THE UPPER HAND
In these better days it is no harm to speak of the time when the Marne had been won and yet our Army in France was within an inch of its life. The thread of its fate had frayed very thin; only one strand remained; at last, not even that—what had taken its place was a gallant sham, a last forlorn bluff, scarcely a hope. And then came the ancient reward of those who fight on without hope. Like a storm that had blown itself out, the strain was suddenly gone. The strong had not known all their strength, the weak had steadfastly hidden their weakness, and they had worn out the strong.
That extreme peril has never recurred. But there were months in 1915 when men in our trenches still felt that the upper hand was not theirs. What would happen was this. Once or twice in the day the Germans, after their meals, would spray a piece of our trench with trench-mortar bombs and rifle-grenades. As a rule they did not mean to attack, in the fuller sense. The piece was not an overture; it was complete in itself; a sort of isolated pas d’intimidation. Not many men on our side would be killed. But, while the shower went on, everyone on duty in our firing trench felt with crystal clearness that he was on the defensive. At each fresh discharge he would plaster himself upon the front wall of the trench and gaze upwards for the coming evil. If he saw the approaching waddle of a trench-mortar bomb, wagging its tail through the air, he would judge it like a catch in the long field, only with an ardent desire to miss it; and to this end he would jump round corners of trench and put solid angles of earth between him and the large muted sound like “pfloonk” that was to ensue. If what he heard was the thin hiss or spit of a rifle grenade, then he knew that it could not be seen, and he kept his head down and wondered how near the venomous little metallic smash of the burst would be. In any case he was bespattered, throughout the bombardment, with little falling bits of earth, warm metals and products of combustion; the tinkling of this hail on his helmet deepened his rueful sense of resemblance to a hen crouching under the lee of a hedge in bad weather. And, all this time, our own mortars and guns would be silent or—almost worse than silence itself—would reply with the mildness of Sterne’s patient ass. “Please do not shell our front trench. But, if you want to, you may,” so they seemed to be saying.
From these mortifications the men in the firing trench, and the gunners who had endured the sharper torment of not being able to help them, were saved by the women, whom Mr. Bone shows us working at home, arming their knights for battle in a sense more valid than any known to Froissart or Malory. There came a time, most moving and memorable to all who were then in our trenches, when any German attempt to gall them began to evoke new, heart-warming sounds. All the upper air, over the place where the pelted sentries were crouching, seemed to have come to life on our side. At last our own trench mortars were answering, not in a few grudged monosyllables, but volubly, out of the fulness of the dump. Higher up also, there rose arch over arch, as it were, of audible, reassuring protection—first the low-pitched bridges of sound traced by the whizz of our field guns, and then the vast rainbow curve of our heavier shells making wing, high over head, with a more august, leisurely waft that sounded divinely. It was a changed and cheered world to be living in. We had the upper hand now, and every woman turning a shell or driving a crane in England had helped us to have it.
We have it now still more securely. Since that time we have learnt the technique of attack—how to keep what we take and how to take what we want at no more than it need cost in lives. We have won, in hard fight, the best of all posts of observation—the sky, so that during the great engagements last year on the Somme there was not a German aeroplane to be seen in the air while ours were ranging everywhere over the battlefield, each with its eyes on the enemy’s lines and its voice at the ear of our guns. Our men and the gunners have now crossed bayonets so often that all the old awe in which Europe held the men of Sedan and Sadowa is gone; boys from Wiltshire and Worcestershire farms, recruits of a few months before, have chased Prussian guardsmen uphill out of their trenches and then held these ruined defences against all that those picked products of intensive military culture could do to regain them.
All this turning of tables has been brought about by one cause, in the sense that if that cause had been absent, the care and skill of the finest leaders, the daring of all our airmen, the staunchness of all our infantry would have been strength to no purpose. Munition workers have woven the curtain of smoke that our gunners now draw between our advancing troops and the eyes of their enemy. It is munitions that, thrown from our howitzers, make level roads through the tangles of wire on which, in the old days, the corpses of whole platoons of our men were hung up to rot and look, from far off, like washing put out to dry on thorned hedges. It is munitions that, when we attack, hold back the hostile supports behind a wall of falling bullets as hard to pass as Adam found the flaming sword at the gate. It is, then, not without reason that in this sheaf of drawings of the war on the Western front are included some drawings of guns and shells in the making. They are drawings of victory in the making, and of the saving of hundreds of thousands of British lives.