Letters from France Part 8

The Germans call it _Trommelfeuer_--drum fire. I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield. You will be sitting at your tea, the normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute. Suddenly, from over the distant hills, to left or right, there breaks out the roll of a great kettledrum, ever so far away. Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron s.h.i.+p's tank instead.

That is _Trommelfeuer_--what we call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid--like the swift roll of a kettledrum--you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French a.s.sault. But it is often our own guns after all--I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of them.

Long afterwards--perhaps in the grey of the next morning--one may see outside of some dug-out, in a muddy wilderness of old trenches and wheel-tracks, guarded by half a dozen Australians with fixed bayonets, a group of dejected men in grey. The cold Scotch mist stands in little beads on the grey cloth--the bayonets s.h.i.+ne very cold in the white light before the dawn--the damp, slippery brown earth is too wet for a comfortable seat. But there is always some Australian there who will give them a cigarette; a cheery Melbourne youngster or two step down into the crowd and liven them with friendly chaff; the blue sky begins to show through the mist--the early morning aeroplane hums past on its way to the line, low down, half hidden in the wrack. The big bushman from Gippsland at a neighbouring coffee stall--praise heaven for that inst.i.tution--gives them a drink of the warm stuff. And I verily believe that at that moment they emerge for the first time out of a frightful dream.

For they are the men who have been through the _Trommelfeuer_.

Strong men arrive from that experience shaking like leaves in the wind.

I have seen one of our own youngsters--a boy who had fought a great fight all through the dark hours, and who had refused to come back when he was first ordered to--I have seen him unable to keep still for an instant after the strain, and yet ready to fight on till he dropped; physically almost a wreck, but with his wits as sharp and his spirits as keen as a steel chisel. I have seen other Australians who, after doing glorious work through thirty or forty hours of unimaginable strain, buried and buried and buried again and still working like tigers, have broken down and collapsed, unable to stand or to walk, unable to move an arm except limply, as if it were string; ready to weep like little children.

It is the method which the German invented for his own use. For a year and a half he had a monopoly--British soldiers had to hang on as best they could under the knowledge that the enemy had more guns and more sh.e.l.l than they, and bigger sh.e.l.l at that. But at last the weapon seems to have been turned against him. No doubt his armaments and munitions are growing fast, but ours have for the moment overtaken them. And h.e.l.l though it is for both sides--something which no soldiers in the world's history ever yet had to endure--it is mostly better for us at present than for the Germans. I have heard men coming out of the thick of it say, "Well, I'm glad I'm not a Hun."

Now, here is what it means. There is no good done by describing the particular horrors of war--G.o.d knows those who see them want to forget them as soon as they can. But it is just as well to know what the work in the munition factories means to _your_ friends--_your_ sons and fathers and brothers at the front.

The normal sh.e.l.ling of the afternoon--a scattered bombardment all over the landscape, which only brings perhaps half a dozen sh.e.l.ls to your immediate neighbourhood once in every ten minutes--has noticeably quickened. The German is obviously turning on more batteries. The light field-gun shrapnel is fairly scattered as before. But 5.9-inch howitzers are being added to it. Except for his small field guns, the German makes little use of guns. His work is almost entirely done with howitzers. He possesses big howitzers--8-inch and larger--as we do. But the backbone of his artillery is the 5.9 howitzer; and after that probably the 4.2.

The sh.e.l.ls from both these guns are beginning to fall more thickly. Huge black clouds shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground, and slowly drift away across the hill-top. Suddenly there is a descending shriek, drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly near; a crash far louder than the nearest thunder; a colossal thump to the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its base; a scatter of flying bits and all sorts of under-noises, rustle of a flying wood splinter, whir of fragments, scatter of falling earth.

Before it is half finished another shriek exactly similar is coming through it. Another crash--apparently right on the crown of your head, as if the roof beams of the sky had been burst in. You can just hear, through the crash, the shriek of a third and fourth sh.e.l.l as they come tearing down the vault of heaven--_crash--crash_. Clouds of dust are floating over you. A swifter shriek and something breaks like a gla.s.s bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low overhead. It bursts like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, _smash, smash, smash_, with one or two more of the heavier sh.e.l.ls punctuating the shower of the lighter ones. The lighter sh.e.l.l is shrapnel from field guns, sent, I dare say, to keep you in the trench while the heavier sh.e.l.l pounds you there. A couple of salvos from each, perhaps twenty or thirty sh.e.l.ls in the minute, and the shrieks cease. The dust drifts down the hill. The sky clears. The sun looks in. Five minutes later down comes exactly such another shower.

That is the beginning. As the evening wears on, the salvos become more frequent. All through the night they go on. The next morning the intervals are becoming even less. Occasionally the hurricane reaches such an intensity that there seems no interval at all. There is an easing in the afternoon--which may indicate that the worst is over, or merely that the guns are being cleaned, or the gunners having their tea.

Towards dusk it swells in a wave heavier than any that has yet come. All through the second night the inferno lasts. In the grey dawn of the second day it increases in a manner almost unbelievable--the dust of it covers everything; it is quite impossible to see. The earth shakes and quivers with the pounding.

It is just then that the lighter guns join in with the roll as of a kettledrum--_Trommelfeuer_. The enemy is throwing out his infantry, and his shrapnel is showering on to our lines in order to keep down the heads of our men to the last moment. Suddenly the whole noise eases. The enemy is casting his shrapnel and big sh.e.l.l farther back.

The chances are that most men in those racked lines do not know whether the enemy ever delivers the attack or not. Our artillery breaks the head of it before it crosses No Man's Land. A few figures on the skyline, hopping from crater to crater, indicate what is left of it. As soon as they find rifle fire and machine-guns on them the remnant give it up as hopeless. They thought our men would have run--and they found them still at their post; that is all.

And what of the men who have been out there under that hurricane, night and day, until its duration almost pa.s.sed memory--amidst sights and sounds indescribable, desperately tried? I was out there once after such a time as that. There they were in their dusty ditch in that blasted, brown Sahara of a country--Sydney boys, country fellows from New South Wales, our old friends just as we knew them, heavy eyed, tired to death as after a long fight with a bush fire or heavy work in drought time--but simply doing their ordinary Australian work in their ordinary Australian way. And that is all they had been doing and all they wished anyone to believe they had been doing.

But what are we going to do for them? The mere noise is enough to break any man's nerves. Every one of those shrieking sh.e.l.ls which fell night and day might mean any man's instant death. As he hears each sh.e.l.l coming he knows it. He saw the sights around him--he was buried by earth and dug out by his mates, and he dug them out in turn. What can we do for him? I know only one thing--it is the only alleviation that science knows of. (I am talking now of the most modern and heaviest of battles, and of the thick and centre of it; for no men have ever been through a heavier fight than Pozieres.) We can force some mitigation of all this by one means and one alone--if we can give the Germans worse. The chief anxiety in the mind of the soldier is--have we got the guns and the sh.e.l.ls--can we keep ahead of them with guns and our ammunition? That means everything. These men have the nerve to go through these infernos, provided their friends at home do not desert them. If the munition worker could see what I have seen, he would toil as though he were racing against time to save the life of a man.

I saw yesterday a letter picked up on the battlefield--it was from an Australian private. "Dear Mother, sisters, brothers and Auntie Lill," it said. "As we are about to go into work that must be done, I want to ask you, if anything should happen to me, not to worry. You must think of all the mothers that have lost ones as dear to them. One thing you can say--that you lost one doing his little bit for a good cause.

"I know you shall feel it if anything does happen to me, but I am willing and prepared to give my life for the cause."

Such lives hang from hour to hour on the work that is done in the British factories.

CHAPTER XX

THE NEW FIGHTING

_France, August 20th._

It is a month this morning since Australians plunged into the heart of the most modern of battles. They had been in many sorts of battle before; but they had never been in the brunt of the whole war where the science and ingenuity of war had reached for the moment their highest pitch. One month ago they plunged into the very brunt and apex of it.

And they are still fighting there.

People have spoken of this war as the war of trenches. But the latest battles have reached a stage beyond that. The war of trenches is a comfortable out-of-date phase, to be looked upon with regret and perhaps even some longing. The war of to-day is a war of craters and potholes--a war of crannies and nicks and crevices torn out of the earth yesterday, and to be shattered into new shapes to-morrow. It may not seem easy to believe, but we have seen the Germans under heavy bombardment leaving the shelter of their trenches for safety in the open--jumping out and running forward into sh.e.l.l holes--anywhere so long as they got away from the cover which they had built for themselves. The trench which they left is by next day non-existent--even the airmen looking down on it from above in the mists of the grey dawn can scarcely tell where it was.

Then some community of ants sets to work and the line begins to show again. Again it is obliterated, until a stage comes when the German decides that it is not worth while digging it out. He has other lines, and he turns his energy on to them.

The result of all this is that areas of ground in the hot corners of battles like that of the Somme and Verdun, and especially disputed hill summits such as the Mort Homme or this Pozieres Ridge, become simply a desert of sh.e.l.l craters.

A few days back, going to a portion of the line which had considerably altered since I was there, I went by a trench which was marked on the map. It was a good trench, but it did not seem to have been greatly used of late, which was rather surprising. "You won't find it quite so good all the way," said a friend who was coming down.

Presently, and quite suddenly, the trench shallowed. The sides which had been clean cut were tumbled in. The fallen earth blocked the pa.s.sage, and the journey became a switchback over tumbled rubbish and into the trench again. Someone had before been living in the trench, for there were tools in it and bits of soldiers' gear. Here and there a shattered rifle stuck out of the terra-cotta soil. The trench shallowed still further. There had been little hastily sc.r.a.ped dug-outs in the sides of it. They were more than three parts filled with earth; but in them, every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the debris. It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the sh.e.l.l that killed him. It must have been an old German trench taken by our men some weeks before. It can scarcely have been visited since, for its garrison lay there just as the sh.e.l.ls had buried them. Probably it had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.

The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a puzzle to say what was trench and what was not. Around one stretched a desert of sh.e.l.l craters--hole bordering upon hole so that there was no s.p.a.ce at all between them. Each hole was circular like the ring of earth at the mouth of an ants' nest several thousand times magnified, and they stretched away like the waves of the sea. Far to the left was a bare, brown hill-side. In front, and to the right, billows of red sh.e.l.l-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.

You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean. In the trough of a sh.e.l.l-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that sh.e.l.l-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance.

But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. In one part of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black, shattered tree stumps. Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding among the craters--clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement.

The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen yards farther--a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable there for a short interval. That was certainly the direction.

It was the parapet sure enough. There, waterlogged in earth, were the remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench. A few yards on was another similar barrier. They must have been the British and German barricade built across that sap at the end of some fierce bomb fight, already long-forgotten by the lapse of several weeks. What Victoria Crosses, what Iron Crosses were won there, by deeds whose memory deserved to last as long as the race endures, G.o.d only knows--one trusts that the great scheme of things provides some record of such a sacrifice.

Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way.

Sh.e.l.ls of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially--about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close--a black burst on the brown hill--two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side--a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline--an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WINDMILL OF POZIeRES AND THE Sh.e.l.l-SHATTERED GROUND AROUND IT]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCH]

One picked the likeliest line, and was ploughing along it, when a bullet hissed not far away. It did not seem probable that there were Germans in the landscape. One looked for another cause. Away to one side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed.

So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable sh.e.l.l-hole trench, the enemy must still have been holding on. It was a case for keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.

Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard.

In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world, to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice, here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position with its wickerwork sh.e.l.l-covers around it--the whole looking like a broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. An officer crawled out to some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.

Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes. "Yes, we were put out there to dig an outpost trench," he said. "The sergeant gave us a wrong direction, I think. We took two days' rations and went out hundreds of yards. No one came near us. There was firing on all sides, and we did not know where we were. Our food was finished--we saw men working--we did not know who they were--but they were English, and we were captured."

CHAPTER XXI

ANGELS' WORK

_France, August 28th._

It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozieres Ridge towards Mouquet Farm. Along a good part of the line the troops were back in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in the trenches they had gone out for.

The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down. The artillery Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had turned into bed. The normal early morning gun was sending its normal sh.e.l.l at intervals ranging up the long valley--_rattle, rattle, rattle_, until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanis.h.i.+ng railway train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its gun barking too--every now and again the little sh.e.l.l came and spat over the hill-side.

The morning broke very pale and white through the mist--as though the earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling over ground smashed in by the last night's fire--red earth new turned.