CHAPTER VI
THE GERMANS
France, May.
The night air on every side of us was full of strange sound. It was not loud nor near, but it was there all the time. We could hear it even while we talked and above the sound of our footsteps on the cobbles of the long French highway. Ahead of us, and far on either side, came this continuous distant rattle. It was the sound of innumerable wagons carrying up over endless cobble stones the food and ammunition for another day.
A cart clattered past from the front with the jingle of trace chains and hammer of metal tyres upon stones. So one driver had finished his job for the night. Farther on was a sound of voices and a chink of spades; some way to our left across a field we can make out dark figures—they may be stunted willows along the far hedge, or they may be a working party going up, with their spades and picks over their shoulders, to one of those jobs which in this flat country can only be done by night.
Twenty miles behind the lines, or more, you can see every night along the horizon in front of you a constant low flicker of light—the flares thrown up by both sides over the long ribbon of No Man's Land—the ribbon which straggles without a break from one end of France to the other. We were getting very close to that barrier now—within a couple of miles of it; and the pure white stars of these glorified Roman candles were describing graceful curves behind a fretwork of trees an inch or two above the horizon. Every five or six seconds a rifle cracked somewhere along the line—very different from the ceaseless pecking of Gallipoli. Then a distant German machine-gun started its sprint, stumbled, went on again, tripped again. A second machine-gun farther down the line caught it up, and the two ran along in perfect step for a while. Then a third joined in, like some distant canary answering its mates. The first two stopped and left it trilling along by itself, catching occasionally like a motor-car engine that misfires, until it, too, stuttered into silence. "Some poor devils being killed, I suppose," you think to yourself, "suppose they've seen a patrol out in front of the lines, or a party digging in the open somewhere behind the trenches." You can't help crediting the Germans—at first, when you come to this place as a stranger—with being much more deadly than the Turks both with their machine-guns and their artillery. But you soon learn that it is by no means necessary that anyone is dying when you hear their machine-guns sing a chorus. They may chatter away for a whole night and nobody be in the least the worse for it. Their artillery can throw two or three hundred shells, or even more, into one of its various targets, not once but many times, and only a man or two be wounded; sometimes no one at all. War is alike in that respect all the world over, apparently; which is comforting.
Presently the road ends and the long sap begins. You plunge into the dark winding alley much as into some old city's ugly by-lane. It is Centennial Avenue. There is room in it to pass another man even when he is carrying a shoulderful of timber. But you must be careful when you do pass him, or one of you will find yourself waist deep in mud. I have said before that you do not walk on the bottom of the trench as you did in Gallipoli, but on a narrow wooden causeway not unlike the bridge on which ducks wander down from the henhouse to the yard—colloquially known as the "duck-boards." The days have probably passed when a man could be drowned in the mud of a communication trench. But it is always unpleasant to step off the duck-boards in wet weather. Seeing that the enemy may have fixed rifles trained on you at any bend of the trench, it is unwise to carry a light; and in a dark night and an unaccustomed trench you are almost sure to flounder.
A party of men loaded with new duck-boards is blocked ahead of you. As you stand there talking to another wayfarer and waiting for the unknown obstacle to move, a bullet flicks off the parapet a few feet away. It was at least a foot above the man's head and was clearly fired from some rifle laid on the trench during the daytime. Every now and then the parapet on one side becomes dense black against a dazzling white sky, and the trench wall on the other side becomes a glaring white background on which the shadow of your own head and shoulders sail slowly past you in inky black silhouette. The sharp-cut shadow gradually rises up the white trench wall, and all is black again until the enemy throws another flare.
As you talk there comes suddenly over the flats on your left a brilliant yellow flicker and a musical whine: "Whine—bang, whine—bang, whine—bang, whine—bang," just like that spoken very quickly.