The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing replies. Ratty was new to this planned-attack game, of course, but since he had been out and taken his whack of the early days, had been wounded, and home, and only lately had come out again, he was entitled to a certain amount of excusing.
Johnny summed it up for them. “We’ve moved a bit since the Noove Chapelle days, you know,” he said. “You didn’t have no little lot like this then, did you?” jerking his head at the bristling line of their machine-guns. “An’ you didn’t have creepin’ barrages, an’ more shells than you could fire, eh? Used to lose seventy an’ eighty per cent. o’ the battalion’s strength goin’ over the bags them days, didn’t you? Well, we’ve changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You’ll see the differ presently.”
Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable “differ” and a great improvement on old ways. He and his company moved up towards the front leisurely and certainly, without haste and without confusion, having the orders detailed overnight for the next day’s march, finding meals cooked and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously known and “detailed” for them, coming at night to camp or billet places left vacant for them immediately before, finding everything planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, although he admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that beyond the front line this carefully-planned moving must cease abruptly. “It’ll be the same plunky old scramble an’ scrap, I’ll bet,” he said. “We’ll see then if all the Fritz trenches is just where we’ve fixed ’em, an’ if we runs to a regular time-table and follows the laid-down route an’ first-turn-to-the-right-an’-mind-the-step-performance we’ve been practisin’.”
But it was as they approached the fighting zone, and finally when they found themselves installed in a support trench on the morning of the Push that Ratty came to understand the full difference between old battles and this new style. For days on end he heard such gun-fire as he had never dreamed of, heard it continue without ceasing or slackening day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred with winking and spurting gusts of flame from our high-explosives. He walked or lay on a ground that quivered and trembled under the unceasing shock of our guns’ discharges, covered his eyes at night to shut out the flashing lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the sky. On the last march that had brought them into the trenches they had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first the huge monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little in advance of the great piles of shells and long roofed sidings crammed with more shells, then farther on past other monsters only less in comparison with those they had seen before, on again past whole batteries of 60-pounders and “six-inch” tucked away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses, and finally up through the field guns packed close in every corner that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in the open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined village—a street that was no more than a cleared strip of cobblestones bordered down its length on both sides by the piled or scattered heaps of rubble and brick that had once been rows of houses—with a mad chorus of guns roaring and cracking and banging in numberless scores about them, passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns ranged battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of flame jumping and flashing along their fronts. They found and settled into their trench with this unbroken roar of fire bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud and long that it seemed impossible to increase it. When their watches told them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned was the “zero hour,” the fixed moment of the attack, the sound of the gun-fire swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of fury that eclipsed all that had gone before. The men crouched in their trench listening in awed silence, and as the zero hour approached Ratty clambered and stood where he could look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn’t he heard the order to keep under cover? Ratty dropped back beside the others. “Lumme,” he said disgustedly, “I dunno wot this bloomin’ war’s comin’ to. Orders, orders, orders! You mustn’t get plunky well killed nowadays, unless you ’as orders to.”
“There they go,” said Johnny suddenly, and all strained their ears for the sound of rattling rifle-fire that came faintly through the roll of the guns. “An’ here they come,” said Ratty quickly, and all crouched low and listened to the rising roar of a heavy shell approaching, the heavy cr-r-rump of its fall. A message passed along, “Ready there. Move in five minutes.” And at five minutes to the tick, they rose and began to pass along the trench.
“Know where we are, Ratty?” asked Johnny. Ratty looked about him. “How should I know?” he shouted back, “I was never ’ere before.”
“You oughter,” returned Johnny. “This is the line we started from back in practice attack—the one that was taped out along by the stream.”
“I’m a fat lot better for knowin’ it too,” said Ratty sarcastically, and trudged on. They passed slowly forward and along branching trenches until they came at last to the front line, from which, after a short rest, they climbed and hoisted their machine-guns out into the open. From here for the first time they could see something of the battleground; but could see nothing of the battle except a drifting haze of smoke, and, just disappearing into it, a shadowy line of figures. The thunder of the guns continued, and out in front they could hear now the crackle of rifle fire, the sharp detonations of grenades. There were far fewer shells falling about the old “neutral ground” than Ratty had expected, and even comparatively few bullets piping over and past them. They reached the tumbled wreckage of shell-holes and splintered planks that marked what had been the front German line, clambered through this, and pushed on stumbling and climbing in and out the shell-holes that riddled the ground. “Where’s the Buffs that’s supposed to be in front o’ us,” shouted Ratty, and ducked hastily into a deep shell-hole at the warning screech of an approaching shell. It crashed down somewhere near and a shower of dirt and earth rained down on him. He climbed out. “Should be ahead about a——here’s some o’ them now wi’ prisoners,” said Johnny. They had a hurried glimpse of a huddled group of men in grey with their hands well up over their heads, running, stumbling, half falling and recovering, but always keeping their hands hoisted well up. There may have been a full thirty of them, and they were being shepherded back by no more than three or four men with bayonets gleaming on their rifles. They disappeared into the haze, and the machine-gunners dropped down into a shallow twisting depression and pressed on along it. “This is the communication trench that used to be taped out along the edge o’ that cornfield in practice attack,” said Johnny, when they halted a moment. “Trench?” said Ratty, glancing along it, “Strewth!” The trench was gone, was no more than a wide shallow depression, a tumbled gutter a foot or two below the level of the ground; and even the gutter in places was lost in a patch of broken earth-heaps and craters. It was best traced by the dead that lay in it, by the litter of steel helmets, rifles, bombs, gas-masks, bayonets, water-bottles, arms and equipment of every kind strewed along it.
By now Ratty had lost all sense of direction or location, but Johnny at his elbow was always able to keep him informed. Ratty at first refused to accept his statements, but was convinced against all argument, and it was always clear from the direct and unhesitating fashion in which they were led that those in command knew where they were and where to go. “We should pass three trees along this trench somewhere soon,” Johnny would say, and presently, sure enough, they came to one stump six foot high and two splintered butts just showing above the earth. They reached a wide depression, and Johnny pointed and shouted, “The sunk road,” and looking round, pointed again to some whitish-grey masses broken, overturned, almost buried in the tumbled earth, the remains of concrete machine-gun emplacements which Ratty remembered had been marked somewhere back there on the practice ground by six marked boards. “Six,” shouted Johnny, and grinned triumphantly at the doubter.
The last of Ratty’s doubts as to the correctness of battle plans, even of the German lines, vanished when they came to a bare stretch of ground which Johnny reminded him was where they had been warned they would most likely come under enfilading machine-gun fire. They halted on the edge of this patch to get their wind, and watched some stretcher-bearers struggling to cross and a party of men digging furiously to make a line of linked-up shell-holes, while the ground about them jumped and splashed under the hailing of bullets.