Part 29

"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 shelled; 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 passengers 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 passed 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 appetite 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 passed 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 glasses 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 shelled. No one was in sight there, and an occasional German five-point-nine shell 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 grass and weeds had grown wild for two seasons, hiding the numerous shell-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 Cox 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 shell 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 pushbutton 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 shell-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 shells 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 shell-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 shell 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!"

XXIV

WATCHING A CHARGE

The British trench comes to life--The line goes forward--A modern charge no chance for heroics--Machine-like forward movement--The most wicked sound in a battle--The first machine gun--A beautiful barrage--The dreaded "shorts"--The barrage lifts to the second line--The leap into the trenches--Figures in green with hands up--Captured from dugouts--A man who made his choice and paid the price--German answering fire--Second part of the program--Again the protecting barrage--Success--Waves of men advancing behind waves of shell fire--Prisoners in good fettle--Brigadier-General Philip Howell.

Now the British trench came to life. What seemed like a row of khaki-colored washbasins bottom side up and fast to a taut string rose out of the cut in the earth on the other side of the valley, and after them came the shoulders and bodies of British soldiers who began climbing over the parapet just as a man would come up the cellar stairs. This was the charge.

Five minutes the barrage or curtain of fire was to last and five minutes was the allotted time for these English soldiers to go from theirs to the German trench which they were to take. So many paces to the minute was the calculation of their rate of progress across that dreadful No Man's Land, where machine guns and German curtains of fire had wrought death in the preceding charge of July 1st.

Every detail of the men's equipment was visible as their full-length figures appeared on the background of the gray-green slope. They were entirely exposed to fire from the German trench. Any tyro with a rifle on the German parapet could have brought down a man with every shot. Yet none fell; all were going forward.

I would watch the line over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of observation in the concrete.

The average layman conceives of a charge as a rush. So it is on the drill-ground, but not where its movement is timed to arrival on the second before a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must not be winded when there is hot work awaiting them in close encounters around traverses and at the mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead of his companions; no one crying, "Come on, boys!" no one swinging his steel helmet aloft, for he needed it for protection from any sudden burst of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, keeping line and intervals except where they had to pass around shell-craters.

If this charge had none of the display of other days it had all the more thrill because of its workmanlike and regulated progress. No get-drunk-six-days-of-the-week-and-fight-like-h--l-on-Sunday business of the swashbuckling age before Thiepval. Every man must do his part as coolly as if he were walking a tight rope with no net to catch him, with death to be reckoned with in the course of a systematic evolution.