Читать книгу My Second Year of the War - Frederick Palmer - Страница 8

Plans at headquarters—A battle by inches—In the observation post—The débris of a ruined village—"Softening" by shell fire—A slice out of the front—The task of the infantryman—The dawn before the attack—Five minutes more—A wave of men twenty-five miles long—Mist and shell-smoke—Duty of the war-correspondent.

I was glad to have had glimpses of every aspect of the preparation from battalion headquarters in the front line trenches to General Headquarters, which had now been moved to a smaller town near the battlefield where the intelligence branch occupied part of a schoolhouse. In place of exercises in geography and lithographs of natural history objects, on the schoolroom walls hung charts of the German Order of Battle, as built up through many sources of information, which the British had to face. There was no British Order of Battle in sight. This, as the Germans knew it, you might find in a German intelligence office; but the British were not going to aid the Germans in ascertaining it by giving it any publicity.

By means of a map spread out on a table an officer explained the plan of attack with reference to broad colored lines which denoted the objectives. The whole was as explicit as if Bonaparte had said:

"We shall engage heavily on our left, pound the center with our artillery, and flank on our right."

The higher you go in the command the simpler seem the plans which by direct and comprehensive strokes conceal the detail which is delegated down through the different units. At Gommecourt there was a salient, an angle of the German trench line into the British which seemed to invite "pinching," and this was to be the pivot of the British movement. The French who were on both sides of the Somme were to swing in from their southern flank of attack near Soyecourt in the same fashion as the British from the northern, thus bringing the deepest objective along the river in the direction of Péronne, which would fall when eventually the tactical positions commanding it were gained.

Not with the first rush, for the lines of the objective were drawn well short of it, but with later rushes the British meant to gain the irregular ridge formation from Thiepval to Longueval, which would start them on the way to the consummation of their siege hammering. It was to be a battle by inches; the beginning of a long task. German morale was still high on the Western front; their numbers immense. Morale could be broken, numbers worn down, only by pounding.

Granted that the attack of July 1st should succeed all along the line, it would gain little ground; but it would everywhere break through the first line fortifications over a front of more than twenty-five miles, the British for about fifteen and the French for about ten. The soldierly informant at "Intelligence" reminded the listener, too, that battalions which might be squeezed or might run into unexpected obstacles would suffer fearfully as in all great battles and one must be careful not to be over-depressed by the accounts of the survivors or over-elated by the roseate narratives of battalions which had swept all before them with slight loss.

The day before I saw the map of the whole I had seen the map of a part at an Observation Post at Auchonvillers. The two were alike in a standardized system, only one dealt with corps and the other with battalions. A trip to Auchonvillers at any time during the previous year or up to the end of June, 1916, had not been fraught with any particular risk. It was on the "joy-riders'" route, as they say.

When I said that the German batteries were making relatively little reply to the preliminary British bombardment I did not mean to imply that they were missing any opportunities. At the dead line for automobiles on the road the burst of a shrapnel overhead had a suggestiveness that it would not have had at other times. Perhaps the Germans were about to put a barrage on the road. Perhaps they were going to start their guns in earnest. Happily, they have always been most considerate where I was concerned and they were only throwing in a few shells in the course of artillery routine, which happened also on our return from the Observation Post. But they were steadily attentive with "krumps" to a grove where some British howitzers sought the screen of summer foliage. If they could put any batteries out of action while they waited for the attack this was good business, as it meant fewer guns at work in support of the British charge.

An artilleryman, perspiring and mud-spattered from shell-bursts, who came across the fields, said: "They knocked off the corner of our gun-pit and got two men. That's all." His eyes were shining; he was in the elation of battle. Casualties were an incident in the preoccupation of his work and of the thought: "At last we have the shells! At last it is our turn!"

On our way forward we passed more batteries and wisely kept to the open away from them, as they are dangerous companions in an artillery duel. Then we stepped into the winding communication trench with its system of wires fast to the walls, and kept on till we passed under a lifted curtain into a familiar chamber roofed with heavy cement blocks and earth.

"Safe from a direct hit by five-point-nines," said the observation officer, a regular promoted from the ranks who had been "spotting" shells since the war began. "A nine-inch would break the blocks, but I don't think that it would do us in."

Even if it did "do us in," why, we were only two or three men. All this protection was less perhaps to insure safety than to insure security of observation for these eyes of the guns. The officer was as proud of his O.P. as any battalion commander of his trench or a battery commander of his gun-position, which is the same kind of human pride that a man has in the improvements on his new country estate.

There was a bench to sit on facing the narrow observation slit, similar to that of a battleship's conning tower, which gave a wide sweep of vision. A commonplace enough mise-en-scène on average days, now significant because of the stretch of dead world of the trench systems and No Man's Land which was soon to be seething with the tumult of death.

Directly in front of us was Beaumont-Hamel. Before the war it had been like hundreds of other villages. Since the war its ruins were like scores of others in the front line. Parts of a few walls were standing. It was difficult to tell where the débris of Beaumont-Hamel began and that of the German trench ended. Dust was mixed with the black bursts of smoke rising from the conglomerate mass of buildings and streets thrown together by previous explosions. The effect suggested the regular spout of geysers from a desert rock crushed by charges of dynamite.

Could anybody be alive in Beaumont-Hamel? Wasn't this bombardment threshing straw which had long since yielded its last kernel of grain? Wasn't it merely pounding the graves of a garrison? Other villages, equally passive and derelict, were being submitted to the same systematic pounding, which was like timed hammer-beats.

"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 arrivé!" 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 Pozières, 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.