Part 6 (2/2)
O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling, O Grave thy victoree?
The Bells of h.e.l.l go ting-a-ling-a-ling For you but not for me!”
It is almost impossible to make oneself believe that, less than two years ago, these iron-hard, sun-bronzed, determined-looking men were keeping books, tending shop, waiting on table, driving wagons, and doing all the other humdrum things which make up the working lives of most of us. Yet this citizen army is winning sensational successes against the best trained troops in the world, occupying positions of their own choosing, fortified and defended with every device that human ingenuity and years of experience have been able to suggest.
These ex-shopkeepers, ex-tailors, ex-lawyers, ex-farmers, ex-cabmen are accomplis.h.i.+ng what most military authorities a.s.serted was impossible: they are driving German veterans out of trenches amply supported by artillery--and they are doing the job cheerfully and extremely well.
I believe that one of the reasons why the morale of the British is so high is because, instead of adopting the dugout life of the Germans, they have in the main kept to the open. Trench life is anything but pleasant, yet it is infinitely more conducive to confidence, courage, and enthusiasm than the rat-like existence of the Germans in foul-smelling, ill-lighted, unsanitary burrows far beneath the surface of the ground. Few men can remain for month after month in such a place and retain their optimism and their self-respect. One of the German dugouts which I saw on the Somme was so deep in the earth that it had two hundred steps. The Germans who were found in it admitted quite frankly that after enjoying for several weeks or months the safety which it afforded, they had no stomach for going back to the trenches. They were only too glad to crawl into their hole when the British barrage began and there they were trapped and surrendered.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A British ”Heavy” Mounted on a Railway-Truck Sh.e.l.ling the German Lines.
During a big offensive the guns frequently fire a round a minute for days on end, the gunners working in s.h.i.+fts, two hours on and two hours off.]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Buried on the Field of Honor.
”Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”]
Germany largely based her confidence of victory on the belief that, under the strain of war, the far-flung British Empire, with its heterogeneous elements and racial jealousies, would promptly crumble.
It was a vital error. Instead of crumbling it hardened into a unity which is adamantine. Canada has already contributed half a million men to the British armies, Australia three hundred thousand. South Africa, by undertaking her own defense, released the imperial regiments stationed there. She not only suppressed the German-fomented rebellion, but she conquered German Southwest Africa and German East Africa, thus adding nearly a sixth of the Dark Continent to the Empire, and has sent ten thousand men to the battle-fields of Europe.
Indian troops are fighting in France, in Macedonia, in Mesopotamia, in Palestine, and in Egypt. From the West Indies have come twelve thousand men. The Malay States gave to the Empire a battles.h.i.+p and a battalion. A little island in the Mediterranean raised the King's Own Malta Regiment. Uganda and Nya.s.saland raised and supported the King's African Rifles--five thousand strong. The British colonies on the other seaboard of the continent increased the West African Field Force to seven thousand men. The fishermen and lumbermen from Newfoundland won imperishable glory on the Somme. From the coral atolls of the Fijis hastened six score volunteers. The Falkland Islands, south of South America, raised 140 men. From the Yukon, Sarawak, Wei-hai-wei, the Seych.e.l.les, Hong-Kong, Belize, Saskatchewan, Aden, Tasmania, British Guiana, Sierra Leone, St. Helena, the Gold Coast, poured Europeward, at the summons of the Motherland, an endless stream of fighting men.
Scattered in trenches and tents, in barracks and billets over the whole of Northern France are men hailing from the uttermost parts of the earth. Some there are who have spent their lives searching for gold by the light of the Aurora Borealis and others who have delved for diamonds on the South African veldt. Some have ridden range on the plains of Texas and others on the plains of Queensland. When, in the recreation huts, the phonograph plays ”_Home, Sweet Home_” the thoughts of some drift to nipa-thatched huts on flaming tropic islands, some think of tin-roofed wooden cottages in the environs of Sydney or Melbourne, others of staid, old-fas.h.i.+oned, red-brick houses in Halifax or Quebec.
Serving as a connecting-link between the British and the French and Belgian armies is a corps of interpreters known as the _liaison_. As there are well over two million Englishmen in France, a very small percentage of whom have any knowledge of French, the _liaison_ enjoys no sinecure. To a.s.sist in the billeting of British battalions in French villages, to conduct negotiations with the canny countryfolk for food and fodder, to mollify angry housewives whose menages have been upset by boisterous Tommies billeted upon them, to translate messages of every description, to interrogate peasants suspected of espionage--these are only a few of the duties which the _liaison_ officers are called upon to perform. The corps is recruited from Englishmen who have been engaged in business in Paris, habitues of the Riviera, students of the Latin Quarter, French hairdressers, head waiters, and ladies' tailors who have learned English ”as she is spoke” in London's West End. The officers of the _liaison_ can be readily distinguished by their caps, which resemble those worn by railroad brakemen, and by the gilt sphinx on the collars of their drab uniforms. This emblem was chosen by Napoleon as a badge for the corps of interpreters he organized during his Egyptian campaign, but the British unkindly a.s.sert it was selected for the _liaison_ officers because n.o.body can understand them.
The more I see of the war the more I am impressed with its utter impersonality. It is a highly organized business, conducted by specialists, and into it personalities and picturesqueness seldom enter. One hears the noise and the clamor, of course; one sees the virility, the intense activity, the feverish haste, yet at the same time one realizes how little the human element counts; all is machinery and mathematics. I remember that one day I was lunching in his dugout with an officer commanding a battery of heavy howitzers.
Just as my host was serving the tinned peaches the telephone-bell jangled. It was an observation officer, up near the firing-line, reporting that through his telescope he had spotted a German ammunition column pa.s.sing through a certain ruined hamlet three or four miles away. On his map the battery commander showed me a small square, probably not more than three or four acres in extent, on which, in order to ”get” that ammunition column, his sh.e.l.ls must fall.
Some rapid calculations on a pad of paper, and, calling in his subordinate, he handed him the ”arithmetic.” A minute or two later, from a clump of trees close by, there came in rapid succession four splitting crashes and four invisible express-trains went screeching toward the German lines to explode, with the roar that scatters death, on a spot as far away and as invisible from me as Was.h.i.+ngton Square is from Grant's Tomb. Before the echo of the guns had died away my host was back to his tinned peaches again. Neither he, nor any of his gunners, knew, or ever would know, or, indeed, very greatly cared, what destruction those sh.e.l.ls had wrought. That's what I mean by the impersonality of modern war.
Our car stopped with startling abruptness in response to the upraised hand of a giant in khaki whose high-crowned sombrero and the bra.s.s letters on his shoulder-straps showed that he was a trooper of the Alberta Horse. On his arm was a red bra.s.sard bearing the magic letters M. P.--Military Police.
”Better not go any farther, sir,” he said, addressing the staff-officer who was my companion. ”The Boches are sh.e.l.ling the road just ahead pretty heavily this morning. They got a lorry a few minutes ago and I've had orders to stop traffic until things quiet down a bit.”
”I'm afraid we'll have to take to the mud,” said my cicerone resignedly. ”And after last night's rain it will be beastly going.
”And don't forget your helmet and gas-mask,” he called, as I stepped from the car into a foot of oozy mire.
”Will we need them?” I asked, for the inverted wash-basin which the British dignify by the name of helmet is the most uncomfortable form of headgear ever devised by man.
”It's orders,” he answered. ”No one is supposed to go into the trenches without mask and helmet. And there's never any telling when we may need them. No use in taking chances.”
Taking off my leather coat, which was too heavy for walking, I attempted to toss it into the car, but the wind caught it and carried it into the mud, in which it disappeared as quickly and completely as though I had dropped it in a lake. Leaving the comparative hardness of the road, we started to make our way to the mouth of a communication trench through what had evidently once been a field of sugar-beets--and instantly sank to our knees in mire that seemed to be a mixture of mola.s.ses, glue, and porridge. It seemed as though some subterranean monster had seized my feet with its tentacles and was trying to drag me down. It was perhaps half a mile to the communication trench and it took us half an hour of the hardest walking I have ever had to reach it. It had walls of slippery clay and a corduroyed bottom, but the corduroy was hidden beneath the mud left by thousands of feet.
Telephone-wires, differentiated by tags of colored tape, ran down the sides. Shortly we came upon a working party of Highlanders who were repairing the trench-wall. The wars of the Middle Ages could have seen no more strangely costumed fighting men. Above their half-puttees showed the brilliantly plaided tops of their stockings. Their kilts of green and blue tartan were protected by khaki ap.r.o.ns. Each man wore one of the recently issued jerkins, a sleeveless and shapeless coat of rough-tanned sheepskin such as was probably worn, in centuries past, by the English bowmen. On their heads were the ”tin pot” helmets such as we were wearing, and in leather cases at their belts they carried broad-bladed and extremely vicious-looking knives.
For nearly an hour we slipped and stumbled through the endless cutting. At one spot the parapet, soaked by water, had caved in. In the breach thus made had been planted a neatly lettered sign. It was terse and to the point: ”The Hun sees you here. Go away.” And we did.
The trench had gradually been growing narrower and shallower and more tortuous until we were walking half doubled over so as not to show our heads above the top. At last it came to an end in a sort of cellar, perhaps six feet square, which had been burrowed from the ridge of a hill. The entrance to the observatory, for that is what it was, had been carefully screened by a burlap curtain; within, a telescope, mounted on a tripod, applied its large and inquisitive eye to a small aperture, likewise curtained, cut in the opposite wall. We were in the advanced observation post on the slopes of Notre Dame de Lorette, less than a thousand yards from the enemy. At the foot of the spur on which we stood ran the British trenches and, a few hundred yards beyond them, the German. From our vantage-point we could see the two lines, looking like monstrous brown snakes, extending for miles across the plain. Perhaps a mile behind the German trenches was a patch of red-brown roofs. It was the town of Lieven, a straggling suburb of Lens, famous as the centre of the mine-fields of Northern France.
The only occupants of the observation post were a youthful Canadian lieutenant and a sergeant of the ”Buzzers,” as they call the Signal Corps. The officer was from Montreal and he instantly became my friend when I spoke of golf at Dixie and rides in the woods back of Mount Royal and a certain c.o.c.ktail which they make with great perfection in a certain club that we both knew. He adjusted the telescope and I put my eye to it, whereupon the streets of the distant town sprang into life before me. In front of a cottage a woman was hanging out was.h.i.+ng--I could even make out the colors of the garments; a gray motor whirled into a square, stopped, a man alighted, and it went on again; a group of men--German soldiers doubtless--strolled across my field of vision and one of them paused for a moment as though to light a pipe; along a street straggled a line of children, evidently coming from school, for it must be remembered that in most of these French towns occupied by the Germans, even those close behind the lines, the civilian life goes on much as usual. Though the Allies could blow these towns off the map if they wished, they do not bombard them save for some specific object, as to do so would be to kill many of their own people. Nor does it pay to waste ammunition on individual enemies.
But if an observation officer sees enough Germans in a group to make the expenditure of ammunition worth while, he will telephone to one of the batteries and a well-placed sh.e.l.l tells the Germans that street gatherings are strictly _verboten_.
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