Читать книгу My Second Year of the War - Frederick Palmer - Страница 7

French national spirit—Our gardeners—Tuning up for the attack—Policing the sky—Sausage balloons—Matter-of-fact, systematic war—A fury of trench raids—Reserves marching forward—Organized human will—Sons of the old country ready to strike—The greatest struggle of the war about to begin.

Our headquarters during my first summer at the front had been in the flat border region of the Pas de Calais, which seemed neither Flanders nor France. Our second summer required that we should be nearer the middle of the British line, as it extended southward, in order to keep in touch with the whole. In the hilly country of Artois a less comfortable chateau was compensated for by the smiling companionship of neighbors in the fields and villages of the real France.

The quality of this sympathetic appeal was that of the thoroughbred racial and national spirit of a great people, in the politeness which gave to a thickset peasant woman a certain grace, in the smiles of the land and its inhabitants, in that inbred patriotism which through the centuries has created a distinctive civilization called French by the same ready sacrifices for its continuity as those which were made on the Marne and at Verdun. Flanders is not France, and France is increasingly French as you proceed from Ypres to Amiens, the capital of Picardy. I was glad that Picardy had been chosen as the scene of the offensive. It made the blow seem more truly a blow for France. I was to learn to love Picardy and its people under the test of battle.

In order that we might be near the field of the Somme we were again to move our quarters, and we had the pang of saying good-by to another garden and another gardener. All the gardeners of our different chateaux had been philosophers. It was Louis who said that he would like to make all the politicians who caused wars into a salad, accompanying his threat with appropriate gestures; Charles who thought that once the "Boches" were properly pruned they might be acceptable second-rate members of international society; and Leon who wanted the Kaiser put to the plow in a coat of corduroy as the best cure for his conceit. That afternoon, when au revoirs were spoken and our cars wound in and out over the byroads of the remote countryside, not a soldier was visible until we came to the great main road, where we had the signal that peaceful surroundings were finally left behind in the distant, ceaseless roar of the guns, like some gigantic drumbeat calling the armies to combat.

A giant with nerves of telephone wires and muscles of steel and a human heart seemed to be snarling his defiance before he sprang into action. We knew the meaning of the set thunders of the preliminary bombardment. That night to the eastward the sky was an aurora borealis of flashes; and the next day we sought the source of the lightnings.

Seamed and tracked and gashed were the slopes behind the British line and densely peopled with busy men in khaki. Every separate scene was familiar to us out of our experience, but every one had taken on a new meaning. The whole exerted a majestic spell. Graded like the British social scale were the different calibers of guns. Those with the largest reach were set farthest back. Fifteen-inch howitzer dukes or nine-inch howitzer earls, with their big, ugly mouths and their deliberate and powerful fire, fought alone, each in his own lair, whether under a tree or in the midst of the ruins of a village. The long naval guns, though of smaller caliber, had a still greater reach and were sending their shells five to ten miles beyond the German trenches.

The eight-inch and six-inch howitzers were more gregarious. They worked in groups of four and sometimes a number of batteries were in line. Beyond them were those alert commoners, the field guns, rapid of fire with their eighteen-pound shells. These seemed more tractable and companionable, better suited for human association, less mechanically brutal. They were not monstrous enough to require motor tractors to draw them at a stately gait, but behind their teams could be up and away across the fields on short notice, their caissons of ammunitions creaking behind them. Along the communication trenches perspiring soldiers carried "plum puddings" or the trench-mortar shells which were to be fired from the front line and boxes of egg-shaped bombs which fitted nicely in the palm of the hand for throwing.

It seemed that all the guns in the world must be firing as you listened from a distance, although when you came into the area where the guns were in tiers behind the cover of a favorable slope you found that many were silent. The men of one battery might be asleep while its neighbor was sending shells with a one-two-three deliberation. Any sleep or rest that the men got must be there in the midst of this crashing babel from steel throats. Again, the covers were being put over the muzzles for the night, or, out of what had seemed blank hillside, a concealed battery which had not been firing before sent out its vicious puffs of smoke before its reports reached your ears. Every battery was doing as it was told from some nerve-center; every one had its registered target on the map—a trench, or a road, or a German battery, or where it was thought that a German battery ought to be.

The flow of ammunition for all came up steadily, its expenditure regulated on charts by officers who kept watch for extravagance and aimed to make every shell count. A fortune was being fired away every hour; a sum which would send a youth for a year to college or bring up a child went into a single large shell which might not have the luck to kill one human being as excuse for its existence; an endowment for a maternity hospital was represented in a day's belch of destruction from a single acre of trodden wheat land. One trench mortar would consume in an hour plum puddings for an orphan school. For you might pause to think of it in this way if you chose. Thousands do at the front.

Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uniforms of the French in place of the British khaki hovered around the gun-emplacements; the soixante-quinze with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor to the British eighteen-pounder. Guns, guns, guns—French and English! The same nests of them opposite Gommecourt and at Estrées thundered across at one another from either bank of the Somme through summer haze over the green spaces of the islands edged with the silver of its tranquil flow in the moonlight or its glare in the sunlight.

Not the least of the calculations in this activity was to screen every detail from aerial observation. New hangars had risen at the edge of level fields, whence the swift fighting machines of an aircraft concentration in keeping with the concentration of guns and all other material rose to reconnaissance, or to lie in wait as a falcon to pounce upon an invading German plane. Thus the sky was policed by flight against prying aerial eyes. If one German plane could descend to an altitude of a thousand feet, its photographs would reveal the location of a hundred batteries to German gunners and show the plan of concentration clearly enough to leave no doubt of the line of attack; but the anti-aircraft guns, plentiful now as other British material, would have caught it going, if not coming, provided it escaped being jockeyed to death by half a dozen British planes with their machine guns rattling.

To "camouflet" became a new English verb British planes tested out a battery's visibility from the air. Landscape painters were called in to assist in the deceit. One was set to "camouflet" the automobile van for the pigeons which, carried in baskets on the men's backs in charges, were released as another means of sending word of the progress of an attack obscured in the shell-smoke. This conscientious artist "camoufleted" the pigeon-van so successfully that the pigeons could not find their way home.

Night was the hour of movement. At night the planes, if they went forth, saw only a vague and shadowy earth. The sausage balloons, German and Allied, those monitors of the sky, a line of opaque, weird question marks against the blue, stared across at each other out of range of the enemy's guns, "spotting" the fall of shells for their own side from their suspended basket observation posts from early morning until they were drawn in by their gasoline engines with the coming of dusk. Clumsy and helpless they seemed; but in common with the rest of the army they had learned to reach their dugouts swiftly at the first sign of shell fire, and descended then with a ridiculous alacrity which suggested the possession of the animal intelligence of self-preservation. Occasionally one broke loose and, buffeted like an umbrella down the street by the wind, started for the Rhine. And the day before the great attack the British aviation corps sprang a surprise on the German sausages, six of which disappeared in balls of flame.

A one-armed man of middle age from India, who offered to do his "bit," refused a post at home in keeping with his physical limitations. His eyes were all right, he said, when he nominated himself as a balloon observer, and he never suffered from sea-sickness which sausage balloons most wickedly induce. Many a man who has ascended in one not only could see nothing, but wanted to see nothing, and turning spinach lopping over the basket rail prayed only that the engine would begin drawing in immediately.

One day the one-armed pilot was up with a "joy-rider"; that is, an officer who was not a regular aerial observer but was sight-seeing. The balloon suddenly broke loose with the wind blowing strong toward Berlin, which was a bit awkward, as he remarked, considering that he had an inexperienced passenger.

"We mustn't let the Boches get us!" he said. "Look sharp and do as I say."

First, he got the joy-rider into the parachute harness for such emergencies and over the side, then himself, both descending safely on the right side of the British trenches—which was rather "smart work," as the British would say, but all to the taste of the one-armed pilot who was looking for adventures. I have counted thirty-three British sausage balloons within my range of vision from a hill. The previous year the British had not a baker's dozen.

What is lacking? Have we enough of everything? These questions were haunting to organizers in those last days of preparation.

After dark the scene from a hill, as you rode toward the horizon of flashes, was one of incredible grandeur. Behind you, as you looked toward the German lines, was the blanket of night pierced and slashed by the flashes of gun blasts; overhead the bloodcurdling, hoarse sweep of their projectiles; and beyond the darkness had been turned into a chaotic, uncanny day by the jumping, leaping, spreading blaze of explosives which made all objects on the landscape stand out in flickering silhouette. Spurts of flame from the great shells rose out of the bowels of the earth, softening with their glow the sharp, concentrated, vicious snaps of light from shrapnel. Little flashes played among big flashes and flashes laid over flashes shingle fashion in a riot of lurid competition, while along the line of the German trenches at some places lay a haze of shimmering flame from the rapid fire of the trench mortars.

The most resourceful of descriptive writers is warranted in saying that the scene was indescribable. Correspondents did their best, and after they had squeezed the rhetorical sponge of its last drop of ink distilled to frenzy of adjectives in inadequate effort, they gaspingly laid their copy on the table of the censor, who minded not "word pictures" which contained no military secrets.

Vision exalted and numbed by the display, one's mind sought the meaning and the purpose of this unprecedented bombardment, with its precision of the devil's own particular brand of "kultur," which was to cut the Germans' barbed wire, smash in their trenches, penetrate their dugouts, close up their communication trenches, do unto their second line the same as to their first line, bury their machine guns in débris, crush each rallying strong point in that maze of warrens, burst in the roofs of village billets over their heads, lay a barrier of death across all roads and, in the midst of the process of killing and wounding, imprison the men of the front line beyond relief by fresh troops and shut them off from food and munitions. Theatric, horrible and more than that—matter-of-fact, systematic war! There was relatively little response from the German batteries, whose silence had a sinister suggestion. They waited on the attack as the target of their revenge for the losses which they were suffering.

By now they knew from the bombardment, if not from other sources, that a British attack was coming at some point of the line. Their flares were playing steadily over No Man's Land to reveal any movement by the British or the French. From their trenches rose signal rockets—the only real fireworks, leisurely and innocent, without any sting of death in their sparks—which seemed to be saying "No movement yet" to commanders who could not be reached by any other means through the curtains of fire and to artillerists who wanted to turn on their own curtains of fire instantly the charge started. Then there were other little flashes and darts of light and flame which insisted on adding their moiety to the garish whole. And under the German trenches at several points were vast charges of explosives which had been patiently borne under ground through arduously made tunnels.

So much for the machinery of material. Thus far we have mentioned only guns and explosions, things built of steel to fire missiles of steel and things on wheels, and little about the machine of human beings now to come abreast of the tape for the charge, the men who had been "blooded," the "cannon fodder." Every shell was meant for killing men; every German battery and machine gun was a monster frothing red at the lips in anticipation of slaughter.

A fury of trench raids broke out from the Somme to Ypres further to confuse the enemy as to the real front of attack. Men rushed the trenches which they were to take and hold later, and by their brief visit learned whether or not the barbed wire had been properly cut to give the great charge a clear pathway and whether or not the German trenches were properly mashed. They brought in prisoners whose identification and questioning were invaluable to the intelligence branch, where the big map on the wall was filled in with the location of German divisions, thus building up the order of battle, so vital to all plans, with its revelation of the disposition and strength of the enemy's forces. It was known that the Germans were rapidly bringing up new batteries north of the Ancre while low visibility postponed the day of the attack.

The men that worked on the new roads keeping them in condition for the passage of the heavy transport, whether columns of motor trucks, or caissons, or the great tractors drawing guns, were no less a part of the scheme than the daring raiders. Every soldier who was going over the parapet in the attack must have his food and drink and bombs to throw and cartridges to fire after he had reached his objective.

Most telling of all the innumerably suggestive features to me were the streets of empty white tents at the casualty clearing stations, and the empty hospital cars on the railway sidings, and the new enclosures for prisoners—for these spoke the human note. These told that man was to be the target.

The staff might plan, gunners might direct their fire accurately against unseen targets by the magic of their calculations, generals might prepare their orders, the intricate web of telephone and telegraph wires might hum with directions, but the final test lay with him who, rifle and bomb ready in hand, was going to cross No Man's Land and take possession of the German trenches. A thousand pictures cloud the memory and make a whole intense in one's mind, which holds all proudly in admiration of human stoicism, discipline and spirit and sadly, too, with a conscious awe in the possession as of some treasure intrusted to him which he cheapens by his clumsy effort at expression.

Stage by stage the human part had moved forward. Khaki figures were swarming the village streets while the people watched them with a sort of worshipful admiration of their stalwart, trained bodies and a sympathetic appreciation of what was coming. These men with their fair complexion and strange tongue were to strike against the Germans. Two things the French had learned about the English: they were generous and they were just, though phlegmatic. Now they were to prove that with their methodical deliberation they were brave. Some would soon die in battle—and for France.

By day they loitered in the villages waiting on the coming of darkness, their training over—nothing to do now but wait. If they went forward it was by platoons or companies, lest they make a visible line on the chalky background of the road to the aviator's eye. A battalion drawn up in a field around a battalion commander, sitting his horse sturdily as he gave them final advice, struck home the military affection of loyalty of officer to man and man to officer. A soldier parting at a doorway from a French girl in whose eyes he had found favor during a brief residence in her village struck another chord. That elderly woman with her good-by to a youth was speaking as she would to her own son who was at the front and unconsciously in behalf of some English mother. Up near the trenches at dusk, in the last billet before the assembly for attack, company officers were recalling the essentials of instructions to a line standing at ease at one side of the street while caissons of shells had the right of way.

With the coming of night battalions of reserves formed and set forth on the march, going toward the flashes in the heavens which illumined the men in their steady tramp, the warmth of their bodies and their breaths pressing close to your car as you turned aside to let them pass. "East Surreys," or "West Ridings," or "Manchesters" might come the answer to inquiries. All had the emblems of their units in squares of cloth on their shoulders, and on the backs of some of the divisions were bright yellow or white patches to distinguish them from Germans to the gunners in the shell-smoke.

Nothing in their action at first glance indicated the stress of their thoughts. Officers and men, their physical movements set by the mold of discipline, were in gesture, in voice, in manner the same as when they were on an English road in training. This was a part of the drill, a part of man's mastery of his emotions. None were under any illusions as soldiers of other days had been. Few nursed the old idea of being the lucky man who would escape. They knew the chances they were taking, the meaning of frontal attacks and of the murderous and wholesale quickness of machine gun methods.

Will, organized human will, was in their steps and shining out of their eyes. It occurred to me that they might have escaped this if England had kept out of the war at the price of something with which Englishmen refused to part. "The day" was coming, "the day" they had foreseen, "the day" for which their people waited.

When they were closing in with death, the clans which make up the British Empire kept faith with their character as do all men. These battalions sang the songs and whistled the tunes of drill grounds at home, though in low notes lest the enemy should hear, and lapsed into silence when they drew near the front and filed through the communication trenches.

Quiet the English, that great body of the army which sees itself as the skirt for the Celtic fringe, ploddingly undemonstrative with memories of the phlegm of their history holding emotions unexpressed; the Scotch in their kilts, deep-chested, with their trunk-like legs and broad hips, braw of face under their mushroom helmets, seemed like mediæval men of arms ready in spirit as well as looks for fierce hand-to-hand encounters; the Welsh, more emotional than the English, had songs which were pleasant to the ear if the words were unrecognizable; and the ruddy-faced Irish, with their soft voices, had a beam in their eyes of inward anticipation of the sort of thing to come which no Irishman ever meets in a hesitating mood. No overseas troops were there except the Newfoundland battalion; for only sons of the old country were to strike on July 1st.

Returning from a tour at night I had absorbed what seemed at one moment the unrealness and at another the stern, unyielding reality of the scenes. The old French territorial, with wrinkled face and an effort at a military mustache, who came out of his sentry box at a control post squinting by the light of a lantern held close to his nose at the bit of paper which gave the bearer freedom of the army and nodding with his polite word of concurrence, was a type who might have stopped a traveler in Louis XIV.'s time. All the farmers sleeping in the villages who would be up at dawn at their work, all the people in Amiens, knew that the hour was near. The fact was in the air no less than in men's minds. Nobody mentioned that the greatest struggle of the war was about to begin. We all knew that it was in hearts, souls, fiber.

There were moments when imagination gave to that army in its integrity of organization only one heart in one body. Again, it was a million hearts in a million bodies, deaf except to the voice of command. Most amazing was the absence of fuss whether with the French or the British. Everybody seemed to be doing what he was told to do and to know how to do it. With much to be left to improvisation after the attack began, nothing might be neglected in the course of preparation.

In other days where infantry on the march deployed and brought up suddenly against the enemy in open conflict the anticipatory suspense was not long and was forgotten in the brief space of conflict. Here this suspense really had been cumulative for months. It built itself up, little by little, as the material and preparations increased, as the battalions assembled, until sometimes, despite the roar of the artillery, there seemed a great silence while you waited for a string, drawn taut, to crack.

On the night of June 30th the word was passed behind a closed door in the hotel that seven-thirty the next morning was the hour and the spectators should be called at five—which seemed the final word in staff prevision.