For the fact of the matter is that once the novelty of his new environment has worn off—and it does wear off with marvellous speed—the soldier in the front-line trench carries on after identically the same patterns that would govern him under ordinary circumstances. The detail that he is in a place of imminent danger becomes to him of secondary importance. Except for the chance that any moment he may stop a bullet his mode of habit resolves itself back to its familiar elements. He is bored or he is interested by exactly the same things that would bore him or excite him anywhere else. To him the shooting back and forth across the top very soon becomes a more or less tedious part of the daily routine of the trench life, but the intrusion into his corner of a moving-picture man with a camera is a novelty, an event very much out of the ordinary; therefore he pays much more attention to the taking of the picture than to what goes on pretty steadily during practically all of his waking hours.
For added qualities of seeming indifference to externals in the midst of great and stirring exertions, see the artillerymen who serve with the heavies. Generally things are fairly lively among those dainty, darling, death-dealing pets that are called the 75's. Under their camouflaging they look like speckled pups when they do not look like spotted circus ponies. It is a brisksome and a heartening thing to see how fast a crew of Frenchmen can serve a battery of these little pintos, feeding the three-inch shells into the pieces with such celerity that at a distance the reports merge together so one might almost imagine he heard the voice of an overgrown machine gun speaking, instead of the intermingled voices of five separate trouble makers. Near Compiègne one day I watched a battery of 75's at work on the Germans advancing in mass formation, I keeping count of the reports; and the average number of shots per minute per gun was twelve.
But the heavies work more slowly, and their crews have a sluggish look about them as befitting men who do their fighting all at long range and never see the foe; though I suspect the underlying reason to be that they have learned to combine the maximum of efficiency and of accuracy with the minimum of apparent effort and the minimum of apparent enthusiasm. Particularly is this to be said in cases where the gunners have become expert through long practice.
On the Montdidier Front on a gloriously beautiful afternoon of early summer I kept company for two hours with three French batteries of 155's. The guns were ranged in dirt emplacements under a bank alongside a sunken road that meandered out from the main street of a village that was empty except for American and French soldiers. The Germans were four miles away, beyond a ridge of low hills. By climbing to the crest of the nearermost rise and lying there in the rank grass and looking through glasses one could make out the German lines. Without glasses one could mark fairly well where the shells from our side fell. But during the time I stayed there no single man among the artillerymen manifested any desire whatsoever to ascertain the visible effects of his handiwork.
Over the ground telephone an order would come from somewhere or other, miles away. The officer in command of one of the batteries would sing out the order to fire so many rounds at such and such intervals. The angles—the deflections for charge temperature, air temperature, barometer pressure and wind—had all been worked out earlier in the day, and a few corrections for range were required. So all the men had to do was to fire the guns. And that literally was all that they did do.
Not all the explosions in that immediate vicinity were caused by “departs,” either. Occasionally there were to be heard the unmistakable whistle and roar and the ultimate crack of an “arrive,” for the Germans' counterbatteries did not remain silent under the punishment the French were dealing out. But when an arrive fell anywhere within eye range the men barely turned their heads to see the column of earth and dust and pulverised chalk-rock go geysering up into the air. It was only by chance I found out an enemy shell had fallen that morning among a gun crew stationed near the westerly end of the line of guns, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, and had blown seven men to bits and wounded as many more.
Still, this apathy with regard to the potential consequences of being where an arrive bursts is not confined to the gunners. When one has had opportunity to see how many shells fall without doing any damage to human beings, and to figure out for oneself how many tons of metal it takes to kill a man, one likewise acquires a measure of this same apparent nonchalance.
For sheer sang-froid it would be hard to match those whose work I watched that day. In intervals of activity they lounged under the gun wheels, smoking and playing card games; and when one battery was playing and another temporarily was silent the members of the idle battery paid absolutely no heed to the work of their fellows.
In two hours just one thing and only one thing occurred to jostle them out of their calm. Something mysterious and very grievous befell a half-grown dog, which, having been abandoned or forgotten by his owners, still lived on in the ruins of the town and foraged for scraps among the mess kitchens. Down the road past the guns came the pup, ki-yiing his troubles as he ran; and at the sound of his poignant yelps some of the gunners quit their posts and ran out into the road, and one of them gathered up the poor beastie in his arms and a dozen more clustered about offering the consolation of pats and soothing words to the afflicted thing. Presently under this treatment he forgot what ailed him, and then the men went back to their places, discussing the affair with many gestures and copious speech. Ten German shells plumping down near by would not have created half so much excitement as the woes of one ownerless doggie had created. I said to myself that if the incident was typically French, likewise it was typical of what might be called the war temperament as exemplified among veteran fighters.
I should add, merely to fill out the settings of the scene, that scarcely was there a ten-minute interlude this day in which German observation planes did not scout over our lines or French observation planes did not scout over theirs. Sometimes only a single plane would be visible, but more often the airmen moved in squadron formations. Each time of course that a plane ventured aloft its coursing flight across the heavens would be marked by bursting pompons of downy white or black smoke—white for shrapnel and black for explosive bursts—where the antiaircraft guns of one side or the other took wing shots at the pesky intruder. One time six sky voyagers were up simultaneously. Another time ten, and still another no less than sixteen might be counted at once. But to focus the attention of any of the persons then upon the earth below, an aërial combat between the two groups would have been required, and even this spectacle—which at the first time of witnessing it is almost the most stirring isolated event that military operations have to offer—very soon, with daily repetitions, becomes almost commonplace, as I myself can testify. War itself is too big a thing for one detached detail of it to count in the estimates that one tries to form of the whole thing. It takes a charge in force over the top or something equally vivid and spectacular to whet up the jaded mentality of the onlooker.