After the scream had been lost to the ear you heard the faint, thudding boom of an explosion from the burst of that conical piece of steel which you had seen slipped into the breech. This was the gunners’ part in chess-board war, where the moves are made over signal wires, while the infantry endure the explosions in their trenches and fight in their charges in the traverses of the trenches at as close quarters as in the days of the cave-dwellers.
There was no stopping work when the general came, of course. It would have been the same had Lord Kitchener been present. The battery commander expressed his regret that he could not show me his guns without any sense of irony; meaning that he was sorry he was too busy to tell me more about his battery. In about the time that it took a telegraph key to click after each one of those distant bursts, he knew whether or not the shot was on the target and what variation of degree to make in the next if it were not; or if the word came to shift the point of aim a little, when you are trying to shake the enemy up here and there along a certain length of trench.
At another wire-end some one was spotting the bursts. Perhaps he was in the kind of place where I once found an observer, who was sitting upon a cushion looking out through a chink broken in a wall, with a signal corps operator near by. It was a small chink, just large enough to allow the lens of a pair of glasses or a telescope a range of vision; and even then I was given certain warnings before the cover over the chink was removed, though there could not have been any German in uniform nearer than four thousand yards. But there may be spies within your own lines, looking for such holes.
From this post I could make out the German and the British trenches in muddy white lines of sandbags running snake-like across the fields, and the officer identified points on the map to me. Every tree and hedge and ditch in the panorama were graven on his mind; all had language for him. His work was engrossing. It had risk, too; there was no telling when a shell might lift him off the cushion and provide a hole for his remains. If he were shelled, the observer would go to a funk pit, as the gunners do, until the storm had passed; and then he would move on with his cushion and his telegraph instrument and make a hole in another wall, if he did not find a tree or some other eminence which suited his taste better. Meanwhile, he was not the only observer in that section. There were others nearer the trenches, perhaps actually in the trenches. The two armies, seeming chained to their trenches, are set with veiled eyes at the end of wires; veiled eyes trying to locate the other’s eyes, the other’s guns and troops, and the least movement which indicates any attempt to gain an advantage.
“Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery officers.
Firing enough one had seen—landscape bathed in smoke and dust and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from the orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show firing, this that we watched from an observing station, but part of the day’s work for the guns and the general. First; the map; “here and there,” as an officer’s finger pointed; and then one looked across the fields, green and brown and golden with summer crops.
Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm. We were going to put some “heavy stuff” in there and some “light stuff,” too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a certain tree.
Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in a certain building. “Heavy stuff” exclusively for this.
No enemy’s wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without interruption; and no German working party ought to be allowed to build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the monotony of their drudgery.
Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them is given by the artillery commander, as a part of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans.