Part 49

"The Boche hasn't done much night-bombing lately. I don't think he's got the 'planes. He gave us one terrible night, though, soon after we crossed the canal, ... knocked out two of my guns and killed any number of horses. There were ammunition dumps going up all over the place that night; ... he stopped us from doing our night firing.

"Have you heard the story of the old woman at S----?" he went on. "When the bombardment was going on the civilians went down into the cellars. The Germans hooked it, and the people came up from the cellars. But Boche snipers were still in the village, and our advance parties warned the inhabitants to keep below.... When, however, our troops came along in a body, one old woman rushed forward from under the church wall, in the square, you know.... She was excited, I expect.... A swine of a Boche in a house on the far side of the square shot her.... Our infantry surrounded that house."

"Well, I must quit," ejaculated the doctor suddenly. We went out and made for the village road again. A screaming swish, and a report that hurt the ears and shattered the windows in the front of the cottage. A Boche high-velocity shell had crashed a few yards away on the other side of the stream, and thrown up spouts of black slimy mud. The doctor and I scurried back to the shelter of the cottage wall. Another shell and another. A lieutenant-colonel of Infantry, on horseback, swung violently round the corner and joined us. Three more shells fell. Then silence. "These sudden bursts of fire are very disconcerting, aren't they?" remarked the colonel as he mounted and rode away.

"Say, now!" said the doctor to me. "I think we'll call back and have that whisky-and-soda Major Bullivant offered us before we resume our journey."

"We'll take a trip up to the 'O.P.' this morning," said the colonel to me at breakfast on October 28th. The wind was sufficiently drying to make walking pleasant, and to tingle the cheeks. The sun was a tonic; the turned-up earth smelt good. Our Headquarter horses had been put out to graze in the orchard--a Boche 4.2 had landed in it the night before--and they were frolicking mightily, Wilde's charger "Blackie" being especially industrious shooing off one of the mules from the colonel's mare. There was a swirling and a skelter of brown and yellow leaves at the gap in the lane where we struck across a vegetable garden. A square patch torn from a bed-sheet flew taut from the top of a clump of long hop-poles--the sign, before the village was freed, to warn our artillery observers that civilians lived in the cottage close by. Similar, now out-of-date, white flags swung to the breeze from many roof-tops in the village. "The extraordinary feature," the colonel mentioned, "was the number of Tricolours that the French had been able to hide from the Germans; they put them out when we came through." He nodded a pleasant good-day to a good looking young staff officer who stood on the steps of the house in the pave-laid street where one of our infantry brigades had made their headquarters. The staff officer wore a pair of those full-below-the-knee "plus 4 at golf" breeches that the Gardee affects. "For myself, I wouldn't wear that kind of breeches unless I were actually on duty with the Guards," said the colonel rather sardonically--"they are so intensely ugly." A tiny piano tinkled at a corner house near the roofless church and the Grande Place. In two-foot letters on the walls in the square were painted, "Hommes" on some houses, "Femmes" on others: reminders of the Boche method of segregating the sexes before he evacuated the inhabitants he wanted to evacuate. Only five civilians remained in the village now--three old men and two feeble decrepit women, numbed and heart-sick with the war, but obstinate in clinging to their homesteads. Already some of our men were patching leaky, shrapnel-flicked roofs with biscuit-tins and strong strips of waterproof sheeting.

We passed through A Battery's garden at nine o'clock. "We won't disturb them," said the colonel. "Bullivant is a morning sleeper, and is certain not to be up after the night-firing." Round the corner, however, stood a new officer who looked smart and fresh, with brightly polished buttons and Sam Browne belt. He saluted in the nervously precise fashion of the newly-joined officer. The colonel answered the salute, but did not speak; and he and I worked our way--following the track of a Tank--through and between hedges and among fruit-trees that had not yet finished their season's output. We passed the huddled-up body of a shot British soldier lying behind a fallen tree-trunk. We were making for the quarry in which C and D Batteries were neighbours. On a ditch-bordered road we met ten refugees, sent back that morning from a hamlet a mile and a half away, not yet considered safe from the Boche. The men, seeing us, removed their hats and lowered them as far as the knee--the way in which the Boche had commanded them to proffer respect. One aged woman in a short blue skirt wore sabots, and British puttees in place of stockings.

There had been a mishap at D Battery in the early hours of the morning. Their five useable 4.5 howitzers had been placed in a perfect how. position against the bank of the quarry. In the excitement of night-firing a reinforcement gunner had failed to "engage the plungers," the muzzle had not been elevated, and the shell, instead of descending five thousand yards away, had hit the bank twelve yards in front. The explosion killed two of the four men working that particular how. and wounded a third, and knocked out the N.C.O. in charge of another how. forty yards distant. The colonel examined the howitzer, looked gravely severe, and said that an officers' inquiry would be held next day. He asked Major Bartlett of C Battery, who was housed in a toy-sized cottage in the centre of the quarry, how his 18-pdrs. were shooting; and mentioned that the infantry were apprehensive of short-shooting along a road close to our present front line, since it lay at an awkward angle for our guns. Major Bartlett, self-possessed, competent, answered in the way the colonel liked officers to answer--no "I thinks": his replies either plain "Yes" or "No." Major Bartlett gave chapter and verse of his battery-shooting during the two previous days, and said that every round had been observed fire.

Walking briskly--the colonel was the fittest man of forty-five I have known--we mounted a slope of turnip-fields and fresh-ploughed land. There was a plantation five hundred yards to right of us, and five hundred yards to left of us; into the bigger one on the left two 5.9's dropped as we came level with it. Splashes of newly thrown-up earth behind tree-clumps, against banks and alongside hedges, showed the short breast-high trenches, some six yards long, in which the infantry had fought a few days before. Fifteen hundred yards away the clustering trees of the great forest where the enemy lay broke darkly against the horizon. "You see that row of tall straight trees in front of the forest, to the right of the gabled house where the white flag is flying," said the colonel, pulling out his glasses--"that's the present front line." Three ponderous booms from that direction denoted trench mortars at work.

We descended the other side of the slope, keeping alongside a hedge that ran towards a red-roofed farm. In two separate places about three yards of the hedge had been cut away. "Boche soldiering!" remarked the colonel informatively. "Enabled him to look along both sides of the hedge and guard against surprise when our infantry were coming up.

"We may as well call at Battalion Headquarters," he added when we reached the farm. In a wide cellar, where breakfast had not yet been cleared away, we came upon a lieutenant-colonel, twenty-four years of age, receiving reports from his company commanders. Suave in manner, clear-eyed, not hasty in making judgments, he had learnt most things to be known about real war at Thiepval, Schwaben Redoubt, and other bloody places where the Division had made history; wounded again in the August advance, he had refused to be kept from these final phases. The colonel and he understood each other. There was the point whether liaison duties between infantry and artillery could be more usefully conducted in the swift-changing individual fighting of recent days from infantry brigade or from infantry battalion; there were conflicting statements by junior officers upon short-shooting, and they required sifting; a few words had to be said about the battalion's own stretch of front and its own methods of harassing the enemy. A few crisp questions and replies, all bearing upon realities, a smile or two, a consultation of maps, and another portion of the colonel's task for that day was completed.

We walked across more ploughed land towards a sunken road, where infantry could be seen congregated in that sort of dolce far niente which, on the part of infantry in support, is really rather deceptive.

A "ping-ping!" whisked past, and stung us to alertness.

"Hullo--machine-guns!" ejaculated the colonel, and we quickened our steps toward the sunken road.

A major and a subaltern of the machine-gunners clambered down the opposite bank.

"I believe I've spotted that fellow, sir," burst forth the major with some excitement. "I think he's in a house over there ... might be a target for you ... bullets have been coming from that way every now and again for two days.... I'll show you, if you like, sir."

The major and the colonel crept out on top of the bank, and made for a shell-hole forty yards in front. I followed them. The major pointed across the rolling grass lands to a two-storied grey house with a slate roof, fourteen hundred yards away. "I believe he's in there," he said with decision.

The colonel looked through his glasses.

The major spoke again. "Do you see the square piece removed from the church spire, sir?... That looks like an 'O.P.', doesn't it?"

The colonel opened his map and pointed to a tiny square patch. "I make that to be the house," he said. "Do you agree?"

"Yes, sir," replied the major. "We thought at first it was the house you see marked four hundred yards more south-east; but I believe that is really the one."

"I've got an 'O.P.' farther forward. I'm going up there now. We'll have a shot at the house," responded the colonel simply.

The major went back to the sunken road. The colonel and I walked straight ahead, each of us in all probability wondering whether the Boche machine-gunner was still on duty, and whether he would regard us as worthy targets. That, at any rate, was my own thought. We strode out over the heavy-going across a strip of ploughed land, and heard the whizz of machine-gun bullets once more, not far from the spot we had just left. We did not speak until we descended to a dip in the ground, and reached a brook that had to be jumped. We were absolutely by ourselves.

Up the slope, on the far side of the brook. More ploughed land. We were both breathing hard now.

Before we came to the crest of the slope the colonel stopped. "We're in view from the Boche front line from the top," he said sharply. "The 'O.P.' is a hole in the ground.... You had better follow me about twenty yards behind.... And keep low.... Make for the fifth telegraph-pole from the left that you will see from the top."

He moved off. I waited and then followed, my mind concentrated at first on the fifth telegraph-pole the colonel had spoken about. There was no shelling at this moment. A bird twittered in a hedge close by; the smell of grass and of clean earth rose strong and sweet. No signs or sound of war; only sunshine and trees and----

The colonel's voice came sharp as whipcord. "Keep down!--keep down!" I bent almost double and walked fast at the same time. My mind turned to September 1916, when I walked along Pozieres Ridge, just before the Courcellette fight, and was shouted at for not crouching down by my battery commander. But there were shells abroad that day.... I almost laughed to myself.

I tumbled after the colonel into the square hole that constituted the "O.P."--it had been a Boche trench-mortar emplacement. The sweat dripped down my face as I removed my tin hat; my hair was wet and tangled.

Johns, a subaltern of D Battery, was in the pit with a couple of telephonists. He was giving firing instructions to the battery.