The work of the scout was, of course, to dominate the enemy in No Man’s Land, and to this end he was continually patrolling it during the hours of darkness. Little, as a rule, is done by daylight, though Gaythorne-Hardy, who was Intelligence Officer of the 4th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment, and whom I have referred to before, in order to investigate the German wire under Hill 63, near Messines, decided, after looking at the ground with a telescope, to crawl out by day. The German lines were some three hundred to four hundred yards away. The season was summer, and the grass long. In winter, crawling between the lines was almost impossible, owing to lack of cover.
The officer in question, accompanied by a corporal, crawled right up to the enemy wire, and got all information and a complete plan of the ground and obstacles. It was a task upon which any but a skilled hunter of big game, as my friend is, might easily have given himself away. To crawl across three hundred yards of open ground, with hundreds of German eyes watching for any movement, and bent on investigating any suspicious spot with a machine-gun, calls for courage and good nerve. This officer, however, had examined his route, decided to make the attempt, and he came back successful. He said it was no more difficult than stalking a deer. He was awarded the Military Cross, and the corporal is now a sergeant with the D.C.M.
But not much was done in No Man’s Land in daylight. Snipers lay out in it, and sentries watched it, and both sides sent a deal of lead across it, but when night fell, it became tenanted, and scouts and patrols crawled out into it—and sometimes never came back. The aim, of course, was always domination, and in order to gain domination many strange things were done.
From a drawing by] [Ernest Blaikley.
Night-work in No Man’s Land.
For instance, there was the “Silent Death,” as it was called, invented by the Canadians, who, under cover of darkness, crawled out into No Man’s Land every night, and lay there awaiting the advent of a German patrol. If such came, it was attacked hand to hand with trench daggers, and its members killed as silently as possible. This soon made the Germans very shy of taking their evening crawl, when so many of them who had gone over the top vanished into the darkness and were never heard of again.
At length the Germans almost gave up patrolling in that sector, and one of my officers who used to be in charge of a “Silent Death” party has often told me how dull and chilly were those long and weary waits in the frost or the rain, waiting for Huns who never came.
In trench warfare, No Man’s Land was the cockpit of the war. Some sections of it were more favourable than others for action, but every evening and every night a great number of British used to go out in front. When one first went out, it seemed almost certain that one must be killed. There was a spasmodic sputter of fire from machine-guns, but as an actual matter of fact, moving about in No Man’s Land was much safer than it seemed.
At first our patrols were very haphazard, and you could sometimes hear a private roaring out that a patrol was out, and that it would return at such and such an hour to such and such a point. This was giving away things with a vengeance to any Germans who spoke English, and it sounds almost impossible that it should have been done—yet it was done, and not in isolated cases only.