X Full Chorus
I
An Observation Post—or “O Pip,” in the mysterious patois of the Buzzers—is not exactly the spot that one would select either for spaciousness or accessibility. It may be situated up a chimney or up a tree, or down a tunnel bored through a hill. But it certainly enables you to see something of your enemy; and that, in modern warfare, is a very rare and valuable privilege.
Of late the scene-painter’s art—technically known as camouflage—has raised the concealment of batteries and their observation posts to the realm of the uncanny. According to Major Wagstaffe, you can now disguise anybody as anything. For instance, you can make up a battery of six-inch guns to look like a flock of sheep, and herd them into action browsing. Or you can despatch a scouting party across No Man’s Land dressed up as pillar-boxes, so that the deluded Hun, instead of opening fire with a machine-gun, will merely post letters in them—valuable letters, containing military secrets. Lastly, and more important still, you can disguise yourself to look like nothing at all, and in these days of intensified artillery fire it is very seldom that nothing at all is hit.
The particular O Pip with which we are concerned at present, however, is a German post—or was a fortnight ago, before the opening of the Battle of the Somme.
For nearly two years the British Armies on the Western Front have been playing for time. They have been sticking their toes in and holding their ground, with numerically inferior forces and inadequate artillery support, against a nation in arms which has set out, with forty years of preparation at its back, to sweep the earth. We have held them, and now der Tag has come for us. The deal has passed into our hand at last. A fortnight ago, ready for the first time to undertake the offensive on a grand and prolonged scale,—Loos was a mere reconnaissance compared with this,—the New British Army went over the parapet shoulder to shoulder with the most heroic Army in the world—the Army of France—and attacked over a sixteen-mile front in the Valley of the Somme.
It was a critical day for the Allies: certainly it was a most critical day in the history of the British Army. For on that day an answer had to be given to a very big question indeed. Hitherto we had been fighting on the defensive—unready, uphill, against odds. It would have been no particular discredit to us had we failed to hold our line. But we had held it, and more. Now, at last, we were ready—as ready as we were ever likely to be. We had the men, the guns, and the munitions. We were in a position to engage the enemy on equal, and more than equal, terms. And the question that the British Empire had to answer in that day, the First of July 1916, was this: “Are these new amateur armies of ours, raised, trained, and equipped in less than two years, with nothing in the way of military tradition to uphold them—nothing but the steady courage of their race: are they a match for, and more than a match for, that grim machine-made, iron-bound host that lies waiting for them along that line of Picardy hills? Because if they are not, we cannot win this war. We can only make a stalemate of it.”
We, looking back now over a space of twelve months, know how our boys answered that question. In the greatest and longest battle that the world had yet seen, that Army of city clerks, Midland farm-lads, Lancashire mill-hands, Scottish miners, and Irish corner-boys, side by side with their great-hearted brethren from Overseas, stormed positions which had been held impregnable for two years, captured seventy thousand prisoners, reclaimed several hundred square miles of the sacred soil of France, and smashed once and for all the German-fostered fable of the invincibility of the German Army. It was good to have lived and suffered during those early and lean years, if only to be present at their fulfilment.
But at this moment the battle was only beginning, and the bulk of their astounding achievement was still to come. Nevertheless, in the cautious and modest estimate of their Commander-in-Chief, they had already done something.
After ten days and nights of continuous fighting, said the first official report, our troops have completed the methodical capture of the whole of the enemy’s first system of defence on a front of fourteen thousand yards. This system of defence consisted of numerous and continuous lines of fire trenches, extending to depths of from two thousand to four thousand yards, and included five strongly fortified villages, numerous heavily entrenched woods, and a large number of immensely strong redoubts. The capture of each of these trenches represented an operation of some importance, and the whole of them are now in our hands.
Quite so. One feels, somehow, that Berlin would have got more out of such a theme.
Now let us get back to our O Pip. If you peep over the shoulder of Captain Leslie, the gunner observing officer, as he directs the fire of his battery, situated some thousands of yards in rear, through the medium of map, field-glass, and telephone, you will obtain an excellent view of to-morrow’s field of battle. Present in the O Pip are Colonel Kemp, Wagstaffe, Bobby Little, and Angus M’Lachlan. The latter had been included in the party because, to quote his Commanding Officer, “he would have burst into tears if he had been left out.”
Overhead roared British shells of every kind and degree of unpleasantness, for the ground in front was being “prepared” for the coming assault. The undulating landscape, running up to a low ridge on the skyline four miles away, was spouting smoke in all directions—sometimes black, sometimes green, and sometimes, where bursting shell and brick-dust intermingled, blood-red. Beyond the ridge all-conquering British aeroplanes occupied the firmament, observing for “mother” and “granny” and signalling encouragement or reproof to these ponderous but sprightly relatives as their shells hit or missed the target.
“Yes, sir,” replied Leslie to Colonel Kemp’s question, “that is Longueval, on the slope opposite, with the road running through on the way to Flers, over the skyline. That is Delville Wood on its right. As you see, the guns are concentrating on both places. That is Waterlot Farm, on this side of the wood—a sugar refinery. Regular nest of machine-guns there, I’m told.”
“No doubt we shall be able to confirm the rumour to-morrow,” said Colonel Kemp drily. “That is Bernafay Wood on our right, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir. We hold the whole of that. The pear-shaped wood out beyond it—it looks as if it were joined on, but the two are quite separate really—is Trones Wood. It has changed hands several times. Just at present I don’t think we hold more than the near end. Further away, half-right, you can see Guillemont.”
“In that case,” remarked Wagstaffe, “our right flank would appear to be strongly supported by the enemy.”
“Yes. We are in a sort of right-angled salient here. We have the enemy on our front and our right. In fact, we form the extreme right of the attacking front. Our left is perfectly secure, as we now hold Mametz Wood and Contalmaison. There they are.” He waved his glass to the northwest. “When the attack takes place, I understand that our Division will go straight ahead, for Longueval and Delville Wood, while the next Division makes a lateral thrust out to the right, to push the Boche out of Trones Wood and cover our flank.”
“I believe that is so,” said the Colonel. “Bobby, take a good look at the approaches to Longueval. That is the scene of to-morrow’s constitutional.”
Bobby and Angus obediently scanned the village through their glasses. Probably they did not learn much. One bombarded French village is very like another bombarded French village. A cowering assemblage of battered little houses; a pitiful little main street, with its eviscerated shops and estaminets; a shattered church-spire. Beyond that, an enclosure of splintered stumps that was once an orchard. Below all, cellars, reinforced with props and sandbags, and filled with machine-guns. Voilà tout!
Presently the Gunner Captain passed word down to the telephone operator to order the battery to cease fire.
“Knocking off?” inquired Wagstaffe.
“For the present, yes. We are only registering this morning. Not all our batteries are going at once, either. We don’t want Brother Boche to know our strength until we tune up for the final chorus. We calculate that—”
“There is a comfortable sense of decency and order about the way we fight nowadays,” said Colonel Kemp. “It is like working out a problem in electrical resistance by a nice convenient algebraical formula. Very different from the state of things last year, when we stuck it out by employing rule of thumb and hanging on by our eyebrows.”
“The only problem we can’t quite formulate is the machine-gun,” said Leslie. The Boche’s dug-outs here are thirty feet deep. When crumped by our artillery he withdraws his infantry and leaves his machine-gunners behind, safe underground. Then, when our guns lift and the attack comes over, his machine-gunners appear on the surface, hoist their guns after them with a sort of tackle arrangement, and get to work on a prearranged band of fire. The infantry can’t do them in until No Man’s Land is crossed, and—well, they don’t all get across, that’s all! However, I have heard rumours—”
“So have we all,” said Colonel Kemp.
“I forgot to tell you, Colonel,” interposed Wagstaffe, “that I met young Osborne at Divisional Headquarters last night. You remember, he left us some time ago to join the Hush! Hush! Brigade.”
“I remember,” said the Colonel.
By this time the party, including the Gunner Captain, were filing along a communication trench, lately the property of some German gentlemen, on their way back to headquarters.
“Did he tell you anything, Wagstaffe?” continued Colonel Kemp.
“Not much. Apparently the time of the H.H.B. is not yet. But he made an appointment with me for this evening—in the gloaming, so to speak. He is sending a car. If all he says is true, the Boche Emma Gee is booked for an eye-opener in a few weeks’ time.”
II
That evening a select party of sight-seers were driven to a secluded spot behind the battle line. Here they were met by Master Osborne, obviously inflated with some important matter.
“I’ve got leave from my C.O. to show you the sights, sir,” he announced to Colonel Kemp. “If you will all stand here and watch that wood on the opposite side of this clearing, you may see something. We don’t show ourselves much except in late evening, so this is our parade hour.”
The little group took up its appointed stand and waited in the gathering dusk. In the east the sky was already twinkling with intermittent Verey lights. All around the British guns were thundering forth their hymns of hate—full-throated now, for the hour for the next great assault was approaching.
Wagstaffe’s thoughts went back to a certain soft September night last year, when he and Blaikie had stood on the eastern outskirts of Béthune listening to a similar overture—the prelude to the Battle of Loos. But this overture was ten times more awful, and, from a material British point of view, ten times more inspiring. It would have thrilled old Blaikie’s fighting spirit, thought Wagstaffe. But Loos had taken his friend from him, and he, Wagstaffe, only was left. What did fate hold in store for him to-morrow? he wondered. And Bobby? They had both escaped marvellously so far. Well, better men had gone before them. Perhaps—
Fingers of steel bit into his biceps muscle, and the excited whinny of Angus M’Lachlan besought him to look!
Down in the forest something stirred. But it was not the note of a bird, as the song would have us believe. From the depths of the wood opposite came a crackling, crunching sound, as of some prehistoric beast forcing its way through tropical undergrowth. And then, suddenly, out from the thinning edge there loomed a monster—a monstrosity. It did not glide, it did not walk. It wallowed. It lurched, with now and then a laborious heave of its shoulders. It fumbled its way over a low bank matted with scrub. It crossed a ditch, by the simple expedient of rolling the ditch out flat, and waddled forward. In its path stood a young tree. The monster arrived at the tree and laid its chin lovingly against the stem. The tree leaned back, crackled, and assumed a horizontal position. In the middle of the clearing, twenty yards farther on, gaped an enormous shell-crater, a present from the Kaiser. Into this the creature plunged blindly, to emerge, panting and puffing, on the farther side. Then it stopped. A magic opening appeared in its stomach, from which emerged, grinning, a British subaltern and his grimy associates.
And that was our friends’ first encounter with a “Tank.” The secret—unlike most secrets in this publicity-ridden war—had been faithfully kept; so far the Hush! Hush! Brigade had been little more than a legend even to the men high up. Certainly the omniscient Hun received the surprise of his life when, in the early mist of a September morning some weeks later, a line of these selfsame tanks burst for the first time upon his incredulous vision, waddling grotesquely up the hill to the ridge which had defied the British infantry so long and so bloodily—there to squat complacently down on the top of the enemy’s machine-guns, or spout destruction from her own up and down beautiful trenches which had never been intended for capture. In fact, Brother Boche was quite plaintive about the matter. He described the employment of such engines as wicked and brutal, and opposed to the recognised usages of warfare. When one of these low-comedy vehicles (named the Crême-de-Menthe) ambled down the main street of the hitherto impregnable village of Flers, with hysterical British Tommies slapping her on the back, he appealed to the civilised world to step in and forbid the combination of vulgarism and barbarity.
“Let us at least fight like gentlemen,” said the Hun, with simple dignity. “Let us stick to legitimate military devices—the murder of women and children, and the emission of chlorine gas. But Tanks—no! One must draw the line somewhere!”
But the ill-bred Crême-de-Menthe took no notice. None whatever. She simply went waddling on—towards Berlin.
“An experiment, of course,” commented Colonel Kemp, as they returned to headquarters—“a fantastic experiment. But I wish they were ready now. I would give something to see one of them leading the way into action to-morrow. It might mean saving the lives of a good many of my boys.”