Part 8

"We keep on softening them," said the observer.

Soldiers have a gift for apt words to describe their work, as have all professional experts. Softening! It personified the enemy as something hard and tough which would grow pulpy under enough well-mapped blows striking at every vital part from dugouts to billets.

All the barbed-wire entanglements in front of the first-line trenches appeared to be cut, mangled, twisted into balls, beaten back into the earth and exhumed again, leaving only a welt of crater-spotted ground in front of the chalky contour of the first-line trenches which had been mashed and crushed out of shape.

"Yes, the Boche's first line looks rather messy," said the officer. "We've been giving him an awful doing these last few days. Turning our attention mostly to the second line, now. That's our lot, there," he added, indicating a cluster of bursts over a nest of burrows farther up on the hillside.

"Any attempts to repair their wire at night?" I asked.

"No. They have to do it under our machine gun fire. Any Boches who have survived are lying doggo."

How many dugouts were still intact and secure refuges for the waiting Germans? Only trench raids could ascertain. As well might the observer with his glasses or an aeroplane looking down try to take a census of the number of inhabitants of a prairie dog village who were all in their holes.

The officer spread out his map marked "Secret and confidential," delimiting the boundaries of a narrow sector. He had nothing to do with what lay to the right and left--other sectors, other men's business--of the area inclosed in the clear, heavy lines crosswise of British and German trenches--a slice out of the front, as it were. Speaking over the telephone to the blind guns, he was interested only in the control of gunfire in this sector. The charge to him was lines on the map parallel with the trenches which would be at given points at given moments--lines which he must support when their soldier counterparts were invisible through the shell-smoke in the nice calculation of time and range which should put the shells into the enemy and never into the charging man.

To infantry commanders with similar maps those lines were breathing human lines of men whom they had trained, and the gunfire a kind of spray which the gunners were to adjust for the protection of the battalions when they should cross that dead space. Once the British were in the German front trenches, details which had been told off for the purpose were to take possession of the dugouts and "breach" them of prisoners and disarm all other Germans, lest they fire into the backs of those who carried the charge farther on to the final stage of the objective. What awaited them they would know only when they climbed over the parapet and became silhouettes of vulnerable flesh in the open. Yes, one had the system in the large and the small, by the army, the corps, the division, the brigade, the battalion, and the man, the individual infantryman who was to suffer that hazard of marching in the open toward the trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench-mortar shells could take, but only he could take and hold.

The advantage of watching the attack from this O.P. in comparison with that of other points was mooted; for the spectator had to choose his seat for the panorama. This time we sought a place where we hoped to see something of the battle as a whole.

"C'est arrive!" said the old porter to me at the door when I left the hotel before dawn. The great day had arrived!

Amiens was in darkness, with the lightnings of the guns which had never ceased their labors through the night flashing in the heavens their magnetic summons to battle. When a dip into a valley shut out their roar a divine hush lay over the world. On either side of the main road was the peace of the hour before the dawn which would send the peasants from their beds to the fields. There were no lights yet in the villages. It had not occurred to the inhabitants to try to see the battle. They knew that they would be in the way; sentries or gunners would halt them.

The traffic was light and all vehicles, except a flying staff officer's car, were going their methodical way. Vaguely, as an aviation station was passed, planes were visible being pushed out of their sheds; the hum of propellers being tried out was faintly heard. The birds of battle were testing their wings before flight and every one out of the hundreds which would take part that day had his task set, no less than had a corps, a regiment of artillery, or the bombers in a charge.

"This is the place," was the word to the chauffeur as we swept up a grade in the misty darkness.

Stretched from trunk to trunk of the trees beside the road were canvas screens to hide the transport from enemy observation. Passing between them had the effect of going through the curtains into a parterre box. Light was just breaking and we were in a field of young beets on the crest of a rise, with no higher ground beyond us all the way to Thiepval, which was in the day's objective, and to Pozieres, which was beyond it. Ordinarily, on a clear day we should have had from here a view over five or six miles of front and through our glasses the action should have been visible in detail.

This morning the sun was not showing his head and the early mist lay opaque over all the positions, holding in place the mighty volume of smoke from bursting shells. As it was not seven o'clock the sun might yet realize its duty in July and dissipate this shroud, which was so thick that it partially obscured the flashes of the guns and the shell-bursts.

Seven-ten came and seven-twenty and still no more light. It was too late now to seek another hill and, if we had sought one, we should have had no better view. At least, we were seeing as much as the Commander of the Fourth Army in his dugout near by. The artillery fire increased. Every gun was now firing, all stretching their powers to the maximum. The mist and smoke over the positions seemed to tremble with the blasts. Near-by shells, especially German, broke brilliantly against a background so thick that it swallowed up the flashes of more distant shells in its garishly illumined density. Thousands of officers were studying their wrist watches for the tick of "zero" as the minute-hands moved on with merciless fatalism; and hundreds of thousands of men who had come into position overnight were in line in the trenches looking to their officers for the word.

Our little group in the beet field was restless and silent; or if we spoke it was not of what was oppressing our minds and stilling our heartbeats. Our glasses gave no aid; they only made the fog thicker. Had we been in the first-line British trenches we could hardly have seen the men who left them through this wall of smoke and mist as they entered the German first line and the answering German "krumps" would have driven us to the dugouts and German curtains of fire held us prisoner.

One of us called attention to a lark that had risen and was singing with all the power in his little throat. Another mentioned a squadron of aeroplanes against the background of a soft and domeless sky, flying with the precision of wild geese. We knew that the German guns were responding now, for the final blasts of British concentration had been a sufficient signal of attack if some British prisoner taken in a trench raid had not revealed the hour.

Seven-twenty-five! someone said, but not one of us needed any reminder. Five minutes more and the great experiment would begin. Had Sir Douglas Haig made an army equal to the task? What would be the answer to skeptics who said that the London cockneys and the Manchester factory hands and all the others without military training could not be made into a force skilful enough to take those trenches? Was the feat of conquering those fortifications within the bounds of human courage, skill and resource?

Not what one saw but what one felt and knew counted. A crowd is spellbound in watching a steeplejack at work, or an aviator doing a "loop-the-loop," or an acrobat swinging from one bar to another above the sawdust ring, or the "leap of death" of the movies; and here we were in the presence of a multitude who were running a far greater risk in an untried effort, with their inspiration not a breathless audience but duty. For none wanted to die. All were human in this. None had any sense of the glorious sport of war, only that of grim routine.

Our group was not particularly religious, but I think that we were all uttering a prayer for England and France. At seven-thirty something seemed to crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that a wave of men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt, wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets. I knew the men who were going into that charge too well to have any apprehension that any battalion would falter. The thing was to be done and they were to do it. Now they were out in No Man's Land; now they were facing the reception prepared for them. Thousands might already be down. We could discern that the German guns, long waiting for their prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo and the engine.

Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the blanket. If the charge had gone home it was already in the German trenches. For all we knew it might have been repulsed and its remnants be struggling back through the curtains of artillery fire and the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun came out without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over the field we had glimpses of some reserves who had looked like a yellow patch behind a hill deploying to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed beetles who were the organized servitors of a higher mind on some other planet.

This was all we saw; and to make more of it would not be fair to other occasions when views of attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not change the impression now. It has its place in the spectator's history of the battle.

FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME

At the little schoolhouse--Twenty miles of German fortifications taken--Doubtful situation north of Thiepval--Prisoners and wounded--Defeat and victory--The topography of Thiepval--Sprays of bullets and blasts of artillery fire--"The day" of the New Army--The courage of civilized man--Fighting with a kind of divine stubbornness--Braver than the "Light Brigade"--Died fighting as final proof of the New Army's spirit--Crawling back through No Man's Land--Not beaten but roughly handled.

In the room at the head of the narrow stairs in the schoolhouse of the quiet headquarters town we should have the answer to the question, Has the British attack succeeded? which was throbbing in our pulsebeats. By the same map on the table in the center of the room showing the plan of attack with its lines indicating the objectives we should learn how many of them had been gained. The officer who had outlined the plan of battle with fine candor was equally candid about its results, so far as they were known. Not only did he avoid mincing words, but he avoided wasting them.

From Thiepval northward the situation was obscure. The German artillery response had been heavy and the action almost completely blanketed from observation. Some detachments must have reached their objective, as their signals had been seen. From La Boisselle southward the British had taken every objective. They were in Mametz and Montauban and around Fricourt. For the French it had been a clean sweep, without a single repulse. Twenty miles of those formidable German fortifications were in the possession of the Allies.