All you could see in the dark was a collection of white and frightened faces. Every trembling finger seemed awkward as a thumb as we got out our gas masks and helmets and put them on, following directions as nearly as we could. I ordered the men to sit still and sent two forward to notify me from headquarters when the gas alarm was over. They lost their way and were not found for two days. We sat there for an hour, and then I ventured to take my mask off. As nothing happened, I ordered the men to do the same. When we got into the trenches with our packs, we found that the gas alarm had been one of Fritz’s jokes. The first sirens had been sounded in the German lines, and there hadn’t been any gas.
Our men evened things up with the Germans, however, the next night. Some of our scouts crawled clear up to the German barbed wire, ten yards in front of the enemy fire trench, tied empty jam-tins to the barricade and then, after attaching light telephone wires to the barbed strands, crawled back to our trenches. When they started pulling the telephone wires the empty tins made a clatter right under Fritz’s nose. Immediately the Germans opened up with all their machine-gun and rifle fire, began bombing the spot from which the noise came and sent up “S. O. S.” signals for artillery fire along a mile of their line. They fired a ten-thousand-dollar salute and lost a night’s sleep over the noise made by the discarded containers of five shillings’ worth of jam. It was a good tonic for the Tommies.
A few days after this, a very young officer passed me in a trench while I was sitting on a fire-step, writing a letter. I noticed that he had the red tabs of a staff officer on his uniform, but I paid no more attention to him than that. No compliments such as salutes to officers are paid in the trenches. After he had passed, one of the men asked me if I didn’t know who he was. I said I didn’t.
“Why you d——d fool,” he said, “that’s the Prince of Wales.”
When the little prince came back, I stood to salute him. He returned the salute with a grave smile and passed on. He was quite alone, and I was told afterward, that he made these trips through the trenches just to show the men that he did not consider himself better than any other soldier. The heir of England was certainly taking nearly the same chance of losing his inheritance that we were.
After we had been on the front line fifteen days, we received orders to make a bombing raid. Sixty volunteers were asked for, and the whole battalion offered. I was lucky—or unlucky—enough to be among the sixty who were chosen. I want to tell you in detail about this bombing raid, so that you can understand what a thing may really amount to that gets only three lines, or perhaps nothing at all, in the official dispatches. And, besides that, it may help some of the young men who read this, to know something, a little later, about bombing.
The sixty of us chosen to execute the raid were taken twenty miles to the rear for a week’s instruction practice. Having only a slight idea of what we were going to try to do, we felt very jolly about the whole enterprise, starting off. We were camped in an old barn, with several special instruction officers in charge. We had oral instruction, the first day, while sappers dug and built an exact duplicate of the section of the German trenches which we were to raid. That is, it was exact except for a few details. Certain “skeleton trenches,” in the practice section, were dug simply to fool the German aviators. If a photograph, taken back to German headquarters, had shown an exact duplicate of a German trench section, suspicion might have been aroused and our plans revealed. We were constantly warned about the skeleton trenches and told to remember that they did not exist in the German section where we were to operate. Meanwhile, our practice section was changed a little, several times, because aerial photographs showed that the Germans had been renovating and making some additions to the trenches in which we were to have our frolic with them.
We had oral instruction, mostly, during the day, because we didn’t dare let the German aviators see us practicing a bomb raid. All night long, sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning, we rehearsed that raid, just as carefully as a company of star actors would rehearse a play. At first there was a disposition to have sport out of it.
“Well,” some chap would say, rolling into the hay all tired out, “I got killed six times to-night. S’pose it’ll be several times more to-morrow night.”
One man insisted that he had discovered, in one of our aerial photographs, a German burying money, and he carefully examined each new picture so that he could be sure to find the dough and dig it up. The grave and serious manner of our officers, however; the exhaustive care with which we were drilled and, more than all, the approach of the time when we were “to go over the top,” soon drove sport out of our minds, and I can say for myself that the very thought of the undertaking, as the fatal night drew near, sent shivers up and down my spine.