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 dug-out. 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.
"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.
This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the experiences there are—but only "close." A delightful word that word close, at the front!
The Germans were generous that afternoon. Another scream seemed aimed at my head. L——— disagreed with me; he said that it was aimed at his. We did not argue the matter to the point of a personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads. It burst back of the trench about as far away as the other shell. After all, a trench is a pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner's large scale map, to hit. It is wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at all.
This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being. We got some fours and fives as we walked along. Three bursting as near together as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk. Then the thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line. Only, unlike the thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and yet again over its path. All depends upon the decision of a German artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.
We were glad to turn out of the support trench into a communication trench leading toward the front trench; into another gallery cut deep in the fields, with scattered shell-pits on either side. Still more soldiers, leaning against the walls or seated with their legs stretched out across the bottom of the ditch; more waiting soldiers, only strung out in a line and as used to the passing of shells as people living along the elevated railroad line to the passing of trains. They did not look up at the screams boring the air any more than one who lives under the trains looks up every time that one passes. Theirs was the passivity of a queue waiting in line before the entrance to a theatre or a ball- grounds.
A senator or a lawyer, used to coolness in debate, or to presiding over great meetings, or to facing crowds, who happened to visit the trenches could have got reassurance from the faces of any one of these private soldiers, who had been trained not to worry about death till death came. Harrowing every one of these screams, taken by itself. Instinctively, unnecessarily, you dodged at those which were low—unnecessarily, because they were from British guns. No danger from them unless there was a short fuse. To the soldiers, the low screams brought the delight of having blows struck from their side at the enemy, whom they themselves could not strike from their reserve position.
For we were under the curving sweep of both the British and the German shells, as they passed in the air on the way to their targets. It was like standing between two railway tracks with trains going in opposite directions. You came to differentiate between the multitudinous screams. "Ours!" you exclaimed, with the same delight as when you see that your side has the ball. The spirit of battle contest rose in you. There was an end of philosophy. These soldiers in the trenches were your partisans. Every British shell was working for them and for you, giving blow for blow.
The score of the contest of battle is in men down; in killed and wounded. For every man down on your side you want two men down on the enemy's. Sport ceases. It is the fight against a burglar with a revolver in his hand and a knife between his teeth; and a wounded man brought along the trench, a visible, intimate proof of a hit by the enemy, calls for more and harder blows.