Those French soldiers, what children they were, as their behaviour in the tower showed! Whenever we were in action, a crowd of them would gather behind the guns to watch the shell in its flight, as is perfectly easy with any low-velocity howitzer. "Venez voir l'obus!" they would cry, and, as the gun fired, "Le voila, voyez, voyez! ah, il tombe——" and a shriek of delight would almost drown one's subsequent orders. What children and what men! Perfect fighters, eager to rush to the attack, yet patient under the iron discipline of the trenches, easily moved to a wild display of nervous energy, possessing creative imagination, yet stoical under agony to a surpassing degree. And not the men only, but every class—peasants, doctors, priests, each in his own sphere, are imbued with the highest spirit of which man can boast, the spirit of self-sacrifice. I hold no brief for any form of doctrine, being one of those who hold that all religions are nothing but quibbles round a central truth that no sane man denies, but the devotion of the French priest strikes me with the deepest admiration. I have seen a battery heavily shelled and suffer many casualties, so that the detachments were forced to take to their dug-outs. The doctor galloped up on horseback, but the priest on foot, running with his soutane tucked up round his waist, was there first, out in the open administering extreme unction to the mortally wounded, helping others to a place of safety. "Greater love hath no man than this——"
IX
CHANGING POSITION
The preparation of a battery position is a business that requires much labour and considerable time, if anything more elaborate than mere screening from view is attempted. Deep pits must be dug for the guns, and slopes cut into these pits by which the said guns may be hauled in and out. These pits must be floored with an elaborate platform, their sides must be revetted, that is to say that boards, corrugated iron or some similar substance must be fixed against them to prevent their falling in, and, most difficult feat of all, they must be roofed over with as much earth as such roof beams as can be procured can be made to bear. When the pits are completed, deep caverns must be dug and prepared to serve as refuges for the detachments in case of the battery being shelled. Other shelters must be provided as magazines for ammunition, as a room for the telephone and its operators, as a refuge for the section commanders. Billets must be found for the men and officers, if no billets are available dug-outs must be made. Places must be found for cook-houses, washing-places, work-shops, stores. A battery position prepared for lengthy occupation is a most elaborate work, and one does not light-heartedly desert it for an open plain where everything remains to be done. But sooner or later the dread message comes: "The battery will be prepared to move at 6 p.m. to-morrow. An officer will proceed forthwith to such-and-such a place where he will be shown the new position selected." Off goes the officer in the car, he meets some deputy from headquarters, and the two trudge off together through the ever-present mud. "Here you are," says the deputy cheerfully; "how does this suit you? Splendid place. Look at that orchard; you could hide the guns under the trees." The battery officer stares glumly at a dozen apple trees, each of which is of a size to flourish contentedly in a fair-sized flower-pot, and makes some dubious reply. "I never knew such difficult fellows to please as you siege battery fellows are in my life! Well, come and look over here. There's a natural pit, ready dug for you; it'll hold all the battery easily." With this the guide indicates with no little pride a gully, at the bottom of which stagnates rather than flows a greenish liquid with an odour of the most clinging type. "Yes, it might be a bit difficult to get the guns in and out, certainly. What about concealment behind that hedge?" But the hedge proves to be separated from the only road by an impassable morass. At last the orchard is selected as the least impossible under the circumstances, and the officer returns to his battery thoroughly convinced that he has selected the worst possible position on the whole front, and wondering what on earth will be said to him when he exhibits it to the rest of the battery.
Or else the proposed site is in the middle of a village, a place with a reputation for being shelled that is notorious from Ypres to Loos. A fabulous arc of fire is demanded from the battery, and weary hours are spent looking for a more or less concealed spot that will allow of the trajectory clearing houses and trees in all the required directions. At last it is found, the necessary measurements made and found satisfactory, when an officer strolls up. "Good-afternoon. You're not going to stop here long, are you? Going to put a battery here! I wouldn't be you for something, then. I've been about here for weeks, and they always strafe the schoolhouse there every day about this time. Look out, here she comes——" and a "woolly bear" or a "whizz-bang" or some other fiendish and aptly named projectile bursts neatly over the building that one had appropriated in one's mind's eye for a mess. Wearily the search begins again—this might do, perhaps—but by now the "evening hate" is in full swing, and a heavy shell settles with a self-satisfied "crrrump!" in the middle of one's oasis, digging one's gun-pits before one's eyes, as it were.
On one occasion the position chosen for us was the really beautiful garden of a medium-sized château. The front was a well-planned mass of shrubbery, intersected with paths and flower-beds, the back a walled vegetable garden, most scrupulously maintained, planted with every sort of vegetable and fruit and provided with a good range of glass. The owner of the place lived in the château, and his gardener worked on the premises. The dismay of these good people when they were told that the place was to be turned into a battery and the men billeted in the château can better be imagined than described. The owner was a philosopher, and took matters calmly. "Enfin, c'est la guerre, que voulez-vous?" he said sadly as we expressed our horror at the necessity of ruining this little paradise. The gardener was no philosopher, and when I look back upon the mutilated shrubberies, the trodden-down grass plots, the hotbeds with their boarding torn up for revetment, the old wall breached in many places for easy access, the broken panes in the greenhouses and, worst of all, four yawning chasms where once the asparagus, the strawberries and the artichokes dwelt together in amity, I do not wonder at the hostile spirit he displayed. I can see him now dancing round the sergeant-major, an imperturbable person of few words in his own tongue, and of none in French, whom he found cutting a few cabbages for the sergeants' dinner. "Sacré nom d'un cochon, regardez-là le voleur qui arrache mes petits choux! Ah, les anglais sont incroyables!" "No compree," says the sergeant-major, and goes on with his garnering. The gardener got something of his own back that night, however, for the garden had a very complete system of hydrants all over it, which same hydrants our friend stealthily visited with the turn-key, which he then disposed of and departed. It was pitch dark and we were all busy working, so that it was some time before we noticed the gathering floods, and the whole place was inches deep in mud and water by the time that we had discovered how to turn it off again. We never brought the crime home to the criminal, but a certain hidden gleam of triumph in that gardener's wholly disapproving eye has always convinced me of his guilt.
We had much to contend with in occupying that position. Several times we were held up in our work, first by somebody who said the situation was too exposed and that it was sheer suicide to occupy a house that was conspicuous for miles round; then by the urgent representations of a French officer who commanded a battery near by, and who declared that we should draw down fire upon the devoted heads of his people; and finally by a conference who debated for some time whether we were really required in that sector at all. However, we got all these matters satisfactorily settled at last, and set to work in earnest. And digging pits by night in the light of a few hurricane lamps is work indeed, especially if it rains persistently, as it almost invariably does. Unskilful wielders of the pick are apt to drive their lethal weapons into everything but the ground they mean to excavate, their favourite targets being such parts of their neighbours as get in their way. This leads to acrimonious wrangling and consequent delay. Better this, however, than the adventure of one lusty champion, who with a mighty effort drove his pick clean through the cast-iron main that supplied the delinquent hydrants, whereby he converted, in an incredibly short space of time, that half-completed pit into a sea of mud and water some four feet deep. To any one who expresses a fondness for bathing I recommend the plugging of a four-inch main, with a good pressure behind it, lying at the bottom of four feet of a cream-like mixture of chalk, clay and water at three o'clock on an autumn morning.
Geology, we are told, is the science that deals with the constitutents of the earth. A new chapter should be written to the text-books, a new branch of the science has been rendered necessary by the war, the study of the properties of mud. Mud is now elevated to the dignity of a fifth element, but surpasses the other four by its perpetual presence, equalled only by that of the ether which pervades everything we know. Mud shares its motto with the Royal Regiment of Artillery, one lives in it, sleeps in it, and not infrequently eats it—indeed, competent experts with carefully trained palates are said to be able to tell from the flavour of the bacon at breakfast the exact part of the line in which it has been rolled before issue. Surely in all the ancient mythologies some student may find for mud some presiding deity that we may suitably propitiate?