“We found the mother wild out there in the woods,” one of the men explained. “She, too, was a victim of war; a refugee from some home destroyed by shell-fire. At first she wouldn’t let us approach her, and we tossed her pieces of meat from a safe distance. I think those pups will bring us luck. We’ll take them along to the Rhine. Some mascots, eh?”
On our way back to the general’s headquarters we must have passed other batteries hidden from sight only a stone’s throw away; and yet in an illustrated paper recently I saw a drawing of some guns emplaced on the crest of a bare hill, naked to all the batteries of the enemy but engaged in destroying all the enemy’s batteries, according to the account. Eleven months of war have not shaken conventional ideas about gunnery; which is one reason for writing this chapter.
Also, on our way back we learned the object of the German fire in answer to our bombardment of the redoubt and the wireless station. They had shelled a cross-roads and a certain village again. As we passed through the village we noticed a new hole in the church tower and three holes in the churchyard, which had scattered clods of earth about the pavement. A shopkeeper across the street was engaged in repairing a window-frame that had been broken by a shell-fragment.
There is no flustering the French population. That very day I heard of an old peasant, who asked a British soldier if he could not get permission for the old man to wear some kind of an armband which both sides would respect, so that he could cut his field of wheat between the trenches. Why not? Wasn’t it his wheat? Didn’t he need the crop?
The Germans fire into villages and towns; for the women and children there are the women and children of the enemy. But those in the German lines belong to the ally of England. Besides, they are women and children. So British gunners avoid the towns—which is, in one sense, a professional handicap.
XIX
ARCHIBALD THE ARCHER
The anti-aeroplane gun—Tricks of the trade—The vagabond of the army lines—Before the days of Archibald—Pie for the Taube—“Swaggerest” of the gun tribe—Sport of war—Puffs in the blue—Difficulty of accuracy—“Sending the prying aerial eye home”—The business of planes.
There is another kind of gun, vagrant and free lance, which deserves a chapter by itself. It has the same bark as the eighteen-pounder field piece; the flight of the shell makes the same kind of sound. But its scream, instead of passing in a long parabola toward the German lines, goes up in the heavens toward something as large as your hand against the light blue of the summer sky—a German aeroplane.