Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal
munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose
business it is to see that he is never without it. How could he sit
so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade? Never! He would get
fidgetty and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the
button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite.
Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time
enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party
will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the
nurses who look after you will.
I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same
boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you pass
and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in
return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman, who has to stand
aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the trenches are
good, better than in many places where good manners are a cult.
There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious
youth than to a British trench. He would learn that there are other men
in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or
a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the
trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and
“hazing” parties need not be organised among the students.
But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology
of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind
of warfare, without the signs of brutality which we associate with the
prize fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.
They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could
not have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the
men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and
their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilisation, and the men
who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.
Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same
time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage
and purpose, as they “sit and take it,” or guard against attacks,
without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and
quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by
comrades pickaback we saw the wounded carried along that passage too
narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!
For the second permissible--periscopes are tempting targets--I looked
through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British
lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust from
sandbags and dugouts merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke.
As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight;
then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion has made. No
wise German would show himself there. British snipers were watching for
him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by
this single “direct hit” of an h. e. (high explosive). Yes, the British
gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it.
Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags
of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together. Another
wounded man was brought by.
“They’re bombing up ahead. He has just been hit by a bomb.”
As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian
realised his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten
Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously _mal à propos_
as an outsider at a bank directors’ meeting or in a football scrimmage.
The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in
the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the
zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions
were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men. We were not
going to see that two hundred yards of captured trench that was beyond
the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer’s
eye!
“A _Boche_ gas shell!” we were told, as we passed an informal
excavation in the communication trench on our way back. “Asphyxiating
effect. No time to put on respirators when one explodes. Laid out half
a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they will recover.”
“The _Boches_ want us to hurry!” exclaimed L----.
They were giving the communication trench a turn at “strafing,” now,
and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use of trying
to respond to one’s natural inclination to run away from the pursuing
shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.
“But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to
the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it.”
We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support trench
by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations made by
shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with your only
view of your surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged. Crash--
and safe again!
“Pretty!” L---- said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black
smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that
men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R----, also smiling,
had said, “A black business, this!” a favourite expression with him.
“Yet--pretty!” R---- and I exclaimed together.
L---- took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir.
He did not know that he had said “Pretty!” or R---- that he had said
“A black business!” several times that afternoon; nor did I know that
I had exclaimed “For the love of Mike!” Psychologists take notice; and
golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle
will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are “strafing.”
Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the
warrens. My companions happened to be near a dugout. They did not go in
tandem, but abreast. It was a “dead heat.” All that I could see in the
way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting
as tissue paper in such a crisis.
At least, one faintly realised what it meant to be in the support
trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never
get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are
sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It
is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front
trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.
“Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire,” said an officer, who ought
to know. “Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to
attack--that is the first degree. You might call this the second.”
It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second
degree will do. We will leave the first till another time.
Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard what seemed the
siren call of another nine-inch. Once, in another war, I had been on a
paved road when--well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch
hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An
effort to “run out the bunt”--Cæsar’s ghost! It was one of our own
shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher-bearers with a wounded man looked
up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were
playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a
cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does
not do for you to be scared.
“Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?” we asked the
chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at a
clearing station for wounded.
“Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car.”
As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the
trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another
car was in sight and ours had no business there (as we were told
afterward), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out
his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.
Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with
Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred
yards of trench.
XXIV
WINNING AND LOSING
The Western front: a pulsating, changing line--Offensive with the
British--The buoyant youth of England--Not a “good show”--
English sportsmanship--A successful battalion--Psychology of
the charge--“Here we are again!”--Stories of the capture--The
“Keetcheenaires”--An army in the making.
Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that
Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in
anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day’s news
was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.
At times one thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant
pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an “all
together” of a tug of war at a given point, straightened or made a
bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a
tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South
Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in
Europe in older days, when one king rode forth against another, became
the landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the
wrestling of siege operations.
The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged became none the
less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and
defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the
movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms in past
times when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the
trenches. For winners and losers returning to their billets in French
villages, as other battalions took their places, had time to think over
the action.
The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915;
any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches
which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course.
Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to
share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his
neighbours.
You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have
been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the
car speeds toward the zone where the reserves are billeted and the
occasional shell is warning that peace is behind you. First, one
alights near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an
attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road
was killed. We go across the fields to the right. Among the surviving
officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room
now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no
outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to
him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English
youth. The colonel comes out of the farmhouse and he sends for some
other officers.
In army language, theirs had not been a “good show.” We had heard the
account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G. H. Q., where they
took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions
were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless
shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out
of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our
artillery had not “connected up” properly.
The German machine guns were not out of commission, and for them it
was like working a loom playing the bullets back and forth across the
zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British
had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why;
that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than
their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in
a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German
parapet before he fell. At last they realised that it could not be
done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment and
though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.
With a soldier’s winning frankness and simplicity they told what had
happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine guns were in
place; they knew what they had to face. One spoke of seeing, as they
lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British
shell-fire.
“A stout-hearted fighter! We had to admire him!” said the adjutant.
It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had
been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be
separated from their sense of sportsmanship.
It was not the first time the guns had not “connected up” for either
side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm
enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did
not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed.
Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self-punishment
which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could
not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. The
pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow which meant more to the
soldier than any injury to his personal pride.
But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these
survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have
another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more
from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no
“let-us-at-’em-again” frightfulness. In order to end this war you must
“lick” one side or the other, and these men were not “licked.” One was
sorry that he had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.
One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they
would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved
to win because they were such manly losers.
At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which
had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the
same simplicity and kindly hospitality which gives life at the front
a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the
dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he
said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his
fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not “on,” what happened to
him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been “on” for the winning
battalion; perfectly “on.” They had buried the machine guns and the
Germans with them.
When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he
gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to
keep on until--! Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse
way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang
in your ear; and then somebody said, “Please open your mouth and take
this!” and you found yourself in a white, silent place full of cots.
The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They
had “walked in.” They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks to
the guns. “Here we are! Here we are again!” as the song at the front
goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number;
and if you don’t, that is velvet. Army courage these days is highly
sensitised steel in response to will.
They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All
had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them.
They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive
and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, re-reading
letters from home, looking at the pictures in the illustrated papers,
as they leaned back and smoked their briar-wood pipes and discussed
politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an
Englishman’s pastime and his birthright.
The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army,
gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to
stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure
on his wrist watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze
of dust from the shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were
under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation
of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He
was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was
his prisoner.
There was nothing grewsome about listening to a diffident soldier
explaining how he “bombed them out,” and you shared his amusement over
the surprise of a German who stuck his head out of a dugout within a
foot of the face of a British soldier, who was peeping inside to see
if any more _Boches_ were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion.
Victory is sweet.
When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the New Army men,
“the Keetcheenaires,” as the French call them, you were reminded of
how, although the war was old, the British army was young. There was
a “Watch our city grow!” atmosphere about it. Little by little, some
great force seems steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that
business institution at G. H. Q. feel like bankers with an enormous,
increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has
watched it in the making.
XXV
THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK
Canadians at the front--Home folks to the American--One touch of
New York slang--Hustlers--The discipline of self-reliance--
Charging through gas--Our bond with the Canadians--Their
optimism and sentiment--The Princess Pats--Holding down the
lid of hell--The second battle of Ypres--The Story of May
Eighth--Holding a salient--The Germans prepare to attack--
The marksmen of the P. P’s--Down go the Germans--The attack
broken--Official record of the struggle--Machine guns buried--
Reinforcements and ammunition--The third and severest charge--
Seventy-five per cent. casualties--The P. P’s, “regulars”--
Modern knights.
These were home folks to the American. You might know all by their
maple leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none
too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent
emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang
phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.
When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard
out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, “Gee! Get onto the
bus!” which referred to our car, and also, “Cut out the noise!” I
was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had
remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street
from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting
about the front at midnight was welcomed with a “glad hand” across that
imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.
What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I
could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from
Winnipeg, and perhaps a “neutral” from Wyoming in his company, fighting
Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy-chair
by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in
Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant’s
cottage in range of the enemy’s shells was getting something more
novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the
Yukon; for that contrast we are quite used to.
All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they
had won--they had won such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If
there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution,
why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilisation’s
sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight
for the good cause, too, particularly after the _Lusitania_ was sunk,
when my own feelings had lost all semblance to neutrality.
The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little
more zip to them than the thoroughgoing British. Their climate spells
“hustle,” and we are all the product of climate to a large degree,
whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba.
Eager and highstrung the Canadian born, quick to see and act. Very
restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come
three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing but
mud in an English winter to fight.
One from the American continent knew what ailed them; they wanted
action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but
the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They
wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though
many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they had
their guns and equipment ready. So he sent them over to France before
it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy
water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders
mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was
“something doing.”
It was in their first trenches that I first saw them, and they were
“on the job, all right,” in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep
of the searchlights and the flares. They had become the most ardent of
pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved
their metal. They refashioned their trenches and drained them with
the fastidiousness of good housekeepers, who had a frontiersman’s
experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands
at the business.
“Their discipline is different from ours,” said a British general, “but
it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops.”
They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars,
but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of “go to it”
when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation
for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any
soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in
the second battle of Ypres when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I
should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British
regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in
detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England
will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the
line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the
crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
“When that gas came along,” said one Canadian, who expressed the
Canadian spirit, “we knew the _Boches_ were springing a new one on us.
You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke
when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws
back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it was the
way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad
over such a dastardly kind of attack.”
Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge
helped, if it did not save the situation. And then at Givenchy--
straight work into the enemy’s trenches under the guns. Canada is a
part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all
imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affections of the
British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky
Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
If there are some people in the United States busy with their own
affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward
the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of merit
which discovers in the glare of battle’s publicity merit which already
existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated
only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial
tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral
neighbours, who fought by their side will be joining in their army
reunions and remarking, “Wasn’t that mud in Flanders--” etc.