Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilisation, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread. They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only civilised man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted to the cave-dweller’s protection because their civilisation is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing anywhere from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller’s time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target.
An officer calls our attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a Chamber of Commerce pointing out the new Union Station.
“Not even a high explosive”—the kind that bursts on impact after penetration—“could get into that!” he says. “We make them for generals and colonels and those who have precious heads on their shoulders.”
With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers; which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. One never goes up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction represented—the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells. After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dugouts to be ready for another go!
The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dugouts; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer—stormy. The German gunners were “strafing quite lively” this afternoon.
Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance they do not count. Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the track and started to fly. Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dugout Street. I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dugout to pieces. Any one who had never heard a shell before would have “scrooched,” as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judged by the sensation that travels down your backbone.
Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound of it was like the burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling, boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world. A gigantic hammerhead sweeps through the air and breaks a steel drumhead.
If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where, hopefully, we have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks from the concussion.
Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half stumbling into the nearest dugout. He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.
“That must have been about six- or seven-inch,” I said to the officer, trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.