Ratty Travers and the others of the machine-gun company being in support had a good view of the lines attacking ahead of them.
“Them Jocks is goin’ along nicely,” said the man who had dropped beside Ratty. Ratty grunted scornfully. “Beautiful,” he said. “An’ we’re doin’ wonderful well ourselves. I never remember gettin’ over the No Man’s Land so easy, or seein’ a trench took so quick an’ simple in my life as this one we’re in; or seein’ a’tillery barrage move so nice an’ even and steady to time.”
“You’ve seed a lot, Ratty,” said his companion. “But you ain’t seed everything.”
“That’s true,” said Ratty. “I’ve never seen a lot o’ grown men playin’ let’s-pretend like a lot of school kids. Just look at that fool wi’ the big drum, Johnny.”
Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big drum was lugging it off at the double away from the kilted line, and strung out to either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed with sticks and biscuit-tins and empty cans. Ratty and his companions were clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, and bore boxes of very real ammunition. In the “trenches” ahead of them, or moving over the open, were other men similarly equipped; rolling back to them came a clash and clatter, a dull prolonged boom-boom-boom. In every detail, so far as the men were concerned, an attack was in full swing; but there was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping whistle and sharp crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking thunder of artillery (except that steady boom-boom), no shell-scorched strip of battered ground. The warm sun shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of flags and tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition and stretchers and all the other accoutrements of battle. There were no signs of death or wounds, none of the horror of war, because this was merely a “practice attack,” a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full ten miles behind the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and tapes, the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit-tins and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The kilts came to a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment later, the “barrage” sprinted off ahead one or two score yards, halted, and fell to banging and battering tins and drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly moved on after them, to halt again at their measured distance until the next “lift” of the “barrage.” It looked sheer child’s play, a silly elaborate game; and yet there was no sign of laughter or play about the men taking part in it—except on the part of Ratty Travers. Ratty was openly scornful. “Ready there,” said a sergeant rising and pocketing the notebook he had been studying. “We’ve only five minutes in this trench. And remember you move half-right when you leave here, an’ the next line o’ flags is the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements along the edge.”
Ratty chuckled sardonically. “I ’ope that in the real thing them machine-guns won’t ‘ave nothing to say to us movin’ half-right across their front,” he said.
“They’ve been strafed out wi’ the guns,” said Johnny simply, “an’ the Jocks ’as mopped up any that’s left. We was told that yesterday.”
“I dare say,” retorted Ratty. “An’ I hopes the Huns ’ave been careful instructed in the same. It ’ud be a pity if they went an’ did anything to spoil all the plans. But they wouldn’t do that. Oh, no, of course not—I don’t think!”
He had a good deal more to say in the same strain—with especially biting criticism on the “artillery barrage” and the red-faced big drummer who played lead in it—during the rest of the practice and at the end of it when they lay in their “final objective” and rested, smoking and cooling off with the top buttons of tunics undone, while the officers gathered round the C.O. and listened to criticism and made notes in their books.
“I’ll admit,” he said, “they might plan out the trenches here the same as the ones we’re to attack from. It’s this rot o’ layin’ out the Fritz trenches gets me. An’ this attack—it’s about as like a real attack as my gasper’s like a machine-gun. Huh! Wi’ one bloke clockin’ you on a stop-watch, an’ another countin’ the paces between the trenches—Boche trenches a mile behind their front line, mind you—an’ another whackin’ a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An’ all this ‘Go steady here, this is a sharp rise,’ or ’hurry this bit, ’cos most likely it’ll be open to enfiladin’ machine-gun fire,’ or ‘this here’s the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements.’ Huh! Plunky rot I calls it.”