My Year of the Great War

by Frederick Palmer

The staff officer served the three of us with helmets for protection in case we got into a gas attack. He said that we might enter our front trenches at a certain point and then work our way as near the new part as we could; division headquarters, four or five miles distant, would show us the way. It was then that the twinkle in the staff officer’s eye as it looked straight into yours became manifest. You can never tell, I have learned, just what a twinkle in a British staff officer’s eye may portend. These fellows who are promoted up from the trenches to join the “brain-trust” in the château, know a great deal more about what is going on than you can learn by standing in the road far from the front and listening to the sound of the guns. We encountered a twinkle in another eye at division headquarters, which may have been telephoned ahead along with the instructions, “At their own risk.”

There are British staff officers who would not mind pulling a correspondent’s leg on a summer day; though, perhaps, it was really the Germans who pulled ours, in this instance. Somebody did remark at some headquarters, I recall, that, “You never know!” which shows that staff officers do not know everything. The Germans possess half the knowledge—and they are at great pains not to part with their half.

We proceeded in our car along country roads, quiet, normal country roads, off the main highway. It has been written again and again, and it cannot be written too many times, that life is going on as usual in the rear of the army. Nothing could be more wonderful and yet nothing more natural. All the men of fighting age were absent. White-capped grandmothers, too old to join the rest of the family in the fields, sat in doorways sewing. Everybody was at work and the crops were growing. One never tires of remarking the fact. It brings you back from the destructive orgy of war to the simple, constructive things of life. An industrious people go on cultivating the land and the land keeps on producing. It is pleasant to think that the crops of Northern France were good in 1915. That is cheering news from home for the soldiers of France at the front.

At an indicated point we left the car to go forward on foot, and the chauffeur was told to wait for us at another point. If the car went any farther it might draw shell-fire. Army authorities know how far they may take cars with reasonable safety as well as a pilot knows the rocks and shoals at a harbour entrance.

There was an end of white-capped grandmothers in doorways; an end of people working in the fields. Rents in the roofless walls of unoccupied houses stared at the passerby. We were in a dead land. One of two soldiers whom we met coming from the opposite direction pointed at what looked like a small miner’s cabin half covered with earth, screened by a tree, as the next headquarters which we were seeking in our progress.

It was not for sightseers to take the time of the general, who received us at the door of his dugout. The German guns had concentrated on a section of his trenches in a way that indicated that another attack was coming. One company already had suffered heavy losses. It was an hour of responsibility for the general, isolated in the midst of silent fields and houses, waiting for news from a region hidden from his view by trees and hedges in that flat country. He might not move from headquarters, for then he would be out of communication with his command. His men were being pounded by shells and the inexorable law of organisation kept him at the rear. Up in the trench he might have been one helpless human being in a havoc of shells which had cut the wires. His place was where he could be in touch with his subordinates and his superiors.

True, we wanted to go to the trench that the Germans had lost and his section was the short cut. Modesty was not the only reason for not taking it. As we started along a road parallel to the front, the head of a soldier popped out of the earth and told us that orders were to walk in the ditch. One judged that he was less concerned with our fate than with the likelihood of our drawing fire, which he and the others in a concealed trench would suffer after we had passed on.

There were three of us, two correspondents, L—— and myself, and R——, an officer, which is quite enough for an expedition of this kind. Now we were finding our own way, with the help of the large scale army map which had every house, every farm, and every group of trees marked. The farms had been given such names as Joffre, Kitchener, French, Botha, and others which the Germans would not like. One cut across fields with the same confidence that, following a diagram of city streets in a guidebook, he turns to the left for the public library and to the right for the museum.

Our own guns were speaking here and there from their hiding-places; and overhead an occasional German shrapnel burst. This seemed a waste of the Kaiser’s munitions, as there was no one in sight. Yet there was purpose in the desultory scattering of bullets from on high. They were policing the district; they were warning the hated British in reserve not to play cricket in those fields or march along those deserted roads.

The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind. Everything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so important in war before. They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bullet-proof; they are the omnipresent threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and emplaced represents no cost of life to your side, only cost of material; which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine—a machine that money cannot reproduce—that gun machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely as you use city water when you don’t pay for it by metre.