"Is that fuse out?" someone asked.
"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," he replied. "It's safer. But here is the best; we're discarding the others," he went on, as he picked up a bomb.
It was a pleasure to throw this crowning achievement of experiments. It fitted your hand nicely; it threw easily; it did the business; it was fool-proof against a man in love or a war-poet.
"We saw as soon as this style came out," said the sergeant, "that it was bound to be popular. Everybody asks for it—except the Boches, sir."
XXI
My Best Day At The Front
It was the best day because one ran the gamut of the mechanics and emotions of modern war within a single experience—and oh, the twinkle in that staff officer's eye!
It was on a Monday that I first met him in the ballroom of a large château. Here another officer was talking over a telephone in an explicit, businesslike fashion about "sending up more bombs," while we looked at maps spread out on narrow, improvised tables, such as are used for a buffet at a reception. Those maps showed all the British trenches and all the German trenches—spider-weblike lines that cunning human spiders had spun with spades—in that region; and where our batteries were and where some of the German batteries were, if our aeroplane observations were correct.
To the layman they were simply blue prints, such as he sees in the office of an engineer or an architect, or elaborate printed maps with many blue and red pencil-lings. To the general in command they were alive with rifle-power and gun-power and other powers mysterious to us; the sword with which he thrust and feinted and guarded in the ceaseless fencing of trench warfare, while higher authorities than he kept their secrets as he kept his and bided their day.
That morning one of the battalions which had its pencilled place on the map had taken a section of trench from the Germans about the length of two city blocks. It got into the official bulletins of both sides several times, this two hundred yards at Pilken in the everlastingly "hot corner" north of Ypres. So it was of some importance, though not on account of its length. To take two hundred yards of trench because it is two hundred yards of trench is not good war, tacticians agree. Good war is to have millions of shells and vast reserves ready and to go in over a broad area and keep on going night and day, with a Niagara of artillery, as fresh battalions are fed into the conflict.
But the Germans had command of some rising ground in front of the British line at this point. They could fire down and crosswise into our trench. It was as if we were in the alley and they were in a first-floor window. This meant many casualties. It was man-economy and fire- economy to take that two hundred yards. A section of trench may always be taken if worth while. Reduce it to dust with shells and then dash into the breach and drive the enemy back from zigzag traverse to traverse with bombs. But such a small action requires as careful planning as a big operation of other days. We had taken the two hundred yards. The thing was to hold them. That is always the difficulty; for the enemy will concentrate his guns to give you the same dose that you gave him. In an hour after they were in, the British soldiers, who knew exactly what they had to do and how to do it, after months of experience, had turned the wreck of the German trench into a British trench which faced toward Berlin, rather than Calais.