Part 8

Back in the Battery the telephone wires ran into a dug-out that was the brain-centre of the guns, and from here the Forward Officer's directions emerged and were translated to the gunners through the Battery Commander and the Battery Sergeant-Major's megaphone.

All the morning the gunners followed those orders blindly, sluing the hot gun-muzzles a fraction this way or that, making minute adjustments on sights and range drums and shell fuses. They could see no glimpse of the fight, but, more or less accurately, they could follow its varying fortunes and trace its movements by the orders that came through to them. When they had to send their shells further back, the enemy obviously were being pressed back; when the fire had to be brought closer the enemy were closer. An urgent call for rapid fire with an increasing range meant our infantry attacking; with a lessening range, their being attacked.

Occasionally the Battery Commander passed to the Section Commanders items of news from the Forward Officer, and they in turn told the 'Numbers One' in charge of the guns, and the gun detachments.

Such a message was passed along when the Forward Officer telephoned news of the heavy pressure on the weakened centre. Every man in the Battery knew what was expected, and detachment vied with detachment in the speedy correcting of aim and range, and the rapid service of their guns. When the order came for a round of 'Battery fire'--which calls for the guns to fire in their turn from right to left--one gun was a few seconds late in reporting ready, and every other man at every other gun fretted and chafed impatiently as if each second had been an hour.

At another message from the Forward Officer the Battery Commander called for Section Commanders. The Sergeant-Major clapped megaphone to mouth and shouted, and two young subalterns and a sergeant jumped from their places, and raced for the dug-out. The Major spoke rapidly and tersely. 'We are putting down a belt of shrapnel in front of our own infantry--very close to them. You know what that means--the most careful and exact laying and fusing, and fire as hot and heavy as you can make it. The infantry can't hold 'em. They're depending on us; the line depends on us. Tell your men so. Be off, now.' The three saluted, whirled on their heels, and were off. They told their men, and the men strained every nerve to answer adequately to the call upon them. The rate of fire worked up faster and faster. Between the thunder-claps of the gun the Sergeant-Major's megaphone bellowed, 'Number Six, check your lay.' Number Six missed the message, but the nearest gun caught the word and passed it along. The Section Commander heard, saluted to show he had heard and understood, and ran himself to check the layer's aim.

Up to now the Battery had worked without coming under any serious fire. There were always plenty of rifle bullets coming over, and an occasional one of the shells that roared constantly past or over fell amongst the guns. A few men had been wounded, and one had been killed, and that was all.

Then, quite suddenly, a tempest of high-explosive shell rained down on the battery, in front of, behind, over, and amongst the guns. Instinctively the men hesitated in their work, but the next instant the voices of the Section Commanders brought them to themselves. There were shelter-pits and dug-outs close by, and, without urgent need of their fire, the guns might be left while the gunners took cover till the storm was over. But there could be no thought of that now, while the picture was in everyone's mind of the infantry out there being hard pressed and overborne by the weight of the assault. So the gunners stayed by their guns and loaded, laid, and fired as fast as they could serve their pieces. The gun shields give little or no protection from high-explosive shells, because these burst overhead and fling their fragments straight down, burst in rear, and hurl jagged splinters outwards in every direction. The men were as open and unprotected to them as bare flesh is to bullet or cold steel; but they knelt or sat in their places, and pushed their work into a speed that was only limited by the need for absolute accuracy.

A shell burst close in rear of Number One gun, and the whirlwind of splinters and bullets struck down half the detachment at a blow. The fallen men were lifted clear, the remaining gunners took up their appointed share of the lost men's duties, a shell was slung in, the breech slammed shut, the firing-lever jerked--and Number One gun was in action again and firing almost as fast as before. The sergeant in charge of another gun was killed instantaneously by a shrapnel bullet in the head. His place was taken by the next senior before the last convulsive tremors had passed through the dead man's muscles; and the gun kept on without missing a round.

The shell-fire grew more and more intense. The air was thick and choking with smoke and chemical fumes, and vibrant with the rush and shriek, of the shells, the hum of bullets, and the ugly whirr of splinters, the crash of impacting shells, and ear-splitting crack of the guns' discharge, the 'r-r-rupp' of shrapnel on the wet ground, the metallic clang of bullets and steel fragments on the gun-shields and mountings. But through all the inferno the gunners worked on, swiftly but methodically. After each shot the layers glared anxiously into the eye-piece of their sights and made minute movements of elevating and traversing wheels, the men at the range-drums examined them carefully and readjusted them exactly, the fuse-setters twisted the rings marking the fuse's time of burning until they were correct literally to a hair-line; every man working as if the gun were shooting for a prize-competition cup. Their care, as well as their speed, was needed; for, more than any cup, good men's lives were at stake and hanging on their close and accurate shooting. For if the sights were a shade to right or left of their 'aiming point,' if the range were shortened by a fractional turn of the drum, if a fuse was wrongly set to one of the scores of tiny marks on its ring, that shell might fall on the British line, take toll of the lives of friend instead of foe, go to break down the hard-pressed British resistance instead of upholding it.

Man after man was hit by shell splinter or bullet, but no man left his place unless he was too badly injured to carry on. The seriously wounded dragged themselves clear as best they could and crawled to any cover from the bursting shells; the dead lay where they fell. The detachments were reduced to skeleton crews. One Section Commander laid and fired a gun; another, with a smashed thigh, sat and set fuses until he fainted from loss of blood and from pain. The Battery Commander took the telephone himself and sent the telephonist to help the guns; and when a bursting shell tore out one side of the sandbags of the dug-out the Battery Commander rescued himself and the instrument from the wreckage, mended the broken wire, and sat in the open, alternately listening at the receiver and yelling exhortation and advice to the gunners through the Sergeant-Major's megaphone. The Sergeant-Major had gone on the run to round up every available man, and brought back at the double the Battery cooks, officers' grooms, mess orderlies and servants. The slackening fire of the Battery spurted again and ran up to something like its own rate. And the Major cheered the men on to a last effort, shouting the Forward Officer's message that the attack was failing, was breaking, was being wiped out mainly by the Battery's fire.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the tornado of shell-fire about them ceased, shifted its storm-centre, and fell roaring and crashing and hammering on an empty hedge and ditch a full three hundred yards away.

And at the same moment the Major shouted exultingly. 'They're done!' he bellowed down the megaphone; 'they're beat! The attack--and he fell back on the Forward Officer's own words--'the attack is blotted out.'

Whereat the panting gunners cheered faintly and short-windedly, and took contentedly the following string of orders to lengthen the range and slacken the rate of fire. And the Battery made shift to move its dead from amongst the gun and wagon wheels, to bandage and tie up its wounded with 'first field dressings,' to shuffle and sort the detachments and redistribute the remaining men in fair proportion amongst the remaining guns, to telephone the Brigade Headquarters to ask for stretcher-bearers and ambulance, and more shells--doing it all, as it were, with one hand while the other kept the guns going, and the shells pounding down their appointed paths.

For the doing of two or more things at once, and doing them rapidly, exactly, and efficiently, the while in addition highly unpleasant things are being done to them, is all a part of the Gunners' game of 'close and accurate artillery support.'

'NOTHING TO REPORT'

'On the Western Front there is nothing to report. All remains quiet.'--OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

The 7th (Territorial) King's Own Asterisks had 'taken over' their allotted portion of the trenches and were settling themselves in for the night. When the two facts are taken in conjunction that it was an extremely unpleasant night, cold, wet and bleak, and the 7th were thoroughly happy and would not have exchanged places with any other battalion in Flanders, it will be very plain to those who know their Front that the 7th K.O.A. were exceedingly new to the game. They were: and actually this was their first spell of duty in the forward firing trenches.

They had been out for some weeks, weary weeks, filled with the digging of communication trenches well behind the firing trenches, with drills and with various 'fatigues' of what they considered a navvying rather than a military nature. But every task piled upon their reluctant shoulders had been performed promptly and efficiently, and now at last they were enjoying the reward of their zeal--a turn in the forward trenches.

The men were unfeignedly pleased with themselves, with the British Army, and with the whole world. The non-coms, were anxious and desperately keen to see everything in apple-pie order. The Company officers were inclined to be fidgety, and the O.C. was worried and concerned to the verge of nerves. He pored over the trench maps that had been handed to him, he imagined assaults delivered on this point and that, hurried, at the point of the pencil, his supports along various blue and red lines to the threatened angles of the wriggly line that represented the forward trench, drew lines from his machine-gun emplacements to the red-inked crosses of the German wire entanglements, frowned and cogitated over the pencil crosses placed by the O.C. of the relieved battalion where the lurking-places of German maxims were suspected. Afterwards he made a long and exhaustive tour of the muddy trenches, concealing his anxiety from the junior officers, and speaking lightly and cheerfully to them--following therein truly and instinctively the first principle of all good commanders to show the greater confidence as they feel it the less. He returned to the Battalion Headquarters, situated in a very grimy cellar of a shell-wrecked house behind the support trenches, and partook of a belated dinner of tinned food flavoured with grit and plaster dust.

The signallers were established with their telephones at the foot of the stone stair outside the cellar door, and into this cramped 'exchange' ran the telephone wires from the companies in the trenches and from the Brigade Headquarters a mile or two back. Every word that the signallers spoke was plainly heard in the cellar, and every time the Colonel heard 'Hello! Yes, this is H.Q.,' he sat motionless waiting to hear what message was coming through. When his meal was finished he resisted an impulse to 'phone' all the forward trenches, asking how things were, unlaced his boots, paused, and laced them up again, lay down on a very gritty mattress in a corner of the cellar, and tried to sleep. For the first hour every rattle of rifle fire, every thud of a gun, every call on the telephone brought him up on his pillow, his ears straining to catch any further sound. After about the tenth alarm he reasoned the matter out with himself something after this fashion:--

'The battalion is occupying a position that has not been attacked for weeks, and it is disposed as other Regular battalions have been, and no more and no less effectually than they. There isn't an officer or man in the forward trenches who cannot be fully trusted to keep a look-out and to resist an attack to the last breath. There is no need to worry or keep awake, and to do so is practically admitting a distrust of the 7th K.O.A. I trust them fully, and therefore I ought to go to sleep.'

Whereupon the Colonel sat up, took off his wet boots, lay down again, resolutely closed his eyes--and remained wide awake for the rest of the night.

But if there be any who feel inclined to smile at the nervousness of an elderly, stoutish, and constitutionally easy-going Colonel of Territorials, I would remind them of a few facts. The Colonel had implicit faith in the stout-heartedness, the spirit, the fighting quality of his battalion. He had had the handling and the training of them ever since mobilisation, and he knew every single man of them as well as they knew themselves. They had done everything asked of them and borne light-heartedly rough quarters, bad weather, hard duties. But--and one must admit it a big and serious 'but'--to-night might be their real and their first testing in the flame and fire of War.

Even as no man knows how he will feel and behave under fire, until he has been under fire, so no regiment or battalion knows. The men were razor-keen for action, but that very keenness might lead them into a rashness, a foolhardiness, which would precipitate action. The Colonel believed they would stand and fight to the last gasp and die to the last man rather than yield a yard of their trench. He believed that of them even as he believed it of himself--but he did not know it of them any more than he knew it of himself. Men, apparently every bit as good as him, had before now developed some 'white streak,' some folly, some stupidity, in the stress and strain of action. Other regiments, apparently as sound as his, had in the records of history failed or broken in a crisis. He and his were new and untried, and military commanders for innumerable ages had doubted and mistrusted new and untried troops.

Well . . . he had done his best, and at least the next twenty-four hours should show him how good or how bad that best had been. But meantime let no one blame him for his anxiety or nervousness.

And meantime the 7th Asterisks, serenely unaware of their Commanding Officer's worry and doubt--and to be fair to them and to him it must be stated that they would have flouted scornfully any suggestion that he had held them--joyfully set about the impossible task of making themselves comfortable, and the congenial one of making the enemy extremely uncomfortable. The sentries were duly posted, and spent an entirely unnecessary proportion of their time peering over the parapet.

There were more Verey pistol lights burnt during the night than would have sufficed a trench-hardened battalion for a month, and the Germans opposite, having in hand a little job of adding to their barbed-wire defences, were puzzled and rather annoyed by the unwonted display of fireworks. They foolishly vented their annoyance by letting off a few rounds of rapid fire at the opposition, and the 7th Asterisks eagerly accepted the challenge, manned their parapets and proceeded to pour a perfect hurricane of fire back to the challengers. The Germans, with the exception of about a dozen picked sharp-shooting snipers, ceased to fire and took careful cover.

The snipers, daring the Asterisks' three minutes of activity, succeeded in scoring seven hits, and the Asterisks found themselves in possession of a casualty list of one killed and six wounded before the Company and platoon commanders had managed to stop the shooting and get the men down under cover.