My Second Year of the War Part 17

There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of observation, for it affected the enemy's _morale_. A soldier likes to see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away. The aerial influence on his psychology is enormous, for he can watch the planes as he lies in a sh.e.l.l-crater with his machine gun or stands guard in the trench; he has glimpses of pa.s.sing wings overhead between the bursts of sh.e.l.ls. To know that his guns are not replying adequately and that every time one of his planes appears it is driven to cover takes the edge off initiative, courage and discipline, in the resentment that he is handicapped.

German prisoners used to say on the Somme that their aviators were "funks," though the Allied aviators knew that it was not their opponents' lack of courage which was the princ.i.p.al fault, even if they had lost _morale_ from being the under dog and lacked British and French initiative, but numbers and material. It was resource against resource again; a fight in the delicate business of the manufacture of the fragile framework, of the wonderful engines with their short lives, and of the skilled battalions of workers in factories. The Germans had to bring more planes from another front in order to restore the balance.

The Allies foreseeing this brought still more themselves, till the numbers were so immense that when a battle between a score of planes on either side took place no one dared venture the opinion that the limit had been reached--not while there was so much room in the air and volunteers for the aviation corps were so plentiful.

XXIII

A PATENT CURTAIN OF FIRE

Thiepval again--Director of tactics of an army corps--Graduates of Staff Colleges--Army jargon--An army director's office--"Hope you will see a good show"--"This road is sh.e.l.led; closed to vehicles"--A perfect summer afternoon--The view across No Man's Land--Nests of burrowers more cunning than any rodents--men--Tranquil preliminaries to an attack--The patent curtain of fire--Registering by practice shots--Running as men will run only from death--The tall officer who collapsed--"The shower of death."

"We had a good show day before yesterday," said Brigadier-General Philip Howell, when I went to call on him one day. "Sorry you were not here.

You could have seen it excellently."

The corps of which he was general staff officer had taken a section of first-line trench at Thiepval with more prisoners than casualties, which is the kind of news they like to hear at General Headquarters. Thiepval was always in the background of the army's mind, the symbol of rankling memory which irritated British stubbornness and consoled the enemy for his defeat of July 15th and his gradual loss of the Ridge. The Germans, on the defensive, considered that the failure to take Thiepval at the beginning of the Somme battle proved its impregnability; the British, on the offensive, considered no place impregnable.

Faintly visible from the hills around Albert, distinctly from the observation post in a high tree, the remains of the village looked like a patch of coal dust smeared in a fold of the high ground. When British fifteen-inch sh.e.l.ls made it their target some of the dust rose in a great geyser and fell back into place; but there were cellars in Thiepval which even fifteen-inch sh.e.l.ls could not penetrate.

"However, we'll make the Germans there form the habit of staying indoors," said a gunner.

Howell who had the Thiepval task in hand I had first known at Uskub in Macedonia in the days of the Macedonian revolution, when Hilmi Pasha was juggling with the Powers of Europe and autonomy--days which seem far away. A lieutenant then, Howell had an a.s.signment from _The Times_, while home on leave from India, in order to make a study of the Balkan situation. In our walks around Uskub as we discussed the politics and the armies of the world I found that all was grist that came to his keen mind. His ideas about soldiering were explicit and practical. It was such hard-working, observant officers as he, most of them students at one time or another at the Staff College, who, when the crisis came, as the result of their application in peace time, became the organizers and commanders of the New Army. The lieutenant I had met at Uskub was now, at thirty-eight, the director of the tactics of an army corps which was solving the problem of reducing the most redoubtable of field works.

Whenever I think of the Staff College I am reminded that at the close of the American Civil War the commanders of all the armies and most of the corps were graduates of West Point, which serves to prove that a man of ability with a good military education has the start of one who has not, though no laws govern geniuses; and if we should ever have to fight another great war I look for our generals to have studied at Leavenworth and when the war ends for the leaders to be men whom the public did not know when it began.

"We shall have another show to-morrow and I think that will be a good one, too," said Howell.

All attacks are "shows;" big shows over two or three miles or more of front, little shows over a thousand yards or so, while five hundred yards is merely "cleaning up a trench." It may seem a flippant way of speaking, but it is simply the application of jargon to the everyday work of an organization. An attack that fails is a "washout," for not all attacks succeed. If they did, progress would be a matter of marching.

"Zero is at four; come at two," Howell said when I was going.

At two the next afternoon I found him occupied less with final details than with the routine business of one who is clearing his desk preparatory to a week-end holiday. Against the wall of what had been once a bedroom in the house of the leading citizen of the town, which was his office, he had an improvised bookkeeper's desk and on it were the mapped plans of the afternoon's operation, which he had worked over with the diligence and professional earnestness of an architect over his blue prints. He had been over the ground and studied it with the care of a landscape gardener who is going to make improvements.

"A smoke barrage screen along there," he explained, indicating the line of a German trench, "but a real attack along here"--which sounded familiar from staff officers in chateaux.

Every detail of the German positions was accurately outlined, yard by yard, their machine guns definitely located.

"We're uncertain about that one," he remarked, laying his pencil on the map symbol for an M.G.

Trench mortars had another symbol, deep dugouts another. It was the business of somebody to get all this information without being communicative about his methods. Referring to a section of a hundred yards or more he remarked that an eager company commander had thought that he could take a bit of German trench there and had taken it, which meant that the gunners had to be informed so as to rearrange the barrage or curtain of fire with the resulting necessity of fresh observations and fresh registry of practice shots. I judged that Howell did not want the men to be too eager; he wanted them just eager enough.

This game being played along the whole front has, of course, been likened to chess, with guns and men as pieces. I had in mind the dummy actors and dummy scenery with which stage managers try out their acts, only in this instance there was never any rehearsal on the actual stage with the actual scenery unless a first attack had failed, as the Germans will not permit such liberties except under machine gun fire. A call or two came over the telephone about some minor details, the princ.i.p.al ones being already settled.

"It's time to go," he said finally.

The corps commander was downstairs in the dining-room comfortably smoking his pipe after tea. There would be nothing for him to do until news of the attack had been received. "I hope you will see a good show,"

he remarked, by way of _au revoir_.

How earnestly he hoped it there is no use of mentioning here. It is taken for granted. Carefully thought out plans backed by hundreds of guns and the lives of men at stake--and against the Thiepval fortifications!

"Yes, we'll make it nicely," concluded Howell, as we went down the steps. A man used to motoring ten miles to catch the nine-thirty to town could not have been more certain of the disposal of his time than this soldier on the way to an attack. His car which was waiting had a right of way up to front such as is enjoyed only by the manager of the works on his own premises. Of course he paid no attention to the sign, "This road is sh.e.l.led; closed to vehicles," at the beginning of a stretch of road which looked unused and desolate.

"A car in front of me here the other day received a direct hit from a 'krump,' and car and pa.s.sengers practically disappeared before my eyes,"

he remarked, without further dwelling on the incident; for the Germans were, in turn, irritated with the insistence of these stubborn British that they could take Thiepval.

Three prisoners in the barbed-wire inclosure that we pa.s.sed looked lonely. They must have been picked up in a little bombing affair in a sap.

"I think that they will have plenty of companions this evening," said Howell. "How they will enjoy their dinner!" He smiled in recollection as did I of that familiar sight of prisoners eating. Nothing excites hunger like a battle or gives such zest to appet.i.te as knowledge that you are out of danger. I know that it is true and so does everybody at the front.

As his car knew no regulations except his wishes he might take it as far as it could go without trying to cross trenches. I wonder how long it would have taken me if I had had a map and asked no questions to find my way to the gallery seat which Howell had chosen for watching the show.

After we had pa.s.sed guns with only one out of ten firing leisurely but all with their covers off, the gunners near their pieces and ample ammunition at hand, we cut straight up the slope, Howell glancing at his wrist watch and asking if he were walking too fast for me. We dropped into a communication trench at a point which experience had proven was the right place to begin to take cover.

"This is a good place," he said at length, and we rubbed our helmets with some of the chalk lumps of the parapet, which left the black spot of our field gla.s.ses the only bit of us not in harmony with our background.

It was a perfect afternoon in late summer, without wind or excessive heat, the blue sky unflecked; such an afternoon as you would choose for lolling in a hammock and reading a book. The foreground was a slope downward to a little valley where the usual limbless tree-trunks were standing in a grove that had been thoroughly sh.e.l.led. No one was in sight there, and an occasional German five-point-nine sh.e.l.l burst on the mixture of splinters and earth.

On the other side of the valley was a cut in the earth, a ditch, the British first-line trench, which was unoccupied, so far as I could see.

Beyond lay the old No Man's Land where gra.s.s and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous sh.e.l.l-craters and the remains of the dead from the British charge of July 1st which had been repulsed. On the other side of this was two hundred yards of desolate stretch up to the wavy, chalky excavation from the deep cutting of the German first-line trench, as distinct as a white line on dark-brown paper.

There was no sign of life here, either, or to the rear where ran the network of other excavations as the result of the almost two years of German digging, the whole thrown in relief on the slope up to the bare trunks of two or three trees thrust upward from the smudge of the ruins of Thiepval.

Just a knoll in rolling farm country, that was all; but it concealed burrows upon burrows of burrowers more cunning than any rodents--men.

Since July 1st the Germans had not been idle. They had had time to profit from the lesson of the attack with additions and improvements.

They had deepened dugouts and joined them by galleries; they had Box and c.o.x hiding-places; nests defensible from all sides which became known as Mystery Works and Wonder Works. The message of that gashed and spaded hillside was one of mortal defiance.

Occasionally a British high explosive broke in the German trench and all up and down the line as far as we could see this desultory sh.e.l.l fire was proceeding, giving no sign of where the next attack was coming, which was part of the plan.

"It's ten to four!" said Howell. "We were here in ample time. I hope we get them at relief," which was when a battalion that had been on duty was relieved by a battalion that had been in rest.

He laid his map on the parapet and the location and plan of the attack became clear as a part of the extensive operations in the Thiepval-Mouquet Farm sector. The British were turning the flank of these Thiepval positions as they swung in from the joint of the break of July 1st up to the Pozieres Ridge. A squeeze here and a squeeze there; an attack on that side and then on this; one bite after another.

"I hope you will like our patent barrage," said the artillery general, as he stopped for a moment on the way to a near-by observation post. "We are thinking rather well of it ourselves of late." He did not even have to touch a pushb.u.t.ton to turn on the current. He had set four as zero.

I am not going to speak of suspense before the attack as being in the very air and so forth. I felt it personally, but the Germans did not feel it or, at least, the British did not want them to feel it. There was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for sh.e.l.l-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme offensive had begun. One could ask nothing better than that the tranquillity should put the Germans to sleep. To the staff expert, however, the dead world lived without the sight of men. Every square rod of ground had some message.

Of course, I knew what was coming at four o'clock, but I was amazed at its power and accuracy when it did come--this improved method of artillery preparation, this patent curtain of fire. An outburst of screaming sh.e.l.ls overhead that became a continuous, roaring sweep like that of a number of endless railroad trains in the air signified that the guns which had been idle were all speaking. Every one by scattered practice shots had registered on the German first-line trench at the point where its sh.e.l.l-bursts would form its link in the chain of bursts. Over the wavy line of chalk for the front of the attack broke the flashes of cracking shrapnel jackets, whose bullets were whipping up spurts of chalk like spurts of dust on a road from a hailstorm.

As the gun-blasts began I saw some figures rise up back of the German trench. I judged that they were the relief coming up or a working party that had been under cover. These Germans had to make a quick decision: Would they try a leap for the dugouts or a leap to the rear? They decided on flight. A hundred-yard sprint and they would be out of that murderous swath laid so accurately on a narrow belt. They ran as men will only run from death. No goose-stepping or "after you, sir" limited their eagerness. I had to smile at their precipitancy and as some dropped it was hard to realize that they had fallen from death or wounds. They seemed only manikins in a pantomime.

Then a lone figure stepped up out of a communication trench just back of the German first line. This tall officer, who could see nothing between walls of earth where he was, stood up in full view looking around as if taking stock of the situation, deciding, perhaps, whether that smoke barrage to his right now rolling out of the British trench was on the real line of attack or was only for deception; observing and concluding what his men, I judge, were never to know, for, as a man will when struck a hard blow behind the knees, he collapsed suddenly and the earth swallowed him up before the bursts of shrapnel smoke had become so thick over the trench that it formed a curtain.

There must have been a sh.e.l.l a minute to the yard. Shrapnel bullets were hissing into the mouths of dugouts; death was hugging every crevice, saying to the Germans:

"Keep down! Keep out of the rain! If you try to get out with a machine gun you will be killed! Our infantry is coming!"