So this was what these young soldiers had come to—here was the real thing. Drums beat, trumpets blare, the Klingelspiel jingles at the regiment's head, and with flowers in your helmet, and your wife or sweetheart shouldering your rifle as far as the station—and you should see these German women marching out with their men!—you go marching out to war. You look out of the windows of various railway trains, then they lead you through a ditch into another ditch, and there, across a stretch of mud which might be your own back yard, is a clay bank, which is your enemy. And one morning at dawn you climb over your ditch and run forward until you are cut down. And when you have, so to speak, been thrown in the stream for the others to cross over, and the trench is taken, and you are put out of the way under a few inches of French earth, then, perhaps, inasmuch as experience shows that it isn't worth while to try to keep a trench unless you have captured more than three hundred yards of it, the battalion retires and starts all over again.
We had walked on down the trenches, turned a bend where two trees had been blown up and flung across it, when there was a dull report near by, followed a moment later by a tremendous explosion out toward the enemy's trench. "Unsere Minen!" ("One of our bombs!") laughed a young soldier beside me, and a crackle of excitement ran along the trench. These bombs were cylinders, about the size of two baking-powder tins joined together, filled with dynamite and exploded by a fuse. They were thrown from a small mortar with a light charge of powder, just sufficient to toss them over into the opposite trench. The Germans knew what was coming, and they were laughing and watching in the direction of the English trenches.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"
There was a dull report and at the same moment something shot up from the English trenches and, very clear against the western sky, came flopping over and over toward us like a bottle thrown over a barn.
"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!" It sailed over our heads behind the trench, there was an instant's silence, and then "Whong!" and a pile of dirt and black smoke was flung in the air. Again there was a dull report, and we sent a second back—this time behind their trench—and again—"Vorsicht! Vorsicht!"—they sent an answer back. Four times this was repeated. A quainter way of making war it would be hard to imagine. They might have been boys playing "anty-over" over the old house at home.
Bombs of this sort have little penetrating power. If thrown in the open they go off on the surface much like a gigantic firecracker. They are easy to dodge by daylight, when you can see them coming, but thrown at night as part of a general bombardment, including shrapnel and heavy explosive shells, or exploding directly in the trench, they must be decidedly unpleasant.
The bomb episode had divided us, two officers and myself waiting on one side of the bend in the trench toward which the bombs were thrown, the others going ahead. It was several minutes before I rejoined them, and I did not learn until we were outside that they had been taken to another periscope through which they saw a space covered with English dead. There were, perhaps, two hundred men in khaki lying there, they said, some hanging across the barbed-wire entanglements at the very foot of the German trench, just as they had been thrown back in the attack which had succeeded at Neuve Chapelle. Several Englishmen had got clear into the German trench before they were killed. Here was another example of the curious localness of this dug-in warfare, that one could pass within a yard or two of such a battle-field and not know even that it was there.
By another communication trench we returned to the little house. The sun was low by this time and the line of figures walking down the-road toward the automobiles in its full light. Perhaps the glasses of some British lookout picked us up—at any rate the whisper of bullets became uncomfortably frequent and near, and we had just got to the motors when —Tssee—ee—rr… BONG! a shell crashed into the church of La Bassée, only three hundred yards in front of us.
Before ours had started, another, flying on a lower trajectory, it seemed, shrieked over our heads and burst beside the road so close to the first motor that it threw mud into it. Apparently we were both observed and sought after, and as the range of these main highways, up and down which troops and munitions pass, is perfectly known, there was a rather uncomfortable few minutes ere we had whirled through La Bassée, with the women watching from their doors—no racing motors for them to run away in!—and down the tree-arched road to ordinary life again.
No, not exactly ordinary, though we ourselves went back to a comfortable hotel, for the big city of Lille, which had shown trolley-cars and a certain amount of animation earlier in the day, was now, at dusk, like a city of the dead. The chambermaid shrugged her shoulders with something about a "punition" and, when asked why they were punished, said that some French prisoners had been brought through Lille a week or two before, and "naturally, the people shouted 'Vive la France!'"