heroic its history;
but no battle honours equal that of the regiment’s part in the second
battle of Ypres; and no heroes of the regiment’s story, whom you
picture in imagination with halos of glory in the wish that you might
have met them in the flesh in their scarlet coats, are the equal of
these survivors in plain khaki manning a ditch in A. D. 1915, whom any
one may meet.
But do not tell them that they are heroes. They will deny it on the
evidence of themselves as eye-witnesses of the action. To remark that
the K. O. P. F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down hill.
It is the business of the K. O. P. F. to be brave. Why talk about it?
One of the three men hit was killed. Well, everybody in the war rather
expects to be killed. The other two “got tickets to England,” as they
say. My lady will take the convalescents joy riding in her car and
afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her
own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef
and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade. Oh, my! What
hopes!
Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such
treatment. Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady
that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it,
he has. My lady’s patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins
knows it will be; and she will wonder if the “stick it” quality of the
British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will. For he has
more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses and
he is having the time of his life in more respects than strawberries
and cream. What hopes! Of course, he will return and hold on in the
face of all that the Germans can give, without any pretence to bravery.
If one goes as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and
says, “How are you?” and, “Are you going to Berlin?” and, “Are you
comfortable?” etc., Tommy Atkins will say, “Yes, sir,” and “Very well,
sir,” etc., as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to
know him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are
shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.
Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family;
into that very human family of soldierdom in a quiet corner; and the
old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is
found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars
on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines. Gaiety and laughter and
comradeship and “joshing” are here among men to whom wounds and death
are a part of the game. One may challenge high explosives with a smile,
no less than ancient round shot. Settle down behind the parapet and the
little incongruities of a trench, paltry without the intimacy of men
and locality, make for humour no less than in a shop or a factory.
Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire--barbed wire from
Switzerland to Belgium--to welcome visitors from that direction,
which, to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach
for any stranger.
“All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear,” says Mr.
Atkins. “Put it down in the guidebooks.”
Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some farmer
sowed before the positions were established in this area is now in
head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of
sandbags which is the enemy’s line. It was late June at its loveliest;
no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away and an
occasional sniper’s bullet. One cracked past as I was looking through
my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the German
trenches.
“Your hat, sir!”
Another moved a sandbag slightly, but not until after the hat had come
down and the head under it most expeditiously. Up to eight hundred
yards a bullet cracks; beyond that range it whistles, sighs, even
wheezes. An elevation gives snipers, who are always trained shots, an
angle of advantage. In winter they had to rely for cover on buildings,
which often came tumbling down with them when hit by a shell. The
foliage of summer is a boon to their craft.
“Does it look to you like an opening in the branches of that tree--the
big one at the right?”
In the mass of leaves a dark spot was visible. It might be natural, or
it might be a space cut away for the swing of a rifle barrel. Perhaps
sitting up there snugly behind a bullet-proof shield fastened to the
limbs was a German sharpshooter, watching for a shot with the patience
of a hound for a rabbit to come out of its hole.
“It’s about time we gave that tree a spray good for that kind of
fungus, from a machine gun!”
A bullet coming from our side swept overhead. One of our own
sharpshooters had seen something to shoot at.
“Not giving you much excitement!” said Tommy.
“I suppose I’d get a little if I stood up on the parapet?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t get a ticket for England; you’d get a box!”
“There’s a cemetery just back of the lines if you’d prefer to stay in
France!”
I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to
the trench. These tender-hearted soldiers who joked with death had
placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought elaborate
French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is another side
of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes, he’s loaded with
sentiment, but not for the movies.
“Keep your head down there, Eames!” called a corporal. “I don’t want to
be taking an inventory of your kit.”
Eames did not even realise that his head was above the parapet. The
hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers
keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach.
That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways
back of the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun,
it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and
Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward for his
patience.
The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who
thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along
the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and
fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing.
As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses, I saw a wisp
of a flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left.
Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of
the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds of the flag and I saw that it
was the tricolour of France.
“A _Boche_ joke!” Tommy explained.
“Probably they are hating the French to-day?”
“No, it’s been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag
of our ally. They’d get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of
humour.”
“If it were a German flag?” I suggested.
“What hopes! We’d make it into a lace curtain!”
Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all
the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood
on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you
walked down the road that ran through the wheat-field, everything was
so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the
trenches opposite.
“There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old _Boche_ professor
in spectacles, who moves a machine gun up and down for a bluff,” said a
soldier, and another corrected him:
“No, the old professor’s the one that walks along at night sending up
flares!”
“Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!”
“And singing the hymn of hate!”
Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a
concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a
pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.
“A mine!”
“In front of the --th brigade!”
“Ours or the _Boches’_?”
“Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!”
“No, theirs!”
Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which
was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became
busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the
trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the
hissing medley of a tempest.
“Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!” said experienced
Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.
The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division
commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to
us, that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the
British trench.
“After all that digging, wasting _Boche_ powder in that fashion! The
Kaiser won’t like it!” said Mr. Atkins. “We exploded one under them
yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn’t wait. They’ve
awful tempers, the _Boches_!” And he finished the job on which he
was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread
surmounted by all the ration jam it would hold; while one of the
company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.
* * * * *
“What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?” growled the
cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the
maze of streets back of the firing-trench. “My word! Is His Majesty’s
army becoming illiterate? _Strafe_ that sign at the corner! What do
you think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at
printing?”
The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, “No
thoroughfare!” The soldier cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves
rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He
was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a
small stove. Yes, they have cook stoves in the trenches. Why not? The
line had been in the same position for six months.
“Little by little we improve our happy home,” said the cook.
The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers’ mess hall,
bought at a store in the nearest town.
When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill
anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with
boarded walls and roof, which was covered with tar paper and a layer of
earth set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the
frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even
as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is baking biscuits for
supper.
The officers’ mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same
fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a
table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or
squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition
boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet
by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the
wheat-field. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still
twilight in the longest day of the year in this region. The hour fits
in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you
sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to
help eat the chicken and to spend the night.
Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the
trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty.
From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the
twenties. Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed,
or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands
where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and
danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K. O. P. F.
who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed
an air of authority he seemed about forty. It was not right to ask the
youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to
start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition
in gruelling, incessant warfare.
“Has any one asked him it yet?” one inquired, referring to some
question to the guest.
“Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be
over?”
It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army and the world. We
had it over with before the soldier cook brought on the roast chicken,
which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation:
Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the honour to
its neighbour, till a brave man said:
“I will! I will _strafe_ the chicken!”
_Gott strafe England!_ _Strafe_ has become a noun, a verb, an
adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how
he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called _Boches_ they
are called Strafers. “Won’t you strafe a little for us?” Tommy sings
out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes!
That gallant youngster of the K. O. P. F. in the midst of bantering
advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing
a leg in anybody’s lap or a wing in anybody’s eye. Timid spectators
who had hung back where he had dared might criticise his form, but
they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed
permanent “strafer” of all the fowls that came to table.
Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to
the Germans. There were arguments about favourite actors and military
methods. The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining
in a summer garden. It was the parents and relatives in pleasant
English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the
sons and brothers in danger. Isn’t it better that way? Would not the
parents prefer it that way? Wasn’t it the way of the ancestors in the
scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day? With the elasticity
of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances. In their
light-heartedness they made war seem a keen sport. They lived war
for all it was worth. If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is
spoiled. There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches.
Youth’s resources defy monotony and death at the same time.
An expedition had been planned for that night. A patrol the previous
night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and
piling sandbags in the wheat-field. The plan was to slip out as soon
as it was really dark with a machine gun and a dozen men, get behind
the Germans’ own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception
when they returned to go on with their work.
Before dinner, however, J----, who was to be the general of the
expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance. Two or more
officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in that
ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain death
to be seen by the enemy. If one is hit the other can help him back. If
one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.
J---- had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in
summer. He wore trunks with his knees bare. When he had to do a “crawl”
he unwound his puttee leggings and wound them over his knees. He and
the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of
the enemy’s sharpshooters. On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing
Indian, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire,
and still not a shot at them. A matter of the commonplace to the men
in the trench held the spectator in suspense. There was a fascination
about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full
realisation that failure in this hide-and-seek game might mean a spray
of bullets and death for these young men.
They entered the wheat, moving slowly like two land turtles. The grain
parted in swaths over them. Surely the Germans might see the turtles’
heads as they were raised to look around. No officer can be too young
and supple for this kind of work. Here the company officer just out of
school is in his element, with an advantage over older officers. That
pair were used to crawling. They did not keep their heads up long. They
knew just how far they might expose themselves. They passed out of
sight, and reappeared and slipped back over the parapet again without
the Germans being any the wiser.
Hard luck! It is an unaccommodating world! They found that the patrol
which had examined the bags at night had failed to discern that they
were old and must have been there for some time.
“I’ll take the machine gun out, anyhow, if the colonel will permit it,”
said J----.
For the colonel puts on the brakes. Otherwise, there is no telling what
risks youth might take with machine guns.
We were half through dinner when a corporal came to report that a
soldier on watch thought that he had seen some Germans moving in the
wheat very near our barbed wire. Probably a false alarm; but no one
in a trench ever acts on the theory that any alarm is false. Eternal
vigilance is the price of holding a trench. Either side is cudgelling
its brains day and night to spring some new trick on the other. If
one side succeeds with a trick, the other immediately adopts it. No
international copyright on strategy is recognised. We rushed out of the
mess hall into the firing-trench, where we found the men on the alert,
their rifles laid on the spot where the Germans were supposed to have
been seen.
“Who are you? Answer, or we fire!” called the ranking young lieutenant.
If any persons present out at front in face of thirty rifles knew the
English language and had not lost the instinct of self-preservation,
they would certainly have become articulate in response to such an
unveiled hint. Not a sound came. Probably a rabbit running through the
wheat had been the cause of the alarm. But you take no risks. The order
was given, and the men combed the wheat with a fusillade.
“Enough! Cease fire!” said the officer. “Nobody there. If there had
been we should have heard the groan of a wounded man or seen the wheat
stir as the Germans hugged closer to the earth for cover.”
This he knew by experience. It was not the first time he had used a
fusillade in this kind of a test.
After dinner J---- rolled his puttees up around his bare knees
again, for the colonel had not withdrawn permission for the machine
gun expedition. J----’s knees were black and blue in spots; they
were also--well, there is not much water for washing purposes in the
trenches. Great sport that, crawling through the dew-moist wheat in the
faint moonlight, looking for a bunch of Germans in the hope of turning
a machine gun on them before they turn one on you.
“One man hit by a stray bullet,” said J----, on his return.
“I heard the bullet go th-ip into the earth after it went through his
leg,” said the other officer.
“Blythe was a recruit and he had asked me to take him out the first
time there was anything doing. I promised that I would, and he got
about the only shot fired at us.”
“Need a stretcher?”
“No.”
Blythe came hobbling through the traverse to the communication trench,
seeming well pleased with himself. The soft part of the leg is not a
bad place to receive a bullet if one is due to hit you.
* * * * *
Night is always the time in the trenches when life grows more
interesting and death more likely.
“It’s dark enough, now,” said one of the youngsters who was out on
another scout. “We’ll go out with the patrol.”
By day, the slightest movement of the enemy is easily and instantly
detected. The light keeps the combatants to the warrens which protect
them from shell and bullet-fire. At night there is no telling what
mischief the enemy may be up to; you must depend upon the ear rather
than the eye for watching. Then the human soldier-fox comes out of his
burrow and sneaks forth on the lookout for prey; both sides are on the
prowl.
“Trained owls would be the most valuable scouts we could have,” said
the young officer. “They would be more useful than aeroplanes in
locating the enemy’s gun positions. A properly reliable owl would come
back and say that a German patrol was out in the wheat-field at such a
point and a machine gun would wipe out the German patrol.”
We turned into a side trench, an alley off the main street, leading out
of the front trench toward the Germans.
“Anybody out?” he asked a soldier, who was on guard at the end of it.
“Yes, two.”
Climbing out of the ditch, we were in the midst of a tangle of barbed
wire protecting the trench front, which was faintly visible in the
starlight. There was a break in the tangle, a narrow cut in the hedge,
as it were, kept open for just such purposes as this. When the patrol
returned it closed the gate again.
“Look out for that wire--just there! Do you see it? We’ve everything
to keep the _Boches_ off our front lawn except ‘keep off the grass!’
signs.”
It was perfectly still, a warm summer night without a cat’s-paw of
breeze. Through the dark curtain of the sky in a parabola rising from
the German trenches swept a brilliant sputter of red light of a German
flare. It was coming as straight toward us as if it had been aimed at
us. It cast a searching, uncanny glare over the tall wheat in head
between the trenches.
“Down flat!” whispered the officer.
It seemed foolish to grovel before a piece of fireworks. There was no
firing in our neighbourhood; nothing to indicate a state of war between
the British Empire and Germany; no visual evidence of any German army
anywhere in France except that flare. However, if a guide, who knows
as much about war as this one, says to prostrate yourself when you are
out between two lines of machine guns and rifles--between the fighting
powers of Britain and Germany--you take the hint. The flare sank
into the earth a few yards away, after a last insulting, ugly fling of
sparks in our faces.
“What if we had been seen?”
“They’d have combed the wheat in this neighbourhood thoroughly, and
they might have got us.”
“It’s hard to believe,” I said.
So it was, he agreed. That was the exasperating thing about it. Always
hard to believe, perhaps, until after all the cries of wolf the wolf
came; until after nineteen harmless flares the twentieth revealed
to the watching enemy the figure of a man above the wheat, when a
crackling chorus of bullets would suddenly break the silence of night
by concentrating on a target. Keeping cover from German flares is a
part of the minute, painstaking economy of war.
We crawled on slowly, taking care to make no noise, till we brought up
behind two soldiers hugging the earth, rifles in hand ready to fire
instantly. It was their business not only to see the enemy first, but
to shoot first, and to capture or kill any German patrol. The officer
spoke to them and they answered. It was unnecessary for them to say
that they had seen nothing. If they had we should have known it. He was
out there less to scout himself than to make sure that they were on the
job; that they knew how to watch. The visit was part of his routine. We
did not even whisper. Preferably, all whispering would be done by any
German patrol out to have a look at our barbed wire and overheard by us.
Silence and the starlight and the damp wheat; but, yes, there was war.
You heard gun-fire half a mile, perhaps a mile, away; and raising your
head you saw auroras from bursting shells. We heard at our backs
faintly snatches of talk from our trenches and faintly in front the
talk from theirs. It sounded rather inviting and friendly from both
sides, like that around some campfire on the plains.
It seemed quite within the bounds of probability that you might have
crawled on up to the Germans and said, “Howdy!” But by the time you
reached the edge of their barbed wire and before you could present
your visiting-card, if not sooner, you would have been full of holes.
That was just the kind of diversion from trench monotony for which the
Germans were looking.
“Well, shall we go back?” asked the officer.