“No, not very heavy. No attack,” a division staff officer explained. “The Boches had been building a redoubt and we turned on some h. e. s.”—meaning high explosive shells.
Night after night, under cover of darkness, the Germans had been labouring on that redoubt, thinking that they were unobserved. They had kept extremely quiet, too, slipping their spades into the earth softly and hammering a nail ever so lightly; and, of course, the redoubt was placed behind a screen of foliage which hid it from the view of the British trenches. Such is the hide-and-seek character of modern war. What the German builders did not know was that a British aeroplane had been watching them day by day and that the spot was nicely registered on a British gunner’s map. On this map it was a certain numbered point. Press a button, as it were, and you ring the bell with a shell at that point. The gunners waited till the house of cards was up before knocking it to pieces.
Surprise is the thing with the guns. A town may go for weeks without getting a single shell. Then it may get a score in ten minutes; or it may be shelled regularly every day for weeks. “They are shelling X again,” or, “They have been leaving Z alone for a long time,” is a part of the gossip up and down the line. Towns are proud of having escaped altogether and proud of the number and size of the shells received.
“Did you get any?” I asked the division staff officer, who had told me about the session the six-inch howitzers had enjoyed. A common question that, at the front, “Did you get any?” (meaning Germans). A practical question, too. It has nothing to do with the form of play or any bit of sensational fielding; only with the score, with results, with casualties.
“Yes, quite a number,” said the officer. “Our observer saw them lying about.”
The guns are watching for targets at all hours—the ever hungry, ever ready, murderous, cunning, quick, scientifically calculating, marvellously accurate, and also the guessing, wondering, blind, groping, helpless, guns, which toss their steel messengers over streams, woodlands, and towns, searching for their unseen prey in a wide landscape.
Accurate and murderous they seem when you drop low behind a trench wall or huddle in a dugout as you hear an approaching scream, and the earth trembles, the air is wracked by a concussion, and the cry of a man a few yards away tells of a hit. Very accurate when still others, sent from muzzles six or seven thousand yards away, fall in that same line of trench! Very accurate when, before an infantry attack, with bursts of shrapnel bullets they cut to bits the barbed-wire entanglements in front of a trench! The power of chaos that they seem to possess when the fighting-trench and the dugouts and all the human warrens which protect the defenders are beaten as flour is kneaded!
Blind and groping they seem when a dozen shells fall harmlessly in a field; when they send their missiles toward objects which may not be worth shooting at; when no one sees where the shells hit and the amount of damage they have done is guesswork; and helpless without the infantry to protect them, the aeroplanes and the observers to see for them.
One thinks of them as demons with subtle intelligence and long reach, their gigantic fists striking here and there at will, without a visible arm behind the blow. An army guards against the blows of an enemy’s demons with every kind of cover, every kind of deception, with all resources of scientific ingenuity and invention; and an army guards its own demons in their lairs as preciously as if they were made of some delicate substance which would go up in smoke at a glance from the enemy’s eye, instead of having barrels of the strongest steel that can be forged.
Your personal feeling for the demons on your side is in ratio to the amount of hell sent by the enemy’s which you have tasted. After you have been scared stiff, while pretending that you were not, by sharing with Mr. Atkins an accurate bombardment of a trench and are convinced that the next shell is bound to get you, you fall into the attitude of the army. You want to pat the demon on the back and say, “Nice old demon!” and watch him toss a shell three or four miles into the German lines from the end of his fiery tongue. Indeed, nothing so quickly develops interest in the British guns as having the German gunners take too much personal interest in you.