- by Max Pemberton
Battle Pictures of the Great War
Alarums and Excursions During a Night Watch
It is the very witching time of night. The man who is "standing to" adds without hesitation that hell itself breathes out contagion on the world.
Silence how dead and darkness how profound! In that silence what dreams may come! They will be of Blighty, to be sure - of faces unforgotten and homes in which there is no darkness. Let it be also the New Year watch, and the dreamer will pluck the holly from the wall. The wassail-bowl is steaming, and he hears the music of the dance.
Let us consider what kind of a night it is for the sub and the sergeants who have the job in hand.
There was a little fall of rain about sunset, and after that a raw wind blowing and a sky which began to clear. It fell exceedingly dark about nine, and later on the relief come up from the rest billets. There was no silence then. An army, as Captain Bairnsfather has said wittily, moves upon its stomach. These fellows, who are just in, marched through a wood and what was left of a village; turned a dangerous corner of a lane and crossed a boggy common, where they fell flat as any clown a policeman has trodden upon. The crawl covered a good quarter of a mile. There were shells bursting away upon the road they had not taken - crimson flashes as of forked lightning in the air; a far-away booming of cannon, and the nearer crack of the shrapnel. But not much mischief was done, and the relief got through and entered the labyrinth - we will not say cheerfully.
What the Mist May Hide
So here they are - a few of them, very few, in the dangerous first-line trench; a larger number some two hundred yards away; and the bulk in Number 3 at the rear. They have vigilant days and nights before them, but their mood is optimistic. Fritz is "no bon," anyway.
They are men of the New Army, but they know their duty, and will do it with courage. They have returned upon no balmy night of spring, and there is no nightingale to serenade them. The trenches show pools of water here and there, despite the pumps. The dug-outs are full of damp, and the cold strikes to the very marrow. A sentry, looking out over No Man's Land, sees the dank mist rising like a pestilence from the sodden plain to cloak the peril beyond and to school the mind to .fears. What is hidden by that chilling curtain? Anything may be there-the Boche creeping like an Indian, a grenade in his hand; raiders advancing with bomb and bayonet; or merely the unburied dead who no longer stare blindly at the stars. The sentry listens .with ears which would prick at the snapping of a twig. He sees ghosts in the mist. If he be a very young soldier, no one knows what he may not do. Rifles go off by accident at these times, and the "Stand to" will bring a full round oath from the dug-out. Nevertheless, it is all in the game, and better to "stand to" for a bogey than to be spitted through in what courtesy calls your bed.
Exploring in No Man's Land
Be it said that this is a rolling down-like country, and that the town lies yonder five miles behind you. It is still a town with streets and shops, and. a church wherein the white- headed old priest yet calls upon God to bless France - the very pink of towns, our fellows think it, and wish to heaven they were within its ancient walls to-night. Before them there are other towns, but they are a very long way off, and all sorts of horrible things are being done and you point to the sky-line you cannot see, and think of the be- cloaked Hun cracking his whip in those gloomy streets, and hear the cries of woe. The night watch permits all this kind of thing, when a man rolls himself up on his shelf and the other man tells him in music that he is the only girl in the world.
Now, in this particular front-line trench there are very few of us-only eight to the half a mile on this occasion. All are very vigilant, for though it is the hour of mists, it should be the hour of moonlight later on, and there is work to be done. The sub - that cheery little fellow about five foot one, with the moustache which you can identify when the light is good, and the air of a d'Artagnan - one of the best we have, is about to cross our wire and see what is doing where the Hun is at home. No Red Indian stalking a camp of white men could enjoy himself more than, our lieutenant will on this occasion. Let the fog lift but a suspicion, and he and his will be over the top and away. That is a curious sensation, verily. Behind is the trench wherein is security; before-is the great unknown - the horrid field of the dead, the bog where the water lies in a hundred pools, and at every step you may touch the waste of war.
Something May Be Doing at Dawn
The lieutenant is used to it, and crawls with the skill which should play bears of genius hi a nursery later on. He puts his hand upon the face of a dead man, and thinks nothing of it. His knees squelch in the mud, his face is splashed by it. He hurts himself upon a broken buckle or a helmet embedded, even upon the jagged fragment of a shell. But all this is in the night's work. Foot by foot he crawls, but the fog, the dreadful silence, is all about him. Where is he? The luminous compass shows him his direction. He discovers now that he has crawled beyond the bank of mist to a lonely ridge of the higher ground; he hears the low buzzing of voices. There are Germans talking in the very bowels of the earth below him. Our gallant featherweight listens, and then falls flat as a codfish. Above him a star-shell has burst like a flame of silver in the sky. In its aureole the wilderness is revealed in all its ghastly desolation. The watcher fears to lift a finger; he hardly dares to breathe. But he has learned what he wants to know - that the German first line is well held to-night, and that something may be doing at dawn.
So he turns back. It is always pleasant to have your eyes .upon home, but the pleasure is enhanced when you know just where that home is. To-night the darkness and the fog together make the latchkey a problem. Our little party crawls as it went, but anon takes courage and stands up-a fatal move. The mists have drifted away hereabouts, and a second star-shell bursts high above them.
"Weafy Willies" and "Hum Jars"
Instantly there is the blowing of a whistle in the depths behind them. A machine-gun rattles like a boy's stick' against a paling. Our featherweight Hears the bullets singing about his ears, and runs like a good 'un. He has only the barbed-wire of his own trench to surmount now. But who shall blame him if the gap is not where it should be? Give him five minutes and he would find his way into the warren with the skill of a trained scout. But out here in the dark, with the bullets rattling, who shall wonder-if the seat of his trousers suffers? ''Five pairs in a month!" he says ruefully, when at last he rolls down into the trench - which means to say that incidentally he sat upon the wire.
Here it may be said that bad things have happened in his; absence. That very good fellow, the captain of the company, was knocked out in the sap with the sergeant-major and his subaltern-all through one of those cursed "Weary Willies" which a trench- mortar flings. You would not think that such ugly little devils - just like little torpedoes with feathers to direct their flight - could work such a mischief. Yet here are three good men carried away on stretchers because of one of them. They were talking in the sap about to-morrow's doings when the thing came over and burst at their feet. One poor fellow got it in the stomach and fell dead without a cry; the sergeant-major was struck in the leg; the good captain in the chest. This will be a bad night for him. They must carry him as they can down the communication-trench, round corners innumerable, and always with the chance of a great shell coming in as they go. At the first of the dressing- stations they will do what is possible; but he has to be hurried on from one surgeon to another, until in the middle of the night he is on a stretcher and the men are trotting across the boggy common. "For God's sake don't run!" he cries. They tell him that that is the most dangerous road in France to-night, and their pace is unchecked.
Meanwhile, our featherweight has patched himself up and taken a new survey of the situation. It is more comfortable here in the trench, to be sure, but not without its excitements. The fog has lifted now and the stars are shining. There is a soft glimmer of light over No Man's Land, and it is something to know that the dead alone people it. For all that the Hun himself is not inactive, A whistle blows and our gay lieutenant dives again.
So does hope rise expectant in the human breast, and so does the night belie us. We are at the still hour before the dawn when the mist is again like a white sea rolling over a rocky shore; when not a sound is to be heard, not a funeral note; when war and the voice of war might have been a thought to have passed into the records of the dead; when thought drones in a man's brain and he perceives nothing clearly.' All this is for a brief hour, and then the crash of awakening. Neither "Weary Willies" nor "rum jars" are the matter this time. It is just daylight, and the first of the great shells comes hurtling over from the distant German batteries. It bursts with a crash of tropical thunder. High into the air go mud and wire and the parapet of your sheltered trench. Another shell falls, and another. The men in the dug-out hear the terrible thudding above them, and wonder if it is to be the end. The watchers nail their flags to the pillars of destiny and cry "Kismet." An "intensive bombardment " - then the Hun is coming over. There will be no breakfast until he is dead or we are taken beneath the ground. A "rum jar" is coming this time. A weird fellow is the "rum jar," a great can of high explosives which turns over and over in the "air like a badly-kicked football, falls with a terrible thud, and will destroy everything in the particular traverse it strikes. You can dodge it, though, and for that the whistle is blown-so many blasts for you to get to the right, so many to the left, but into shelter by all means - for this fellow will destroy every living thing in the particular traverse it enters. Not three days ago it blew a gallant Highlander sixty yards out of his own trench into the second lines behind him, and although he was un-scratched, not a bone of his body remained whole. The night will give you whiz-bangs, and these you cannot dodge. The words describe them exactly.
Huns Bolt for their Warrens
So to the "stand to." The light reveals everything clearly. The sun is coming up; the mist has rolled away. Again you see No Man's Land and the low hills beyond it and the wan trees, and the broken spires of the distant villages. It is a lifeless plain, but war is about to conjure the enemies of life from the caverns beneath it. The bombardment has ceased for an instant, and yonder the first of the steel helmets is to be seen. It is the helmet of a Hun, and hundreds will be after it before a man can count twenty. Now is our featherweight at his best, and now are his men truly splendid. The regiment is up; the machine-guns are busy. They sweep that plain with a hail of lead in which no living thing can move. Away back, our own artillery, warned by the telephone and by those great silver bees in the sky above, rains its barrage upon that fearful waste. No hope for the Hun here. If he were not suck a devil you would pity him, for he goes down like corn before the sickle - man after man, watch them staggering, their arms outstretched, reeling, falling. In less than a minute the few who live have turned tail and are bolting wildly for their warrens. The attack has failed; the sun is shining. We can get to breakfast now!
