Where Men Hold Rendezvous with Death
Told by G. Valentine Williams, with the British Army
Written in the field and under the eye of the censor, G. Valentine Williams presents in “With Our Army in Flanders” (Edward Arnold, London) a series of vivid war chapters differing in many respects from the current conventional accounts from the battle fronts. Mr. Williams is the London Daily Mail correspondent. He tells about the babel of tongues where men gather in khaki, strange meetings at the front of long separated friends and brothers, the hunger of the big guns.
I—WHERE ALL DIALECTS MEET AT BATTLE
One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a battalion has been marching past me on the road and tried to guess, often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the regiment from the men’s accents or from their tricks of speech.
Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom, differs.
I spent a most fascinating half hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys and newsboys they were, or of the same class, vanboys and the like.
I visited the Cameron Highlanders—what was left of their Territorial battalion—after the second battle of Ypres and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them.
It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard two sappers “fra’ Wigan” engaged in a lively argument with two privates (from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen “fra’ Wigan” were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but only a little less.
During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by two prowling Southerners from one of the home counties and carried off to brigade headquarters as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking Welsh and Cameron Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire Geordines, the homely burr of the Third Hussars and other regiments recruited in the West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the rich brogue of the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation of the Canadians, a man out here begins to realize of what composite layers our race is formed.
II—OLD FRIENDS AT THE FRONT
Everybody who is anything is at the front. Never was there such a place for meeting as at Flanders. The Strand is not in it. My own experience is that of everybody else. One finds at the front men one has lost sight of for years, old friends who have dropped away in the hurry of existence, chance acquaintances of a Riviera train de luxe, men one has met in business, men who have measured one for clothes.
Often I have heard my name sung out from the center of a column of marching troops, and a figure has stepped out to the roadside who, after my mind has shredded it of the unfamiliar uniform, the deep brown sunburn, the set expression, has revealed itself as old Tubby Somebody whom one had known at school, or Brown with whom one had played golf on those little links behind the Casino at Monte Carlo, or the manager of Messrs. Blank in the city.
I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was billetted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War Correspondents’ Headquarters were situated, where he had come with the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest, after the terrible “gruelling” they sustained in the second battle of Ypres.
At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a motor-car driver, whose father had particularly asked me to look out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!
Humor is probably the largest component part of the spirit of the British soldier, a paradoxical, phlegmatic sense of humor that comes out strongest when the danger is the most threatening. A Jack Johnson bursts close beside a British soldier who is lighting his pipe with one of those odious French sulphur matches. The shell blows a foul whiff of chemicals right across the man’s face. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” he exclaimed with a perfectly genuine sigh, “these ‘ere French matches will be the death o’ me!”
A reply which is equally characteristic of the state of mind of the British soldier who goes forth to war is that given by the irate driver of a staff car to a sentry in the early days of the war. The sentry in the dead of night had levelled his rifle at the chauffeur because the car had not stopped instantly on challenge. The driver backed his car toward where the sentry was standing. “I’ll ‘ave a word with you, young feller,” he said. “Allow me to inform you that this car can’t be stopped in less than twenty yards. If you go shoving that rifle of yours in people’s faces some one will get shot before this war’s over!”
There is a great strain of tenderness in the British soldier, a great readiness to serve. Hear him on a wet night in the trenches, begrimed, red-eyed with fatigue, chilled to the bone, just about to lie down for a rest, offer to make his officer, tired as he is, “a drop of ‘ot tea!” Watch him with German prisoners! His attitude is paternal, patronizing, rather that of a friendly London policeman guiding homeward the errant footsteps of a drunkard.
III—DEEP IN A SOLDIER’S HEART
Under influence of nameless German atrocities of all descriptions, the attitude of the British soldier in the fighting line is becoming fierce and embittered. Nothing will induce him, however, to vent his spite on prisoners, though few Germans understand anything else but force as the expression of power. They look upon our men as miserable mercenaries whose friendliness is simply an attempt to curry favor with the noble German krieger; our men regard them as misguided individuals who don’t know any better….
The German phrase, “Stellungskrieg,” is a very accurate description of the great stalemate on the western front which we, more vaguely, term “trench warfare.” It is, indeed, a constant manoeuvering for positions, a kind of great game of chess, in which the Germans, generally speaking, are seeking to gain the advantage for the purposes of their defensive, whilst the Allies’ aim is to obtain the best positions for an offensive when the moment for this is ripe.
The ground is under ceaseless survey. A move by the enemy calls for a counter-move on our part. A new trench dug by him may be found to enfilade our trenches from a certain angle, and while by the construction of new traverses or the heightening of parapet and parados the trench may be rendered immune from sniping, a fresh trench will be dug at a new angle or a machine gun brought up to make life sour for the occupants of the new German position, and force them in their turn to counter-measures.
Any one who saw the trenches at Mons or even, much later, the trenches on the Aisne, would scarcely recognize them in the deep, elaborate earthworks of Flanders, with the construction of which our army is now so familiar.
High explosive shells in unlimited quantities are necessary to keep the hammer pounding away at one given spot. To break a path for our infantry through the weakly held German trenches around Neuve Chapelle we had many scores of guns pouring in a concentrated fire on a front of 1,400 yards for a period of thirty-five minutes. In the operations around Arras the French are said to have fired nearly 800,000 shells in one day.
Even this colossal figure was surpassed by the expenditure of high-explosive shells by the German and Austrian armies in their successful thrust against Przemysl. Our bombardment of Neuve Chapelle was, in the main, effective, though barbed-wire entanglements in front of part of the German trenches were not cut, and heavy casualties were thus caused to the infantry when they advanced.
For the most part, however, we found the German trenches obliterated, the little village a smoking heap of ruins, and those Germans who survived, dazed and frightened, amid piles of torn corpses. If this enormous concentration of guns was required to blast a path of 1,400 yards with a thirty-five-minute bombardment, what a gigantic concentration of artillery, what a colossal expenditure of ammunition, will be required to drive a wedge several miles deep through positions which the Germans have spent three seasons in strengthening and consolidating!
IV—IN THE BOWELS OF THE EARTH
I went down one of our mines one night. I was spending the night in our trenches and the captain in command of this particular section asked me if I would care to see “our mine.” Considerations of the censorship impel me to abridge what follows up to the moment when I found myself in a square, greasy gallery, with clay walls propped up by timber balks leading straight out in the direction of the German trenches. Guttering candles stuck on the balks at intervals faintly lit up as strange a scene as I have witnessed in this war.
Deep in the bowels of the earth a thick, square-set man in khaki trousers and trench boots, a ragged vest displaying a tremendous torso all glistening with sweat, was tipping clay out of a trolley and gently chaffing in a quite unprintable English of the region of Lancashire a hoarse but invisible person somewhere down the shaft.
I crawled round the quizzer, slipping on the greasy planks awash with muddy water on the floor of the gallery, and found myself confronted by another of the troglodytes, a man who was so coated with clay that he appeared to be dyed khaki (like the horses of the Scots Greys) from top to toe. I asked him whence he came, so different was he, in speech and appearance, from the black-haired, low-browed Irishmen watching at the parapet of the trench far above us. “A coom fra’ Wigan!” he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a grimy hand, and, thus saying, he turned round and made off swiftly, bent double as he was, down the low gallery.
I followed, the water swishing ankle-deep round my field boots. The air was dank and foul; the stooping position became almost unbearable after a few paces; one slipped and slithered at every step.
At intervals side-galleries ran out from the main gap, unlit, dark and forbidding—listening posts. After a hundred paces or so a trolley blocked the way. Behind it two men were working, my taciturn acquaintance and another. The latter was hacking at the virgin earth with a pick; the former was shoveling the clay into the trolley.
I had not been out of that mine for more than a minute when an electric lamp flashed in my eyes, and an excitable young man, who held an automatic pistol uncomfortably near my person, accosted me thus: “I beg your pardon, sir”—it occurred to me that the pistol accorded ill with this polite form of address—”but may I ask what you were doing down my mine?” My friend, the Captain, rushed forward with an explanation and an introduction, the pistol was put away, and the sapper subaltern was easily persuaded to come along to the dugout and have a drop of grog before turning in.
One story of the mines which made everybody laugh was that of the subaltern fresh out from home, a keen young officer, who came one night to the dug-out of the sapper officer supervising the digging of a mine.
“You must go up at once,” he whispered in his ear in a voice hoarse with excitement, “it is very important. Lose no time.” The sapper had gone to his dug-out worn out after several sleepless nights, and was very loath to sally forth into the cold and frosty air. “It is a mine, a German mine,” said the subaltern fresh out from home; “you can see them working through the glasses.” The sapper was out in a brace of shakes, and hurriedly followed the subaltern along the interminable windings of the trenches.
In great excitement the subaltern led him to where a telescope rested on the parapet. “Look!” he said dramatically. The sapper applied his eye to the glass. There was a bright moon, and by its rays he saw, sure enough, figures working feverishly about a shaft. There was something familiar about it, though; then he realized that he was looking down his own mine. The wretched youth who had dragged him from his slumbers had forgotten the windings of the trench.
V—INVENTIVE GENIUS OF THE SOLDIERS
“Bombing” is one form of trench warfare particularly annoying to the enemy. The revival of bombing began when a British soldier, to while away an idle moment, put some high explosive and a lighted fuse in a discarded bully-beef tin, and pitched it into the German trench opposite him.
In his way the British soldier is as handy as the bluejacket, and the long days of the winter monotony produced all kinds of inventions in the way of mortars and bombs, which led to the scientific development of this mode of warfare. A Territorial officer was discovered making all manner of ingenious bombs and trench appliances in his spare time. He was taken out of the trenches and installed in an empty school, and when last I heard of him had a regular factory turning out bombs for the firing line.
Bombing is very tricky work. Your bomb must be safe as long as it is in your possession. Nor must it be liable to explosion if dropped after the safety-catch has been removed. That is why bombs are provided with time fuses. Some nicety of judgment is required to hurl them so that they will explode on impact or immediately afterward.
If the time fuse has still a second or so to burn when the bomb falls in the enemy trench, a resolute man will pick it up and fling it back, with disastrous consequences to the bomber. Therefore bombers must be trained. The training is extremely simple, but it is essential, and I look forward to the time when every soldier who comes out to France from home will have gone through a course of bombing just as he has gone through a course of musketry.
Just as the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 introduced the needle-gun, and the Franco-Prussian War the chassepot rifle, and the South African War was the war of the magazine rifle, so the present war will be known as the war of the automatic gun. When the German General Staff sits down to write its official history of the great war it will be able to attribute the greater part of the success that German arms may have achieved to its foresight in accumulating an immense stock of machine-guns, and in studying the whole theory and tactics of this comparatively new weapon before any other army in the world became alive to its paramount importance.
The only factor that furnishes anything like a certain basis for calculation as to the date of the conclusion of the war is the number of fighting men available for each of the different belligerents. Of all the supplies required for making war, the supply of men is limited. The Germans recognized this sooner than any of their opponents. In the machine-gun they had a machine that does the work of many men.
The machine-gun is the multiplication of the rifle. The Vickers gun fires up to 500 shots a minute. This is also the average performance of the German gun. To silence this multiplication of fire you must outbid it, you must beat it down with an even greater multiplication. This is where the difficulty comes in for an attacking force.
The machine-gun, with its mounting and ammunition and spare parts, is neither light in weight nor inconspicuous to carry. When the infantry has rushed a trench after the preliminary bombardment the machine-guns have to be carried bodily forward over a shell and bullet swept area, where the machine-gun detachment is a familiar and unexpected target for the German marksmen. This is where the automatic rifle is destined to play a part—a part so decisive, in my opinion, as may win the war for us.
The automatic rifle is a light machine-gun. In appearance it resembles an ordinary service rifle, with rather a complicated and swollen-looking magazine. It is not water-cooled like the machine-gun, but air-cooled, and is therefore not absolutely reliable for long usage, as it inevitably becomes heated after much firing. It will fire, however, up to 300-odd shots a minute, and can be regarded as the ideal weapon for beating down German machine-gun fire and checking the advance of bombers while the heavier but more reliable machine-guns are coming up.