Action Front

by Boyd Cable

A man forgot all these things when he came down the cellar steps and crept to a corner to snatch what sleep he could, but remembered them again only when he was wakened and sent out into their midst, and into all the toils and terrors the others had passed, or were to go into or even then were meeting.

The signalers at the instruments, the sergeants who gathered them in and sent them forth, gave little or no thought to the orderlies. These men were hardly more than shadows, things which brought them long screeds to be translated to the tapping keys, hands which would stretch into the candle-light and lift the messages that had just "buzzed" in over their wires. The sergeant thought of them mostly as a list of names to be ticked off one by one in a careful roster as each man did his turn of duty, went out, or came back and reported in. And the man who sent messages these men bore may never have given a thought to the hands that would carry them, unless perhaps to wonder vaguely whether the message could get through from so and so to such and such, from this map square to that, and if the chance of the messages getting through—the message you will note, not the messenger—seemed extra doubtful, orders might be given to send it in duplicate or triplicate, to double or treble the chances of its arriving.

The night wore on, the orderlies slept and woke, stumbled in and out; the telephonists droned out in monotonous voices to the telephone, or "buzzed" even more monotonous strings of longs and shorts on the "buzzer." And in the open about them, and all unheeded by them, men fought, and suffered wounds and died, or fought on in the scarce lesser suffering of cold and wet and hunger.

In the signalers' room all the fluctuations of the fight were translated from the pulsing fever, the human living tragedies and heroisms, the violent hopes and fears and anxieties of the battle line, to curt cold words, to scribbled letters on a message form. At times these messages were almost meaningless to them, or at least their red tragedy was unheeded. Their first thought when a message was handed in for transmission, usually their first question when the signaler at the other end called to take a message, was whether the message was a long one or a short one. One telephonist was handed an urgent message to send off, saying that bombs were running short in the forward line and that further supplies were required at the earliest possible moment, that the line was being severely bombed and unless they had the means to reply must be driven out or destroyed. The signaler took that message and sent it through; but his instrument was not working very clearly, and he was a good deal more concerned and his mind was much more fully taken up with the exasperating difficulty of making the signaler at the other end catch word or letter correctly, than it was with all the close packed volume of meaning it contained. It was not that he did not understand the meaning; he himself had known a line bombed out before now, the trenches rent and torn apart, the shattered limbs and broken bodies of the defenders, the horrible ripping crash of the bombs, the blinding flame, the numbing shock, the smoke and reek and noise of the explosions; but though all these things were known to him, the words "bombed out" meant no more now than nine letters of the alphabet and the maddening stupidity of the man at the other end, who would misunderstand the sound and meaning of "bombed" and had to have it in time-consuming letter-by-letter spelling.

When he had sent that message, he took off and wrote down one or two others from the signaling station he was in touch with. His own station, it will be remembered, was close up to the forward firing line, a new firing line which marked the limits of the advance made that morning. The station he was connected with was back in rear of what, previous to the attack, had been the British forward line. Between the two the thin insignificant thread of the telephone wire ran twisting across the jumble of the trenches of our old firing line, the neutral ground that had lain between the trenches, and the other maze of trench, dug-out, and bomb-proof shelter pits that had been captured from the enemy. Then in the middle of sending a message, the wire went dead, gave no answer to repeated calls on the "buzzer." The sergeant, called to consultation, helped to overlook and examine the instrument. Nothing could be found wrong with it, but to make quite sure the fault was not there, a spare instrument was coupled on to a short length of wire between it and the old one. They carried the message perfectly, so with curses of angry disgust the wire was pronounced disconnected, or "disc," as the signaler called it.

This meant that a man or men had to be sent out along the line to find and repair the break, and that until this was done, no telephone message could pass between that portion of the forward line and the headquarters in the rear. The situation was the more serious, inasmuch as this was the only connecting line for a considerable distance along the new front. A corporal and two men took a spare instrument and a coil of wire, and set out on their dangerous journey.

The break of course had been reported to the O.C., and after that there was nothing more for the signaler at the dead instrument to do, except to listen for the buzz that would come back from the repair party as they progressed along the line, tapping in occasionally to make sure that they still had connection with the forward station, their getting no reply at the same time from the rear station being of course sufficient proof that they had not passed the break.

Twice the signaler got a message, the second one being from the forward side of the old neutral ground in what had been the German front line trench; the report said also that fairly heavy fire was being maintained on the open ground. After that there was silence.

When the signaler had time to look about him, to light a cigarette and to listen to the uproar of battle that filtered down the cellar steps and through the closed door, he spoke to the sergeant about the noise, and the sergeant agreed with him that it was getting louder, which meant either that the fight was getting hotter or coming closer. The answer to their doubts came swiftly to their hands in the shape of a note from the O.C., with a message borne by the orderly that it was to be sent through anyhow or somehow, but at once.

Now the O.C., be it noted, had already had a report that the telephone wire was cut; but he still scribbled his note, sent his message, and thereafter put the matter out of his mind. He did not know how or in what fashion the message would be sent; but he did know the Signaling Company, and that was sufficient for him.