But because I have thus seen the work of our guns in the field, because I have been allowed to penetrate the arcana of gunnery, and to enter holy places where few save those of the craft are suffered to enter, I find myself in a dilemma. Despite the ceaseless activity of German spies in peace and war, there are still many blanks in the German information about our artillery. Far be it from me to fill them in! Permit me, therefore, to leave the guns hidden beneath their covers, cunningly stowed away from prying eyes in their emplacements.
In a battery you get a good idea of the detachment of modern war. The effect of the war of positions is to hold off from the guns the rough-and-tumble of fighting. It happens occasionally, as in the case of the London Territorial “Heavies,” surrounded and captured during the second battle of Ypres, that the tide of battle sweeps up and washes round the guns. But as a general rule the guns, in their positions behind the front, are several miles from the actual firing-line. Their rôle is practically that of the artillery of a besieging force, and they thereby acquire a fixity of tenure which must be particularly sympathetic to the gunners who remember the awful ordeal of the guns on the retreat from Mons.
A skilful fencer who has a good reach and a long foil can keep his opponent at a distance without moving his position, without losing his calm. The gunners in this war of positions are using a foil several miles long. Their blade is constantly in play, but the enemy is kept at arm’s length. Therefore, the life of the gunners is probably more ordered and stable than the life of any other formation at the front.
In a London newspaper office some years ago I used to know a cable operator who on Saturday nights, when the wires were clear, was wont to pass the time by playing cable chess with the operators at Queenstown or New York. Many an evening I have sat by his side and watched him, poring over his chessboard, with one hand on the cable-key ready to transmit his move across the wires. The sense of long distance, which that quiet cable-room, with its shaded lights, its absorbed chess enthusiast, and its ticking instrument, used to convey, has come back to me in these batteries at the front, where death goes and comes over a stretch of miles.
Among my notes of a visit to a battery of field-guns, I find the following observation: “The coolness, the savage Sachlichkeit (a comprehensive German word which may be rendered by ‘business-likeness’) of the gunners; exposed to the constant menace of death at long range themselves, their one thought in life is to ‘get back’ at the enemy on the distant horizon.”
This studied efficiency in the business of slaying is indeed the dominant impression left on the mind by a view of one of these batteries in action. The officers, always neat and trim, are nonchalant and laconic as they snap out in monosyllables the orders that carry with them winged death; the men serving the gun—just a handful of dust-coloured figures about some ironwork—go about their work swiftly and silently. A word with the telephone orderly as to range and angle and shell, a brisk order, a yellow-painted shell is whipped smartly out of its neat caisson standing open by the gun, its doors flung wide like two arms, as though to say, “Help yourself!” there is a snapping and a clicking of bolts and blocks, then the voice of the sergeant: “All ready to fire, sir!”
The gun is laid on its quarry. No gun fires without an object. Somewhere in the sun-bathed flats beyond, where the horizon is smudged in blue behind a curtain of dancing heat, there are men whose glass of life is all but run out. How often have I thought on this picture, in the few seconds’ interval between that short phrase, “All ready to fire, sir!” and the brisk command: “No. 1 gun, fire!” ... A group of Germans, not the fierce helmeted Huns in exquisitely neat uniforms that our artists love to show us in the illustrated papers, but vague figures in ill-fitting dirty grey that makes them look like scavengers, with trousers, showing a band of white lining, turned up over their boots, curiously long tunics unbuttoned at the throat, and little round caps, all stained with mud and sweat, their heads beneath shaved until the skin shows greyish through the pale stubble—a group of vague Unknowns waiting for death.
Perhaps they are walking up a communication trench, plodding in Indian file, silent; maybe they are sitting outside a dug-out talking of the things which form the staple conversation of the men on both sides out here—their food, their duties, their spell of rest from the trenches, their leave, their sergeant. All are marked down by the Power that regulates these things—those that are to die, those that shall survive. Even now one is taking that step forward that shall save his life, another has tarried an instant, and for that instant’s delay he shall die. The cigarette that the officer in our battery is lighting shall give the doomed ones a few seconds’ respite.
The shell is in the gun, bearing in its shining and beautifully turned case that which shall release a never-ending succession of events springing from the widows and orphans which this shot shall make. In a second now it will be sped, in another second its work will be done. There will be telegrams—ill-omened and feared visitants in these days of war—arriving in German homes, in the officer’s flat on the third-floor of a dull street in a garrison town, in the tenement dwelling in a Berlin slum, in a farm in Pomerania, in a wooden cottage on a pine slope in the Black Forest.
There will be tears and hysterics and black stuff and crape in the house; black-bordered announcements, headed by the Iron Cross, in newspapers beginning, “Den Tod für Kaiser und Reich ...”; visits of condolence from Onkel Fritz and Tante Frieda in the Gutes Zimmer (the parlour); lonely widows and fatherless orphans, bereft sweethearts and heartbroken mothers....