By stealth, by trick and device, by artificial expedients smacking of the allied schools of the housebreaker and the highwayman, things are accomplished that once upon a bygone time eventuated from brawn, plus powder, plus chilled steel. Trench work means setting a man to dig in the mud a hole that may become his grave, and frequently does. He spends his days in a shallow crevice in the earth and his nights in a somewhat deeper one, called a dug-out. He combines in his customary life the habits of the boring grub and the habits of the blind worm, with a touch of the mine mule thrown in.
Once in a while he stings like a puff-adder, but not often. The infantryman plies a spade a week for every hour that he pumps a rifle. The cavalryman is more apt to be driving a truck or tramping long roads than riding a horse. The artilleryman sets up his pieces miles behind the line and fires at the indirect target of an invisible foe, without the poor satisfaction of being able to tell, with his eyes, whether he scored a hit or a miss. A sum in arithmetic is his guide and a telephone operator is his mentor. Mayhap some day a hostile shell descends out of a clear sky upon his battery; and then the men are mess and the guns are scrap and that is all there is to that small chapter of the great tale of the war.
The bomber who spends months learning how to cast the grenade may never get a chance to cast one except in practice. A man fights for his flag but doesn't see it when the action starts, for then it is furled. The regimental band plays him off to church service but not into the battle. When the battle begins the bandmen have exchanged their horns for the handles of a litter, becoming stretcher bearers. The general wears no epaulets. He wears a worried look brought on by dealing o' nights with strategic problems out of a book. The modern thin red line is a thing done in bookkeeper's ink on a ruled form. So it goes. The bubble reputation is won, not at the cannon's mouth, but across a desk top in a shell-proof fox den far from where the cannon are. The gallant six hundred do not ride into the jaws of death. Numbering many times six hundred, they advance afoot, creeping at a pallbearer's pace behind a barrage fire. So it keeps on going.
In only one wing of the service, and that the newest of all the wings, is there to be found a likeness to the chivalry and the showiness of these other times. The aviator is the one exception to a common rule. To him falls the great adventure. He goes jousting in the blue lists of the sky, helmeted and corseleted like a crusader of old. His lance is a spitting machine gun. His steed is a twentieth-century Pegasus, with wings of fine linen and guts of tried steel. Thousands of envying eyes follow him as he steers his single course to wage his single combat, and if he takes his death up there it is a clean, quick, merciful death high above the muck and more and jets of noxious laboratory fumes where the rest take theirs.
Even the surroundings of the birdman's nest are physically nore attractive than the habitat of his brother at arms who bides below. I can think of nothing homelier in outline or colour than the shelters—sometimes of planking, sometimes of corrugated iron, sometimes of earth—in which the soldiers hide here in France. The field hospital is apt to be a distressingly plain structure of unpainted boards with sandbags banked against it.
I have seen a general's headquarters in an underground tunnel that was like an overgrown badger's nest, with nothing outwardly to distinguish it from a similar row of tunnels except that it had a lettered sign over its damp and dripping mouth.
Tents, which have a certain picturesque quality when grouped, are rarely seen here in this closely settled Europe, where nearly always there are enough roofed and walled buildings to provide billets for the troops, however numerous. Instead of tents there are occasionally jumbles of makeshift barracks, and more often haphazard colonies of sheds serving as garages or as supply depots or as offices or as what not. War, which in itself is so ugly a thing, seems to possess the facility of making ugly its accessories before and after the fact.
But the quarters of the flying machines, through their vastness and isolation, acquire a certain quality of catching the eye that is entirely lacking for the rest of the picture—the big hangars in the background, suggesting by their shape and number the pitched encampment of a three-ring circus; the flappy canvas shields at the open side of the dromes, which being streaked and daubed with paint camouflage, enhance the carnival suggestion by looking, at a distance, like side-show banners; the caravans of trucks drawn up in lines; and in fine weather the flying craft resting in the landing field, all slick and groomed and polished, like a landed proprietor's blooded stock, giving off flashes from aluminum and varnish and steel and deft cabinetwork in answer to the caresses of the sunshine.
Right here I am reminded that the temperamental differences of the Allied nations are shown most aptly, I think, in the fashion in which the aviators decorate their gorgeous pets.
Upon its planes, of course, each bears the distinguishing mark of the country to which it belongs, but the bodies are the property, so to speak, of the individual flyers, to be treated according to the fancy of the individual.