Part 7 (2/2)
THE FRONT
Persons of a rheumatic habit are said to apprehend the approach of damp weather by certain presentiments in their bones. So people of a nervous temperament--like the writer--have premonitions of the approach to ”the Front” by a feeling of cold feet. These are usually induced by the spectacle of large and untimely cavities in the road, but they may be accentuated, as not infrequently happened, by seeing the process of excavation itself--and hearing it. The effect on the auditory nerves is known as ”k-r-rump,” which is, phonetically speaking, a fairly literal translation. The best thing to do on such occasions is to obey the nursery rhyme, and ”open your mouth and shut your eyes.” The intake of air will relieve the pressure on your ear-drums. I have been told by one of our gunners that the gentle German has for years been experimenting in order to produce as ”frightful” and intimidating a sound by the explosion of his sh.e.l.ls as possible. He has succeeded. Cases have been known of men without a scratch laughing and crying simultaneously after a too-close acquaintance with the German hymnology of hate. The results are, however, sometimes disappointing from the German point of view, as in the case of the soldier who, being spattered with dirt but otherwise untouched, picked himself up, and remarked with profound contempt, ”The dirty swine!”
The immediate approach to the trenches is usually marked by what sailors call a ”dodger,” which is to say, a series of canvas screens. These do not conceal your legs, and if you are exceptionally tall, they may not conceal your head. Your feet don't matter, but if you are wise you duck your head. Nine out of ten soldiers take an obstinate pride in walking upright, and will laugh at you most unfeelingly for your pains. Once in the communication trench you are fairly safe from snipers, but not, of course, from shrapnel or high-angle fire. A communication trench which I visited, when paying an afternoon call at a dug-out, was wide enough to admit a pony and cart, and, as it has to serve to bring up ration-parties and stretcher-bearers as well as reliefs, it is made as wide as is consistent with its main purpose, which is to protect the approach and to localise the effect of sh.e.l.l-fire as much as possible, the latter object being effected by frequent ”traversing.” To reach the fire-trenches is easy enough; the difficulty is to find your way out of them. The main line of fire-trenches has a kind of loop-line behind it with innumerable junctions and small depots in the shape of dug-outs, and at first sight the subaltern's plan of the estate was as bewildering as a signalman's map of Clapham Junction. And the main line is complicated by frequent traverses--something after the pattern of a Greek fret, whereas such French trenches as I have seen appeared to prefer the Norman dog-tooth style of architecture. A survey of these things makes it easy to understand the important part played by the bomb and the hand-grenade in trench warfare, for when you have ”taken” part of a trench you never know whether you are an occupier or merely a lodger until you have fully explored what is behind the traverses to the right and left of you. The delivery of a bomb serves as a very effective notice of ejectment. The back of the trench is protected by a ridge of earth commonly known as a parados. My servant, whose vocabulary was limited, called it a paradox, and was not very wide of the mark.
Somewhere behind the trenches at varying distances are the batteries.
The gunners affect orchards and copses as affording good cover for their guns, and if none are to be found they improvise them. Hop-poles trailed with hops or cut saplings will do very well. Usually there is a delectable garden, which is the peculiar pride of the men. Turf emplacements are constructed for the six guns, and turfed dug-outs house the telephone-operator and the gunners. The battery officers are billeted some way back, usually in a kind of farmhouse, whose chief decorative feature is a midden-heap; in England it would promptly be the subject of a closing order by any Public Health authority.
There is nothing more admirable than a field-gun. As a s.h.i.+p answers her helm or an aeroplane its controls, so does an eighteen-pounder respond to every turn of her elevating and traversing gear. Watch a gunner laying his gun on a target he cannot see; observe him switch the gun round from the aiming point to the target; remark the way in which the sight clinometer registers the angle of sight and the drum registers the range; and then ask yourself whether the smartest s.h.i.+p that ever sailed the high seas could be more docile to a turn of the wheel. With perfect simplicity did a man in the R.F.A. once say to me, ”We feel towards our gun as a mother feels to her child; we'd sooner lose our lives than our gun.” In that confession of faith you have the whole of the gunner's creed.
The heavy guns are generally to be found in splendid isolation; one such I visited and I marvelled at its appearance; it resembled nothing so much as the mottled trunk of a decayed plane-tree except for its girth. ”Futurist art,” explained the major deprecatingly as I stared at its daubed surface; ”it makes it unrecognisable.” It certainly did.
Close by were what looked at a distance like a bed of copper cuc.u.mbers.
”More gardening?” I asked. ”Yes, market gardening,” replied the major; ”if we lay the sh.e.l.ls like that with sand-bags between them we prevent their igniting one another in case of accidents. It helps us to deliver the goods.”
A mile or two from the battery headquarters at X---- Y---- was the observing station. The battery-major and myself were accompanied thither by a huge mastiff who in civil life was a dairyman by profession and turned a churn, but had long since attached himself to the major as orderly. We duly arrived at a deserted farm, but at this point the mastiff stopped dead and declined to come any further. I thought this churlish, and told him so, but he merely wagged his tail. When we entered the farmyard I understood. It was pitted with sh.e.l.l-holes, and they were obviously of very recent excavation. As a matter of fact the Huns suspected that farm, and with good reason, and treated it to intermittent ”Hate.” The mastiff therefore always waited for the battery-major at what it judged, quite erroneously, to be a safe distance. We clambered up into a loft by means of unreliable ladders. In the roof of the loft some tiles had been removed, and leaning our arms on the rafters we looked out. ”You see that row of six poplars over there?” said the Major, pointing to a place behind the German trenches.
I recognised them, for the same six poplars I had seen through a periscope in the trenches the day before. ”Well, you see the roof of a house between the second and third tree from the right? Good!” He turned to the telephone operator in the corner of the loft. ”Lay No. 2 on the register! Report when ready!” The operator repeated the words confidentially to the distant battery, and even as he spoke the receiver answered ”Ready!” ”Fire!” I had my eyes glued to the house, yet nothing seemed to happen, and I rubbed my field-gla.s.ses dubiously with my pocket-handkerchief. Had they missed? Even as I speculated there was a puff of smoke and a spurt of flame in the roof of the house between the poplars. We had delivered the goods.
If one of those ruinous farms does not contain a battery mess the chances are that it will shelter a field ambulance or else a company in billets. Field ambulances, like the batteries, are somewhat migratory in their habits, and change their positions according as they are wanted.
But a field ambulance is not, as might be supposed, a vehicle but a unit of the R.A.M.C, with a major or a colonel in charge as O.C. The A.D.M.S.
of a division has three field ambulances under him, and when an attack in force is projected he mobilises these three units at forward dressing stations in the rear of the trenches. They are a link between the aid-posts in front and the collecting stations behind. From the collecting stations the wounded are sent on to the clearing hospitals and thence to the base. It sounds beautifully simple, and so it is. The most eloquent compliment to its perfection was the dreamy reminiscence of a soldier I met at the base: ”I got hit up at Wipers, sir; something hit me in the head, and the next thing I knew was I heard somebody saying 'Drink this,' and I found myself in bed at Boulogne.” Every field ambulance has an attendant chaplain, and a very good sort he usually is.
Is the soldier sick, he visits him; penitent, he shrives him; dying, he comforts him. One such I knew, a Catholic priest, six feet two, and a mighty hunter of buck in his day, who was often longing for a shot at the Huns, and as often imposing penances upon himself for such un-ghostly desires. He found consolation in confessing the Irishmen before they went into the trenches: ”The bhoys fight all the better for it,” he explained. He was sure of the salvation of his flock; the only doubts he had were about his own. We all loved him.
There is one great difference between life in billets and life in the trenches. In billets the soldier ”grouses” often, in trenches never.
This may be partly due to a very proper sense of proportion; it may also be due to the fact that, the necessity for vigilance being relaxed and the occasions for industry few, life in billets is apt to become a great bore. The small Flemish and French towns offer few amenities; in our mess we found our princ.i.p.al recreation in reunions with other fraternities at the _patisserie_ or in an occasional mount. Of _patisseries_ that at Bethune is the best; that at Poperinghe the worst.
Besides, the former has a piano and a most pleasing Mademoiselle. In the earlier stages of our occupation some of the officers at G.H.Q. did a little coursing and shooting, but there was trouble about _delits de cha.s.se_, and now you are allowed to shoot nothing but big game--namely, Germans--although I have heard of an irresponsible Irishman in the trenches who vaulted the parapet to bag a hare and, what is more remarkable, returned with it. Needless to say, his neighbours were Saxons. As for the men, their opportunities of relaxation are more circ.u.mscribed. Much depends on the house in which they are billeted. If there is a baby, you can take the part of mother's help; one of the most engaging sights I saw was a troop of our cavalrymen (they may have been the A.V.C.) riding through Armentieres, leading a string of remounts, each remount with a laughing child on its back. Or, again, you can wash.
If you are not fortunate enough to be billeted at Bailleul, which has the latest thing in baths, enabling men to be baptized, like Charlemagne's reluctant converts, in platoons, you can always find a pump. The spectacle of our men stripped to the waist sousing each other with water under the pump is a source of standing wonder to the inhabitants. I am not sure whether they think it indecent, or merely eccentric; perhaps both. But then, as Anatole France has gravely remarked, a profound disinclination to wash is no proof of chast.i.ty.
Besides, as one of the D.M.S.'s encyclicals has reminded us, cleanliness of body is next to orderliness of kit. If you take carbolic baths you may, with G.o.d's grace, escape one or more of the seven plagues of Flanders. These seven are lice, flies, rats, rain, mud, smells, and ”souvenirs.” The greatest of these is lice, for lice may mean cerebro-meningitis. Owing to their unsportsmanlike and irritating habits they are usually called ”snipers.” But, unlike snipers, they are not ent.i.tled to be treated as prisoners of war (their habits partake too much of espionage), and when captured they receive a short shrift from an impa.s.sive man with a hot iron in the asbestos drying-room.
But it may well happen that in spite of babies, and baths, and bra.s.s bands, and footb.a.l.l.s, and boxing-gloves, and playing marbles (the General in command of one of our divisions told me he had seen six Argyll and Sutherland sergeants playing marbles with shrapnel bullets in some support trenches), the men get bored. They are often very crowded, and crowding may develop fastidious animosities. A man may tolerate shrapnel in the trenches with equanimity, and yet may find his neighbour's table-manners in billets positively intolerable. Men may become ”stale” or get on each other's nerves. When a company commander sees signs of this, he has one very potent prescription; he prescribes a good stiff route march. It has never been known to fail. Many a time in the winter months, when out visiting Divisional Headquarters, did I, in the shameful luxury of my car, come across a battalion slogging along ruddy and cheerful in the mud, and singing with almost reproachful unction:
Last night I s-s-aw you, I s-saw you, you naughty boy!
Some one ought to make an anthology (for private circulation only) of the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches. And if the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, ”they were weak verses.” Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac beauty are not unworthy to rank with the cla.s.sical lines on the burial of Sir John Moore. And there is that magnificent _Hymn before Battle_ by Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its kind.
With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours. After all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones. I once asked a French soldier over a game of cards--in civil life he was a plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]--whether he could get any sleep in the trenches amid the infernal din of the guns. ”Oh, I slept pretty well on the whole,” he explained nonchalantly, ”mais mon voisin, celui-la”--he pointed reproachfully to a comrade who was imperturbably shuffling the pack--”il ronflait si fort qu'il finissait par me degouter.”
FOOTNOTE:
[7] See Chapter XV.
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