Italy at War and the Allies in the West

by E. Alexander Powell

"Be lavish with your ammunition," Napoleon urged upon his battery commanders. "Fire incessantly." And it is that maxim which the artillerists of all the nations at war are following to-day. The expenditure of shells staggers the imagination. In a single day, near Arras, the French let loose upon the German lines $1,625,000 worth of projectiles, or almost as great a quantity as Germany used in the entire war of 1870-71. Five million shells of all calibers were fired by the British gunners during the first four weeks of the offensive on the Somme. In one week's attack north of Verdun the Germans fired 2,400,000 field-gun shells and 600,000 larger ones. To transport this mountain of potential destruction required 240 trains, each carrying 200 tons of projectiles.

During the "Big Push" on the Somme, there were frequently eighty guns on a front of two hundred yards. The batteries would fire a round per gun per minute for days on end, the gunners working in shifts, two hours on and two hours off. So thickly did the shells fall upon the German lines that the British observing officers were frequently unable to spot their own bursts. A field-battery of eighteen-pounders firing at this rate will blaze away anywhere from twelve to twenty tons of ammunition a day. As guns firing with such rapidity wear out their tubes and their springs in a few days, it is necessary to rush entire batteries to the repair-shops at the rear. And that provides another burden for the railways.

In addition to the railways of standard gauge, the British have laid down an astonishing trackage of narrow-gauge, Décauville, and monorail systems. These portable and easily laid field railways twist and turn and coil like snakes among the gun positions, the miniature engines, with their strings of toy cars, puffing their way into the heart of the artillery zone, where the ammunition is unloaded, sorted, and classified in calibers, and then artfully hidden from the prying eyes of enemy aviators and from their bombs. These great collections of gun-food the English inelegantly term "ammunition dumps." Nor do the trains that come up loaded go back empty, for upon the miniature trucks are loaded the combings of the battle-field to be shipped back to the "economy shops" in the rear. Where possible, wounded men are sent back to the hospitals in like fashion, some of the railways having trucks specially constructed for this purpose. Where the light railways stop the monorail systems begin, food, cartridges, and mail being sent right up into the forward trenches in small cars or baskets suspended from a single overhead rail and pushed by hand. They look not unlike the old-fashioned cash-and-parcel carriers which were used in American department stores before the present system of pneumatic tubes came in.

Comprising another branch of the L. C.'s multifarious activities are the field telephones, whose lines of black-and-white poles run out across the landscape in every direction. And it is no haphazard and hastily improvised system either, but as good in every respect as you will find in American cities. It has to be good. Too much depends upon it. An indistinct message might cost a thousand lives; a break-down in the system might mean a great military disaster. Every officer of importance in the British zone has a telephone at hand, and as the armies advance the telephones go with them, the wires and portable instruments being transported by the motor-cycle despatch riders of the Army Signal Corps, so that frequently within thirty minutes after a battalion has captured a German position its commander will be in telephonic communication with Advanced G. H. Q. The speed with which the connections are made would be remarkable even in New York. I have seen an officer at General Headquarters establish communication with the Provost Marshal's office in Paris in three minutes, and with the War Office in London in ten.

I might mention in passing that nowadays the General Headquarters of an army (G. H. Q. it is always called on the British front, Grand Quartier-Général on the French, and Comando Supremo on the Italian) is usually eight, ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty-five miles behind the firing-line. Most of the commanding generals have, however, advanced headquarters, considerably nearer the front, where they usually remain during important actions. It is said that at Waterloo Napoleon and Wellington watched each other through their telescopes. Compare this with the battle for Verdun, where the headquarters of the Crown Prince must have been at least thirty miles from those of General Nivelle at Souilly.

If one of the greatest triumphs of the war is the creation of the transport system, another is the maintenance, often under heavy shell-fire, of the highways on which that transport moves. No one can imagine what the traffic from the Channel up to the British front is like; one must see it to believe it. The roads are as crowded with traffic as is Fifth Avenue on a sunny afternoon. Every fifty yards or so are military police, mounted and afoot, who control the traffic with small red flags as do the New York bluecoats with their stop-and-go signs. So incredibly dense was the volume of traffic during the Somme offensive that it is little exaggeration to say that an active man could have started immediately back of the British front and could have made his way to Albert, twenty miles distant, if not, indeed, to the English Channel, by jumping from lorry to wagon, from wagon to ambulance, from ambulance to motor-bus. In going from Albert up to the front I passed hundreds, yes, thousands of lumbering motor-lorries bearing every kind of supply from barbed wire to marmalade. In order to avoid confusion, the lorries belonging to the ammunition-train have painted on their sides a shell, while those comprising the supply column are designated by a four-leaf clover. A whole series of other distinctive emblems, such as stars, crescents, pyramids, Maltese crosses, unicorns, make it possible to tell at a glance to what division or unit a vehicle belongs. I passed six-mule teams from Missouri and Mississippi hauling wagons made in South Bend, Indiana, which were piled high with sides of Australian beef and loaves of French-made bread. Converted motor-buses, which had once borne the signs Bank-Holborn-Marble Arch, rumbled past with their loads of boisterous men in khaki bound for the trenches or bringing back other loads of tired men clad apparently in nothing save mud. Endless strings of ambulances went rocking and rolling by and some of them were dripping crimson. Tractors, big as elephants, panted and grunted on their way, hauling long trains of wagons laden with tins of cocoa or condensed milk, with kegs of nails, with lumber, with fodder. Occasionally a gray staff-car like our own threaded its tortuous and halting way through the terrific press of traffic. We passed one that had broken down. The two officers who were its occupants were seated on the muddy bank beside the road smoking cigarettes while the driver was endeavoring to get his motor started again. One of them, on the shoulder-straps of whose "British warm" were the stars of a captain, was a slender, fair-haired, rather delicate-looking youngster in the early twenties. It was the Prince of Wales, but, so far as receiving any attention from the hurrying throng was concerned, he might as well have been an unknown subaltern. For it is an extremely democratic army, and royalty receives from it scant consideration; Lloyd George is of far more importance than King George to the man in khaki.

Almost since the beginning of the war this particular stretch of road on which I was travelling had been shelled persistently, as was shown by the splintered tree-stumps which lined the road and the shell-craters which pitted the fields on either side. To keep this road passable under such wear and tear as it had been subjected to for many months would have been a remarkable accomplishment under any circumstances; to keep it open under heavy shell-fire is a performance for which the labor battalions deserve the highest praise. Wearing their steel helmets, the road-making gangs have kept at work, night and day, along its entire length, exposed to much of the danger of the men in the trenches, and having none of their protection. There has been no time to obtain ordinary road metal, so they have filled up the holes with bricks taken from the ruined villages which dot the landscape, rolling them level when they get the chance. For nothing must be permitted to interfere with that flow of traffic; on it depends the food for the men and for the guns. An hour's blockade on that road would prove infinitely more serious than would a freight wreck which blocked all four tracks of the New York Central. No wonder that Lord Derby, in addressing his Pioneer Battalions in Lancashire, remarked: "In this war the pick and the shovel are as important as the rifle."

While I was standing on the summit of a little eminence beyond Fricourt, looking down on that amazing scene of industry, a big German shell burst squarely on the road. It wrecked a motor-lorry, it killed several horses and half a dozen men, but, most serious of all, it blew in the road a hole as large as a cottage cellar. The river of traffic may have halted for two or three minutes, certainly not more. In scarcely more time than it takes to tell it, the nearest military police were on the spot. The stream of vehicles bound for the front was swung out into the fields at the right, the stream headed for the rear was diverted into the fields at the left. Within five minutes a hundred men were at work with pick and shovel filling up the hole with material piled at frequent intervals along the road for just that purpose. Within twenty minutes a steam-roller had arrived—goodness knows where it had materialized from!—and was at work rolling the road into hardness. Within thirty minutes after the shell burst the hole which it made no longer existed and the lorries, the tractors, the wagons, the guns, the buses, the ambulances were rolling on their way. Then they bore away the six tarpaulin-covered forms beside the road and buried them.

The weather is a vital factor in war. The heavy rains of a French winter quickly transform the ground, already churned up by months of shell-fire, into a slimy, glutinous swamp, incredibly tenacious and unbelievably deep. Through this vast stretch of mud, pitted everywhere with shell-holes filled with stagnant water, the infantry has to make its way and the guns have to be moved forward to support the infantry. On one stretch of road, only a quarter of a mile long, on the Somme, twelve horses sank so deeply in the mud that it was impossible to extricate them and they had to be shot. No wonder that the soldiers, going up to the trenches, prefer to leave their overcoats and blankets behind and face the misery of wet and cold rather than be burdened with the additional weight while struggling through the molasses-like mire. The only thing that they take up to the trenches which could by any stretch of the imagination be described as a comfort is whale-oil, carried in great jars, with which they rub their feet several times daily in order to prevent "trench feet." If you want to get a real idea of what the British infantryman has to endure during at least six months of the year, I would suggest that you strap on a pack-basket with a load of forty-two pounds, which is the weight of the British field equipment, tramp for ten hours through a ploughed field after a heavy rain, jump in a canal, and, without removing your clothes or boots, spend the night on a manure-pile in a barnyard. Then you will understand why soldiers become so heedless of gas, bullets, and shells. But with it all the British soldier remains incorrigibly cheerful. He is a born optimist and he shows it in his songs. Away back in the early months of the war he went into action to the lilt of "Tipperary." The gloom and depression of that first terrible winter induced in him a more serious mood, to which he gave vent in "Onward, Christian Soldiers." But now he feels that victory, though still far off, is certain, and he puts his confidence into words: "Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile," "Keep the Home Fires Burning," "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," and "Hallelujah! I'm a Hobo!" The latter very popular. Then there was another, adapted by the Salvation Army from an old music-hall tune, which I heard a battalion chanting lustily as it went slush-slushing up to the firing-line. It ran something like this: