Part 23 (1/2)
Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being downhearted. Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big sh.e.l.ls on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error. With the first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target. ”Right on!”
And again and again--right on! The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place. If the aeroplane's conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now. The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.
”Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general. ”It's always hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like that.”
He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself. The wireless station got two extra sh.e.l.ls for full measure. Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough. Conservation of sh.e.l.ls has become a first principle of the artillerists' duty. The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.
Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a sh.e.l.l into a gun- breech. The men in the trenches are always calling for sh.e.l.ls. They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down. The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.
”The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!” said one of the officers who was at our observation post. ”They always do. The other day they chose this particular spot for their target”--which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.
Let either side start a bombardment and the other responds. There is a you-hit-me-and-I'll-hit-you character about siege warfare. Gun-fire provokes gun-fire. Neither adversary stays quiet under a blow. It was not long before we heard the whish of German sh.e.l.ls pa.s.sing some distance away.
They say sport is out of war. Perhaps, but not its enthralling and horrible fascination. Knowing what the target is, knowing the object of the fire, hearing the scream of the projectile on the way and watching to see if it is to be a hit, when the British are fighting the Germans on the soil of France, has an intensive thrill which is missing to the spectator who looks on at the Home Sports Club shooting at clay pigeons--which is not in justification of war. It does explain, however, the attraction of gunnery to gunners. One forgets, for the instant, that men are being killed and mangled. He thinks only of points scored in a contest which requires all the wit and strength and fort.i.tude of man and all his cunning in the manufacture and control of material.
You want your side to win; in this case, because it is the side of humanity and of that kindly general and the things that he and the army he represents stand for. The blows which the demons from the British lairs strike are to you the blows of justice; and you are glad when they go home. They are your blows. You have a better reason for keeping an army's artillery secrets than for keeping secret the signals of your Varsity football team, which anyone instinctively keeps--the reason of a world cause.
Yet another thing to see--an aeroplane a.s.sisting a battery by spotting the fall of its sh.e.l.ls, which is engrossing enough, too, and amazingly simple. Of course this battery was proud of its method of concealment. Each battery commander will tell you that a British plane has flown very low, as a test, without being able to locate his battery. If it is located, there is more work due in ”make-up” to complete the disguise. Compet.i.tion among batteries is as keen as among battles.h.i.+ps of our North Atlantic fleet.
Situation favoured this battery, which was Canadian. It was as nicely at home as a first-cla.s.s Adirondack camp. At any rate, no other battery had a dug-out for a litter of eight pups, with clean straw for their bed, right between two gun-emplacements.
”We found the mother wild, out there in the woods,” one of the men explained. ”She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by sh.e.l.l-fire. At first she wouldn't let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We'll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?”
On our way back to the general's headquarters we must have pa.s.sed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone's throw away; and yet in an ill.u.s.trated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy, but engaged in destroying all the enemy's batteries, according to the account. Twelve months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.
Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station.
They had sh.e.l.led a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we pa.s.sed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower, and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a sh.e.l.l-fragment.
There is no fl.u.s.tering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old farmer to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn't it his wheat? Didn't he need the crop?
And the Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid towns--which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.
XVIII Archibald The Archer
There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the sh.e.l.l makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of pa.s.sing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky--a German aeroplane.
At a height of seven or eight thousand feet the target seems almost stationary, when really it is going somewhere between fifty and ninety miles an hour. It has all the heavens to itself, and to the British it is a sinister, prying eye that wants to see if we are building any new trenches, if we are moving bodies of troops or of transport, and where our batteries are in hiding. That aviator three miles above the earth has many waiting guns at his command. A few signals from his wireless and they would let loose on the target he indicated.
If the planes might fly as low as they pleased, they would know all that was going on in an enemy's lines. They must keep up so high that through the aviator's gla.s.ses a man on the road is the size of a pin- head. To descend low is as certain death as to put your head over the parapet of a trench when the enemy's trench is only a hundred yards away. There are dead lines in the air, no less than on the earth.
Archibald, the anti-aircraft gun, sets the dead line. He watches over it as a cat watches a mouse. The trick of sneaking up under cover of a noonday cloud and all the other man-bird tricks he knows. A couple of seconds after that crack a tiny puff of smoke breaks about a hundred yards behind the Taube. A soft thistledown against the blue it seems at that alt.i.tude; but it would not if it were about your ears. Then it would sound like a bit of dynamite on an anvil struck by a hammer and you would hear the whizz of scores of bullets and fragments.
The smoking bra.s.s sh.e.l.l-case is out of Archibald's steel throat, and another sh.e.l.l-case with its charge slipped into place and started on its way before the first puff breaks. The aviator knows what is coming.
He knows that one means many, once he is in range.
Archibald rushes the fighting; it is the business of the Taube to side- step. The aviator cannot hit back except through his allies, the German batteries, on the earth. They would take care of Archibald if they knew where he was. But all that the aviator can see is mottled landscape. From his side Archibald flies no goal flags. He is one of ten thousand tiny objects under the aviator's eye.
Archibald's propensities are entirely peripatetic. He is the vagabond of the army lines. Locate him and he is gone. His home is where night finds him and the day's duties take him. He is the only gun that keeps regular hours like a Christian gentleman. All the others, great and small, raucous-voiced and shrill-voiced, fire at any hour, night or day.