II Sensations under Fire
It is said of Sir John French that, on his own admission, he has “never done anything worth doing without having to screw himself up to it.” There is no hint here of practical fear, which the hardened soldier, the fighting man, rarely experiences; but of the moral and mental conflict which precedes the assumption of sovereign duties and high commands. Every man who goes into battle has this need. He requires the moral preparation of knowing why he is fighting, and what he is fighting for. In the present war, Lord Kitchener’s fine message to every soldier in the Expeditionary Force made this screwing-up process easy. But to men going under fire for the first time some personal preparation is also necessary to combat the ordinary physical terror of the battlefield.
Soldiers are not accustomed to self-analysis. They are mainly men of action, and are supposed to lack the contemplative vision. That was the old belief. This war, however, which has shattered so many accepted ideas, has destroyed that conviction too. Nothing is more surprising than the revelation of their feelings disclosed in the soldiers’ letters. They are the most intimate of human documents. Here and there a hint is given of the apprehension with which the men go into action, unspoken fears of how they will behave under fire, the uncertainty of complete mastery over themselves, brief doubts of their ability to stand up to this new and sublime ordeal of death.
Rarely, however, do the men allow these apprehensions to depress or disturb them. Throughout the earliest letters from the front the one pervading desire was eagerness for battle—a wild impatience to get the first great test of their courage over, to feel their feet, obtain command of themselves.
“We were all eager for scalps,” writes one of the Royal Engineers, “and I took the cap, sword, and lance of a Uhlan I shot through the chest.” An artilleryman says a gunner in his battery was “so anxious to see the enemy,” that he jumped up to look, and got his leg shot away. Others tell of the intense curiosity of the young soldiers to see everything that is going on, of their reckless neglect of cover, and of the difficulty of holding them back when they see a comrade fall. “In spite of orders, some of my men actually charged a machine gun,” an officer related. After the first baptism of fire any lingering fear is dispelled. “I don’t think we were ever afraid at all,” says another soldier, “but we got into action so quickly that we hadn’t time to think about it.” “Habit soon overcomes the first instinctive fear,” writes a third, “and then the struggle is always palpitating.”
Of course, the fighting affects men in different ways. Some see the ugliness, the horror of it all, grow sick at the sight, and suffer from nausea. Others, seeing deeper significance in this desolation of life, realize the wickedness and waste of it; as one Highlander expresses it: “Being out there, and seeing what we see, makes us feel religious.” But the majority of the men have the instinct for fighting, quickly adapt themselves to war conditions, and enter with zest into the joy of battle. These happy warriors are the men who laugh, and sing, and jest in the trenches. They take a strangely intimate pleasure in the danger around them, and when they fall they die like Mr. Julian Smith of the Intelligence Department, declaring that they “loved the fighting.” All the wounded beg the doctors and nurses to hurry up and let them return to the front. “I was enjoying it until I was put under,” writes Lance-Corporal Leslie, R.E. “I must get back and have another go at them,” says Private J. Roe, of the Manchesters. And so on, letter after letter expressing impatience to get into the firing line.
The artillery is what harasses the men most. They soon developed a contempt for German rifle fire, and it became a very persistent joke in the trenches. But nearly all agree that German artillery is “hell let loose.” That is what the enemy intended it to be, but they did not reckon upon the terrors of Hades making so small an impression upon the British soldier. There is an illuminating passage in an official statement issued from the General Headquarters:
“The object of the great proportion of artillery the Germans employ is to beat down the resistance of their enemy by a concentrated and prolonged fire, and to shatter their nerve with high explosives before the infantry attack is launched. They seem to have relied on doing this with us; but they have not done so, though it has taken them several costly experiments to discover this fact. From the statements of prisoners, indeed, it appears that they have been greatly disappointed by the moral effect produced by their heavy guns, which, despite the actual losses inflicted, has not been at all commensurate with the colossal expenditure of ammunition which has really been wasted. By this it is not implied that their artillery fire is not good. It is more than good; it is excellent. But the British soldier is a difficult person to impress or depress, even by immense shells filled with high explosives which detonate with terrific violence and form craters large enough to act as graves for five horses. The German howitzer shells are 8 to 9 inches in caliber, and on impact they send up columns of greasy black smoke. On account of this they are irreverently dubbed ‘Coal-boxes,’ ‘Black Marias,’ or ‘Jack Johnsons’ by the soldiers. Men who take things in this spirit, are, it seems, likely to throw out the calculations based on the loss of moral so carefully framed by the German military philosophers.”
Every word of this admirable official message is borne out by the men’s own version of their experiences of artillery fire. “At first the din is terrific, and you feel as if your ears would burst and the teeth fall out of your head,” writes one of the West Kents, “but, of course, you can get used to anything, and our artillerymen give them a bit of hell back, I can tell you.” “The sensation of finding myself among screaming shells was all new to me,” says Corporal Butlin, Lancashire Fusiliers, “but after the first terrible moments, which were enough to unnerve anybody, I became used to the situation. Afterwards the din had no effect upon me.” And describing an artillery duel a gunner declares: “It was butcher’s work. We just rained shells on the Germans until we were deaf and choking. I don’t think a gun on their position could have sold for old iron after we had finished, and the German gunners would be just odd pieces of clothing and bits of accouterment. It seems ‘swanky’ to say so, but once you get over the first shock you go on chewing biscuits and tobacco when the shells are bursting all round. You don’t seem to mind it any more than smoking in a hailstorm.”
Smoking is the great consolation of the soldiers. They smoke whenever they can, and the soothing cigarette is their best friend in the trenches. “We can go through anything so long as we have tobacco,” is a passage from a soldier’s letter; and this is the burden of nearly all the messages from the front. “The fight was pretty hot while it lasted, but we were all as cool as Liffy water, and smoked cigarettes while the shells shrieked blue murder over our heads,” is an Irishman’s account of the effect of the big German guns.
The noise of battle—especially the roar of artillery—is described in several letters. “It is like standing in a railway station with heavy expresses constantly tearing through,” is an officer’s impression of it. A wounded Gordon Highlander dismisses it as no more terrible than a bad thunderstorm: “You get the same din and the big flashes of light in front of you, and now and then the chance of being knocked over by a bullet or piece of shell, just as you might be struck by lightning.” That is the real philosophy of the soldier. “After all, we are may-be as safe here as you are in Piccadilly,” says another; and when men have come unhurt out of infinite danger they grow sublimely fatalistic and cheerful. An officer in the Cavalry Division, for instance, writes: “I am coming back all right, never fear. Have been in such tight corners and under such fire that if I were meant to go I should have gone by now, I’m sure.” And it is the same with the men. “Having gone through six battles without a scratch,” says Private A. Sunderland, of Bolton, “I thought I would never be hit.” Later on, however, he was wounded.
Though the artillery fire has proved most destructive to all ranks, by far the worst ordeal of the troops was the long retreat in the early stages of the war. It exhausted and exasperated the men. They grew angry and impatient. None but the best troops in the world, with a profound belief in the judgment and valor of their officers, could have stood up against it. A statement by a driver of the Royal Field Artillery, published in the Evening News, gives a vivid impression of how the men felt. “I have no clear notion of the order of events in the long retreat,” he says; “it was a nightmare, like being seized by a madman after coming out of a serious illness and forced towards the edge of a precipice.” The constant marching, the want of sleep, the restless and (as it sometimes seemed to the men) purposeless backward movement night and day drove them into a fury. The intensity of the warfare, the fierce pressure upon the mental and physical powers of endurance, might well have exercised a mischievous effect upon the men. Instead, however, it only brought out their finest qualities.
In an able article in Blackwood’s Magazine, on “Moral Qualities in War,” Major C.A.L. Yate, of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, dealt with the “intensity” of the war strain, of which he himself had acute experience. “Under such conditions,” he wrote, “marksmen may achieve no more than the most erratic shots; the smartest corps may quickly degenerate into a rabble; the easiest tasks will often appear impossible. An army can weather trials such as those just depicted only if it be collectively considered in that healthy state of mind which the term moral implies.” It is just that moral which the British Expeditionary Force has been proved to possess in so rich a measure, and which must belong to all good soldiers in these days of nerve-shattering war.
Little touches of pathos are not wanting in the scenes pictured in the soldiers’ letters, and they bring an element of humanity into the cold, well-ordered, practical business of war. Men who will meet any personal danger without flinching often find the mists floating across their eyes when a comrade is struck down at their side. Private Plant, Manchester Regiment, tells how his pal was eating a bit of bread and cheese when he was knocked over: “Poor chap, he just managed to ask me to tell his missus.” “War is rotten when you see your best pal curl up at your feet,” comments another. “One of our chaps got hit in the face with a shrapnel bullet,” Private Sidney Smith, First Warwickshires, relates. “‘Hurt, Bill?’ I said to him. ‘Good luck to the old regiment,’ says he. Then he rolled over on his back.” “Partings of this kind are sad enough,” says an Irish Dragoon, “but we’ve just got to sigh and get used to it.”
Their own injuries and sufferings don’t seem to worry them much. The sensation of getting wounded is simply told. One man, shot through the arm, felt “only a bit of a sting, nothing particular. Just like a sharp needle going into me. I thought it was nothing till my rifle dropped out of my hand, and my arm fell. Rotten luck.” That is the feeling of a clean bullet wound. Shrapnel, however, hurts—“hurts pretty badly,” Tommy says. And the lance and the bayonet make ugly gashes. In sensitive men, however, the continuous shell-fire produces effects that are often as serious as wounds. “Some,” says Mr. Geoffrey Young, the Daily News and Leader correspondent, “suffer from a curious aphasia, some get dazed and speechless, some deafened”; but of course their recovery is fairly rapid, and the German “Black Marias” soon exhaust their terrors. A man may lose his memory and have but a hazy idea of the day of the week or the hour of the day, but Tommy still keeps his nerve, and after his first experience of the enemy’s fire, to quote his own words, “doesn’t care one d—— about the danger.”
As showing the general feeling of the educated soldier, independent altogether of his nationality, it is worth quoting two other experiences, both Russian. Mr. Stephen Graham in the Times recites the sensations of a young Russian officer. “The feeling under fire at first is unpleasant,” he admits, “but after a while it becomes even exhilarating. One feels an extraordinary freedom in the midst of death.” The following is a quotation from a soldier’s letter sent by Mr. H. Williams, the Daily Chronicle correspondent at Petrograd: “One talks of hell fire on the battlefield, but I assure you it makes no more impression on me now than the tooting of motors. Habit is everything, especially in war, where all the logic and psychology of one’s actions are the exact reverse of a civilian’s.... The whole sensation of fear is atrophied. We don’t care a farthing for our lives.... We don’t think of danger. In this new frame of mind we simply go and do the perfectly normal, natural things that you call heroism.”
When the heroic things are done and there comes a lull in the fighting, it is sweet to sink down in the trenches worn out, exhausted, unutterly drowsy, and snatch a brief unconscious hour of sleep. Some of the men fall asleep with the rifles still hot in their hands, their heads resting on the barrels. Magnificently as they endure fatigue, there comes a time when the strain is intolerable, and, “beat to the world,” as one officer describes it, they often sink into profound sleep, like horses, standing. At these times it seems as if nothing could wake them. Shrapnel may thunder around them in vain; they never move a muscle. In Mr. Stephen Crane’s fine phrase, they “sleep the brave sleep of wearied men.”