firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we
came to a board nailed to a tree with the caution, “Keep to the right!”
If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were
seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard
of this ground had been tried out by actual experience, at the cost of
dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.
Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from
the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a
stretcher just arriving automatically framed the word, “shell-fire!”
The stains overrunning on tanned skin beyond the edges of the white
bandage were a bright red in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or
a trousers leg, or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of
the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the
ones the thousands come.
Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual
is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is
nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will
he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are No,
you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built
skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.
The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the very touch
of death’s fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get
well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the
lasting decoration of his courage, is home and all that it means and
those in it mean to him. What kind of a home has he, this private
soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife? Or in a cottage with a
flower garden in front, only a few minutes’ walk from the green fields
of the English countryside?--but we set out to tell you about the kind
of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.
We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the
Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where the British and
French had fought many a Thermopylæ in the last eight months. Along its
banks run rows of fine trees narrowing in perspective before the eye.
Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others
splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many
times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chip had just flown from the
axeman’s blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which
nature’s sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed
while it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring from the
remaining branches.
In this neighbourhood the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with
passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and
come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the stone
age, would be at home here, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at
their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a place for
men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and
use soap and safety razors. One would not be surprised to see some
figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap
on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering
welcome to the bosom of his family.
Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old
civilisation, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread.
They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves
worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only
civilised man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted
to the cave-dweller’s protection because their civilisation is so
highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing anywhere
from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty
miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even
more tender than in the cave-dweller’s time, not to mention that his
brain-case is a larger target.
An officer calls our attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic
pride of a member of a Chamber of Commerce pointing out the new Union
Station.
“Not even a high explosive”--the kind that bursts on impact after
penetration--“could get into that!” he says. “We make them for
generals and colonels and those who have precious heads on their
shoulders.”
With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the
soldiers; which brings us back to the question of munitions in the
economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this
kind which I had seen. One never goes up to the trenches without seeing
something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving
lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete
with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction
represented--the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs
of the damage done by shells. After a bombardment, dig out the filled
trenches and renew the smashed dugouts to be ready for another go!
The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads.
We noticed that all the men were in their dugouts; none were walking
about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer--stormy. The
German gunners were “strafing quite lively” this afternoon.
Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred yards
away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance
they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the
track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels
faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives
you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it
gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that shell
has your name and your number on Dugout Street. I was certain that it
was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dugout to pieces. Any one
who had never heard a shell before would have “scrooched,” as the small
boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express
tears past the station. It is the kind of scream that makes you want to
roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel
as tall and large as a cathedral, judged by the sensation that travels
down your backbone.
Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the
creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or
like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about
to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards
away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound of it was
like the burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as
the swirling, boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream
in the world. A gigantic hammerhead sweeps through the air and breaks a
steel drumhead.
If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better
view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital
worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where,
hopefully, we have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the report
was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an
adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks
from the concussion.
Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we
heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The shell
might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more.
Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an
adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening
to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half stumbling into the
nearest dugout. He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he
had sand in them. Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a
call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.
“That must have been about six- or seven-inch,” I said to the officer,
trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct
form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.
“Nine inch, h. e.,” replied the expert. This was gratifying. It was the
first time that I had been that near to a nine-inch shell explosion.
Its “eat-’em-alive” frightfulness was depressing. But the experience
was worth having. One wants all the experiences there are--but only
“close.” A delightful word that word close, at the front!
But the Germans were generous that afternoon. Another big scream seemed
aimed at my own head. L---- disagreed with me; he said that it was
aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a personal
quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of the
trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a
pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner’s large scale map, to hit. It is
wonderful how, firing at such long ranges, he is able to hit the trench
at all.
This was all of the nine-inch style, for the time being. We got some
fours and fives in our neighbourhood, as we walked along. Three
bursting as near together as the ticks of a clock, made almost no
smoke as they brought some tree-limbs down and tore away a section of
a trunk. Then the thunder storm moved on to another part of the line.
Only, unlike the thunder storms of nature, this, which is man-made and
controlled as a fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back
again and yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a
German artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower bed shall get
another sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.
We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication
trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep
in the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more
soldiers, leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched
out across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung
out in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living
along the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did
not look up at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives
under the trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the
passivity of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre
or a ball-ground.
A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding
over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the
trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of these
private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death till
death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by itself.
Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were low--
unnecessarily because they were from British guns. No danger from them
unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low screams brought
the delight of having blows struck from their side at the enemy, whom
they themselves could not strike from their reserve position.
For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the
German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets.
It was like standing between two railroad tracks with trains going
by in opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the
multitudinous screams. “Ours!” you exclaimed, with the same delight as
when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle contest
rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers in the
trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working for them
and for you, giving blow for blow.
The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and
wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down on
the enemy’s. Sport ceases. It is the fight between a burglar with a
revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man
brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the
enemy, calls for more and harder blows.
Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields,
lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the
spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always
so on summer days. Between the screams you heard their full-pitched
chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of
German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to
take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea of
ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.
Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted
summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were
spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching
for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery positions,
and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.
It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over
the British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It
looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud.
The British aviators are so low that the bull’s-eye identification
marks are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in
and out, like the short stop and second baseman around second, there
in the very arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other
targets. But scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them.
In the midst of a lace-work of puffs of shrapnel bursts, which slowly
spread in the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip
and rise and turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good;
probably his planecloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel
fragments to remain aloft longer.
Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at you! Get
in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British airmen!
But Herr Taube always stays high--the Br’er Fox of the air. Of course,
it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it was
real.
Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and
large calibre. One-two-three-four in quick succession as the roll of a
drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we have
made ourselves masters of the German trench. British shells responded.
“Ours again!”
But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of
steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a
thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your
head--ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier, who
was smiling. The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at
the expense of the sightseer, who had dodged one of our own shells. In
addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied
by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod
fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal columns
in order to preserve our dignity.
We were witnessing what is called the “artillery preparation for an
infantry attack,” which was to try to recover that two hundred yards
of trench from the British. Only the Germans did not limit their
attention to the lost trench alone. It was hottest there around the
bend of our line, from our view-point; for there they must maul the
trench into formless _débris_ and cut the barbed wire in front of it
before the charge was made.
“They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep
us guessing,” said the officer, “before they make their final
concentration. So it’s pretty thick around this part.”
“Which might include the communication trench?”
“Certainly. This makes a good line shot. No doubt they will spare us a
few when they think it is our turn. We do the same thing. So it goes.”
From the variety of screams of big shells and little shells and
screams harrowingly close and reassuringly high, which were indicated
as ours, one was warranted in suggesting that the British were doing
considerable artillery preparation themselves.
“We must give them as good as they send--and more.”
More seemed correct.
“Those close ones you hear are doubtless meant for the front German
trench, which accounts for their low trajectory; the others for their
support trenches or any battery positions that our planes have located.”
We could not see where the British shells were striking. We could judge
only of the accuracy of some of the German fire. Considering the storm
being visited on the support trench which we had just left, we were
more than ever glad to be out of it. Artillery is the war burglar’s
jimmy; but it has to batter the house into ruins and smash all the
plate and blow up the safe and kill most of the family before the
burglar can enter. Clouds of dust rose from the explosions; limbs of
trees were lopped off by tornadoes of steel hail.
“There! Look at that tree!”
In front of a portion of the British support trench a few of a line
of stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an
eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the
same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the bark.
The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion. Through
it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green wood had
been cut in two as neatly as a thistle stem is severed by a sharp blow
from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried across the
splintered stump with crushing impact from the power of its flight,
plus the power of the burst of the explosive charge which broke the
shell-jacket into slashing fragments; and the towering column of limbs,
branches, and foliage laid its length on the ground with a majestic
dignity. Which shows what one shell can do, one of three which burst in
the neighbourhood at the same time. In time, the shells would get all
the trees; make them into chips and splinters and toothpicks.
“I’d rather that it would hit a tree-trunk than my trunk,” said L----.
“But you would not have got it as badly as the tree,” said the officer
reassuringly. “The substance would have been too soft for sufficient
impact for a burst. It would have gone right through!”
XXIII
MORE BEST DAY
“Without any anæsthetic”--Tea at a dugout--Over the wires “German
West Africa fallen”--Playing with death--A tragedy--Travelling
the “narrow cut of earth”--Good manners of the trenches--And
democracy--“The men who will rule England”--A periscope glance
at the German trench--A “direct hit” for the British--“Bombing
up ahead!”--A gas shell--Under heavy fire--“Like beating up
grouse to the guns and we are the birds”--Crash!--And safe
again!--A “dead heat” to cover--A touch of “nerves”--Back to
the dead land behind the trenches.
At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon
had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.
“Without any anæsthetic,” he explained. “No chance if we sent him back
to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well. Already
chirking up.”
A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had
left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the
family practitioner’s cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man
who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room; who
has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger on your
pulse. There are thousands of that kind at home. Probably you have sent
a hurry telephone call for his like more than once.
“The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea,” he continued,
“only we have antiseptics now. It’s wonderful how little you can work
with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men, these, with
great recuperative power and discipline and resolution--very different
patients from those we usually operate on.”
Tea was served inside the battalion commander’s dugout. Tea is as
essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average
American in summer. They don’t think of getting on without it if they
can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take
cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.
It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of
perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the
battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a
busy man’s sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer the
function had just come over the network of wires which connects up the
whole army, from trenches to headquarters--good news in the midst of
the shells.
German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the
British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A
suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies
like Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike,
live-and-let-live idea, which has something to do with keeping the
United States intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up
over the British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes;
for it is clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the
British Empire.
“Hans and Jacob we have named them,” said the colonel, referring to two
Germans who were buried back of his dugout. “It’s dull up here when
the _Boches_ are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play. We hold
conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches. Hans is fat and
cheerful and trusting. He believes everything that the Kaiser tells him
and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a professor and a fearful
‘strafer.’ It seems a little gruesome, doesn’t it, but not after you
have been in the trenches for a while.”
A little gruesome--true! Not in the trenches--true, too! Where all is
satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with
death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say, “I
know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may,
to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow--”
Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through the
head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had messed with
him and marched with him and known him in the fulness of affection of
comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A heartbreak for some home
in England. No one dwelt on the incident. What was there to say? The
trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself, was the only outward sign
of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the
dugout. The subject was changed to something about the living. One must
carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part
serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for
his own sake. Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem. Please,
I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake. They managed cake
without any difficulty up there in the trenches. And who if not men in
the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know?
“It was here that he was hit,” another officer said, as we moved on in
the trench. “He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak there
and a bullet might go through and catch a man, who thought himself
safely under cover as he walked along. He had started to fix the
sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet came right through the top
of one of the bags in front of him.”
A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is
a simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but
there is something about seeing any one hit by a sniper which is more
horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of
murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a
cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of one man.
Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers,
which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No
one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The men
were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of
what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all as a part of
the day’s work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British
phlegm and cheerfulness.