“No. 1 gun, fire!”
The scream of the shell cleaving the air strikes upon the ear still reverberating from the crash of the explosion. As the breech is opened a thin vapour of smoke blows out of the gun, and vanishes in an instant, as though rejoicing to be free. The men are busied about the gun. In quick succession the other guns of the battery discharge their shots.
The officer turns on his heel. “You’d better stay to tea!” he says. “My people have sent me a birthday cake.”
Give and take!—that is the philosophy of war. These gunners in their placid batteries hear death coming at them in the wind—day after day, night after night. They are matched against worthy foes—from the gunners’ standpoint—fine artillery, well supplied, that shoots well. The guns are the rooks and bishops of this great game of chess. They sweep off the board any piece that comes into their field. The gun which I saw firing to-day may be discovered to-morrow before there is time to shift its position. Then a rain of shells will fall all about it, smashing in the dug-outs, slaying and maiming the devoted men whose place is by their gun.
In this trench warfare the battery is a placid place. So well concealed are the guns, so cunningly hidden, so skilfully blended in their surroundings, that one is often not aware that guns or howitzers are thrusting their noses into the air within twenty yards of where you enter. There is an air of permanency about the large solid dug-outs, a touch of homeliness about the curls of blue smoke that drift lazily aloft from the fires where the cooks are making the tea in tin “dixies.”
The gunners show a certain facetiousness in naming their underground homes. “Rowton House,” “Ritz Hotel,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Ocean View,” are some of the names burnt in fretwork on the neat boards fixed at the entrances to the dug-outs. Within, pictures cut from the illustrated papers are hung, those of pretty ladies and the guns of other armies being more especially favoured. You are sure to find one or two men here engaged in fashioning knick-knacks, such as ash-trays or lamp-stands, out of parts of German shell sent over at the battery. I saw some of these souvenirs, one a sugar-sifter, made by one of our gunners out of the case of a shell—a very well-finished piece of work.
When heavy fighting is on, the battery, though it always preserves its outward calm, is a very busy place. When the guns concentrate during a preliminary bombardment, the gunners hardly get a moment to breathe, but keep on loading and firing, and loading and firing, while all the time fresh supplies of shells are brought up, and the piles of empty shell-cases, with their bronze burnt black at the edges, swell steadily. Then it is that the ammunition convoys stream together to the ammunition railheads, where shells, great and small, neatly packed in their wooden boxes, are lying in the goods-trains that have brought them up from the base.
Soon after the fighting at Festubert in June, I spent a morning at an ammunition railhead. The officer in charge showed me round, a pleasant young man in very old riding-breeches and a khaki shirt, who had an office, a place of wonderful contrivances in the way of chairs and desks and pigeon-holes and shelves made out of empty shell-boxes, installed in a railway-truck. The railhead was established in a railway-siding, where, on three or four sets of metals, long trains were waiting, some full, others empty, about to return to the base to be replenished. The full trains contained the overflow. What can be safely stored is dumped out, and collected by the ammunition convoys—motor lorries of the Mechanical Transport—which come to the railhead daily to fetch supplies, in order to bring deplenished stocks up at the front to the normal level again.
I saw, I believe, almost every form in which “villainous saltpetre digged out of the bowels of the harmless earth” is employed for the dismemberment of man. There were shells galore, from huge 4-foot howitzer shells in enormous coffin-like boxes, one to each, down to small 15-pounder shells, several to a case. There were hundreds of cases of bombs and grenades: stick-bombs, and round bombs, and square bombs; bombs for trench mortars, large and small; boxes of Verey flare-lights, and stacks of S.A.A.—that is, small arms ammunition, rifle and revolver cartridges. I was lost in admiration at the exquisite neatness of the packing—so contrived that by the simplest manipulation the shell and its charges can be lifted safely out of the box without hammering or violence of any kind.
Every day the officer in charge sends in his returns of the amount of ammunition supplied, and the amount in hand. The returns for the preceding days of fighting in the Festubert region were eloquent of the part that artillery is playing in this war. The returns are made according to the size and description of shell.