XVIII
WITH THE GUNS
A war of explosions—And machines—Battle-panorama style—Value of surprise—Ever hungry guns—Accurate or blind and groping guns—Demon guns—Balloon observations—Finding the guns—Ingenious concealments—“Funk pits”—Mechanism—Bookkeeping and trigonometry—“Cover!”—The German aeroplane—New howitzers and their crews—The general—A gun specialist—The “hell-for-leather” guns—The “curtain of fire”—In operation—Spotting the targets—How the system works—A chagrined gunner—A bull’s eye!—The Germans retort—Horrible fascination of war—A queer “refugee”—“Besides, they are women and children.”
It is a war of explosions, from bombs thrown by hand within ten yards of the enemy to shells thrown as far as twenty miles and mines laid under the enemy’s trenches; a war of guns, from seventeen-inch down to three-inch and machine guns; a war of machinery, with man still the pre-eminent machine.
Guns mark the limit of the danger zone. Their screaming shells laugh at the sentries at the entrances to towns and at cross-roads who demand passes of all other travellers. Any one who tried to keep out of range of the guns would never get anywhere near the front. It is all a matter of chance, with long odds or short odds, according to the neighbourhood you are in. If shells come, they come without warning and without ceremony. Nobody is afraid of shells and everybody is—at least, I am.
“Gawd! W’at a ’ole!” remarks Mr. Thomas Atkins casually, at sight of an excavation in the earth made by a thousand-pound projectile.
It is only eighteen years ago that, at the battle of Domoko in the Greco-Turkish war, I saw half a dozen Turkish batteries swing out on the plain of Thessaly, limber up in the open and discharge salvos with black powder, in the good, old, battle-panorama style. One battery of modern field guns unseen would wipe out the lot in five minutes. Only ten years ago, at the battle of Liao-yang, as I watched a cloud of shrapnel smoke sending down steel showers over the little hill of Manjanyama, which sent up showers of earth from shells burst by impact on the ground, a Japanese military attaché remarked:
“There you have a prophecy of what a European war will be like!”
He was right. He knew his business as a military attaché. The voices of the guns along the front seem never silent. In some direction they are always firing. When one night the reports from a certain quarter seemed rather heavy, I asked the reason the next day.