Read Ebook: A Temporary Gentleman in France by Dawson A J Alec John

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from a sap they have on that side. But we had been warned about that, and gave 'em gyp for it. We had a machine-gun trained on that sap-head of theirs, and plastered it pretty effectually, so quickly that I think we must have got their grenadiers. They shut up very promptly, anyhow, and a bombing patrol of ours that got to the edge of their sap half an hour later found not a creature there to bomb.

Our fire during the night was similar to theirs, but a bit less. "The Peacemaker" has a strong prejudice in favour of saving his ammunition for use on real live targets, and I think he's right. We had one man slightly wounded, and that's all. And I think that must be admitted to be pretty good, seeing that we were at work along the parapet all night. That is a specimen of a really quiet night.

At Stand-to this morning Fritz plastered our parapet very thoroughly with his machine-guns, evidently thinking we were Johnny Raws. He wasted hundreds of rounds of ammunition over this. We were all prepared. Not a head showed, and my best sniper, Corporal May, got one of their machine-gun observers neatly through the head. Our lines are only a hundred yards apart just there.

But I must turn in, old thing, or I'll get no rest to-day. I know I haven't told you about the look I had at the Boche trenches. But perhaps I'll have something better to tell when I next write.

Meantime, we are as jolly as sand-boys, and please remember that you need not be in the least anxious about your

"WHAT IT'S LIKE"

The wonder is, not that I didn't get the one post card you mention, but that you apparently have had everything I have written. Really, I do think the British postal arrangements out here are one of the most remarkable features of the war. The organisation behind our lines is quite extraordinary. Right up here in the firing line itself we get our letters and parcels every day. In the midst of a considerable bombardment I have seen fellows in artillery shelters in the line reading letters and opening parcels of little luxuries just received from home.

It's very nice of you to copy out my letters for friends at home to read. One simply can't hope to write to a number of different people, you know, because any spare time going one wants to use for sleep. I'm sorry I've omitted to tell you about some things I promised to explain, and must try to do better.

As to the time I saw into the Boche trenches while we were in for instruction, that was nothing really; due to my own stupidity, as a matter of fact, and I dare say that's why I said nothing about it. It was our second night in for instruction, and the Company we were with was sending out a small bombing patrol, so, of course, I asked if I could go too, and see what was to be seen. The O.C. of the Company very kindly let me go, and take with me Corporal Slade, of my platoon, an excellent chap, and very keen to learn. I wish he could have had a better teacher.

While close to the Boche wire our little party--only five, all told--sighted a Boche patrol quite twenty strong, and our officer in charge very properly gave the word to retire to a flank and get back to our own trench, or, rather, to a sap leading from it, so as to give warning of the Boche patrol. This was where, in my experience, I went wrong and led Slade astray. I was very curious, of course, to have a good look at the Boche patrol--the first I'd seen of the enemy in the open--and, like a fool, managed to get detached from the other three of our lot, Slade sticking close to me with a confidence I didn't deserve.

When I realised that the others were clean out of sight, and the Boche party too, I made tracks as quickly as I could--crawling, you know--as I believed for our line, cursing myself for not having a compass, a mistake you may be sure I shall not make again. Just then a regular firework display of flares went up from the Boche line, and they opened a hot burst of machine-gun fire. We lay as close as we could in the soggy grass, Slade and myself, and got no harm. Things were lively for a while, with lots of fire from both sides, and more light from both sides than was comfortable.

Later, when things had quietened down, we got on the move again, and presently, after a longish crawl through barbed wire, reached the parapet, and were just about to slide in, side by side, pretty glad to be back in the trench, when a fellow came round the traverse--we were just beside a traverse--growled something, and jabbed at Slade with his bayonet.

Bit confusing, wasn't it? Makes you think pretty quick. I suppose we realised we had struck the Boche line instead of our own in something under the twentieth part of a second, and what followed was too confused for me to remember much about. No doubt we both recognised the necessity for keeping that chap quiet in the same fraction of time that we saw we had reached the wrong trenches. I can remember the jolly feeling of my two thumbs in his throat. It was jolly, really, though I dare say it will seem beastly to you. And I suspect Slade did for the chap. We were lying on a duck-board at the bottom of the trench, and I know my little trench dagger fell and made a horrid clatter, which I made sure would bring more Boches. But it didn't.

I am sorry to say I left the little dagger there, but I collared the Boche's rifle and bayonet, thinking that was the only weapon I had, and clean forgetting the two Mills bombs in my pockets. Slade was a perfect brick and behaved all through like the man he is. We were anxious to make tracks without unnecessary delay, but, being there, thought we might as well have a look at the trench. We crept along two bays without hearing or seeing a soul. And then we heard a man struggling in deep mud and cursing in fluent German. I've thought since, perhaps, we ought to have waited for him and tried a bomb on him. But at the same time came several other different voices, and I whispered to Slade to climb out and followed him myself without wasting any time. The trench was a rotten bad one at this point, worse, I think, than any of ours. And I was thankful for it, because if it had been good those Boches would surely have been on us before we could get out. As it was, the mud held them, and the noises they made grovelling about in it prevented them from hearing our movements, though we made a good deal of noise, worrying through their wire, especially as I was dragging that Boche rifle, with bayonet fixed.

There were glimmering hints of coming daylight by the time we got into the open, which made it a bit easier to take a bearing, and also pretty necessary to have done with it quickly, because in another half-hour we should have been a target for the whole Boche line. Here again Slade was first-rate. He recognised a big shell-hole in the ground, which he had noticed was about fifty yards north of the head of a sap leading from our own line, and that guided us in to the same opening in our wire from which we had originally started. Fine chap, Slade! Three minutes later we were in our own trench, and I got a good tot of rum for both of us from the O.C. Company, who'd made up his mind he'd have to report us "Missing." So, you see, you didn't miss much by not being told all about this before, except an instance of carelessness on my part, which might have been more costly if I hadn't had a most excellent chap with me. "The Peacemaker's" going to recommend him for Lance-Sergeant's stripes, by the way, when we get out of trenches this time.

You know, that question of yours about what it is really "like" here at the front isn't nearly so easy to answer as you might suppose. You must just be patient. I'll tell you things as I learn them and see them, gradually; and, gradually, too, you must try to piece 'em together till they make some sort of picture for you. If I were a real writer I might be able to make it all clear in one go, but--well, it's not easy.

I've told you about the trenches on the way up from Ambulance Corner, the communication trenches, that is, running up at right angles to the firing line. The chief difference between the firing line and the communication trenches, of course, is that it faces the Boche front line, running roughly parallel to it, and that, say eighteen inches above the bottom of it, there is a fire-step running along its front side. When you get up on that you have a fire position: that is, you can see over the parapet, across No Man's Land, to the Boche front line, and fire a rifle.

The lines of trenches are not straight, of course. They curve about according to the nature of the ground. Running out from them on both sides towards the enemy lines there are saps, at the end of which we station listening posts at night with wired-up telephone and bell connections with the firing line. Roughly speaking, a fire trench is cut out rather like this:

with traverses every twenty or thirty paces, so as to make it impossible for an enemy on your flank to get what is called enfilade fire down and along the trench. Enfilade fire is deadly, of course. Fire from the front, on the other hand, if it falls short or overshoots the mark even by a yard lands in front of or behind your trench. You get that?

And what does it look like when one stares out from one's front trench? Well, it depends. It's always pretty queer, but it's queerest at night, when the Boche is sending up his ghostly flares, or when there's enough moonlight to make you fancy all the time you can see all manner of things. First, there's your own parapet, anything from five to five-and-twenty feet of it, sloping gradually down to the open grass of No Man's Land. That's what stops the bullets destined for your head. When Boche shells are well enough placed to blow it in, you must build it up again as soon as you can, or the bit of trench behind it will be exposed, and as your men pass to and fro there will be casualties.

Well, then, anything from ten to twenty or thirty feet beyond the lip of your trench, your wire entanglements begin, and extend, say a good thirty or forty paces out into No Man's Land. You've seen barbed-wire entanglements in pictures: row after row of stakes laced together across and across by barbed wire, forming an obstacle which it is particularly difficult and beastly to get through, especially at night, which, of course, is the only time you could even approach it without being blown to bits.

Here and there all through our wire are old bells, tin cans, bits of flattened tin, and oddments of that sort hanging loosely, so that when even a rat begins cavorting about in the wire at night your sentries know about it, and the Boche is neither so slim nor so agile as a rat. Say that he comes by night with bombs in his hand. One cannot throw a bomb with any accuracy of aim more than twenty or thirty yards. Boche finds himself stopped by our wire, say fifty or sixty yards from our line. If he slowly worms himself in, say twenty paces, without being heard--and he won't--and lobs a bomb at our line, imagine the hail of lead that's coming about him as he tries to wriggle his way back through the wire after shying his bomb!

But, as a matter of fact, the Boche is not good at that game. He does not shine at all at creep-in on our line. When he leaves his trenches at all he seems to prefer coming out in pretty close formation, rubbing shoulders with his pals. Our fellows are a good deal better at sculling about over the sticks than he is.

Here and there in the wire, among the tin cans and things, you can see fluttering bits of weather-worn uniform and old rags, and, at times, things more gruesome. Beyond the wire you see the strip of No Man's Land. Where we are, the average width of it is round about a hundred yards. In some places it's more, and in one place we can see, perhaps a mile off, it narrows down to much less than half that. Then begins the Boche wire, and through and across that you see the Boche front line, very much like your own, too much like your own to be very easily distinguished from it at night.

But that's a wonderful thing, that strip we call No Man's Land, running from the North Sea to Switzerland, five hundred miles. All the way along that line, day and night, without a moment's cessation, through all these long months, men's eyes have been glaring across that forsaken strip, and lead has been flying to and fro over it. To show yourself in it means death. But I have heard a lark trilling over it in the early morning as sweetly as any bird ever sang over an English meadow. A lane of death, five hundred miles long, strewn from end to end with the remains of soldiers! And to either side of it, throughout the whole of these five hundred miles, a warren of trenches, dug-outs, saps, tunnels, underground passages, inhabited, not by rabbits, but by millions of rats, it's true, and millions of hiving, busy men, with countless billions of rounds of death-dealing ammunition, and a complex organisation as closely ordered and complete as the organisation of any city in England!

It's also inhabited at this moment by one man who simply must stop scribbling, and have some grub before going on duty. This one among the millions, with the very healthy appetite, manages, in despite of all the strafing, to think quite a lot about you, and hopes you will go on thinking equally cheerily of him--your

THE DUG-OUT

Here's an odd coincidence. The second sentence in your letter that reached me last night says: "Do tell me just what a dug-out is like." You are always asking me what something or other is "like," which forces upon me the sad conclusion that my letters are not in the least descriptive. But, "Do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his best," and if I had the pen of a readier writer you may be sure I'd use it. Yet the odd thing is, with regard to this particular command for information, I have the pen of a readier writer. You know Taffy Morgan--Billy--of our Company? Well, it seems he's quite a bit of a writer, and occasionally sends things home to his father who, is trying to keep a consecutive narrative of the doings of the Battalion. Now last night, within an hour of getting your letter, I read a thing Taffy showed me that he was sending home, all about a Company Headquarters dug-out in the line: much more decent than my scribbles. So I've asked him to let me copy some of it, and here it is pat, in answer to your question:

"'Dug-out' is the only word for it. I don't know who did the christening, but it is, like so many words and phrases adopted without question by Tommy at the front, the one proper, exact, and adequate name for the places we inhabit in the trenches. The particular dug-out I have in mind is a Company Headquarters, situated, like a good many others, in a loop trench, perhaps seventy to a hundred yards long, which curves round at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in rear of the fire-trench. The average depth of this little back-water of a trench is, say, seven feet. It was made by the French before we took over, and is very wide at the top. It has no made parapet, but is just a gaping ditch, its ragged, receding top edges eight or ten feet apart, the lower part, in which one walks, being two to three feet wide. The bottom of this ditch is duck-walked: that is to say, it has wooden gratings six feet long and eighteen inches wide laid along it. Each length of duck-walk is supported at either end by a trestle driven deep down into the mud.

"Here and there at a bend in the trench there will be a gap of several inches between duck-walks. Again one finds a place where one or two slats have been broken. These are cheerless pitfalls on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck-walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous list to one side or the other, simple enough to negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurrying along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on the sort of trench in which men lose their boots, and have to be dug out themselves.

"It happens that my picture of this Company Headquarters dug-out is a three o'clock in the morning picture: moonless, and the deadest hour of the night, when Brother Boche is pretty generally silent, save for a mechanical sort of dropping rifle fire: a fire which one knows somehow, from its sound, means nothing, unless perhaps it means a certain number of German sentries sleepily proving to themselves that they are awake. In the same desultory fashion, Boche, nearly two hundred yards away across the wire entanglements and the centre strip of No Man's Land, sends up a flare of parachute light every few minutes, which, for half a minute, fills our black ditch with a queer, ghostly sort of radiance, making its dank and jagged sides to gleam again, and drawing curses from anyone feeling his way along it, even as motor lights in a country lane at home make a pedestrian curse on a dark night.

"As one gropes along this ditch one comes to narrow gaps here and there in the side farthest from the enemy. These lead to all kinds of odd necessary places: the homes of signallers, runners, and others, refuse pits, bomb and trench stores, and so on. Presently a thin streak of light shows like a white string in the blackness. This is one of the gaps, about four feet high and eighteen inches wide. A dripping waterproof sheet hangs as a curtain over this gap: the white string is the light from within escaping down one side of the sheet. Lift the sheet to one side, take two steps down and forward--the sheet dripping on your neck the while--and you are in the Company Headquarters dug-out: a hole dug out of the back of the ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duck-boards outside, its internal dimensions ten feet by eight by six.

"At the back of this little cave, facing you as you enter--and unless you go warily you are apt to enter with a rush, landing on the earthen floor in a sitting position, what with the wet slime on your gum boots and the steps--are two bunks, one above the other, each two feet wide and made of wire netting stretched on rough stakes fastened to stout poles and covered more or less by a few empty sand-bags. One of these is the bunk of the O.C. Company, used alternatively by one of his subalterns. In the other, a Platoon Commander lies now asleep, one gum-booted leg, mud-caked well above the knee, dangling over the front edge, a goatskin coat over his shoulders, his cap jammed hard down over his eyes to shut out the light of the candle which, stayed firmly to the newspaper tablecloth by a small island of its own grease, burns as cheerily as it can in this rather draughty spot, sheltered a little from the entrance by a screen consisting of a few tins half full of condensed milk, butter, sugar, and the like. The officer in the bunk is sleeping as though dead, and the candle-light catching the mud-flecked stubble on his chin suggests that his turn in the trenches should be at least half over. Another few days should bring him to billets and shaving water."

"Hung about the sides of the dug-out are half-empty canvas packs or valises, field-glasses, a couple of periscopes, a Very pistol, two sticks caked all over with dry mud, an oilskin coat or two similarly varnished over with the all-pervading mud of the trench, a steel helmet, a couple of pairs of field boots and half a dozen pictures from illustrated papers, including one clever drawing of a grinning cat, having under it the legend, 'Smile, damn you!' The field boots are there, and not in use, because the weather is of the prevalent sort, wet, and the tenants of the place are living in what the returns call 'boots, trench, gum, thigh.' Overhead is stretched across the low roof tarred felt. Above that are rough-hewn logs, then galvanised iron and stones and earth: not shell-proof, really, but bullet- and splinter-proof, and for the most part weather-proof--at least as much so as the average coat sold under that description.

"The trench outside is very still just now, but inside the dug-out there is plenty of movement. All round about it, and above and below, the place is honeycombed by rats--brown rats with whitish bellies, big as young cats, heavy with good living; blundering, happy-go-lucky, fearless brutes, who do not bother to hunt the infinitely nimbler mice who at this moment are delicately investigating the tins of foodstuffs within a few inches of the head of the O.C. Company. The rats are variously occupied: as to a couple of them, matrons, in opposite corners of the roof, very obviously in suckling their young, who feed with awful zest; as to half a dozen others, in courting, during which process they keep up a curious kind of crooning, chirruping song wearisome to human ears; and as to the numerous remainder, in conducting a cross-country steeplechase of sorts, to and fro and round and round on the top side of the roofing felt, which their heavy bodies cause to bulge and sag till one fancies it must give way.

"There is a rough rickety stool beside the table. On this is seated the O.C. Company, his arms outspread on the little ledge of a table, his head on his arms, his face resting on the pages of an open Army Book 153, in which, half an hour ago, he wrote his morning situation report, in order that his signallers might inform Battalion Headquarters, nearly a mile away down the communication trench to the rear, with sundry details, that there was nothing doing beyond the normal intermittent strafing of a quiet night. The O.C. Company is asleep. A mouse is clearing its whiskers of condensed milk within two inches of his left ear, and the candle is guttering within two inches of his cap-peak. During the past few days he has had four or five such sleeps as this, half an hour or so at a time, and no more, for there has been work toward in the line, involving exposure for men on the parapet and so forth, of a sort which does not make for restfulness among O.C. Companies.

"There comes a quiet sound of footfalls on the greasy duck-boards outside. Two mice on the table sit bolt upright to listen. The cross-country meeting overhead is temporarily suspended. The O.C. Company's oilskin-covered shoulders twitch nervously. The mother rats continue noisily suckling their young, though one warily pokes its sharp nose out over the edge of the felt, sniffing, inquiringly. Then the waterproof sheet is drawn aside, and the O.C. Company sits up with a jerk. A signaller on whose leather jerkin the raindrops glisten in the flickering candle-light thrusts head and shoulders into the dug-out.

"'Message from the Adjutant, sir!'

"The O.C. reads the two-line message, initials the top copy for return to the signaller, spikes the carbon copy on a nail overhead, where many others hang, glances at his wrist-watch, and says wearily:

"'Well, what are the signallers strafing about, anyhow? It's ten minutes before time now. Here you are!'

"He tears two written pages from the Army message book which was his pillow, signs them, and hands them up to the signaller.

"Brother Boche may remain quiet. Three o'clock is a good quiet time. And there is no moon. But, Brother Boche being dead quiet just now, may conceivably have patrols out there in No Man's Land. They may carry valuable information quickly to his line, and two or three machine-guns may presently open up on the O.C. Company and his wiring party, who, again, may be exposed by means of flare lights from the other side. One hopes not. Meanwhile, after a glance round, the O.C. picks up his mud-caked leather mitts, settles the revolver pouch on his belt, blows out the guttering candle, feels his way out past the dripping waterproof sheet into the black trench, and leaves the dug-out to his sleeping brother officer and the rats.

"Theoretically, this O.C. Company may be himself as much in need of sleep as anyone in the trench. Actually, however, apart from his needs, he is personally responsible for whatever may happen in quite a long stretch of dark, mysterious trench: of trench which in one moment may be converted by the ingenious Boche into a raging hell of paralysing gas and smoke, of lurid flame and rending explosion. German officers seated in artillery dug-outs a mile or so away across the far side of No Man's Land may bring about that transformation in one moment. They did it less than a week ago, though, by reason of unceasing watchfulness on this side, it availed them nothing. They may be just about to do it now, and, unlike the average of German O.C. Companies, our officers never ask their men to face any kind of danger which they themselves do not face with them. And so, for this particular O.C. Company, the interior of that queer little dug-out does not exactly bring unmixed repose. But the rats love it."

Taffy writes a much better letter, doesn't he? than your

A BOMBING SHOW

Very many thanks for the parcel with the horse-hide mitts and the torch refills, both of which will be greatly appreciated. The mitts are the best things of the kind I've seen for trench work, and as for electric torches, I don't know what we should do without them.

I've come below for a sleep, really. Taffy Morgan was very much off colour yesterday, and is far from fit to-day. I had to take his duty as well as my own last night, so came off pretty short in the matter of rest. But I must stop to tell you about the lark we had last night; the jolliest thing that's happened since we came in, and no end of a score for "A" Company. My batman tells me "B" are mad as hatters about it.

Our signalling officer happened to be along the front yesterday afternoon with a brand-new telescope that someone had sent the C.O., a very fine instrument. Signals wasn't interested in our bit of line, as it happens, but was dead nuts on some new Boche machine-gun emplacement or other away on "B's" left. When he was coming back through our line I got him to lend me the new glass while he had some tea and wrote reports in our dug-out. Perhaps you think there's not much need of a telescope when the Boche line is less than a couple of hundred yards away. Well, now you'd hardly believe how difficult it is to make things out. At this time of the year the whole of this place is full of mist, for one thing. And then, you see, the ground in front is studded all over with barbed wire, stakes, long rank grass, things thrown out: here and there an old log, and, here and there, of course, a dead body. One has to look along the ground level, since to look from a higher level would mean exposure, and I can assure you it's surprisingly easy to miss things. I've wasted a good many rounds myself, firing at old rags or bits of wood, or an old cape in the grass among the Boche wire, feeling sure I'd got a sniper. The ground is pretty much torn up, too, you understand, by shells and stuff, and that makes it more difficult.

Well, I was looking out from a little sheltered spot alongside the entrance to what we call Stinking Sap. It has rather a rottener smell than most trenches, I think. And all of a sudden I twigged something that waked me right up. It was nothing much: just a shovel sticking up against a little mound. But it led to other things. A yard away from where this shovel lay the C.O.'s fine glass enabled me to make out a gap in the wet, misty grass. You may be sure I stared jolly hard, and presently the whole thing became clear to me. The Boches had run out a new sap to fully sixty yards from their fire trench, which at this particular point is rather far from ours: over 250 yards, I suppose. It was right opposite our own Stinking Sap, and I suppose the head of it was not more than 100 yards from the head of Stinking Sap. There was no Boche working there then; not a sign of any movement. I made sure of that. Then I got my compass and trench map, and took a very careful bearing. And then I toddled round to Company Headquarters and got hold of "the Peacemaker," without letting Signals know anything about it. If the O.C. liked to let Battalion Headquarters know, that was his business.

Of course, "the Peacemaker" was delighted. "It's perfectly clear they must have cut it last night," he said. "And as sure as God made little apples, they'll be going on with it to-night. Let's see, the moon rises about 9.45. Splendid! They'll get to work as soon as it's dark."

He was awfully decent about it, and agreed to let me go, since I'd had the luck to spot it. As a matter of fact, he did the more important spotting himself. He twigged what I'd overlooked: a whacking big shell-hole, shallow but wide, about fifteen or twenty feet to one side of their sap-head; an absolutely ideal spot for cover, and no more than a hundred yards from the head of Stinking Sap. I decided to take Corporal Slade with me, because he's such a fine bomber, besides being as cool as a cucumber and an all-round good chap. You remember he was with me that time in Master Boche's trench. Somehow, the thing got round before tea-time, and the competition among the men was something awful. When Slade gave it out that I was taking all the men I wanted from No. 1 Platoon, there was actually a fight between one of my lot and a fellow named Ramsay, of No. 3 Platoon; a draper, I'll trouble you, and a pillar of his chapel at home. Then a deputation of the other Platoon Sergeants waited on "the Peacemaker," and in the end, to save bloodshed, I agreed to take Corporal Slade and one man from my own Platoon, and one man from each of the other three Platoons. To call for volunteers for work over the parapet with our lot is perfectly hopeless. You must detail your men, or the whole blessed Company would swarm out over the sticks every time, especially if there's the slightest hint of raiding or bombing.

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