It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large chateau. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the British trenches and all the German trenches—spider-weblike lines that cunning human spiders had spun with spades—in that region; and where our batteries were and where some of the German batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.

To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their day.

That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly "hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians agree. Good war is to have millions of shells and vast reserves ready and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.

But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire- economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with shells and then dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than Calais.

In their official bulletin the Germans said that they had recovered the trench. They did recover part of it for a few hours. It was then that the commander on the German side must have sent in his report to catch the late evening editions. Commanders do not like to confess the loss of trenches. It is the sort of thing that makes headquarters ask: "What is the matter with you over there, anyway?" There was a time when the German bulletins about the Western front seemed rather truthful; but of late they have been getting into bad habits.

The British general knew what was coming; he knew that he would start the German hornets out of their nest when he took the trench; he knew, too, that he could rely upon his men to hold till they were told to retire or there were none left to retire. The British are a home- loving people, who do not like to be changing their habitations. In succeeding days the question up and down the lines was, "Have we still got that trench?" Only two hundred yards of ditch on the continent of Europe! But was it still ours? Had the Germans succeeded in "strafing" us out of it yet? They had shelled all the trenches in the region of the lost trench and had made three determined and unsuccessful counter-attacks when, on the fifth day, we returned to the chateau to ask if it were practicable to visit the new trench.

"At your own risk!" said the staff officer. If we preferred we could sit on the veranda where there were easy chairs, on a pleasant summer day. Very peaceful the sweep of the well-kept grounds and the shade of the stately trees of that sequestered world of landscape. Who was at war? Why was anyone at war? Two staff motor-cars awaiting orders on the drive and a dust-laden dispatch rider with messages, who went past toward the rear of the house, were the only visual evidence of war. The staff officer served us with helmets for protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in the staff officer's eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest. You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff officer's eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from the trenches to join the "brain-trust" in the chateau, know a great deal more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, "At their own risk."

There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a correspondent's leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark at some headquarters, I recall, that "You never know!" which shows that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half the knowledge—and they are at great pains not to part with their half.

We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White- capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops were growing. You never tire of remarking the fact. It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front.

At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.

There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passer-by. We were in a dead land. One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner's cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress.

It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general who received us at the door of his dug-out. German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable law of organization kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors.

True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch. I judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.

There were three of us, two correspondents, L——— and myself, and R———, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind. Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre, Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not like. We cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a diagram of city streets in a guidebook, a man turns to the left for the public library and to the right for the museum.

Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places; and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a waste of the Kaiser's munitions as there was no one in sight. Yet there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high. They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those deserted roads.

The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind. Anything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so important in war as now. They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine—a machine that money cannot reproduce—that gun-machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.

Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that British generals become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:

"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.

By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide.

That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!" If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.

Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come.

Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd. When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions: Will he die? Has he been maimed for life? If the answers to both are no, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.

The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of death's fingers. How happy he is when he knows that he will get well! In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him. What kind of a home has he, this private soldier? In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes' walk from the green fields of the English countryside? But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.

We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months. Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before the eye. Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others splintered down, bit by bit. Others still standing have been hit many times. There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown from the axeman's blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature's sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring.

In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight. Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors. It does not seem a place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and use soap and safety razors. One would not be surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.

Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread. They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted to the cave-dweller's protection because their civilization is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller's time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target.

An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station.

"Not even a high explosive"—the kind that bursts on impact after penetration—"could get into that!" he says. "We make them for generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their shoulders."

With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. You never go up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction represented—the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells! After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dug-outs to be ready for another go!

The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer— stormy. The German gunners were "strafing" in a very lively way this afternoon.

Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dug-out Street.

I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dug-out to pieces. Anyone who had never heard a shell before would have "scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging by the sensation that travels down your backbone.

Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling, boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world. A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel drum-head.

If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where, hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks from the concussion.

Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half- stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.

"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer, trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.

"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.

This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the experiences there are—but only "close." A delightful word that word close, at the front!

The Germans were generous that afternoon. Another scream seemed aimed at my head. L——— disagreed with me; he said that it was aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of the trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner's large scale map, to hit. It is wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at all.

This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being. We got some fours and fives as we walked along. Three bursting as near together as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk. Then the thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line. Only, unlike the thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a German artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.

We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more soldiers, leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did not look up at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the passivity of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball- grounds.

A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death till death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by itself. Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were low—unnecessarily, because they were from British guns. No danger from them unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve position.

For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working for them and for you, giving blow for blow.

The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the enemy, calls for more and harder blows.

Looking over the parapet of the communication trench you saw fields, lifeless except for the singing birds in the wheat, who had also the spirit of battle. The more shells, the more they warble. It was always so on summer days. Between the screams you hear their full-pitched chorus, striving to make itself heard in competition with the song of German invasion and British resistance. Mostly, the birds seemed to take cover like mankind; but I saw one sweep up from the golden sea of ripening grain toward the men-brothers with their wings of cloth.

Was this real, or was it extravaganza? Painted airships and a painted summer sky? The audacity of those British airmen! Two of them were spotting the work of British guns by their shell-bursts and watching for gun-flashes which would reveal concealed German battery-positions, and whispering results by wireless to their own batteries.

It is a great game. Seven or eight thousand feet high, directly over the British planes, is a single Taube cruising for the same purpose. It looks like a beetle with gossamer wings suspended from a light cloud. The British aviators are so low that the bull's-eye identification marks are distinctly visible to the naked eye. They are playing in and out, like the short stop and second baseman around second, there in the very arc of the passing shells from both sides fired at other targets. But scores of other shells are most decidedly meant for them. In the midst of a lacework of puffs of shrapnel-bursts, which slowly spread in the still air, from the German anti-aircraft guns, they dip and rise and turn in skilful dodging. At length, one retires for good; probably his plane-cloth has become too much like a sieve from shrapnel- fragments to remain aloft longer.

Come down, Herr Taube, come down where we can have a shot at you I Get in the game! You can see better at the altitude of the British airmen! But Herr Taube always stays high—the Br'er Fox of the air. Of course, it was not so exciting as the pictures that artists draw, but it was real.

Every kind of shell was being fired, low and high velocity, small and large calibre. One-two-three-four in as quick succession as the roll of a drum, four German shells burst in line up in the region where we have made ourselves masters of the German trench. British shells responded.

"Ours again!"

But I had already ducked before I spoke, as you might if a pellet of steel weighing a couple of hundred pounds, going at the rate of a thousand yards a second or more, passed within a few yards of your head—ducked to find myself looking into the face of a soldier who was smiling. The smile was not scornful, but it was at least amused at the expense of the sightseer who had dodged one of our own shells. In addition to the respirators in case of a possible gas attack, supplied by that staff officer with a twinkle in his eye, we needed a steel rod fastened to the back of our necks and running down our spinal columns in order to preserve our dignity.

We were witnessing what is called the "artillery preparation for an infantry attack," which was to try to recover that two hundred yards of trench from the British. Only the Germans did not limit their attention to the lost trench. It was hottest there around the bend of our line, from our view-point; for there they must maul the trench into formless debris and cut the barbed wire in front of it before the charge was made.

"They touch up all the trenches in the neighbourhood to keep us guessing," said the officer, "before they make their final concentration. So it's pretty thick around this part."

"Which might include the communication trench?"

"Certainly. This makes a good line shot. No doubt they will spare us a few when they think it is our turn. We do the same thing. So it goes."

From the variety of screams of big shells and little shells and screams harrowingly close and reassuringly high, which were indicated as ours, one was warranted in suggesting that the British were doing considerable artillery preparation themselves.

"We must give them as good as they send—and better."

Better seemed correct.

"Those close ones you hear are doubtless meant for the front German trench, which accounts for their low trajectory; the others for their support trenches or any battery-positions that our planes have located." We could not see where the British shells were striking. We could judge only of the accuracy of some of the German fire. Considering the storm being visited on the support trench which we had just left, we were more than ever glad to be out of it. Artillery is the war burglar's jemmy; but it has to batter the house into ruins and blow up the safe and kill most of the family before the burglar can enter. Clouds of dust rose from the explosions; limbs of trees were lopped off by tornadoes of steel hail.

"There! Look at that tree!"

In front of a portion of the British support trench a few of a line of stately shade trees were still standing. A German shell, about an eight-inch, one judged, struck fairly in the trunk of one about the same height from the ground as the lumberman sinks his axe in the bark. The shimmer of hot gas spread out from the point of explosion. Through it as through an aureole one saw that twelve inches of green wood had been cut in two as neatly as a thistle-stem is severed by a sharp blow from a walking-stick. The body of the tree was carried across the splintered stump with crushing impact from the power of its flight, plus the power of the burst of the explosive charge which broke the shell-jacket into slashing fragments; and the towering column of limbs, branches, and foliage laid its length on the ground with a majestic dignity. Which shows what one shell can do, one of three which burst not far away at the same time. In time, the shells would get all the trees; make them into chips and splinters and toothpicks.

"I'd rather that it would hit a tree-trunk than my trunk," said L———.

"But you would not have got it as badly as the tree," said the officer reassuringly. "The substance would have been too soft for sufficient impact for a burst. It would have gone right through!"



XXII More Best Day



At battalion headquarters in the front trenches the battalion surgeon had just amputated an arm which had been mauled by a shell.

"Without any anaesthetic," he explained. "No chance if we sent him back to the hospital. He would die on the way. Stood it very well. Already chirking up."

A family practitioner at home, the doctor, when the war began, had left his practice to go with his Territorial battalion. He retains the family practitioner's cheery, assuring manner. He is the kind of man who makes you feel better immediately he comes into the sick-room; who has already made you forget yourself when he puts his finger on your pulse.

"The same thing that we might have done in the Crimea," he continued, "only we have antiseptics now. It's wonderful how little you can work with and how excellent the results. Strong, healthy men, these, with great recuperative power and discipline and resolution— very different patients from those we usually operate on."

Tea was served inside the battalion commander's dugout. Tea is as essential every afternoon to the British as ice to the average American in summer. They do not think of getting on without it if they can possibly have it, and it is part of the rations. As well take cigarettes away from those who smoke as tea from the British soldier.

It was very much like tea outside the trenches, so far as any signs of perturbation about shells and casualties were concerned. In that the battalion commander had to answer telegrams, it had the aspect of a busy man's sandwich at his desk for luncheon. Good news to cheer the function had just come over the network of wires which connects up the whole army, from trenches to headquarters—good news in the midst of the shells.

German West Africa had fallen. Botha, who was fighting against the British fifteen years ago, had taken it fighting for the British. A suggestive thought that. It is British character that brings enemies like Botha into the fold; the old, good-natured, sportsmanlike live-and-let- live idea, which has something to do with keeping the United States intact. A board with the news on it in German was put up over the British trenches. Naturally, the board was shot full of holes; for it is clear that the Germans are not yet ready to come into the British Empire.

"Hans and Jacob we have named them," said the colonel, referring to two Germans who were buried back of his dug-out. "It's dull up here when the Boches are not shelling, so we let our imaginations play. We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches. Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it, but not after you have been in the trenches for a while."

A little gruesome—true! Not in the trenches—true, too! Where all is satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow———"

Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had messed with him and marched with him and known him in the fullness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident. What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself, was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the dug-out. The subject was changed to something about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know? "It was here that he was hit," another officer said, as we moved on in the trench. "He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along. He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him."

A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.

Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers, which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all as a part of the day's work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.

Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and making tea. Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it. How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade? Never! He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite.

Any minute a shell may come. Mr. Atkins does not think of that. Time enough to think after it has arrived. Then perhaps the burial party will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses who look after you will.

I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same boat and have learned unselfishness. When they got up to let you pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant. The manners of the trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners are a cult.

There is no better place to send a spoiled, undisciplined, bumptious youth than to a British trench. He will learn that there are other men in the world besides himself and that a shell can kill a rich brute or a selfish brute as readily as a poor man. Democracy there is in the trenches; the democracy where all men are in the presence of death and "hazing" parties need not be organized among the students.

But there is another and a greater element in the practical psychology of the trenches. These good-natured men, fighting the bitterest kind of warfare without the signs of brutality which we associate with the prize-fighter and the bully in their faces, know why they are fighting. They consider that their duty is in that trench, and that they could not have a title to manhood if they were not there. After the war the men who have been in the trenches will rule England. Their spirit and their thinking will fashion the new trend of civilization, and the men who have not fought will bear the worst scars from the war.

Ridiculous it is that men should be moles, perhaps; but at the same time there is something sublime in the fellowship of their courage and purpose, as they "sit and take it," or guard against attacks, without the passion of battle of the old days of excited charges and quick results, and watch the toll pass by from hour to hour. Borne by comrades pick-a-back we saw the wounded carried along that passage too narrow for a litter. A splash of blood, a white bandage, a limp form!

For the second permissible—periscopes are tempting targets—I looked through one over the top of the parapet. Another film! A big British lyddite shell went crashing into the German parapet. The dust from sandbags and dug-outs merged into an immense cloud of ugly, black smoke. As the cloud rose, one saw the figure of a German dart out of sight; then nothing was visible but the gap which the explosion had made. No wise German would show himself. British snipers were watching for him. At least half a dozen, perhaps a score, of men had been put out by this single "direct hit" of an h.e. (high explosive). Yes, the British gunners were shooting well, too. Other periscopic glimpses proved it.

Through the periscope we learned also that the two lines of sandbags of German and British trenches were drawing nearer together. Another wounded man was brought by.

"They're bombing up ahead. He has just been hit." As we drew aside to make room for him to pass, once more the civilian realized his helplessness and unimportance. One soldier was worth ten Prime Ministers in that place. We were as conspicuously mal a propos as an outsider at a bank directors' meeting or in a football scrimmage. The officer politely reminded us of the necessity of elbow room in the narrow quarters for the bombers, who were hidden from view by the zigzag traverses, and I was not sorry, though perhaps my companions were. If so, they did not say so, not being talkative men. We were not going to see the two hundred yards of captured trench that were beyond the bombing action, after all. Oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!

"A Boche gas shell!" we were told, as we passed an informal excavation in the communication trench on our way back. "Asphyxiating effect. No time to put on respirators when one explodes. Laid out half a dozen men like fish, gasping for air, but they will recover."

"The Boches want us to hurry!" exclaimed L———.

They were giving the communication trench a turn at "strafing," now, and shells were urgently dropping behind us. There was no use trying to respond to one's natural inclination to run away from the pursuing shower when you had to squeeze past soldiers as you went.

"But look at what we are going into! This is like beating up grouse to the guns, and we are the birds! I am wondering if I like it."

We could tell what had happened in our absence in the support trench by the litter of branches and leaves and by the excavations made by shells. It was still happening, too. Another nine-inch, with your only view of surroundings the wall of earth which you hugged. Crash—and safe again!

"Pretty!" L——— said, smiling. He was referring to the cloud of black smoke from the burst. Pretty is a favourite word of his. I find that men use habitual exclamations on such occasions. R———, also smiling, had said, "A black business, this!" a favourite expression with him.

"Yes—pretty!" R———and I exclaimed together.

L———took a sliver off his coat and offered it to us as a souvenir. He did not know that he had said "Pretty!" or R——— that he had said "A black business!" several times that afternoon; nor did I know that I had exclaimed, "For the love of Mike!" Psychologists take notice; and golfers are reminded that their favourite expletives when they foozle will come perfectly natural to them when the Germans are "strafing." Then another nine-inch, when we were out of the gallery in front of the warrens. My companions happened to be near a dug-out. They did not go in tandem, but abreast. It was a "dead heat." All that I could see in the way of cover was a wall of sandbags, which looked about as comforting as tissue paper in such a crisis.

At least, one faintly realized what it meant to be in the support trenches, where the men were still huddled in their caves. They never get a shot at the enemy or a chance to throw a bomb, unless they are sent forward to assist the front trenches in resisting an attack. It is for this purpose that they are kept within easy reach of the front trenches. They are like the prisoner tied to a chair-back, facing a gun.

"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack —that is the first degree. You might call this the second."

It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.

Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.

Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when—well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"—Caesar's ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher- bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.

"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the chauffeur—also British and imperturbable—whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.

"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."

As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.

Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.



XXIII Winning And Losing



Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.

At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another, became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.

The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged was none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms as in past times, when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers, returning to their billets in French villages as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.

The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course.

Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.

You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is a warning that peace lies behind you. First, we alighted near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We went across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth.

In army language, theirs had not been a "good show." We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G.H.Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not "connected up" properly.

The German machine-guns were not out of commission, and for them it was like working a loom playing bullets back and forth across the zone of a hundred yards which the British had to traverse. The British had been told to charge and they charged. Theirs not to reason why; that was the glory of the thing. Nothing more gallant in warfare than their persistence, till they found that it was like trying to swim in a cataract of lead. One officer got within fifty yards of the German parapet before he fell. At last they realized that it could not be done—later than they should, but they were a proud regiment, and though they had been too brave, there was something splendid about it.

With a soldier's winning frankness and simplicity they told what had happened. Even before they charged they knew the machine-guns were in place; they knew what they had to face. One man spoke of seeing, as they lay waiting, a German officer standing up in the midst of the British shell-fire.

"A stout-hearted fighter I We had to admire him!" said the adjutant.

It was a chivalrous thought with a deep appeal, considering what he had been through. Oh, these English! They will not hate; they cannot be separated from their sense of sportsmanship.

It was not the first time the guns had not "connected up" for either side, and German charges on many occasions had met a like fate. Calm enough, these officers, true to their birthright of phlegm. They did not make excuses. Success is the criterion of battle. They had failed. Their unblinking recognition of the fact was a sort of self- punishment which cut deep into your own sensitiveness. One young lieutenant could not keep his lip from trembling over that naked, grim thought. Pride of regiment had been struck a whip-blow, which meant more to the soldier than any injury to his personal pride.

But next time! They wanted another try for that trench, these survivors. No matter about anything else—the battalion must have another chance. You appreciated this from a few words and more from the stubborn resolution in the bearing of all. There was no "let- us-at-'em-again" frightfulness. In order to end this war you must "lick" one side or the other, and these men were not "licked." You were sorry that you had gone to see them. It was like lacerating a wound.

One could only assure them, in his faith in their gallantry, that they would win next time. And oh, how you wanted them to win! They deserved to win because they were such manly losers.

At home in their rough wooden houses in camp we found a battalion which had won—the same undemonstrative type as the one that had lost; the same simplicity and kindly hospitality, which gives life at the front a charm in the midst of its tragedy, from these men of one of the dependable line regiments. This colonel knew the other colonel, and he said about the other what his fellow-officers had said: it was not his fault; he was a good man. If the guns were not "on," what happened to him was bound to happen to anybody. They had been "on" for the winning battalion; perfectly "on." They had buried the machine-guns and the Germans with them.

When a man goes into the kind of charge that either battalion made he gives himself up for lost. The psychology is simple. You are going to keep on until———!

Well, as Mr. Atkins has remarked in his own terse way, a battle was a lot of noise all around you and suddenly a big bang in your ear; and then somebody said, "please open your mouth and take this!" and you found yourself in a white, quiet place full of cots.

The winning battalion was amazed how easily the thing was done. They had "walked in." They were a little surprised to be alive—thanks to the guns. "Here we are! Here we are again!" as the song at the front goes. It is all a lottery. Make up your mind to draw the death number; and if you don't, that is "velvet." Army courage these days is highly sensitized steel in response to will.

They had won; there was a credit mark in the regimental record. All had won; nobody in particular, but the battalion, the lot of them. They did not boast about it. The thing just happened. They were alive and enjoying the sheer fact of life, writing letters home, rereading letters from home, looking at the pictures in illustrated papers, as they leaned back and smoked their brier-wood pipes and discussed politics with that freedom and directness of opinion which is an Englishman's pastime and his birthright.

The captain who was describing the fight had retired from the army, gone into business, and returned as a reserve officer. The guns were to stop firing at a given moment. As the minute-hand lay over the figure on his wrist-watch he dashed for the broken parapet, still in the haze of dust from shell-bursts, to find not a German in sight. All were under cover. He enacted the ridiculous scene with humorous appreciation of how he came face to face with a German as he turned a traverse. He was ready with his revolver and the other was not, and the other was his prisoner.

There was nothing gruesome about listening to a diffident soldier explaining how he "bombed them out," and you shared his amusement over the surprise of a German who stuck up his head from a dug-out within a foot of the face of a British soldier who was peeping inside to see if any more Germans were at home. You rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.

When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were reminded that although the war was old the British army was young. There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making.



XXIV The Maple Leaf Folk



These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.

When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.

What a strange place to find Canadians—at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to that contrast.

All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won—they had such a lot—to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, particularly after the Lusitania was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.

The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells "hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba. Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act. Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.

One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."

It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal.

They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.

"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."

They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it" when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.

"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back—and then he goes in. We went in. We charged—well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."

Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy—straight work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.

If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders———" etc.

My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing- match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.

As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'elite. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.

I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its membership and its distance from home.

Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown the lid off with high explosives.

It was in a big chateau that I heard the story—a story characteristic of modern warfare at its highest pitch—and felt its thrill when told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that chateau. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!

For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pat's before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing is quite good enough. Ask the generals in whose command they have served if you have any doubts. There is one way to win praise at the front: by fighting. The P.P.s knew the way.

"Too bad Gault is not here. He's in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell-wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan, his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile, and telling us to stick.

"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show—piece of shell in the eye."

"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."

The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.

The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire, which means shells all over the place and machine-guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.

On the night of May 7th the P.P.s had a muster of six hundred and thirty-five men. This was a good deal less than half of the original total in the battalion, including recruits who had come out to fill the gaps caused by death, wounds, and sickness. Bear in mind that before this war a force was supposed to prepare for retreat with a loss of ten per cent, and get under way to the rear with the loss of fifteen per cent, and that with the loss of thirty per cent, it was supposed to have borne all that can be expected of the best trained soldiers.

The Germans were quiet that night, suggestively quiet. At 4.30 a.m. the prelude began; by 5.30 the German gunners had fairly warmed to their work. They were using every kind of shell they had in the locker. Every signal wire the P.P.s possessed had been cut. The brigade commander could not know what was happening to them and they could not know his wishes; except that it may be taken for granted that the orders of any British brigade commander are always to "stick it." The shell-fire was as thick at the P.P.s' backs as in front of them; they were fenced in by it. And they were infantry taking what the guns gave in order to put them out of business so that the way would be clear for the German infantry to charge. In theory they ought to have been buried and mangled beyond the power of resistance by what is called "the artillery preparation for the infantry in attack."

Every man of the P.P.s knew what was coming. There was relief in their hearts when they saw the Germans break from their trenches and start down the slope of the hill in front. Now they could take it out of the German infantry in payment for what the German guns were doing to them. This was their only thought. Being good shots, with the instinct of the man who is used to shooting at game, the P.P.s "shoot to kill" and at individual targets. The light green of the German uniform is more visible on the deep green background of spring grass and foliage than against the tints of autumn. At two or three or four hundred yards neither Corporal Christy, the old bear-hunter, lying on the parapet nor other marksmen of the P.P.s could miss their marks. They kept on knocking down Germans; they didn't know that men around them were being hit; they did not know they were being shelled except when a burst shook their aim or filled their eyes with dust. In that case they wiped the dust out of their eyes and went on. The first that many of them realized that the German attack was broken was when they saw green blots in front of the standing figures, which were now going in the other direction. Then the thing was to keep as many of these as possible from returning over the hill. After that they could dress the wounded and make the dying a little more comfortable. For there was no taking the wounded to the rear. They had to remain there in the trench perhaps to be wounded again, spectators of their comrades' valour without the preoccupation of action.

In the official war journal where a battalion keeps its records—that precious historical document which will be safeguarded in fireproof vaults one of these days—you may read in cold, official language what happened in one section of the British line on the 8th of May. Thus:

"7 a.m. Fire trench on right blown in at several points ... 9 a.m. Lieutenants Martin and Triggs were hit and came out of left communicating trench with number of wounded . . . Captain Still and Lieutenant de Bay hit also . . . 9.30 a.m. All machine-guns were buried (by high explosive shells) but two were dug out and mounted again. A shell killed every man in one section . . . 10.30 a.m. Lieutenant Edwards was killed . . . Lieutenant Crawford, who was most gallant, was severely wounded . . . Captain Adamson, who had been handing out ammunition, was hit in the shoulder, but continued to work with only one arm useful . . . Sergeant-Major Frazer, who was also handing out ammunition to support trenches, was killed instantly by a bullet in the head."

At 10.30 only four officers remained fit for action. All were lieutenants. The ranking one of these was Niven, in command after Gault was wounded at 7 a.m. We have all met the Niven type anywhere from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Circle, the high-strung, wiry type who moves about too fast to carry any loose flesh and accumulates none because he does move about so fast. A little man Niven, rancher and horseman, with a good education and a knowledge of men. He rather fits the old saying about licking his weight in wild cats—wild cats being nearer his size than lions or tigers.

Eight months before he had not known any more about war than thousands of other Canadians of his type, except that soldiers carried rifles over their shoulders and kept step. But he had "Fanny" Farquhar, of the British army, for his teacher; and he studied the book of war in the midst of shells and bullets, which means that the lessons stick in the same way as the lesson the small boy receives when he touches the red-hot end of a poker to ascertain how it feels.

Writing in the midst of ruined trenches rocked by the concussion of shells, every message he sent that day, every report he made by orderly after the wires were down was written out very explicitly; which Farquhar had taught him was the army way. The record is there of his coolness when the lid was blown off of hell. For all you can tell by the firm chirography, he might have been sending a note to a ranch foreman.

When his communications were cut, he was not certain how much support he had on his flanks. It looked for a time as if he had none. After the first charge was repulsed, he made contact with the King's Royal Rifle Corps on his right. He knew from the nature of the first German charge that the second would be worse than the first. The Germans had advanced some machine-guns; they would be able to place their increased artillery fire more accurately.

Again green figures started down that hill and again they were put back. Then Niven was able to establish contact with the Shropshire Light Infantry, another regiment on his left. So he knew that right and left he was supported, and by seasoned British regulars. This was very, very comforting, especially when German machine-gun fire was not only coming from the front but in enfilade, which is most trying to a soldier's steadiness. In other words, the P.P.s were shooting at Germans in front, while bullets were whipping crosswise of their trenches and of the regulars on their flanks, too. Some of the German infantrymen who had not been hit or had not fallen back had dug themselves cover and were firing at a closer range.

The Germans had located the points in the P.P.s' trench occupied by machine-guns. At least, they could put these hornets' nests out of business if not all the individual riflemen. So they concentrated high explosive shells on the guns. This did the trick; it buried them. But a buried machine-gun may be dug out and fired again. It may be dug out two or three times and keep on firing as long as it will work and there is anyone to man it.

While the machine-guns were being exhumed every man in one sector of the trench was killed. Then the left half of the right fire trench had three or four shells, one after another, bang into it. There was no trench left; only macerated earth and mangled men. Those emerging alive were told to retreat to the communication trench. Next, the right end of the left fire trench was blown in. When the survivors fell back to the communication trench that also was blown in their face.

"Oh, but we were having a merry party!" as Lieutenant Vandenberg put it.

Niven and his lieutenants were moving here and there to the point of each new explosion to ascertain the amount of damage and to decide what was to be done as the result. One soldier described Niven's eyes as sparks emitted from two holes in his dust-caked face.

Pappineau tells how a tree outside the trench was cut in two by a shell and its trunk laid across the breach of the trench caused by another shell; and lying over the trunk, limp and lifeless where he had fallen, was a man killed by still another shell.

"I remember how he looked because I had to step around him and over the trunk," said Pappineau.

Unless you did have to step around a dead or a wounded man there was no time to observe his appearance; for by noon there were as many dead and wounded in the P.P.s' trench as there were men fit for action.

Those unhurt did not have to be steadied by their superiors. Knocked down by a concussion they sprang up with the promptness of disgust of one thrown off a horse or tripped by a wire. When told to move from one part of the trench to another where there was desperate need, a word was sufficient. They understood what was wanted of them, these veterans. They went. They seized every lull to drop the rifle for the spade and repair the breaches. When they were not shooting they were digging. The officers had only to keep reminding them not to expose themselves in the breaches. For in the thick of it, and the thicker the more so, they must try to keep some dirt between all of their bodies except the head and arm which had to be up in order to fire.

At 1.30 p.m. a cheer rose from that trench. It was in greeting of a platoon of the King's Royal Rifles which had come as a reinforcement. Oh, but this band of Tommies did look good to the P.P.s! And the little prize package that the very reliable Mr. Atkins had with him —the machine-gun! You can always count on Mr. Atkins to remain "among those present" to the last on such occasions.

Now Niven got word by messenger to go to the nearest point where the telephone was working and tell the brigade commander the complete details of the situation. The brigade commander asked him if he could stick, and he said, "Yes, sir!" which is what Colonel "Fanny" Farquhar would have said. This trip was hardly what would be called peaceful. The orderly whom Niven had with him both going and coming was hit by high explosive shells. Niven is so small that it is difficult to hit him. He is about up to Major Gault's shoulder.

He had been worrying about his supply of rifle-cartridges. There were not enough to take care of another German infantry charge, which was surely coming. After repelling two charges, think of failing to repel the third for want of ammunition! Think of Corporal Christy, the bear- hunter, with the Germans thick in front of him and no bullets for his rifle! But appeared again Mr. Thomas Atkins, another platoon of him, with twenty boxes of cartridges, which was rather a risky burden to bring through shell-fire. The relief as these were distributed was that of having something at your throat which threatens to strangle you removed.

Making another tour of his trenches a little later in the afternoon, Niven found that there was a gap of fifty yards between his left and the right of the adjoining regiment. Fifty yards is the inch on the end of a man's nose in trench-warfare on such an occasion. He was able to place eight men in the gap. At least, they could keep a look out and tell him what was going on.

It was not cheering news to learn that the regiments on his left had withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear—a long distance in trench warfare. But the P.P.s had no time to retire. They could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their demoralization except to flee from the danger in front, regardless of more danger to the rear. They were held where they were under what cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells, putting the machine- guns out of action.

Now the Germans were coming on again in their supreme effort. It was as a nightmare, in which only the objective of effort is recalled and all else is a vague struggle of every ounce of strength which one can exert against smothering odds. No use to ask these men what they thought. What do you think when you are climbing up a rope whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice? You climb; that is all.

The P.P.s shot at Germans. After a night without sleep, after a day among their dead and wounded, after torrents of shell-fire, after breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of exaltation entirely oblivious of danger, of their surroundings, mindless of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug of war. Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who could "shoot the eye off an ant," as Niven said, leaned out over the parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying down and the Germans were so thick that he could not afford any misses.

Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine-gun at last. Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it up again. The explosion which destroyed the gun finally crushed his leg and arm. He crawled out of the debris toward the support trench which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.

The Germans got possession of a section of the P.P.s' trench where, it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the Germans were to go in this direction. When the day's work was done, there, in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P.P.s counted their numbers. Of the six hundred and thirty-five men who had begun the fight at daybreak, one hundred and fifty men and four officers, Niven, Pappineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for duty.

Vandenberg is a Hollander, but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at Zacetecas and at home fighting with the P.P.s in front of Ypres.

Darkness found all the survivors among the P.P.s in the support and communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead who were in the fire-trench. Most of them had already been buried by shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by their living comrades, Niven recited such portions as he could recall of the Church of England service for the dead—recited them with a tight throat. Then the P.P.s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the position to their relief, a battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps. Corporal Christy, the bear-hunter, had his "luck with him." He had not even a scratch.

Such is the story of a hard fight by one battalion in the kind of warfare waged in Europe these days, a story only partially told; a story to make a book. All the praise that the P.P.s, millionaire or labourer, scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they are worthy of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best, one poor, little, finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and military secrecy something of what has happened many times in a small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French chateau were the P.P.s colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There is room, one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between Halifax and Vancouver.

"Of course we could not take our colours into action," said Niven. "They would have been torn into tatters or buried in a shell-crater. But we've always kept them up at battalion headquarters. I believe we are the only battalion that has. We promised the Princess that we would."

In her honour, an old custom has been renewed in France: knights are fighting in the name of a fair lady.



XXV Many Pictures



A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day's experiences. One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come to the gateway of our chateau. They are pages at random out of a library of overwhelming information.

One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice; again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the gloaming they return to roost.

If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an hour, and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer gangways or customs houses.

The airmen are a type which one associates with certain marked characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem rather shy, men given to observation rather than to talking; accustomed to using their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realize that some quiet, young fellow who is pointed out has had so many hairbreadth escapes. What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights' heroes who are borne away-on magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if they had broken a shoelace.

Up in their seat, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another adventure. They have all the spirit of corps of the oldest regiments, and, besides, a spirit peculiar to the newest branch in the service of war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is because of the British temperament, with that combination of coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes belies. Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterizes air service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few.

Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks going about our village street. They were from the cadet school where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with chocolate drops on their, sleeve-bands as commissioned officers. This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals. His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to his efforts to cook in her kitchen; woman-like, she would rather handle the pots and pans herself.

Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population goes; so the two get on better than French and English military authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to understand each other and to see that difference in race does not mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for property and the rights of the population.

And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine-gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.



"Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass," wrote a Sikh soldier home, "and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land."

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gharwalis, the brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey, bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war. Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water. They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is the secret of the American's nervous energy. It seemed to me that it was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed by, everyone seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.

You asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the force.

The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them in a gymkhana. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, "Good!" when the performer succeeded, or, "Too bad!" when he failed.

If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said: "We try to be fair to the natives!" which means that they are just and even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit, yet holds together for that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how to rule.

That church bell across the street from our chateau begins its clangor at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the fields in harvest time. But its peal carrying across the farmlands is softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening. In the morning it tells them that the day is long and they have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.

"Will they do it?"

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said, France would go on fighting till the Germans were beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell were clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with—as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution—and if they would lend the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.

A busy man, the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge.

These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great, conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the pain de menage that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.



One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual. But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own—their soldiers of France!



When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears the wreath-circled crossed batons of a field-marshal.

It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander, though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the trench-line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognized in a figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the British army in France. No need of a call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months' drill at home, and said, "Very good!" and was away to other inspections where he might not necessarily say, "Very good!"

Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was the last of such platforms erected for him.

"Inspections! They are second nature to us!" said a new army man. "We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general's own fault if it isn't found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting."

Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing twenty men and one officer, for this is chalked on .the door. Before they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of their voices is pleasant.

A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on the sleeve. The sergeant-major was an old regular, the knowing back-bone of the battalion, who had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith hadn't got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.

Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road. Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect. They were "bunkies," pals, chums.

"When did you enlist?" I asked.

"In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was our duty, then; but we've been a long time arriving."

"How do you like it?"

"We are not yet masters of the language, we find," said the schoolmaster, "though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it."

"I'm learning the gestures fast, though," said the architect.

"The French are glad to see us," said the schoolmaster. "They call us the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming. But now we are here, I think they will find that we can keep up our end."