My Year of the War Part 29

There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, b.u.mptious youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a sh.e.l.l can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.

But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare without the signs of brutality which we a.s.sociate with the prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting.

They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a t.i.tle to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their thinking will fas.h.i.+on the new trend of civilization, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.

Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellows.h.i.+p of their courage and purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without the pa.s.sion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pa.s.s by from hour to hour. Borne by comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that pa.s.sage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!

For the second permissible--periscopes are tempting targets--I looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British lyddite sh.e.l.l went cras.h.i.+ng into the German parapet. The dust from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it.

Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together.

Another wounded man was brought by.

"They're bombing up ahead. He has just been hit." As we drew aside to make room for him to pa.s.s, once more the civilian realized his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal a propos as an outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men.

We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench that were beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!

"A Boche gas sh.e.l.l!" we were told, as we pa.s.sed an informal excavation in the communication trench on our way back.

"Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they will recover."

"The Boches want us to hurry!" exclaimed L------.

They were giving the communication trench a turn at "strafing," now, and sh.e.l.ls were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use trying to respond to one's natural inclination to run away from the pursuing shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.

"But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it."

We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations made by sh.e.l.ls. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with your only view of surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged.

Crash--and safe again!

"Pretty!" L------ said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R------, also smiling, had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.

"Yes--pretty!" R------and I exclaimed together.

L------took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R------ that he had said "A black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing."

Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.

At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are sent forward to a.s.sist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.

"Yes, this was pretty heavy sh.e.l.l-fire," said an officer who ought to know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack --that is the first degree. You might call this the second."

It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.

Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.

Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when--well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"--Caesar's ghost! It was one of our own sh.e.l.ls! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher- bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire.

If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.

"Did you get any sh.e.l.ls in your neighbourhood?" we asked the chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.

"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."

As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being sh.e.l.led by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.

Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.

XXIII Winning And Losing

Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in antic.i.p.ation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.

At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another, became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.

The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.

The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course.

Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.

You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the occasional sh.e.l.l is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth.

In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless sh.e.l.l-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.

The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not be done--later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British sh.e.l.l-fire.

"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these Englis.h.!.+ They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmans.h.i.+p.

It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate.

Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self- punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.

But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else--the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let- us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick"

one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.

One could only a.s.sure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.

At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won--the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns and the Germans with them.

When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until------!

Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.

The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done.

They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive--thanks to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is highly sensitized steel in response to will.

They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; n.o.body in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters from home, looking at the pictures in ill.u.s.trated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman's pastime and his birthright.