My Second Year of the War

by Frederick Palmer

The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host. He was putting his "bit," as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit village and the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the darkness was through great flashes of light which announced the bursting of a fifteen-hundred-pound shell that had gone hurtling through the air with its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to the Ridge was merged in the blanket of night. Out of it came the regular flashes of guns for a while as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before the attack.

Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries that had found nesting places among the débris. The whole slope had become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of reckoning had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around us and behind us as usual, in a battle of competitive crashes among themselves, and near by we saw the figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird lightning glow, which might include the horses of a caisson in a flicker of distinct silhouette flashed out of the night and then lost in the night, with the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every voice had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry at "zero."

The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd—anything you wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.

It was still dark when three-thirty came and pyrotechnics were added to the display, which I could not think of as being in any sense pyrotechnical, when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's surface in the direction of some new manoeuver appeared showers of glowing red sparks, which rose to a height of a hundred feet with a breadth of thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One shower was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells.

It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy. No imaginative translation to space could hold any longer. With the charge going in, the intimate human element was supreme. The thought of those advancing waves of men in the darkness made the fiery display a dissociated objective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares rose and those illumining the dark masses of foliage must be Bazentin Wood gained, and those beyond must be in the Bazentin villages, Little Bazentin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, like most of the villages, numbering a dozen to fifty houses could be much smaller and be called villages.

This was all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be true. And that hateful Trônes Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal?

Our suspense was intensified by the thought that this action might be the turning-point in the first stage of the great Somme battle. We strained our eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies the sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar as indicative of results. There was a good augury in the comparatively slight German shell fire in response, though we were reminded that it might at any minute develop with sudden ferocity.

Now the flashes of the guns grew dim. A transformation more wonderful than artillery could produce, that of night into day, was in process. Not a curtain but the sun's ball of fire, undisturbed by any efforts of the human beings on a few square miles of earth, was holding to his schedule in as kindly a fashion as ever toward planets which kept at a respectful distance from his molten artillery concentration.

Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared the great welts of chalk of the main line trenches, then the lesser connecting ones; the woods became black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, still and dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the villages, until finally all the conformations of the scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the first fresh light of a brilliant summer's day. Where the blazes had been was the burst of black smoke from shells and we saw that it was still German fire along the visible line of the British objective, assuring us that the British had won the ground which they had set out to take and were holding it.

"Up and at them!" had done the trick this time, and trick it was; a trick or stratagem, to use the higher sounding word; a trick in not waiting on the general attack for the taking of Trônes according to obvious tactics, but including Trônes in the sweep; a trick in the daring way that the infantry was sent in ahead of the answering German curtain of fire.