A Minstrel in France

by Sir Harry Lauder

It was cruel business to be knocking the towns and factories of our ally, France, to bits in the fashion that we were doing that day— there and at many another point along the front. The Huns are fond of saying that much of the destruction in Northern France has been the work of allied artillery. True enough—but who made that inevitable And it was not our guns that laid waste a whole countryside before the German retreat in the spring of 1917, when the Huns ran wild, rooting up fruit trees, cutting down every other tree that could be found, and doing every other sort of wanton damage and mischief their hands could find to do.

"Hard lines," said the battery commander. He shrugged his shoulders.
"No use trying to spare shells here, though, even on French towns.
The harder we smash them the sooner it'll be over. Look here, sir."

He pointed out the men who sat, their telephone receivers strapped over their ears. Each served a gun. In all that hideous din it was of the utmost importance that they should hear correctly every word and figure that came to them over the wire—a part of that marvelously complete telephone and telegraph system that has been built for and by the British army in France.

"They get corrections on every shot," he told me. "The guns are altered in elevation according to what they hear. The range is changed, and the pointing, too. We never see old Fritz—but we know he's getting the visiting cards we send him."

They were amazingly calm, those laddies at the telephones. In all that hideous, never-ending din, they never grew excited. Their voices were calm and steady as they repeated the orders that came to them. I have seen girls at hotel switchboards, expert operators, working with conditions made to their order, who grew infinitely more excited at a busy time, when many calls were coming in and going out. Those men might have been at home, talking to a friend of their plans for an evening's diversion, for all the nervousness or fussiness they showed.

Up there, on the Pimple, I had seen Normabell, the eyes of the battery. Here I was watching its ears. And, to finish the metaphor, to work it out, I was listening to its voice. Its brazen tongues were giving voice continually. The guns—after all, everything else led up to them. They were the reason for all the rest of the machinery of the battery, and it was they who said the last short word.

There was a good deal of rough joking and laughter in the battery. The Canadian gunners took their task lightly enough, though their work was of the hardest—and of the most dangerous, too. But jokes ran from group to group, from gun to gun. They were constantly kidding one another, as an American would say, I think. If a correction came for one gun that showed there had been a mistake in sighting after the last orders—if, that is, the gunners, and not the distant observers, were plainly at fault—there would be a good-natured outburst of chaffing from all the others.

But, though such a spirit of lightness prevailed, there was not a moment of loafing. These men were engaged in a grim, deadly task, and every once in a while I would catch a black, purposeful look in a man's eyes that made me realize that, under all the light talk and laughter there was a perfect realization of the truth. They might not show, on the surface, that they took life and their work seriously. Ah, no! They preferred, after the custom of their race, to joke with death.

And so they were doing quite literally. The Germans knew perfectly well that there was a battery somewhere near the spot where I had found my gunners. Only the exact location was hidden from them, and they never ceased their efforts to determine that. Fritz's airplanes were always trying to sneak over to get a look. An airplane was the only means of detection the Canadians feared. No—I will not say they feared it! The word fear did not exist for that battery! But it was the only way in which there was a tolerable chance, even, for Fritz to locate them, and, for the sake of the whole operation at that point, as well as for their own interest, they were eager to avoid that.

German airplanes were always trying to sneak over, I say, but nearly always our men of the Royal Flying Corps drove them back. We came as close, just then, to having command of the air in that sector as any army does these days. You cannot quite command or control the air. A few hostile flyers can get through the heaviest barrage and the staunchest air patrol. And so, every once in a while, an alarm would sound, and all hands would crane their necks upward to watch an airplane flying above with an iron cross painted upon its wings.