CHAPTER XIX
TROMMELFEUER
France, August 21st.
The Germans call it Trommelfeuer—drum fire. I do not know any better description for the distant sound of it. We hear it every day from some quarter of this wide battlefield. You will be sitting at your tea, the normal spasmodic banging of your own guns sounding in the nearer positions five, ten, perhaps fifteen times in the minute. Suddenly, from over the distant hills, to left or right, there breaks out the roll of a great kettledrum, ever so far away. Someone is playing the tattoo softly and very quickly. If it is nearer, and especially if it is German, it sounds as if he played it on an iron ship's tank instead.
That is Trommelfeuer—what we call intense bombardment. When it is very rapid—like the swift roll of a kettledrum—you take it that it must be the French seventy-fives down South preparing the way for a French assault. But it is often our own guns after all—I doubt if there are many who can really distinguish between the distant sound of them.
Long afterwards—perhaps in the grey of the next morning—one may see outside of some dug-out, in a muddy wilderness of old trenches and wheel-tracks, guarded by half a dozen Australians with fixed bayonets, a group of dejected men in grey. The cold Scotch mist stands in little beads on the grey cloth—the bayonets shine very cold in the white light before the dawn—the damp, slippery brown earth is too wet for a comfortable seat. But there is always some Australian there who will give them a cigarette; a cheery Melbourne youngster or two step down into the crowd and liven them with friendly chaff; the blue sky begins to show through the mist—the early morning aeroplane hums past on its way to the line, low down, half hidden in the wrack. The big bushman from Gippsland at a neighbouring coffee stall—praise heaven for that institution—gives them a drink of the warm stuff. And I verily believe that at that moment they emerge for the first time out of a frightful dream.
For they are the men who have been through the Trommelfeuer.
Strong men arrive from that experience shaking like leaves in the wind. I have seen one of our own youngsters—a boy who had fought a great fight all through the dark hours, and who had refused to come back when he was first ordered to—I have seen him unable to keep still for an instant after the strain, and yet ready to fight on till he dropped; physically almost a wreck, but with his wits as sharp and his spirits as keen as a steel chisel. I have seen other Australians who, after doing glorious work through thirty or forty hours of unimaginable strain, buried and buried and buried again and still working like tigers, have broken down and collapsed, unable to stand or to walk, unable to move an arm except limply, as if it were string; ready to weep like little children.
It is the method which the German invented for his own use. For a year and a half he had a monopoly—British soldiers had to hang on as best they could under the knowledge that the enemy had more guns and more shell than they, and bigger shell at that. But at last the weapon seems to have been turned against him. No doubt his armaments and munitions are growing fast, but ours have for the moment overtaken them. And hell though it is for both sides—something which no soldiers in the world's history ever yet had to endure—it is mostly better for us at present than for the Germans. I have heard men coming out of the thick of it say, "Well, I'm glad I'm not a Hun."