The homogeneity of these Territorial battalions, even of the Divisions, is remarkable. One day I met the whole of the London Division together on the occasion of Divisional sports. The big field in which the meeting was held was the microcosm of London life. It was London in Picardy. Every London accent was heard in that crowd—the whole gamut of dialects—from the mannered speech of Berkeley Square through all the intonations and inflexions of the suburbs from Highbury to Brixton, and from Shepherd’s Bush to Streatham, down to the strident tones of the New Cut and the Old Kent Road. It was strange to think that but a short year since all these men had travelled together in ’bus and tube, had rubbed elbows in Oxford Street or the Strand, strangers all, leading the jealously guarded individual existence of the average Londoner—to think that they were now thrown together into almost the closest relationship it is possible to conceive, the life of troops fighting side by side in the field.
With the Scottish battalions the family spirit is even more marked. The Scotsman is a far more clannish creature than the Southerner, and these Scottish battalions hang together with a fierce esprit de corps in which the Englishman feels positively lost. This is especially true of the kilted battalions, which have in their bonnets and kilts a perpetual reminder of their origin.
I have been in the trenches with Highland battalions in which hardly a man born south of the Tweed was serving, and in which all, officers as well as men, spoke in the broadest Scottish vernacular. The chaplains of some of these Scottish Territorial regiments are delightful characters, fine types of “meenister” and “verra’ godly men,” but, for all that, stout, great-hearted fellows who are continually with the men in the front line. The fine, practical spirit in which these Scottish padres carry out their mission is expressed in the saying of one of their number, Chaplain to the 5th Gordon Highlanders, whose continual exhortation to the men is: “Keep your hearts up and your heads doon!”
With these brave words, which might well serve as a motto for the Territorial on active service, we will leave the Territorials at the post of duty. When the country’s need of men was sorest, they volunteered for foreign service and came to France and did their part. Now that the first great transports have crossed the Channel with the men of the New Army, the original mission of the Territorials may be regarded as accomplished, though, doubtless, many fights still await them. They gave their help at a time when every man was wanted to hold our fragile line. Now they have become absorbed into the framework of our army in the field, which the legions of the New Army are expanding into the great Continental host to decide the ultimate issue with the hordes of Germany.
CHAPTER XVI
THE EYES OF THE ARMY
“Why, all my life I have been trying to guess what lay on the other side of the hill!”—The Duke of Wellington.
One day, while I was gazing at a German working-party grubbing like ants on a far slope behind the enemy lines, a hawk glided swiftly and strongly into the field of my telescope. It hung almost motionless in the clear summer air, high up above the green valley, its powerful wings outspread, the very incarnation of waking watchfulness. And I found myself wondering of what the hawk reminded me, poised aloft, now swooping a little this way, now that, until a low droning in the azure far above gave me my clue even as an aeroplane glittered into sight.
The aeroplane stood out, almost motionless as it seemed to me, over the German lines, while with a “pom-pom-pom!” the German anti-aircraft guns ringed it round in puffs of white smoke. Like the hawk that continued to hover over the valley, it was watching—watching. Like the hawk’s, its searching glance plunged down into the animate life far below, the life that pursues its normal round unperturbed because it knows it cannot escape from the eyes in the sky.
The aeroplanes are the eyes of the army. They alone have made possible the war of positions. From the Alps to the North Sea the warring nations of Europe are hidden in the ground, but their eyes are far aloft. It is the alliance between the mole and the hawk. While the man in the trench uses the periscope to observe from his safe shelter the enemy trench across the way, the army commanders in the rear peer through the eyes of the aeroplanes into the enemy trenches and into the enemy country far behind the firing-line.
The most important contribution which this war is destined to make to our knowledge of warfare lies in the development of the use of military aircraft. The aeroplane has revolutionized warfare, because it has practically removed from war the element of surprise. The only hope that the modern General has of maintaining the fog of war lies in the weather, which, in more than one instance in this war, has effectually veiled from peering eyes aloft movements which are destined to have a decisive influence on the operations.