With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

A bombardment like this makes men optimistic. The infantry, waiting in the paling darkness before dawn for the preliminary bombardment to do its work, were elated as the heavy shells went plumping into the German trenches, as the curtain of smoke from the high-explosive drifted thicker and thicker in the twilight.

The men’s comments were fierce and heartfelt. “Ah! they’re getting it at last, the ——s! That’ll learn ’em! Boom!” (as a shell exploded with a deafening crash). And when the storming-party went forward it was irresistible. The men “had their tails up,” as the army says. Not only did they hurl the Germans out of their trenches, but they held the positions. Every time the Germans massed for a counter-attack our guns were ready for them, and swept the attack away before it had properly developed.

I was able to appreciate the elation of the men who fought at Hooge, because I had already seen, in past months, the evil effects of the shortage of shells. As I talked to these gallant fellows, full of their stories of the fight, I kept thinking of a position I had visited months before where, day after day, the Germans kept up an almost incessant bombardment with shells of all calibres. As so much of their strategy, their action was aimed at achieving a moral effect, like their senseless raids on undefended English seaside resorts. At this particular position they had no chance of breaking through our line, yet, so much do they believe in the effect of high-explosives in undermining the moral of troops, that they fired away ammunition from their guns in the most reckless fashion.

I spent an afternoon in a dug-out there with a Colonel, a fine, hearty body of a man, while the shells passed almost continuously over our heads or burst noisily, with whizzing fragments of hot metal, in our immediate vicinity. He expressed himself very sagely on this question of shells. “Of course,” he said, “perpetual bombardment like this is a great strain on the men. But they are stout fellows, and they stand it all right. What does upset them, though, is the silence of our guns. My men see that a little energy on the part of our guns promptly reduces the Germans to silence. If we give the Germans shot for shot, and sometimes, for a change, two shells to their one, they become as meek as lambs. What my men lack is the heartening sound of our own shells. When our guns do retaliate, their fire is feeble, and soon dies away. A well-fed man is a better fighter than a fellow with an empty belly. So troops who know that they have the weight of metal behind them may be counted upon to make a better showing than men who feel that they are not properly supported.”

But I do not intend to go further into the shell controversy here. Hooge showed us that the tide has turned. The shells which our guns fired that day were better than anything the gunners had ever seen before. The issue, in the Commander-in-Chief’s expressive phrase, is now between Krupp’s and Birmingham. Birmingham will win if England understands that, were every man left in England and every woman from this moment to give their services to the making of munitions of war, even then our Generals could not conscientiously say they were certain that the supply would be sufficient.

In our former wars the gunners reaped the richest harvest of decorations, for they most often found themselves in a tight corner, and the rule of the Royal Artillery is, “Never lose a gun!” If you want a contrast between the war of movement and the war of positions, between August, 1914, and August, 1915, you have but to look at the gunners then, when the war was in the open, and now, when the belligerents have sat down to a siege. The foaming horses, the jingling accoutrements, the mud-bespattered guns, the gunners falling man by man about their gun—this splendid picture of war, painted on many a glorious page of our military history, has been replaced—temporarily, I know—by as strange a blend of peace and war as can be seen in the field to-day.

Not that in the main the gunner’s task to-day is less perilous than before. Most of the shells that the Germans send over night and day are hunting for our batteries, searching for them principally with the aid of little maps provided by the German air observers. The Germans have to reckon with a resourceful lot of men in our gunners, however, and so skilfully are the guns hidden that more often than not the enemy’s projectiles plump harmlessly into fields, and cause no greater damage than the massacre of a few dozen buttercups and daisies.

But the gunner is toujours en vedette. He must stay with his gun. If his battery is firing, he can take no thought of safety. He must expose himself. Shells or no shells, he must go about his duty. Thus, though the day of the race forward with the guns is over for the moment, the gunners’ casualties go on steadily, in little driblets, it is true, but nevertheless mounting up to a long roll of honour that will show future generations that, in the long months of trench warfare, the Royal Artillery, true to its grand traditions, did its work as steadfastly and gallantly as in the thrilling days of the retreat from Mons and the advance on the Marne.

The gunners have had a difficult task in Flanders. Since the battle of the Marne the great offensives on our front have been with the enemy. The Germans, even when advancing, never forget for a moment that he who goes forward may also have to fall back, and their striving has always been to secure for themselves good defensible positions from which their guns can dominate our lines. The flatness of the country has made the work of artillery observation both perilous and difficult, and the heroism with which the observation officers exposed themselves in the fighting round Ypres, at Neuve Chapelle, and at Festubert, to mention but a few concrete cases, is a chapter by itself in the roll of fame of the Royal Artillery in this war. The time has not yet come when one may write freely of this most thrilling and perilous of duties at the front, the observing for the guns, but I have seen the observation officers at their work, and feel very strongly that one cannot pass over their gallantry and tenacity in silence.

I have witnessed the growth of our artillery; with it I have passed from the discouraging days of the shell shortage to the brighter era that dawned at Hooge. I have spent many absorbingly interesting days with the gunners in the batteries, with the observation officers at their stations. I have seen in action every type of gun, every type of howitzer, big and small, used in our army to-day. I know the voices of them all—the short, sharp report of the field-gun, the ear-splitting crash of the 4·7, the air-shaking roar of the heavy howitzer, whose shell in its passage through the air over one’s head produces long-drawn-out reverberating waves of sound that resemble nothing on earth unless it be the echo of a fast motorcar rushing through miles of empty, narrow streets.