A "Temporary Gentleman" in France

by A. J. Dawson

You will easily understand that of all things in trench warfare nothing is more important than the ability of your Company to man the fire-step, ready to repel an attack, or to make one, on the shortest possible notice. When the order comes there must be no fiddling about looking for rifles, or appearing on the fire-step with incomplete equipment. See how useless that would be in the event of a surprise attack in the dark, when the enemy could creep very close indeed to your parapet before the best of sentries could give any alarm! Troops in the firing line must be able to turn out, equipped in every detail for fighting—for days on end of fighting—not only quickly, but instantly; without any delay at all. That is why, in the British Army, at all events—and I've no doubt the French are the same—nobody in the firing line is allowed to remove his equipment. Officer and man alike, when we lie down to sleep, we lie down in precisely the same order as we go into action: haversack and water-bottle, ammunition and everything complete. That detail of the filled water-bottle, for instance, may make all the difference between a man who is an asset to his country in a critical action and a man who is useless and a bad example. You never know the moment at which an action that will last forty-eight hours or more is going to begin; and, though a man may keep going a long while without food, he's not much use if he cannot rinse his mouth out after a bit.

But at this rate I shall never get done. It's always so when I set out to write to you about any specific thing.

Well, we Stand-to an hour before dawn. It happens this way: "the Peacemaker" is in the trench doing something, or he comes out of the dug-out. He looks at his watch and at the sky, and he tells his orderly to bring another orderly. Then he says to the pair of them: "Pass the word to Stand-to." One bolts along the trench to the left and one to the right; and as they hurry along they give the word to every sentry and to everyone they see: "Stand-to!" Meanwhile "the Peacemaker" pokes about and observes, and jumps like a hundred of bricks on any man whose bayonet is not fixed, whose belt is unbuckled, or who is slow in getting to the fire-step. All this time he has his watch in his hand.

Pretty soon the first of those two orderlies comes racing back. Very often they see each other approaching the Officer Commanding from opposite directions, and make a real race of it, and report breathlessly: "All correct, sir." To be able to do this, they must have got the word from each Platoon Sergeant. Probably about this time the officer on duty comes along from whatever part of the line he happens to have been patrolling at the time. And he also reports that all was correct in the part of the line he has come from, or that such and such a section was a bit behind this morning, and that Corporal So-and-so wants a little stirring up.

Also, by this time the Company Sergeant-Major will have arrived, with a couple of runners, each carrying under his arm a jar of mixed rum-and-water, half and half. Rum is never served out in any circumstances, save in the presence of an officer. So the officer on duty goes to one end of the line, and "the Peacemaker" to the other, and both work slowly back toward the centre, watching the serving out of the rum, and looking carefully over each man and his equipment. In the centre, the officer on duty probably waits, while the O.C. Company goes right on, so that he may see the whole of his line and every single man in it. So you see, in a way, Stand-to is a parade, as well as an important tactical operation. Because, remember, the sentries are keenly watching all this while, and so are a good many more pairs of eyes than look out at any other time. But, whereas the sentries are steadily gazing into the rapidly greying mysteries of No Man's Land, the other pairs of eyes are only taking occasional sharp glances, and then down again, below the parapet.

There has probably been very little firing from either side during this time. Now, very suddenly, a violent crackling starts along to the left of the line. Instantly, every exposed head ducks. Fritz has started the first verse of his morning Hymn of Hate. He always thinks to catch us, and never does. We enjoy his hymn, because we love to see him waste his ammunition, as he proceeds to do now in handsome style. Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r! The spray of his machine-guns traverses very neatly up and down the length of our parapet. His gunners are clearly convinced that at Stand-to time they are certain to get a few English heads. Then, as suddenly as he began, he stops; and—every head remains ducked. We've been at some pains to teach 'em that. Twenty seconds later—or it may be two minutes—the spray begins again, just where it stopped, or a hundred yards to right or left of that. The Boche is quite smart about this; only he seems to act on the assumption that we never learn anything. That's where he's rather sold.

And, while Fritz sends forth his morning Hymn, our snipers in their carefully-hidden posts have their eyes glued on the neighbourhood of his machine-gun emplacements; and every now and again they get their reward, and the head of a Boche machine-gun observer, or some other Teuton whose curiosity overcomes his discretion, drops never to rise any more.

Before the Hymn began, you understand, the greying mystery has grown considerably less mysterious, and one has been able to see almost as much in the pearly dawn light as one will see at high noon, especially in these misty localities.

When Fritz has got through the last verse of his Hymn he is almost invariably quiet and harmless as a sucking dove for an hour or two. I take it he makes a serious business of his breakfast. And there again he often pays. Our snipers have their brekker later, and devote half an hour now to observation of the neighbourhood of all the little spirals of smoke in the Boche lines which indicate breakfast fires. They generally have some luck then; and sometimes it becomes worth while to turn on a machine-gun or two, where Fritz's appetite has made him careless.