Now It Can Be Told Part 29

This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little glinting stars burst continually over one spot, where the Bluff was hidden beyond Zillebeke Lake. When daybreak came, with the rim of a red sun over a clump of trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of intensity like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy artillery were firing salvos. Field-guns, widely scattered, concentrated their fire upon one area, where their sh.e.l.ls were bursting with a twinkle of light. Somewhere a machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato strokes, like an urgent knocking at the door. High overhead was the song of an airplane coming nearer, with a high, vibrant humming. It was an enemy searching through the mist down below him for any movement of troops or trains.

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3d Division which attacked at four thirty-two that morning, and they were the Suffolks, Gordons, and King's Own Liverpools who led the a.s.sault, commanded by General Pratt. They flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy barrage fire, smas.h.i.+ng through broken belts of wire and stumbling in and out of sh.e.l.l-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone to cover in deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on the Bluff and its neighborhood during the previous ten days and nights. At first only a few men, not more than a hundred or so, could be discovered alive. The dead were thick in the maze of trenches, and our men stumbled across them.

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the sh.e.l.l-fire, and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the darkness before dawn. Small parties were collected and pa.s.sed back as prisoners-marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well as their lives after all that h.e.l.l about them. Hours later, when our battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the objective that had been given to them, other living men were found to be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be induced to come out. Terror kept them in those holes, and they were like wild beasts at bay, still dangerous because they had their bombs and rifles. An ultimatum was shouted down to them by men too busy for persuasive talk. "If you don't come out you'll be blown in." Some of them came out and others were blown to bits. After that the usual thing happened, the thing that inevitably happened in all these little murderous attacks and counter-attacks. The enemy concentrated all its power of artillery on that position captured by our men, and day after day hurled over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, under which our men cowered until many were killed and more wounded. The first attack on the Bluff and its recapture cost us three thousand casualties, and that was only the beginning of a daily toll of life and limbs in that neighborhood of h.e.l.l. Through driving snowstorms sh.e.l.ls went rus.h.i.+ng across that battleground, ceaselessly in those first weeks of March, but the 3d Division repulsed the enemy's repeated attacks in bombing fights which were very fierce on both sides.

I went to General Pilcher's headquarters at Reninghelst on March 4th, and found the staff of the 17th Division frosty in their greeting, while General Pratt, the brigadier of the 3d Division, was conducting the attack in their new territory. General Pilcher himself was much shaken. The old gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bombardment had begun on his men. With Captain Rattnag his A. D. C. he lay for an hour in a ditch with sh.e.l.ls screaming overhead and bursting close. More than once when I talked with him he raised his head and listened nervously and said: "Do you hear the guns?... They are terrible."

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories on war and experimented in light-signals, as when one night I stood by his side in a dark field, and had a courteous old-fas.h.i.+oned dignity and gentleness of manner. He was a fine old English gentleman and a gallant soldier, but modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal for all those who hated its slaughter.

Those men of the 3d Division-the "Iron Division," as it was called later in the war-remained in a hideous turmoil of wet earth up by the Bluff until other men came to relieve them and take over this corner of h.e.l.l.

What remained of the trenches was deep in water and filthy mud, where the bodies of many dead Germans lay under a litter of broken sand-bags and in the holes of half-destroyed dugouts. Nothing could be done to make it less horrible. Then the weather changed and became icily cold, with snow and rain.

One dugout which had been taken for battalion headquarters was six feet long by four wide, and here in this waterlogged hole lived three officers of the Royal Scots to whom a day or two before I had wished "good luck."

The servants lived in the shaft alongside which was a place measuring four feet by four feet. There were no other dugouts where men could get any shelter from sh.e.l.ls or storms, and the enemy's guns were never silent.

But the men held on, as most of our men held on, with a resignation to fate and a stoic endurance beyond that ordinary human courage which we seemed to know before the war.

The chaplain of this battalion had spent all the long night behind the lines, stoking fires and going round the cook-houses and looking at his wrist-watch to see how the minutes were crawling past. He had tea, rum, socks, oil, and food all ready for those who were coming back, and the lighted braziers were glowing red.

At the appointed time the padre went out to meet his friends, pressing forward through the snow and listening for any sound of footsteps through the great hush.

But there was no sound except the soft flutter of snowflakes. He strained his eyes for any moving shadows of men. But there was only darkness and the falling snow.

Two hours pa.s.sed, and they seemed endless to that young chaplain whose brain was full of frightful apprehensions, so that they were hours of anguish to him.

Then at last the first men appeared. "I've never seen anything so splendid and so pitiful," said the man who had been waiting for them.

They came along at about a mile an hour, sometimes in groups, sometimes by twos or threes, holding on to each other, often one by one. In this order they crept through the ruined villages in the falling snow, which lay thick upon the ma.s.ses of fallen masonry. There was a profound silence about them, and these snow-covered men were like ghosts walking through cities of death.

No man spoke, for the sound of a human voice would have seemed a danger in this great white quietude. They were walking like old men, weak-kneed, and bent under the weight of their packs and rifles.

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a cheery voice that hid the water in his heart every one had a word and a smile in reply, and made little jests about their drunken footsteps, for they were like drunken men with utter weariness.

"What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?" was one man's joke.

The last of those who came back-and there were many who never came back-were some hours later than the first company, having found it hard to crawl along that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place where the braziers were glowing.

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was a hero, though his name will never be known in the history of that silent and hidden war. And yet it was an ordinary episode, no degree worse in its hards.h.i.+p than what happened all along the line when there was an attack or counter-attack in foul weather.

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very simple men, should have "stuck it out" with that grandeur of courage which endured all things without self-interest and without emotion. They were unconscious of the virtue that was in them.

XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of sh.e.l.ls, saving them up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was concentrating "hate."

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being sh.e.l.led to pieces by long-range howitzers, or from engineers whose working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and piling up the casualties. It was hard to say: "Sorry!... We've got to go slow with ammunition."

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate the "heavies" had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields by day and night.

There was a larger supply of sh.e.l.ls for all those pieces, and no longer the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for artillery support. Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the enemy asked for trouble by any special show of "hate" he got it quickly and with a double dose.

Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except in places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down at them from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every battery. Going round the salient one day with General Burstall-and a very good name, too!-who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our guns and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.

Here and there our amateur gunners-quick to learn their job-found a good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and give praise to the little G.o.d of Luck, until one day sooner or later they were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not caught too soon.

So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village, where I went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet Street.

He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it-that was before his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic case of sh.e.l.l-shock-and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked in a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to bits, except where, on the outskirts, the chateau with its racing-stables remained untouched-"German spies!" said the boy-and where a little grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was battered and broken, and there were enormous sh.e.l.l-pits in the churchyard and open vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of their tombs. We walked along a sunken road and then to a barn in open fields. The roof was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on wet days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the room above the ladder where the officers had their mess. There were some home-made chairs up there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies were tacked up to the beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let down at night. A gramophone played merry music and gave a homelike touch to this parlor in war.

"A good spot!" I said. "Is it well hidden?"

"As safe as houses," said the captain of the battery. "Touching wood, I mean."

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

"What's happened?" I asked, not having heard the howl of a sh.e.l.l.

"Nothing," said the boy, "except touching wood. The captain spoke too loudly."

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill showed black as ink.

The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle of fire.

"It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench," said a bright-eyed boy by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he became a gunner officer in Flanders). "With any luck we shall get 'em in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal... And my gun's ready first, as usual."

The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull roar of a "heavy."

A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a mile away.

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

"Repeat!"

"We've got'em," said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.

The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

"We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit."

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns fired together. "Repeat!" came the high voice through the megaphone.