After the bombing section, we pass with the men to the trenches. Bayonets are drawn and rifles loaded. After firing several rounds, comes the command, "Advance." At a bound they are "over the top" and off, heads down; they run very slowly and keep together. A breathless man who outruns his comrades is useless and is soon killed by the enemy. The drill sergeant shouts to the men "Keep together, keep together, men, one man can't take a trench," and my friend the "padre" notes his words to tell to his congregation when he goes home, where the minister can't do all the work. When they are near the enemy's trench, the final word "Charge" is shouted, the whole line leaps forward with a wild yell, and the bayonets are driven into the stuffed sacks which are suspended as dummies to serve in the place of men.
For miles across the great plain the "Bull Ring" is alive with men. Here in one section they are doing physical drill and learning to go over all kinds of obstacles—trenches, fences, barbed wire, shell holes, and ditches. There they are practicing musketry and advancing under cover. In one place the artillery is in full swing, and in another you hear the sputter of the machine guns. In one section they are taught to dig trenches and in another to take them.
Before a great advance where a system of trenches is to be taken, a "rehearsal" often takes place. From a height of thousands of feet above the lines the aircraft with powerful telescopic cameras photograph every foot of the battlefield covered by the enemy's lines. These photographs are developed and studied and diagrams drawn from them of the enemy's system of trenches. These diagrams are reproduced far behind the front in elaborately prepared earthwork and trenches which are an exact replica of the enemy's lines. The divisions which are to take part in the attack are sent back to rehearse their exact duties at just the point corresponding to that which they will have to take. Each officer knows every nook and crevice, each bay and angle of the trenches he will have to capture. When all is ready the men are placed in their exact positions and they execute in reality what they have rehearsed in theory behind the lines. The lesson of preparedness and organization is studied and mastered with infinite care.
CHAPTER IV
WITH THE BRITISH ARMY
I
In sheltered America we cannot realize what war means, but when we entered the warring countries of Europe, in an instant we were in a different atmosphere. We landed in England upon a darkened coast, we entered a darkened train, where every blind was drawn lest it furnish a guide to London for invading Zeppelins or aeroplanes. We passed through gloomy towns and villages, where not a single light was showing from a window, where every street lamp and railway station was darkened or hidden. Automobiles with a dim spark of light groped through the black streets of the metropolis.
In London we saw a great Zeppelin brought down in flames. It was a sight never to be forgotten. At half-past two in the morning we were awakened by the roar of the anti-aircraft guns in and around the city. After traveling all night from Germany, one Zeppelin had arrived over London and a whole fleet of them was scattered over the coasts and counties of England.
We sprang to the window and found the sky swept by a score of searchlights with their great shafts of piercing light, shooting from the dark depths of the city high into the sky, where they all converged on a single bright object that hung nine thousand feet above us. Long, and shining like silver with its flashing aluminum, the Zeppelin seemed held as if blinded by the fierce light. Bombs were dropping from it and explosions followed in rapid succession in the city beneath.