A Minstrel in France Part 16

Then, and, as a rule, then only, fire would cease for a few minutes.

There was far less chance of detection when the guns were still. At the height at which our archies--so the anti-aircraft guns are called by Tommy Atkins--forced the Boche to fly there was little chance of his observers picking out this battery, at least, against the ground.

If the guns were giving voice that chance was tripled--and so they stopped, at such times, until a British flyer had had time to engage the Hun and either bring him down or send him scurrying for the safe shelter behind his own lines.

Fritz, in the air, liked to have the odds with him, as a rule. It was exceptional to find a German flyer like Boelke who really went in for single-handed duels in the air. As a rule they preferred to attack a single plane with half a dozen, and so make as sure as they could of victory at a minimum of risk. But that policy did not always work-- sometimes the lone British flyer came out ahead, despite the odds against him.

There was a good deal of firing on general principles from Fritz. His sh.e.l.ls came wandering querulously about, striking on every side of the battery. Occasionally, of course, there was a hit that was direct, or nearly so. And then, as a rule, a new mound or two would appear in the little cemetery, and a new set of crosses that, for a few days, you might easily enough have marked for new because they would not be weathered yet. But such hits were few and far between, and they were lucky, casual shots, of which the Germans themselves did not have the satisfaction of knowing.

"Of course, if they get our range, really, and find out all about us, we'll have to move," said the officer in command. "That would be a bore, but it couldn't be helped. We're a fixed target, you see, as soon as they know just where we are, and they can turn loose a battery of heavy howitzers against us and clear us out of here in no time. But we're pretty quick movers when we have to move! It's great sport, in a way too, sometimes. We leave all the camouflage behind, and some-times Fritz will spend a week sh.e.l.ling a position that was moved away at the first sh.e.l.l that came as if it meant they really were on to us."

I wondered how a battery commander would determine the difference between a casual hit and the first sh.e.l.l of a bombardment definitely planned and accurately placed.

"You can tell, as a rule, if you know the game," he said. "There'll be searching sh.e.l.ls, you see. There'll be one too far, perhaps. And then, after a pretty exact interval, there'll be another, maybe a bit short. Then one to the left--and then to the right. By that time we're off as a rule--we don't wait for the one that will be scored a hit! If you're quick, you see, you can beat Fritz to it by keeping your eyes open, and being ready to move in a hurry when he's got a really good argument to make you do it."

But while I was there, while Fritz was inquisitive enough, his curiosity got him nowhere. There were no casual hits, even, and there was nothing to make the battery feel that it must be making ready for a quick trek.

Was that no a weird, strange game of hide and seek that I watched being played at Vimy Ridge? It gave me the creeps, that idea of battling with an enemy you could not see! It must be hard, at times, I think, for, the gunners to realize that they are actually at war.

But, no--there is always the drone and the squawking of the German sh.e.l.ls, and the plop-plop, from time to time, as one finds its mark in the mud nearby. But to think of shooting always at an enemy you cannot see!

It brought to my mind a tale I had heard at hame in Scotland. There was a hospital in Glasgow, and there a man who had gone to see a friend stopped, suddenly, in amazement, at the side of a cot. He looked down at features that were familiar to him. The man in the cot was not looking at him, and the visitor stood gaping, staring at him in the utmost astonishment and doubt.

"I say, man," he asked, at last, "are ye not Tamson, the baker?"

The wounded man opened his eyes, and looked up, weakly.

"Aye," he said. "I'm Tamson, the baker." His voice was weak, and he looked tired. But he looked puzzled, too.

"Weel, Tamson, man, what's the matter wi' ye?" asked the other. "I didna hear that ye were sick or hurt. How comes it ye are here? Can it be that ye ha' been to the war, man, and we not hearing of it, at all?"

"Aye, I think so," said Tamson, still weakly, but as if he were rather glad of a chance to talk, at that.

"Ye think so?" asked his friend, in greater astonishment than ever.

"Man, if ye've been to the war do ye not know it for sure and certain?"

"Well, I will tell ye how it is," said Tamson, very slowly and wearily. "I was in the reserve, do ye ken. And I was standin' in front of my hoose one day in August, thinkin' of nothin' at all. I marked a man who was coming doon the street, wi' a blue paper in his hand, and studyin' the numbers on the doorplates. But I paid no great heed to him until he stopped and spoke to me.

"He had stopped outside my hoose and looked at the number, and then at his blue paper. And then he turned to me.

"'Are ye Tamson, the baker?' he asked me--just as ye asked me that same question the noo.

"And I said to him, just as I said it to ye, 'Aye, I'm Tamson, the baker.'

"'Then it's Hamilton Barracks for ye, Tamson,' he said, and handed me the blue paper.

"Four hours from the time when he handed me the blue paper in front of my hoose in Glasgow I was at Hamilton Barracks. In twelve hours I was in Southhampton. In twenty hours I was in France. And aboot as soon as I got there I was in a lot of shooting and running this way and that that they ha' told me since was the Battle of the Marne.

"And in twenty-four hours more I was on my way back to Glasgow! In forty-eight hours I woke up in Stobe Hill Infirmary and the nurse was saying in my ear: 'Ye're all richt the noon, Tamson. We ha' only just amputated your leg!'

"So I think I ha' been to the war, but I can only say I think so. I only know what I was told--that ha' never seen a d.a.m.n German yet!"

That is a true story of Tamson the baker. And his experience has actually been shared by many a poor fellow--and by many another who might have counted himself lucky if he had lost no more than a leg, as Tamson did.

But the laddies of my battery, though they were shooting now at Germans they could not see, had had many a close up view of Fritz in the past, and expected many another in the future. Maybe they will get one, some time, after the fas.h.i.+on of the company of which my boy John once told me.

The captain of this company--a Hieland company, it was, though not of John's regiment--had spent must of his time in London before the war, and belonged to several clubs, which, in those days, employed many Germans as servants and waiters. He was a big man, and he had a deep, ba.s.s voice, so that he roared like the bull of Bashan when he had a mind to raise it for all to hear.

One day things were dull in his sector. The front line trench was not far from that of the Germans, but there was no activity beyond that of the snipers, and the Germans were being so cautious that ours were getting mighty few shots. The captain was bored, and so were the men.

"How would you like a pot shot, lads?" he asked.

"Fine!" came the answer. "Fine, sir!"

"Very well," said the captain. "Get ready with your rifles, and keep your eyes on you trench."

It was not more than thirty yards away--pointblank range. The captain waited until they were ready. And then his voice rang out in its loudest, most commanding roar.

"Waiter!" he shouted.

Forty helmets popped up over the German parapet, and a storm of bullets swept them away!

CHAPTER XVII

It was getting late--for men who had had so early a breakfast as we had had to make to get started in good time. And just as I was beginning to feel hungry--odd, it seemed to me, that such a thing as lunch should stay in my mind in such surroundings and when so many vastly more important things were afoot!--the major looked at his wrist watch.

"By Jove!" he said, "Lunch time! Gentlemen--you'll accept such hospitality as we can offer you at our officer's mess?"

There wasn't any question about acceptance! We all said we were delighted, and we meant it. I looked around for a hut or some such place, or even for a tent, and, seeing nothing of the sort, wondered where we might be going to eat. I soon found out. The major led the way underground, into a dugout. This was the mess. It was hard by the guns, and in a hole that had been dug out, quit literally. Here there was a certain degree of safety. In these dugouts every phase of the battery's life except the actual serving of the guns went on.

Officers and men alike ate and slept in them.

They were much snugger within than you might fancy. A lot of the men had given homelike touches to their habitations. Pictures cut from the ill.u.s.trated papers at home, which are such prime favorites with all the Tommies made up a large part of the decorative scheme.

Pictures of actresses predominated; the Tommies didn't go in for war pictures. Indeed, there is little disposition to hammer the war home at you in a dugout. The men don't talk about it or think about, save as they must; you hear less talk about the war along the front than you do at home. I heard a story at Vimy Ridge of a Tommy who had come back to the trenches after seeing Blighty for the first time in months.

"h.e.l.lo, Bill," said one of his mates. "Back again, are you? How's things in Blighty?" "Oh, all right," said Bill.

Then he looked around. He p.r.i.c.ked his ears as a sh.e.l.l whined above him. And he took out his pipe and stuffed it full of tobacco, and lighted it, and sat back. He sighed in the deepest content as the smoke began to curl upward.

"Bli'me, Bill--I'd say, to look at you, you was glad to be back here!" said his mate, astonished.

"Well, I ain't so sorry, and that's a fact," said Bill. "I tell you how it is, Alf. Back there in Blighty they don't talk about nothing but this b.l.o.o.d.y war. I'm fair fed up with it, that I am! I'm glad to be back here, where I don't have to 'ear about the war every bleedin'

minute!"

That story sounds far fetched to you, perhaps, but it isn't. War talk is shop talk to the men who are fighting it and winning it, and it is perfectly true and perfectly reasonable, too, that they like to get away from it when they can, just as any man likes to get away from the thought of his business or his work when he isn't at the office or the factory or the shop.

Captain G.o.dfrey explained to me, as we went into the mess hall for lunch, that the dugouts were really pretty safe. Of course there were dangers--where are there not along that strip of land that runs from the North Sea to Switzerland in France and Belgium?

"A direct hit from a big enough sh.e.l.l would bury us all," he said.

"But that's not likely--the chances are all against it. And, even then, we'd have a chance. I've seen men dug out alive from a hole like this after a sh.e.l.l from one of their biggest howitzers had landed square upon it."