"BIG-BANG"—STORY OF AN AMERICAN ADVENTURER
A Tale of the Great Trench Mortars
Told by C. P. Thompson
"Big-Bang" was Tommy's name for one of our pioneer trench mortars, invented and operated by a man named X——. The author met X—— in a café not far from the front, and heard from him the details of the story that is here set down. "So far as I am aware," he writes, "the tale is perfectly true. I had it confirmed by the men of the R. E. company to which X—— was attached." Recorded in the Wide World.
I—THE SOLDIERS IN THE CAFE SALOME
It was at Nœux-les-Mines, in the Café Salome, at the bottom of the old slag-heap by the station. After tea, there being no further parade until the working party assembled at ten o'clock that night, I had repaired thither to drink wine and smoke until closing time. As always, the café was crowded with the men of half-a-dozen London regiments, with Scotsmen in stained and muddy kilts, and French artillerymen from the South. Later in the evening they would begin to sing in unison—great roaring choruses swung and tossed from café to café and taken up by the crowded-out groups in the street.
I had managed to secure a chair at a little table in the corner, and for companion saw before me a small, grizzled man, about fifty, whose blue eyes, despite the dark rings underneath them, were yet singularly intelligent, keen, and clear. We exchanged a few remarks whilst taking each other's measure, and then, apropos of my description of a terrible bombardment by the German minenwerfers which we had recently endured, he began to talk, and gave me a rambling impression of his strange and original career, and especially of his adventures in connection with his masterpiece, "Big-Bang"—a device now extinct.
I will call him X——. Before his connection with the British Army I gathered he had wandered widely in an up-and-down, rolling-stone sort of fashion. The Klondike had known his store during the gold rush. He was one of those men who did undefined but profitable things in the Western States before the days of their organized exploitation; made thousands of dollars and spent every cent of them, roving here and there, never staying anywhere for long, as is the way with these pioneers of the human race.
II—THE AMERICAN ADVENTURER TELLS HIS TALE
When the war broke out he was in the West, the manager of an opera company touring the coast towns, and immediately he determined to take a hand. At first he experienced considerable perplexity as to how he was to get "mixed up" in the war. Apart from his nationality, his small stature, a finger missing from his right hand, and a pronounced limp—both legacies from the Spanish-American war in the Philippines—seemed destined to preclude him from serving in the army of any country in any capacity. He was even refused by a party of Americans forming a Red Cross contingent for duty with any of the belligerents willing to accept their service.
However, he remembered an old friend, a major of Engineers in charge of a company at a China station, and he immediately hurried from San Francisco across the Pacific to Hong-Kong, where he found the —th Siege Company, R.E., under orders to move, and cursing destiny, in the shape of the British War Office, which refused to allow them to be in at the fall of Tsing-tau. Forthwith he attached himself to them. His sole qualification consisted of an erratic but handy knowledge of mechanics, picked up here and there—as chauffeur to a Vancouver millionaire, as a greaser, ganger, and a stoker, but principally during eighteen months of desultory employment in the machine-shops of Pittsburg. After much argument concerning the King's Regulations with regard to recruits and the position of a man in the ranks, the major had taken him on the strength as mechanic for the three motor-cycles owned by his command. In September, 1914, he left the Western theatre of war—quietly exultant, as I imagine.
He was curiously frank as to his attitude towards the war.
"I have always liked big things, and I had to get into this somehow," he said, finishing a large cassis. "This war is the biggest thing that ever happened to this old world, and if I were left out of it I should go mad—I should, or commit suicide. That's how I feel about it. Looking on is no good to me; I have to be right in it. But I've no illusions. Neither your cause nor the Germans' nor the newspaper gas of both parties interest me. If the Allies hadn't adopted me I should have squeezed somehow into one of the armies of the Central Powers. Of course, the party I joined, that party I stick to; you can count on me to the last drop of my blood. But you take me—I've no patriotism, as you understand these things."
They landed in France early in October, and within forty-eight hours were with a corps at a point where the British forces lay resting after the Marne and the Aisne. With those battles the operations passed the mobile phase and began to settle down to the stagnation of the trenches.
The novel conditions of warfare in the earth demanded new methods and ingenious adaptations, and soon the Engineers found themselves overwhelmed with orders from corps headquarters and harassed by perplexed divisions and brigades. Bombs and explosive missiles of all sorts were in great demand, but materials other than Tickler's jam-pots were not to be procured. And pumps were wanted; emplacements, redoubts, trenches, field works of all descriptions required overseers from the Engineers to superintend the working-parties, composed of uninitiated infantry.
III—CATAPULT THAT HURLS BOMBS
One day while he was busy upon a patent catapult the major came to X—— and showed him a message from the corps, who, introduced suddenly and unexpectedly to that formidable engine of destruction, the minenwerfer, desired urgently some improvised machine or gun wherewith to retaliate until supplies of the new weapon arrived from home arsenals. Nor were the elaborate specifications peculiar to all staff instructions lacking. The proposed machine must be capable of hurling a heavy bomb a distance of not less than two hundred yards; but at the same time, if a gun, it must not require a powerful propelling charge. It must be portable and sufficiently compact to allow of its introduction into a front-line trench; its working must not demand intricate mechanical knowledge, nor must more than four men be needed for its crew, and so on and so forth. X——, if I recollect his narrative aright, remarked, "Jehoshaphat!" and went away to a nearby café to ponder out this problem in mechanics. By the next morning he had planned and partly constructed the first of his famous simplified mortars.
It was, so far as I remember the constructional details, merely a large tube, about three feet long and with a diameter of six inches, made of very thick sheet-iron and closed at one end by a block of wrought iron, pinned and welded on. The barrel mounted on a cradle, the bed weighed under half a hundredweight, and was secured to the ground by long iron pins like glorified tent-pegs. The ammunition consisted of huge canisters packed with gun-cotton and exploded by a time fuse or a simple percussion detonator. And if one did not look what he was doing, the bomb might easily be slipped into the mortar detonator first—to the dire confusion of the gun-crew. Gunpowder, rammed and wadded and ignited through a touch-hole, discharged the canister upon its travel. This creation was dispatched with precise instructions as to its use and probable eccentricities, and all hoped it would "make good."
Two days later came the report that at the first discharge the mortar had burst. It was requested that a stronger one be made, and, further, that the engineer-constructor should accompany his engine into the trenches, there to superintend its working. Thus one day X—— descended upon the lines with a new and larger mortar of more solid construction, one dubious artilleryman as assistant gunner, canister, a bag of powder, and a ramrod.
I can imagine the breathless interest with which the garrison in the trenches observed the loading of the mortar, the swift retirement from its vicinity, and the stunned confusion following the first shot. It went off with a stupendous roar, belching forth smoke and flame. The canister, turning over and over in the air, was seen to describe a mighty arc and fall upon a ruined house behind the German lines and there explode mightily, demolishing the place as completely and spectacularly as if a mine had been sprung beneath it. A great cheer burst forth. The delighted soldiers promptly poured in "fifteen rounds rapid," and a machine-gun rattled through a belt in honour of the occasion and to follow up the bomb. The new weapon was voted a huge success.
It was fired five times in all, two bombs failing to explode, one excavating a ton or so of earth from the centre of No Man's Land, whilst the fifth fell plump into the German fire-trench, levelling it for half-a-dozen yards in either direction and sending high into the air a vast shower of earth, rent sandbags, timber, and human fragments.
Then, just as a sixth projectile was being loaded, the German artillery got to work. A storm of "whizz-bang" shells hurtled over, exploding everywhere—in the air, on the ground, and sometimes against the high parapet, which was sent flying. Two batteries of heavy howitzers concentrated a slow, deliberate fire, dropping 5.2 and 9-inch shells in the zone of the mortar, which was buried under tons of earth. At length the bombardment ceased, and rescue parties came to dig out those men whose dug-outs had fallen in upon them or who had been buried in the ruins of the trench. X—— had remained by his mortar and was rescued unconscious.
Yet, with the tenaciousness of his breed, he came back again—having spent a week at the field ambulance's barn hospital and a few days at his company's quarters—armed with a third and more powerful mortar. This time he had taken the precaution to provide himself with smokeless powder. The German artillery observers, however, were on the look-out for him, and although there was no longer a mountain of smoke to serve as a target, the position of the mortar was disclosed by the enormous roar of its discharge, which could be heard four miles away. Not five minutes elapsed before half-a-dozen batteries, informed by telephone, opened a tremendous fire and speedily rendered the vicinity untenable. Casualties were high, and X—— and his weapon lost favour with the neighbouring infantry.
IV—"BIG-BANG" HIS ONLY FRIEND
Then this intrepid man mounted "Big-Bang" upon a base to which were affixed four small wheels with broad treads. Having fired the mortar, he would trundle it away down the trench as fast as he could go, invariably getting clear of the fatal area before the shells began to fall. Then he would stop and fire another shot and again make off, dragging his mortar at the end of a rope. His ammunition he placed in recess here and there along the line. The enraged infantry took to heaving the canisters over the parapet until one so thrown exploded, blowing in the trench, upon which they left them severely alone. But whenever the maker of those canisters appeared with his mortar round the corner of the traverse they cursed him heartily.
In this way X—— became the best-hated man from Richebourg to the sea. Refused admittance to dug-outs, he was obliged to sleep on firing-platforms, on the floors of side trenches, or in saps where night working-parties trod on him. No one spoke to him except to utter oaths. Men said upon seeing him:—
"Here comes the Kaiser's best friend!"
Sarcastic remarks were also passed on his mortar; and, strangely enough, these hurt him more than personal abuse. He had come almost to love his creation. Hatred of it he could tolerate, but anything savouring of contempt; anything derogatory uttered against its power as a destroyer, touched him to the quick; and I fancy singularly biting language was heard in those winter trenches of 1914 and 1915.
So he dragged on his solitary existence—desolate, hated, yet feared because of his power of avenging himself by firing his weapon from any spot he pleased, and thus dooming it to a tremendous "strafing" by the enemy. He wanted someone to own him, and tried to attach himself to the artillery, but they refused to have anything to do with him. The thing his peculiar nature found it hardest to endure was the knowledge, gradually forced upon him, that he was "out of it," a mere independent unit belonging actually to neither side, a man whose decease many of the British, equally with the Huns, would have hailed with much glee.
This must have weighed upon him. Possibly he brooded. And all the time, with an invincible obstinacy that was almost heroic, he fired and fled and fled and fired, retreating sometimes up, sometimes down the trenches, dodging the shells all day and sometimes at night. And then he broke down.
"It was one of those illnesses your Army doesn't recognize officially," he told me. "It began with a sort of tired, discouraged feeling, and I used to have queer dreams. The noise of 'Big-Bang' going off made me jump like a marionette. I'd sweat and grow dizzy and my knees trembled and my stomach rose. I fell down one day and they came and took me away to the field ambulance, and after a bit they sent me down to Boulogne. I don't quite know what happened there during the first weeks. But when I got better they gave me a pretty good time—made quite a fuss of me, in fact. The colonel wanted to send me to England, but I told him how great I am on seeing this war through, and he grunted and said he'd see what he could do. When I came out I found this staff job waiting for me. It's not what I'd like exactly, but I suppose I'm getting old now. Still, we're close to the guns and I have a pretty free hand here, and can make trips to the trenches to say 'How-do' to the boys and see how things are getting along. Oh, yes; it's not so bad. But I was sorry to leave old 'Big-Bang.' I made her and I worked her, and I guess she did her bit."
For a space he meditated, puffing clouds of smoke from a ten-sou cigar. Then with a start he returned to life.
"Will you have a vin blanc, old chap? Hi, papa, deux vins blancs!"
As he pushed back his soft cap I saw that "Big-Bang" had set its mark upon him. The hair about his temples was white as snow.