“Here are some who have been in France from the first,” said the general, when we came to a battery of field-guns; of the eighteen-pounders, the fellows you see behind the galloping horses, the hell-for-leather guns, the guns which bring the gleam of affection into the eyes of men who think of pursuits and covering retreats and the pitched-battle conditions, before armies settled down in trenches and growled and hissed at each other day after day and brought up guns of calibres which we associate with battleships and coast fortifications.
These are called “light stuff” and “whiz-bangs” now, in army parlance. They throw an eighteen-pound shell which carries three hundred bullets, and so fast that one chases another through the air. There has been so much talk about the need of heavy guns that you might think eighteen-pounders were too small for consideration. Were the German line broken, these are the ones which could follow as rapidly as the engineers could lay bridges for them to cross.
They are the boys who weave the “curtain of fire” which you read about in the French official bulletins as checking an infantry charge; which demolish the barbed-wire entanglements to let an infantry charge get into a trench. If a general wants a shower of bullets over any part of the German line he has only to call up the eighteen-pounders and it is sent as promptly as the pressure of a button brings a pitcher of iced water to a room in a first-class hotel. A veteran eighteen-pounder crew in action is a poem in precision and speed of movement. The gun itself seems to possess intelligence.
There was the finesse of gunners’ craft, worthy of veterans, in the way that these eighteen-pounders were concealed. The Germans had put some shells in the neighbourhood, but without fooling the old hands. They did not change the location of their battery, and their judgment that the shots which came near were chance shots fired at another object was justified. Particularly I should like to mention their “funk pits,” which kept them safe from the heaviest shells. For the veterans knew how to take care of themselves; they had an eye to the protection which comes of experience with German high explosives. Their expert knowledge of all the ins and outs of their business had been fought into them for eleven months.
Another field battery, also, I have in mind, placed in an orchard. Which orchard of all the thousands of orchards along the British front the German Staff may guess, if they choose. If German guns fired at all the orchards, one by one, they might locate it—and then again they might not. Besides, this is a peculiar sort of orchard.
It is a characteristic of gunners to be neat and to have an eye for the comeliness of things. These men had a lawn and a garden and tables and chairs. If you are familiar with the tidiness of a retired New England sailor, who regards his porch as a quarter-deck and sallies forth to remove each descending autumn leaf from the grass, then you know how scrupulous they were about litter.
For weeks they had been in the same position, unseen by German aeroplanes. They had daily baths; they did their week’s washing, taking care not to hang it where it would be visible from the sky. Every day they received London papers and letters from home. When they were needed to help in making war, all they had to do was to slip a shell in the breech and send it with their compliments to the Germans. They were camping out at His Majesty’s expense in the pleasant land of France in the joyous summer time; and on the roof of sods over their guns were pots of flowers, undisturbed by blasts from the gun-muzzles.
It was when leaving another battery that, out of the tail of my eye, I caught a lurid flash through a hedge, followed by the sharp, ear-piercing crack that comes from being in line with a gun-muzzle when a shot is fired. We followed a path which took us to the rear of the report, where, through undergrowth, we stepped among the busy groups around the breeches of some guns of one of the larger calibres.
An order for some “heavy stuff” at a certain point on the map was being filled. Sturdy men were moving in a pantomime under the shade of a willow tree, each doing exactly his part in a process that seemed as simple as opening a cupboard door, slipping in a package of concentrated destruction, and closing the door again. All that detail of range-finding and mathematical adjustment of aim at the unseen target which takes so long to explain was applied as automatically as an adding-machine adds up a column of figures. Everybody was as practice-perfect in his part as performers who have made hundreds of appearances in the same act on the stage.
All ready, the word given, a crack, and through the air in front you saw a wingless, black object rising in a curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose, multiplied by ten, rising to its zenith and then descending till it passed out of sight behind a green bank of foliage on the horizon.