Part 11

They were matter-of-fact, dwelling on the simple essentials. Men had died; men had been wounded; men had survived. This was all according to expectation. Mostly, they did not rehearse their experiences. Their brains had had emotion enough; their bodies asked for rest. They lay silently enjoying the fact of life and sunlight. Details which were lost in the haze of action would develop in the memory in later years like the fine points of a photographic plate.

The former German trench on a commanding knoll had little resemblance to a trench. Here artillerists had fulfilled infantry requirements to the letter. Areas of shell-craters lay on either side of the tumbled walls and dugout entrances were nearly all closed. The infantry which took the position met no fire in front, but had an enfilade at one point from a machine gun. Where the dead lay told exactly the breadth of its sweep through which the charge had unfalteringly passed; and this was only a first objective. As you could see, the charge had gone on to its second with slight loss. A young officer after being wounded had crawled into a shell-crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had died peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the earth beside him.

In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty crater of one of the mines exploded on July 1st at the hour of attack was large enough to hold a battalion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with its vast plume of smoke and dust scooped from the bowels of the earth. Famous since to sightseers of war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were the last word in German provision against attack. The making of dugouts is standardized like everything else in this war. There is the same angle of entrance, the same flight of steps to that underground refuge, in keeping with the established pattern. Depth, capacity and comfort are the result of local initiative and industry. There may be beds and tables and tiers of bunks. Many such chambers were as undisturbed as if never a shell had burst in the neighborhood. The Germans in occupation had been told to hold on; a counter-attack would relieve them. The faith of some of them endured so well that they had to be blasted out by explosives before they would surrender.

There was reassurance in the proximity of such good dugouts when habitable to a correspondent if shells began to fall, as well as protection for the British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors were closed by the British as the simplest form of burial for the dead within who had waited for bombs to be thrown before surrendering. For the method of taking a dugout had long since become as standardized as its construction. The men inside could have their choice from the Briton at the entrance.

"Either file out or take what we send," as a soldier put it. "We can't leave you there to come out and fire into our backs, as the Kaiser told you to do, when we've started on ahead."

You could follow for miles the ruins of the first line, picking your way among German dead in all attitudes, while a hand or a head or a foot stuck out of the shell-hammered chalk mixed with flesh and fragments of clothing, the thing growing nauseatingly horrible and your wonder increasing as to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and how men had been able to conquer the remains that the shells had left. It was a prodigious feat, emphasizing again the importance of the months of preparation.

And the litter over the whole field! This, in turn, expressed how varied and immense is the material required for such operations. One had in mind the cleaning up after some ghastly debauch. Shell-fragments were mixed with the earth; piles of cartridge cases lay beside pools of blood. Trench mortars poked their half-filled muzzles out of the toppled trench walls. Bundles of rocket flares, empty ammunition boxes, steel helmets crushed in by shell-fragments, gasbags, eye-protectors against lachrymatory shells, spades, water bottles, unused rifle grenades, egg bombs, long stick-handled German bombs, map cases, bits of German "K.K." bread, rifles, the steel jackets of shells and unexploded shells of all calibers were scattered about the field between the irregular welts of chalky soil where shell fire had threshed them to bits.

The rifles and accoutrements of the fallen were being gathered in piles, this being, too, a part of a prearranged system, as was the gathering of the wounded and later of the dead who had worn them. Big, barelegged forms of the sturdy Highland regiment which would not halt for a machine gun were being brought in and laid in a German communication trench which had only to be closed to make a common grave, each identification disk being kept as a record of where the body lay. Another communication trench near by was reserved for German dead who were being gathered at the same time as the British. In life the foes had faced each other across No Man's Land. In death they were also separated.

Up to the first-line German trenches, of course, there were only British dead, those who had fallen in the charge. It was this that made it seem as if the losses had been all on one side. In the German trenches the entries on the other side of the ledger appeared; and on the fields and in the communication trenches lay green figures. Over that open space they were scattered green dots; again, where they had run for cover to a wood's edge, they lay thick as they had dropped under the fire of a machine gun which the British had brought into action. A fierce game of hare and hounds had been played. Both German and British dead lay facing in the same direction when they were in the open, the Germans in retreat, the British in pursuit. An officer called attention to this grim proof that the initiative was with the British.

By the number of British dead lying in No Man's Land or by the blood clots when the bodies had been removed, it was possible to tell what price battalions had paid for success. Nothing could bring back the lives of comrades who had fallen in front of Thiepval to the survivors of that action; but could they have seen the broad belts of No Man's Land with only an occasional prostrate figure it would have had the reassurance that another time they might have easier going. Wherever the Germans had brought a machine gun into action the results of its work lay a stark warning of the necessity of silencing these automatic killers before a charge. Yet from Mametz to Montauban the losses had been light, leaving no doubt that the Germans, convinced that the weight of the attack would be to the north, had been caught napping.

The Allies could not conceal the fact and general location of their offensive, but they did conceal its plan as a whole. The small number of shell-craters attested that no such artillery curtains of fire had been concentrated here as from Thiepval to Gommecourt. Probably the Germans had not the artillery to spare or had drawn it off to the north.

All branches of the winning army making themselves at home in the conquered area among the dead and the litter behind the old German first line--this was the fringe of the action. Beyond was the battle itself, with the firing-line still advancing under curtains of shell-bursts.

VIII

FORWARD THE GUNS!

An audacious battery--"An unusual occasion"--Guns to the front at night--Close to the firing-line--Not so dangerous for observers--The German lines near by--Advantages of even a gentle slope--Skilfully chosen German positions--A game of hide and seek with death--Business-like progress--Haze, shell-smoke and moving figures--Each figure part of the "system."

Hadn't that battery commander mistaken his directions when he emplaced his howitzers behind a bluff in the old No Man's Land? Didn't he know that the German infantry was only the other side of the knoll and that two or three score German batteries were in range? I looked for a tornado to descend forthwith upon the gunners' heads. I liked their audacity, but did not court their company when I could not break a habit of mind bred in the rules of trench-tied warfare where the other fellow was on the lookout for just such fair targets as they.

For the moment these "hows" were not firing and the gunners were in a little circumscribed world of their own, dissociated from the movement around them as they busily dug pits for their ammunition. In due course someone might tell them to begin registering on a certain point or to turn loose on one which they had already registered. Meanwhile, very workmanlike in their shirt-sleeves, they had no concern with the traffic in the rear, except as it related to their own supply of shells, or with the litter of the field, or the dead, or the burial parties and the scattered wounded passing back from the firing-line. Their business relations were exclusively with the battle area hidden by the bluff. I thought that they were "rather fond of themselves" (as the British say) that morning, though not so much so, perhaps, as the crew of the eighteen pounders still farther forward within about a thousand yards of the Germans whom they were pelting with shrapnel.

Ordinarily, the eighteen pounders were expected to keep a distance of four or five thousand yards; but this was "rather an unusual occasion" as an officer explained. It would never do for the eighteen pounders to be wall-flowers; they must be on the ballroom floor. Had these men who were mechanically slipping shells into the gun-breeches slept last night or the previous night? Oh, yes, for two or three hours when they were not firing.

What did fatigue matter to an eighteen-pounder spirit released from the eternal grind of trench warfare and pushing across the open in the way that eighteen pounders were meant to do? Weren't they horse artillery? What use had they had for their horses in the immovable Ypres salient except when they drew back their guns to the billets after their tour of duty?--they who had drilled and drilled in evolutions in England under the impression that field guns were a mobile arm!

When orders came on the afternoon of July 1st to go ahead "right into it" it was like a summons to a holiday for a desk-ridden man brought up in the Rockies. Out into the night with creaking wheels and caissons following with sharp words of urging from the sergeant, "Now, wheelers, as I taught you at Aldershot," as they went across old trenches or up a stiff slope and into the darkness, with transport giving them the right of way, and on to a front that was in motion, with officers studying their maps and directions by the pocket flashlight--this was something like. And a young lieutenant hurried forward to where the rifles were talking to signal back the results of the guns firing from the midst of the battle. Something like, indeed! The fellows training their pieces in keeping with his instructions might be in for a sudden concentration of blasts from the enemy, of course. Wasn't that part of the experience? Wasn't it their place to take their share of the pounding, and didn't they belong to the guns?

These were examples close at hand, but sprinkled about the well-won area I saw the puffs from other British batteries which, after a nocturnal journey, morning found close to the firing-line. While I was moving about in the neighborhood I cast glances in the direction of that particular battery of eighteen pounders which was still serenely firing without being disturbed by the German guns. There was something unreal about it after nearly two years of the Ypres salient.

But the worst shock to a trench-tied habit of mind was when I stood upon the parapet of a German trench and saw ahead the British firing-line and the German, too. I ducked as instinctively, according to past training, as if I had seen a large, black, murderous thing coming straight for my head. In the stalemate days a dozen sharpshooters waiting for such opportunities would have had a try at you; a machine gun might have loosened up, and even batteries of artillery in their search for game to show itself from cover did not hesitate to snipe with shells at an individual.

I must be dead; at least, I ought to be according to previous formulae; but realizing that I was still alive and that nothing had cracked or whistled overhead, I took another look and then remained standing. I had been considering myself altogether too important a mortal. German guns and snipers were not going to waste ammunition on a non-combatant on the skyline when they had an overwhelming number of belligerent targets. A few shrapnel breaking remotely were all that we had to bother us, and these were sparingly sent with the palpable message, "We'll let you fellows in the rear know what we would do to you if we were not so preoccupied with other business."

I was near enough to see the operations; to have gone nearer would have been to face in the open the sweep of bullets over the heads of the British front line hugging the earth, which is not wise in these days of the machine gun. A correspondent likes to see without being shot at and his lot is sometimes to be shot at without being able to see anything except the entrance of a dugout, which on some occasions is more inviting than the portals of a palace.

In the distance was the main German second trench line on the crest of Longueval and High Wood Ridge, which the British were later to win after a struggle which left nothing of woods or villages or ridges except shell-craters. Naturally, the Germans had not restricted their original defenses to the ridge itself, any more than the French had theirs to the hills immediately in front of Verdun. They had placed their original first-line trenches along the series of advantageous positions on the slope and turned every bit of woods and every eminence into a strong point on the way back to the second line, whose barbed-wire entanglements rusted by long exposure were distinct under the glasses. A German officer stood on the parapet looking out in our direction, probably trying to locate the British infantry advance which was hugging a fold in the ground and resting there for the time being. I imagined how beaver-like were the Germans in the second line strengthening their defenses. I scanned all the slopes facing us in the hope of seeing a German battery. There must be one under those balls of black smoke from high explosives from British guns and another a half mile away under the same kind of shower.

"They withdrew most of their guns behind the ridge overnight," said an officer, "in order to avoid capture in case we made another rush."

On the other side of this natural wall they would be safe from any except aerial observation, and the advanced British batteries, though all in the open, were in folds in the ground, or behind bluffs, or just below the skyline of a rise where they had found their assigned position by the map. How much a few feet of depression in a field, a slightly sunken road, the grade of a gentle slope, which hid man or gun from view counted for I did not realize that day as I was to realize in the fierce fight for position which was to come in succeeding weeks.

It was easy to understand why the Germans had made a strong point in the first line where I was standing, for it was a position which, in relation to both the British and the German trenches, would instantly appeal to the tactical eye. Here they had emplaced machine guns manned by chosen desperate men which had given the British charge its worst experience over a mile front. I could see all the movement over a broad area to the rear which, however, the rise under my feet hid from the ridge where the German officer stood. The advantage which the Germans had after their retreat from the Marne was brought home afresh once you were on conquered ground. A mile more or less of depth had no sentimental interest to them, for they were on foreign soil. They had chosen their positions by armies, by corps, by battalions, by hundreds of miles and tens of miles and tens of yards with the view to a command of observation and ground. This was a simple application of the formula as old as man; but it was their numbers and preparedness that permitted its application and wherever the Allies were to undertake the offensive they must face this military fact, which made the test of their skill against frontal positions all the stiffer and added tribute to success.