With the Guns

by Cecil J. C. Street

During the night of September 24-25, infantry patrols left the trenches to explore the condition of the enemy's wire entanglements, upon the destruction of which our field batteries had been engaged during the previous day. Artillery fire was therefore reduced as much as could be done with safety, and was chiefly directed upon reserves and billets, in order to make the chance of rounds falling short injuring the patrols as small as possible. During the evening the batteries opposed to us had shown far greater liveliness than they had hitherto. Possibly the enemy had got information as to where the decisive attack was to be made, as it seems to be the fact that owing to the four days' bombardment having taken place along the whole of the British front, they had hitherto hesitated to reinforce any particular sector, but had kept their reserves in a state of immediate readiness at their various railway centres. If this was the case, it is very probable that during the 23rd and 24th fresh batteries were placed in position between Vendin-le-Vieil and Lens, and that these came into action on the afternoon and evening of the 24th. This supposition is borne out by the fact of the enemy's ability to bring a terrific fire to bear on Loos as soon as we entered it.

Until the light failed, we had been busily engaged dropping shell along the Double Crassier, upon whose grim black crest the enemy were suspected of having mounted a number of machine guns. I had been in the observation post nearly the whole day—it is, by the way, worthy of remark as showing the immunity from retaliation that we had enjoyed in our sector, that we used to walk to and from our O.P. at all hours of the day through country literally covered with batteries, none of whom up till now had suffered any casualties—but at about seven o'clock duty recalled me to the battery. So absorbed had I been in the difficult business of observing in the failing light, that although I was conscious that shells were bursting all round, I had no idea that anything out of the ordinary was taking place until one of our telephonists, who had been out repairing the line, returned somewhat shaken, having been blown off his feet and thrown some distance by a high-explosive detonating close to him. His only complaint, I may say, was that he had lost a pair of wire-cutters in the adventure!

However, as soon as I started my walk homewards along the "Harrow Road," I found things still fairly lively. Several houses had been destroyed since the morning, and some very fine examples of shell-holes in the middle of the road added to the joys of the transport drivers, whose wagons of all descriptions were now beginning to pour along it. At one point a medium shell burst about twenty yards away from me—I had heard it coming and found friendly refuge in the ditch—and before the smoke had fairly cleared an armoured car and a motor cyclist orderly drove simultaneously into it from opposite directions. Nobody was hurt, but the road was most effectively obstructed, and the effect produced was exactly like that of a block in Piccadilly, including the language. I reached the battery safely, to find that the shelling had not reached so far back, but that another form of excitement had supervened. We had received orders to be ready to move at the shortest possible notice, in case a general advance upon the morrow should render a change in our position necessary. Of course, we had been prepared for this for days, but even so this official pronouncement of our hopes sent a thrill through every one of us. This was, then, the decisive struggle, the Waterloo of the campaign at last!

Moving a battery of heavy guns is, however, no small matter, and one that involves a vast amount of labour, not to be lightly undertaken. A story is told of a certain major, distinguished alike for his capability and his piety, who, knowing from bitter experience the difficulties that attended a change of position of his battery, added on this night to his usual formula of prayer these heart-felt words, "O Lord, grant us victory in the coming struggle—but not in my sector!"

I think that despite the fact that the guns were silent for the first time since the beginning of the bombardment, very few of us slept much that night. Our schemes were perfect, certainly, every detail of our actions of the morrow had been long worked out, each phase starting a definite time after an empiric zero, which we now learnt was fixed for 5.50 a.m. But—would the enemy consent to fall in with those schemes? Suppose they anticipated our offensive by an attack of their own? The wire in front of their trenches was already destroyed, even now our infantry were busy cutting wide passages through our own. How strong were they in reality? Was their passive endurance of our fire only a blind to lull us into security? These and a thousand other conjectures troubled our minds all night, and it was with a deep feeling of relief that we stood in the battery, no untoward incident having marred our plans, at 5.30 a.m. on the 25th—the eagerly awaited Day Z!

Then were the scenes at the opening of the bombardment repeated. Along our line all was again quiet, only from our right came the distant echoes of the fighting round Souchez and the Labyrinth, a deep roar that had now been continuous for over a week. Again we sit in the telephone dug-out, tense and expectant. "Official time coming, sir!" Watches are taken out in readiness. "Five thirty-five—now!" Quarter of an hour to go! One by one we creep out to see for the last time that all is ready. One minute more—"Hook your lanyards!" slowly the hand ticks round—time zero—"Fire!" This was no deliberate bombardment, every gun must in the short interval allowed it work to its utmost capacity, every man sweating in the dust-laden pits must toil as he never toiled before to feed it; into the luckless trenches in front of us must pour such a blasting hurricane of fire that the resistance prepared for our attack shall wither away in its deadly breath. But soon our own troops will be pouring out of their trenches, charging over the dividing ground to hurl themselves upon the trenches into which our wrath is now being poured, and then our fire must be lifted lest we do more harm than good. All is arranged for in the time-table. At forty minutes past zero, or 6.30 a.m., every battery lifts its fire from the front line to the second line, and still the furious fire continues. But now we know that the blow is being struck—what would we all not give to be in action in the open as in old days so that we could see the assault, watch the joining of the battle? Unprofitable thoughts! let us rather devote every fibre of our beings to the only task by which we can help, the task of pouring an ever-increasing weight of shell upon the defenders. That morning dawned grey and dull. From the observing post it was hardly possible to see further than the front line trenches at half-past five, and until the moment of the assault visibility did not greatly increase. However, this was to be the battlefield, we knew, at all events in the first stages of the struggle. The expectancy of viewing the greatest battle in history was to our little party in the O.P. strangely banal; I, for one, could not grasp the reality of it; I felt as though I were in a box waiting for the actors to come upon a stage before which the curtain had risen prematurely. There was no sign of battle, no movement that the eye could detect over the whole of the wide prospect before us. And then suddenly came time zero, bringing with it a scene that could never be forgotten. From the whole length of our front trench, as far as the eye could reach, rose, vertically at first, a grey cloud of smoke and gas, that, impelled by a gentle wind, spread slowly towards the enemy's trenches, very soon enveloping the whole of our range of vision in its opaque veil. This was our view of the assault, this dismal vapour the aura that was to surround a thousand sacrifices, the cloak that was to hide a thousand gallant deeds, the winding-sheet that was to enwrap so many a hero. Modern war holds no dramatic spectacles to enchant the brush of a Meisonnier, no drama is wrought upon a lime-lit stage to arrest the pulses of the watching nations. Yet none the less is its fascination omnipotent; its magnetic attraction, that draws into its vortex every man that owns a soul to plague him, is none the less irresistible; its influence still has the power to weld a chain of heroes out of a dirty, blasphemous, footsore crowd of sinners. War tends to the uplifting of the race, not to its debasement, let him who has faced it deny it if he can!

At 6.30 a.m. the infantry left their trenches and, so far as we were concerned, vanished into the smoke. All we could see were the columns scaling the ladders and starting to double across the open. Some seemed to trip as they ran, and fell in various attitudes from which they did not trouble to rise. At first we thought that our wire had not been thoroughly cut, and that these men had fallen over some unseen strands. But the red pools that slowly surrounded each soon undeceived us, the while that the roar of rifle-fire from the enemy's side grew ever more menacing. We could not see what success attended those who went on, but we heard subsequently that practically no resistance was encountered on the enemy's first and second line, but that the third line was very strongly held and considerably delayed, in some sectors permanently arrested, our advance.

The battery and the O.P. were equally desirable as far as vision went, the battery being blind by nature and the O.P. by science. It has, incidentally, yet to be proved that the hindrance to the enemy caused by the use of smoke is not more than counterbalanced by the paralysing of the initiative of one's own artillery, who are entirely dependent, when this method of warfare is employed, upon time-tables and such messages as the advancing infantry may be able to send back. However, that is not a question meet for discussion except in works devoted to the abstruse study of strategy and tactics. Let us return to the passage of events in the battery.

Here hopes and fears fought for the mastery throughout the morning, in accordance with the portents of the day. An order to lift fire on to a more distant point seemed to mean that our attack was developing against it, and the men in the pits paused to cheer in the midst of their unceasing labour. Then suddenly fire would be swept back on to a point that we had determined in our own minds to have been captured long ago, and our spirits fell, the detachments setting their teeth and straining at the heated guns to force by sheer weight of metal the taking of the disputed point. Or, saddest sight of all, down the road flowed an ever-widening stream of casualties, ambulances laden with stretchers upon which twisted forms lay very still, others with the less severely wounded, and a motley crowd on foot with minor injuries, supporting one another as one imagines the scriptural halt, maimed and blind to have done. I think that none of us realized till we saw the magnitude of this stream, how fierce a fight was raging in front of us. If this sight hardened our determination, the next procession went far to cheer us. A few hundred prisoners were marched past us on the way to the rear, fine upstanding men enough, looking perfectly fit and in the prime of life, disposing effectually, in my mind at least, of the fable born of our national love for self-deceit that the enemy were hard put to it to find men fit for service.

The German batteries were now devoting their attention to our advancing infantry, endeavouring at the same time to create a barrage behind them on our main arteries of communication. The Harrow Road suffered to a certain extent, but the greatest slaughter took place on the Lens-Béthune and Vermelles-Hulluch roads. On the former the whole of a divisional train was overwhelmed by shrapnel, blocking the road for a quarter of a mile with shattered wagons and dead horses (a picture of which debris subsequently went the round of the illustrated Press under the heading "Captured German Battery at Loos"). Two of our field batteries that endeavoured to come into action in the open between Quality Street and La Chapelle de Notre Dame de Consolation suffered very heavily and were silenced. Of the losses of the infantry, nobody who did not see the procession of casualties and, worse still, the burial parties of the next few days, can form an adequate picture. "British Offensive in the West," we read, "Gain of five miles of trench." Each foot of that five miles cost us a life and a sum of human agony such as this world has never known. Watch that communication trench marked "Stretchers to rear only." Here they come, two stretcher-bearers, one limping painfully, the sleeve of the other growing ever darker with a purple stain that spreads slowly over it. Between them they carry a poor wretch with both legs broken, whose low moan of agony rises to a sharp wail at each jolting step. Supporting themselves on the shoulders of the stretcher-bearers are two more, one with his breath gurgling through a throat choked with blood, one with a shattered shoulder and side. Through the treacherous clay that covers the bottom of the trench they make their way of agony, reeling from side to side as their feet fail to find a foothold, cursing their Maker for the horror of their torture. See, the first stretcher-bearer slips—his wounded foot will bear him no longer—and down falls the whole party in one screaming, writhing mass. Two miles more: is there no end to human suffering? is heaven so pitiless? There is the answer, a sharp whistle, a low report, a puff of smoke just over the trench, and all is quiet, save for one form that crawls very slowly on hands and knees through the yellow clay that grows dark crimson in his track. In these terms must we reckon the price of victory.