“You’ve heard, I suppose!” said the other. “No? Baddish news. Our left has cracked and the Germ has a slice of their trenches. It upsets all our plans, and we’ve got ’em all to make over again.”
The Captain stared blankly at him. “All to make ... that means all to-day’s work to begin and go through again. All to-day’s work—well, I’m ...”
The aide had been eyeing the mud-bedaubed figure with water dripping from the torn coat, the sopping cap dangling in the dirty hand, the blue unshaven chin and red-rimmed eyes. He giggled suddenly. “I say, you know what the troops call the Staff?” He spluttered laughter. “The Gilded Staff,” he said, pointing at the Captain. “Behold—oh, my aunt—behold the Gilded Staff.”
X
A RAID
For several days our artillery had been bombarding stretches of the front German trenches and cutting the wire entanglements out in front of them preparatory to a big attack. The point actually selected for the raid was treated exactly the same as a score of other points up and down the line. By day the guns poured a torrent of shrapnel on the barbed wire, tearing it to pieces, uprooting the stakes, cutting wide swathes through it. Because the opposing lines were fairly close together, our shells, in order to burst accurately amongst and close over the wire, had to skim close over our own parapet, and all day long the Forward Officers crouched in the front trench, observing and correcting the fall of their shells that shrieked close over them with an appalling rush of savage sound. And while they busied themselves on the wire, the howitzers and heavier guns methodically pounded the front-line trench, the support and communication trenches, and the ground behind them. At night the tempest might slacken at intervals, but it never actually ceased. The guns, carefully laid on “registered” lines and ranges during the day, continued to shoot with absolute accuracy during the darkness—although perhaps “darkness” is a misleading term where the No Man’s Land glowed with light and flickered with dancing shadows from the stream of flares that tossed constantly into the air, soaring and floating, sinking and falling in balls of vivid light. If no lights were flung up for a period from the German line, our front line fired Verey pistol lights, swept the opposing trench and wire with gusts of shrapnel and a spattering hail of machine-gun bullets to prevent any attempt on the enemy’s part to creep out and repair their shattered defences.
Our bombardment had not been carried out unmolested. The German gunners “crumped” the front and support lines steadily and systematically, searched the ground behind, and sought to silence the destroying guns by careful “counter-battery” work. But all their efforts could not give pause to our artillery, much less silence it, and the bombardment raged on by day and night for miles up and down the line. It was necessary to spread the damage, because only by doing so, only by threatening a score of points, was it possible to mislead the enemy and prevent them calculating where the actual raid was to be made.
The hour chosen for the raid was just about dusk. There was no extra-special preparation immediately before it. The guns continued to pour in their fire, speeding it up a little, perhaps, but no more than they had done a score of times in the past twenty-four hours. The infantry clambered out of their trench and filed out through the narrow openings in their own wire entanglements, with the shells rushing and crashing over them so close that instinctively they crouched low to give them clearance. Out in front, and a hundred yards away, the ground was hidden and indistinct under the pall of smoke that curled and eddied from the bursting shrapnel, only lit by sharp, quick-vanishing glare after glare as the shells burst. In the trench the infantry had just left, a Forward Officer peered out over the parapet, fingered his trench telephone, glanced at the watch on his wrist, spoke an occasional word to his battery checking the flying seconds, and timing the exact moment to “lift.”