1
I saw rather more of the British than of the French aviators because
of the vileness of the weather when I visited the latter. It is quite
impossible for me to institute comparisons between these two services. I
should think that the British organisation I saw would be hard to beat,
and that none but the French could hope to beat it. On the Western front
the aviation has been screwed up to a very much higher level than on
the Italian line. In Italy it has not become, as it has in France, the
decisive factor. The war on the Carso front in Italy--I say nothing of
the mountain warfare, which is a thing in itself--is in fact still in
the stage that I have called B. It is good warfare well waged, but not
such an intensity of warfare. It has not, as one says of pianos and
voices, the same compass.
This is true in spite of the fact that the Italians along of all the
western powers have adopted a type of aeroplane larger and much more
powerful than anything except the big Russian machines. They are not at
all suitable for any present purpose upon the Italian front, but at
a later stage, when the German is retiring and Archibald no longer
searches the air, they would be invaluable on the western front because
of their enormous bomb or machine gun carrying capacity. “But sufficient
for the day is the swat thereof,” as the British public schoolboy says,
and no doubt we shall get them when we have sufficiently felt the need
for them. The big Caproni machines which the Italians possess are of 300
h.p. and will presently be of 500 h.p. One gets up a gangway into them
was one gets into a yacht; they wave a main deck, a forward machine gun
deck and an aft machine gun; one may walk about in them; in addition
to guns and men they carry a very considerable weight of bombs beneath.
They cannot of course beget up with the speed nor soar to the height
of our smaller aeroplanes; it is as carriers in raids behind a force of
fighting machines that they should find their use.
The British establishment I visited was a very refreshing and reassuring
piece of practical organisation. The air force of Great Britain has
had the good fortune to develop with considerable freedom from old army
tradition; many of its officers are ex-civil engineers and so forth;
Headquarters is a little shy of technical direction; and all this in
a service that is still necessarily experimental and plastic is to the
good. There is little doubt that, given a release from prejudice,
bad associations and the equestrian tradition, British technical
intelligence and energy can do just as well as the French. Our problem
with our army is not to create intelligence, there is an abundance of
it, but to release it from a dreary social and official pressure. The
air service ransacks the army for men with technical training and sees
that it gets them, there is a real keenness upon the work, and the men
in these great mobile hangars talk shop readily and clearly.
I have already mentioned and the newspapers have told abundantly of
the pluck, daring, and admirable work of our aviators; what is still
untellable in any detail is the energy and ability of the constructive
and repairing branch upon whose efficiency their feats depend. Perhaps
the most interesting thing I saw in connection with the air work was
the hospital for damaged machines and the dump to which those hopelessly
injured are taken, in order that they may be disarticulated and all that
is sound in them used for reconstruction. How excellently this work
is being done may be judged from the fact that our offensive in July
started with a certain number of aeroplanes, a number that would
have seemed fantastic in a story a year before the war began. These
aeroplanes were in constant action; they fought, they were shot down,
they had their share of accidents. Not only did the repair department
make good every loss, but after three weeks of the offensive the army
was fighting with fifty more machines than at the outset. One goes
through a vast Rembrandtesque shed opening upon a great sunny field, in
whose cool shadows rest a number of interesting patients; captured and
slightly damaged German machines, machines of our own with scars of
battle upon them, one or two cases of bad landing. The star case came
over from Peronne. It had come in two days ago.
I examined this machine and I will tell the state it was in, but I
perceive that what I have to tell will read not like a sober statement
of truth but like strained and silly lying. The machine had had a direct
hit from an Archibald shell. The propeller had been clean blown away; so
had the machine gun and all its fittings. The engines had been stripped
naked and a good deal bent about. The timber stay over the aviator had
been broken, so that it is marvellous the wings of the machine did not
just up at once like the wings of a butterfly. The solitary aviator had
been wounded in the face. He had then come down in a long glide into the
British lines, and made a tolerable landing....
2
One consequence of the growing importance of the aeroplane in warfare is
the development of a new military art, the art of camouflage. Camouflage
is humbugging disguise, it is making things--and especially in this
connection, military things--seem not what they are, but something
peaceful and rural, something harmless and quite uninteresting to
aeroplane observers. It is the art of making big guns look like
haystacks and tents like level patches of field.
Also it includes the art of making attractive models of guns, camps,
trenches and the like that are not bona-fide guns, camps, or trenches at
all, so that the aeroplane bomb-dropper and the aeroplane observer may
waste his time and energies and the enemy gunfire be misdirected.
In Italy I saw dummy guns so made as to deceive the very elect at a
distance of a few thousand feet. The camouflage of concealment aims
either at invisibility or imitation; I have seen a supply train look
like a row of cottages, its smoke-stack a chimney, with the tops of sham
palings running along the back of the engine and creepers painted up
its sides. But that was a flight of the imagination; the commonest
camouflage is merely to conceal. Trees are brought up and planted
near the object to be hidden, it is painted in the same tones as its
background, it is covered with an awning painted to look like grass or
earth. I suppose it is only a matter of development before a dummy cow
or so is put up to chew the cud on the awning.
But camouflage or no camouflage, the bulk of both the French and British
forces in the new won ground of the great offensive lay necessarily in
the open. Only the big guns and the advanced Red Cross stations had got
into pits and subterranean hiding places. The advance has been too rapid
and continuous for the armies to make much of a toilette as they halted,
and the destruction and the desolation of the country won afforded few
facilities for easy concealment. Tents, transport, munitions, these all
indicated an army on the march--at the rate of half a mile in a week or
so, to Germany. If the wet and mud of November and December have for a
time delayed that advance, the force behind has but accumulated for the
resumption of the thrust.
3
A journey up from the base to the front trenches shows an interesting
series of phases. One leaves Amiens, in which the normal life threads
its way through crowds of resting men in khaki and horizon blue, in
which staff officers in automobiles whisk hither and thither, in which
there are nurses and even a few inexplicable ladies in worldly costume,
in which restaurants and cafes are congested and busy, through which
there is a perpetual coming and going of processions of heavy vans to
the railway sidings. One dodges past a monstrous blue-black gun going
up to the British front behind two resolute traction engines--the
three sun-blistered young men in the cart that trails behind lounge in
attitudes of haughty pride that would shame the ceiling gods of Hampton
Court. One passes through arcades of waiting motor vans, through arcades
of waiting motor vans, through suburbs still more intensely khaki or
horizon blue, and so out upon the great straight poplar-edged road--to
the front. Sometimes one laces through spates of heavy traffic,
sometimes the dusty road is clear ahead, now we pass a vast aviation
camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an encampment of cavalry.
One turns aside, and abruptly one is in France--France as one knew it
before the war, on a shady secondary road, past a delightful chateau
behind its iron gates, past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are
in a village street full of stately Indian soldiers.
It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare tourist to
the British offensive passes through Albert, with its great modern red
cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt Madonna and Child
that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone knows, hanging out
horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly suggests an imminent dive
upon the passing traveller. One looks right up under it.
Presently we begin to see German prisoners. The whole lot look entirely
contented, and are guarded by perhaps a couple of men in khaki. These
German prisoners do not attempt to escape, they have not the slightest
desire for any more fighting, they have done their bit, they say, honour
is satisfied; they give remarkably little trouble. A little way further
on perhaps we pass their cage, a double barbed-wire enclosure with a few
tents and huts within.
A string of covered waggons passes by. I turn and see a number of men
sitting inside and looking almost as cheerful as a beanfeast in Epping
Forest. They make facetious gestures. They have a subdued sing-song going
on. But one of them looks a little sick, and then I notice not very
obtrusive bandages. “Sitting-up cases,” my guide explains.
These are part of the casualties of last night's fight.
The fields on either side are now more evidently in the war zone.
The array of carts, the patches of tents, the coming and going of men
increases. But here are three women harvesting, and presently in a
cornfield are German prisoners working under one old Frenchman. Then
the fields become trampled again. Here is a village, not so very much
knocked about, and passing through it we go slowly beside a long column
of men going up to the front. We scan their collars for signs of some
familiar regiment. These are new men going up for the first time; there
is a sort of solemn elation in many of their faces.
The men coming down are usually smothered in mud or dust, and unless
there has been a fight they look pretty well done up. They stoop under
their equipment, and some of the youngsters drag. One pleasant thing
about this coming down is the welcome of the regimental band, which is
usually at work as soon as the men turn off from the high road. I hear
several bands on the British front; they do much to enhance the general
cheerfulness. On one of these days of my tour I had the pleasure of
seeing the ---th Blankshires coming down after a fight. As we drew
near I saw that they combined an extreme muddiness with an unusual
elasticity. They all seemed to be looking us in the face instead of
being too fagged to bother. Then I noticed a nice grey helmet dangling
from one youngster's bayonet, in fact his eye directed me to it. A man
behind him had a black German helmet of the type best known in English
illustrations; then two more grey appeared. The catch of helmets was
indeed quite considerable. Then I perceived on the road bank above
and marching parallel with this column, a double file of still muddier
Germans. Either they wore caps or went bare-headed. There were no
helmets among them. We do not rob our prisoners but--a helmet is a
weapon. Anyhow, it is an irresistible souvenir.
Now and then one sees afar off an ammunition dump, many hundreds of
stacks of shells--without their detonators as yet--being unloaded from
railway trucks, transferred from the broad gauge to the narrow gauge
line, or loaded onto motor trolleys. Now and then one crosses a railway
line. The railway lines run everywhere behind the British front, the
construction follows the advance day by day. They go up as fast as the
guns. One's guide remarks as the car bumps over the level
crossing, “That is one of Haig's railways.” It is an aspect of the
Commander-in-Chief that has much impressed and pleased the men. And at
last we begin to enter the region of the former Allied trenches, we pass
the old German front line, we pass ruined houses, ruined fields, and
thick patches of clustering wooden crosses and boards where the dead
of the opening assaults lie. There are no more reapers now, there is no
more green upon the fields, there is no green anywhere, scarcely a tree
survives by the roadside, but only overthrown trunks and splintered
stumps; the fields are wildernesses of shell craters and coarse weeds,
the very woods are collections of blasted stems and stripped branches.
This absolutely ravaged and ruined battlefield country extends now along
the front of the Somme offensive for a depth of many miles; across it
the French and British camps and batteries creep forward, the stores,
the dumps, the railways creep forward, in their untiring, victorious
thrust against the German lines. Overhead hum and roar the aeroplanes,
away towards the enemy the humped, blue sausage-shaped kite balloons
brood thoughtfully, and from this point and that, guns, curiously
invisible until they speak, flash suddenly and strike their one short
hammer-blow of sound.
Then one sees an enemy shell drop among the little patch of trees on
the crest to the right, and kick up a great red-black mass of smoke and
dust. We see it, and then we hear the whine of its arrival and at last
the bang. The Germans are blind now, they have lost the air, they are
firing by guesswork and their knowledge of the abandoned territory.
“They think they have got divisional headquarters there,” someone
remarks.... “They haven't. But they keep on.”
In this zone where shells burst the wise automobile stops and tucks
itself away as inconspicuously as possible close up to a heap of ruins.
There is very little traffic on the road now except for a van or so that
hurries up, unloads, and gets back as soon as possible. Mules and men
are taking the stuff the rest of the journey. We are in a flattened
village, all undermined by dug-outs that were in the original German
second line. We report ourselves to a young troglodyte in one of these,
and are given a guide, and so set out on the last part of the journey
to the ultimate point, across the land of shell craters and barbed
wire litter and old and new trenches. We have all put on British steel
helmets, hard but heavy and inelegant head coverings. I can write little
that is printable about these aesthetic crimes. The French and German
helmets are noble and beautiful things. These lumpish _pans._..
They ought to be called by the name of the man who designed them.
Presently we are advised to get into a communication trench. It is not
a very attractive communication trench, and we stick to our track across
the open. Three or four shells shiver overhead, but we decide they are
British shells, going out. We reach a supporting trench in which men are
waiting in a state of nearly insupportable boredom for the midday
stew, the one event of interest in a day-long vigil. Here we are told
imperatively to come right in at once, and we do.
All communication trenches are tortuous and practically endless. On
an offensive front they have vertical sides of unsupported earth and
occasional soakaways for rain, covered by wooden gratings, and they go
on and on and on. At rare intervals they branch, and a notice board says
“To Regent Street,” or “To Oxford Street,” or some such lie. It is all
just trench. For a time you talk, but talking in single file soon palls.
You cease to talk, and trudge. A great number of telephone wires come
into the trench and cross and recross it. You cannot keep clear of them.
Your helmet pings against them and they try to remove it. Sometimes you
have to stop and crawl under wires. Then you wonder what the trench is
like in really wet weather. You hear a shell burst at no great distance.
You pass two pages of _The Strand Magazine._ Perhaps thirty yards on
you pass a cigarette end. After these sensational incidents the trench
quiets down again and continues to wind endlessly--just a sandy,
extremely narrow vertical walled trench. A giant crack.
At last you reach the front line trench. On an offensive sector it has
none of the architectural interest of first line trenches at such places
as Soissons or Arras. It was made a week or so ago by joining up shell
craters, and if all goes well we move into the German trench along by
the line of scraggy trees, at which we peep discreetly, to-morrow night.
We can peep discreetly because just at present our guns are putting
shrapnel over the enemy at the rate of about three shells a minute, the
puffs follow each other up and down the line, and no Germans are staring
out to see us.
The Germans “strafed” this trench overnight, and the men are tired and
sleepy. Our guns away behind us are doing their best now to give them
a rest by strafing the Germans. One or two men are in each forward sap
keeping a look out; the rest sleep, a motionless sleep, in the earthy
shelter pits that have been scooped out. One officer sits by a telephone
under an earth-covered tarpaulin, and a weary man is doing the toilet of
a machine gun. We go on to a shallow trench in which we must stoop, and
which has been badly knocked about.... Here we have to stop. The road to
Berlin is not opened up beyond this point.
My companion on this excursion is a man I have admired for years and
never met until I came out to see the war, a fellow writer. He is a
journalist let loose. Two-thirds of the junior British officers I met
on this journey were really not “army men” at all. One finds that the
apparent subaltern is really a musician, or a musical critic, or an
Egyptologist, or a solicitor, or a cloth manufacturer, or a writer. At
the outbreak of the war my guide dyed his hair to conceal its tell-tale
silver, and having been laughed to scorn by the ordinary recruiting
people, enlisted in the sportsmen's battalion. He was wounded, and then
the authorities discovered that he was likely to be of more use with a
commission and drew him, in spite of considerable resistance, out of the
firing line. To which he always returns whenever he can get a visitor
to take with him as an excuse. He now stood up, fairly high and clear,
explaining casually that the Germans were no longer firing, and showed
me the points of interest.
I had come right up to No Man's Land at last. It was under my chin. The
skyline, the last skyline before the British could look down on Bapaume,
showed a mangy wood and a ruined village, crouching under repeated
gobbings of British shrapnel. “They've got a battery just there, and
we're making it uncomfortable.” No Man's Land itself is a weedy space
broken up by shell craters, with very little barbed wire in front of us
and very little in front of the Germans. “They've got snipers in most of
the craters, and you see them at twilight hopping about from one to the
other.” We have very little wire because we don't mean to stay for very
long in this trench, but the Germans have very little wire because they
have not been able to get it up yet. They never will get it up now....
I had been led to believe that No Man's Land was littered with the
unburied dead, but I saw nothing of the sort at this place. There had
been no German counter attack since our men came up here. But at one
point as we went along the trench there was a dull stench. “Germans, I
think,” said my guide, though I did not see how he could tell.
He looked at his watch and remarked reluctantly, “If you start at once,
you may just do it.”
I wanted to catch the Boulogne boat. It was then just past one in
the afternoon. We met the stew as we returned along the communication
trench, and it smelt very good indeed.... We hurried across the great
spaces of rusty desolation upon which every now and again a German shell
was bursting....
That night I was in my flat in London. I had finished reading the
accumulated letters of some weeks, and I was just going comfortably to
bed.