My Year of the War Part 23

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big sh.e.l.ls on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target. "Right on!"

And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

"Here, they are firing more than six!" said the general. "It's always hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like that."

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra sh.e.l.ls for full measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough. Conservation of sh.e.l.ls has become a first principle of the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.

Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a sh.e.l.l into a gun- breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for sh.e.l.ls. They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

"The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!" said one of the officers who was at our observation post. "They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target"--which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.

Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German sh.e.l.ls pa.s.sing some distance away.

They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fort.i.tude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.

You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively keeps--the reason of a world cause.

Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane a.s.sisting a battery by spotting the fall of its sh.e.l.ls, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If it is located, there is more work due in "make-up" to complete the disguise. Compet.i.tion among batteries is as keen as among battles.h.i.+ps of our North Atlantic fleet.

Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-cla.s.s Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.

"We found the mother wild, out there in the woods," one of the men explained. "She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by sh.e.l.l-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?"

On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have pa.s.sed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in an ill.u.s.trated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.

Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.

They had sh.e.l.led a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we pa.s.sed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower, and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a sh.e.l.l-fragment.

There is no fl.u.s.tering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need the crop?

And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.

XVIII Archibald The Archer

There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the sh.e.l.l makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of pa.s.sing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.

At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.

If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that was going on in an enemy's lines. They must keep up so high that through the aviator's gla.s.ses a man on the road is the size of a pin- head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over the parapet of a trench when the enemy's trench is only a hundred yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.

Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a noonday cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred yards behind the Taube. A soft thistledown against the blue it seems at that alt.i.tude; but it would not if it were about your ears. Then it would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and you would hear the whizz of scores of bullets and fragments.

The smoking bra.s.s sh.e.l.l-case is out of Archibald's steel throat, and another sh.e.l.l-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.

He knows that one means many, once he is in range.

Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to side- step. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator's eye.

Archibald's propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night finds him and the day's duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day.

Aeroplanes rarely go up at night; and when no aeroplanes are up, Archibald has no interest in the war. But he is alert at the first flush of dawn, on the look-out for game with the avidity of a pointer dog; for aviators are also up early.

Why he was named Archibald n.o.body knows. As his full name is Archibald the Archer, possibly it comes from some a.s.sociation with the idea of archery. If there were ten thousand anti-aircraft guns in the British army, every one would be known as Archibald.

When the British Expeditionary Force went to France it had none. All the British could do was to bang away at Taubes with thousands of rounds of rifle-bullets, which might fall in their own lines, and with the field guns.

It was pie in those days for the Taubes! Easy to keep out of the range of both rifles and guns and observe well! If the Germans did not know the progress of the British retreat from on high it was their own fault.

Now, the business of firing at Taubes is left entirely to Archibald.

When you see how hard it is for Archibald, after all his practice, to get a Taube, you understand how foolish it was for the field guns to try to get one.

Archibald, who is quite the "swaggerist" of the gun tribe, has his own private car built especially for him. Such of the cavalry's former part as the planes do not play he plays. He keeps off the enemy's scouts.

Do you seek team-work, spirit of corps, and smartness in this theatre of France, where all the old glamour of war is supposed to be lacking? You will find it in the attendants of Archibald. They have pride, elan, alertness, pepper, and all the other appetizers and condiments. They are as neat as a private yacht's crew, and as lively as an infield of a major league team. The Archibaldians are naturally bound to think rather well of themselves.

Watch them there, every man knowing his part, as they send their sh.e.l.ls after the Taube! There is not enough waste motion among the lot to tip over the range-finder, or the telescopes, or the score board, or any of the other paraphernalia a.s.sisting the man who is looking through the sight in knowing where to aim next, as a screw answers softly to his touch.

Is the sport of war dead? Not for Archibald! Here you see your target --which is so rare these days when British infantrymen have stormed and taken trenches without ever seeing a German--and the target is a bird, a man-bird. Puffs of smoke with bursting hearts of death are cl.u.s.tered around the Taube. One follows another in quick succession, for more than one Archibald is firing, before your entranced eye.

You are staring like the crowd of a county fair at a parachute act. For the next puff may get him. Who knows this better than the aviator?

He is, likely, an old hand at the game; or, if he is not, he has all the experience of other veterans to go by. His ruse is the same as that of the escaped prisoner who runs from the fire of a guard in a zigzag course, and more than that. If a puff comes near on the right, he turns to the left; if one comes near on the left, he turns to the right; if one comes under, he rises; over, he dips. This means that the next sh.e.l.l fired at the same point will be wide of the target.

Looking through the sight, it seems easy to hit a plane. But here is the difficulty. It takes two seconds, say, for the sh.e.l.l to travel to the range of the plane. The gunner must wait for its burst before he can spot his shot. Ninety miles an hour is a mile and a half a minute.

Divide that by thirty and you have about a hundred yards which the plane has travelled from the time the sh.e.l.l left the gun-muzzle till it burst. It becomes a matter of discounting the aviator's speed and guessing from experience which way he will turn next.

That ought to have got him--the burst was right under. No! He rises.

Surely that one got him! The puff is right in front, partly hiding the Taube from view. You see the plane tremble as if struck by a violent gust of wind. Close! Within thirty or forty yards, the telescope says.

But at that range the naked eye is easily deceived about distance.

Probably some of the bullets have cut his plane.

But you must hit the man or the machine in a vital spot in order to bring down your bird. The explosions must be very close to count. It is amazing how much sh.e.l.l-fire an aeroplane can stand. Aviators are accustomed to the whizz of sh.e.l.l-fragments and bullets, and to have their planes punctured and ripped. Though their engines are put out of commission, and frequently though the man be wounded, they are able to volplane back to the cover of their own lines.

To make a proper story we ought to have brought down this particular bird. But it had the luck, which most planes, British or German have, to escape antiaircraft gun-fire. It had begun edging away after the first shot and soon was out of range. Archibald had served the purpose of his existence. He had sent the prying aerial eye home.

A fight between planes in the air very rarely happens, except in the imagination. Planes do not go up to fight other planes, but for observation. Their business is to see and learn and bring home their news.

XIX Trenches In Summer

It was the same trench in June, still a relatively "quiet corner," which I had seen in March; but I would never have known it if its location had not been the same on the map. One was puzzled how a place that had been so wet could become so dry.

This time the approach was made in daylight through a long communication ditch, which brought us to a sh.e.l.l-wrecked farmhouse. We pa.s.sed through this and stepped down at the back door into deep traverses cut among the roots of an orchard; then behind walls of earth high above our heads to battalion headquarters in a neat little shanty, where I deposited the first of the cakes I had brought on the table beside some battalion reports. A cake is the right gift for the trenches, though less so in summer than in winter when appet.i.tes are less keen. The adjutant tried a slice while the colonel conferred with the general, who had accompanied me this far, and he glanced up at a sheet of writing with a line opposite hours of the day, pinned to a post of his dug-out.

"I wanted to see if it were time to make another report," he said. "We are always making reports. Everybody is, so that whoever is superior to someone else knows what is happening in his subordinate's department."