ACCORDING TO PLAN

“Ratty” Travers dropped his load with a grunt of satisfaction, squatted down on the ground, and tilting his shrapnel helmet back, mopped a streaming brow. As the line in which he had moved dropped to cover, another line rose out of the ground ahead of them and commenced to push forward. Some distance beyond, a wave of kilted Highlanders pressed on at a steady walk up to within about fifty paces of the string of flickering, jumping white patches that marked the edge of the “artillery barrage.”

Ratty Travers and the others of the machine-gun company being in support had a good view of the lines attacking ahead of them.

“Them Jocks is goin’ along nicely,” said the man who had dropped beside Ratty. Ratty grunted scornfully. “Beautiful,” he said. “An’ we’re doin’ wonderful well ourselves. I never remember gettin’ over the No Man’s Land so easy, or seein’ a trench took so quick an’ simple in my life as this one we’re in; or seein’ a’tillery barrage move so nice an’ even and steady to time.”

“You’ve seed a lot, Ratty,” said his companion. “But you ain’t seed everything.”

“That’s true,” said Ratty. “I’ve never seen a lot o’ grown men playin’ let’s-pretend like a lot of school kids. Just look at that fool wi’ the big drum, Johnny.”

Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big drum was lugging it off at the double away from the kilted line, and strung out to either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed with sticks and biscuit-tins and empty cans. Ratty and his companions were clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, and bore boxes of very real ammunition. In the “trenches” ahead of them, or moving over the open, were other men similarly equipped; rolling back to them came a clash and clatter, a dull prolonged boom-boom-boom. In every detail, so far as the men were concerned, an attack was in full swing; but there was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping whistle and sharp crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking thunder of artillery (except that steady boom-boom), no shell-scorched strip of battered ground. The warm sun shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of flags and tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition and stretchers and all the other accoutrements of battle. There were no signs of death or wounds, none of the horror of war, because this was merely a “practice attack,” a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full ten miles behind the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and tapes, the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit-tins and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The kilts came to a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment later, the “barrage” sprinted off ahead one or two score yards, halted, and fell to banging and battering tins and drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly moved on after them, to halt again at their measured distance until the next “lift” of the “barrage.” It looked sheer child’s play, a silly elaborate game; and yet there was no sign of laughter or play about the men taking part in it—except on the part of Ratty Travers. Ratty was openly scornful. “Ready there,” said a sergeant rising and pocketing the notebook he had been studying. “We’ve only five minutes in this trench. And remember you move half-right when you leave here, an’ the next line o’ flags is the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements along the edge.”

Ratty chuckled sardonically. “I ’ope that in the real thing them machine-guns won’t ‘ave nothing to say to us movin’ half-right across their front,” he said.

“They’ve been strafed out wi’ the guns,” said Johnny simply, “an’ the Jocks ’as mopped up any that’s left. We was told that yesterday.”

“I dare say,” retorted Ratty. “An’ I hopes the Huns ’ave been careful instructed in the same. It ’ud be a pity if they went an’ did anything to spoil all the plans. But they wouldn’t do that. Oh, no, of course not—I don’t think!”

He had a good deal more to say in the same strain—with especially biting criticism on the “artillery barrage” and the red-faced big drummer who played lead in it—during the rest of the practice and at the end of it when they lay in their “final objective” and rested, smoking and cooling off with the top buttons of tunics undone, while the officers gathered round the C.O. and listened to criticism and made notes in their books.

“I’ll admit,” he said, “they might plan out the trenches here the same as the ones we’re to attack from. It’s this rot o’ layin’ out the Fritz trenches gets me. An’ this attack—it’s about as like a real attack as my gasper’s like a machine-gun. Huh! Wi’ one bloke clockin’ you on a stop-watch, an’ another countin’ the paces between the trenches—Boche trenches a mile behind their front line, mind you—an’ another whackin’ a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An’ all this ‘Go steady here, this is a sharp rise,’ or ’hurry this bit, ’cos most likely it’ll be open to enfiladin’ machine-gun fire,’ or ‘this here’s the sunk road wi’ six machine-gun emplacements.’ Huh! Plunky rot I calls it.”

The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing replies. Ratty was new to this planned-attack game, of course, but since he had been out and taken his whack of the early days, had been wounded, and home, and only lately had come out again, he was entitled to a certain amount of excusing.

Johnny summed it up for them. “We’ve moved a bit since the Noove Chapelle days, you know,” he said. “You didn’t have no little lot like this then, did you?” jerking his head at the bristling line of their machine-guns. “An’ you didn’t have creepin’ barrages, an’ more shells than you could fire, eh? Used to lose seventy an’ eighty per cent. o’ the battalion’s strength goin’ over the bags them days, didn’t you? Well, we’ve changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You’ll see the differ presently.”

Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable “differ” and a great improvement on old ways. He and his company moved up towards the front leisurely and certainly, without haste and without confusion, having the orders detailed overnight for the next day’s march, finding meals cooked and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously known and “detailed” for them, coming at night to camp or billet places left vacant for them immediately before, finding everything planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, although he admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that beyond the front line this carefully-planned moving must cease abruptly. “It’ll be the same plunky old scramble an’ scrap, I’ll bet,” he said. “We’ll see then if all the Fritz trenches is just where we’ve fixed ’em, an’ if we runs to a regular time-table and follows the laid-down route an’ first-turn-to-the-right-an’-mind-the-step-performance we’ve been practisin’.”

But it was as they approached the fighting zone, and finally when they found themselves installed in a support trench on the morning of the Push that Ratty came to understand the full difference between old battles and this new style. For days on end he heard such gun-fire as he had never dreamed of, heard it continue without ceasing or slackening day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred with winking and spurting gusts of flame from our high-explosives. He walked or lay on a ground that quivered and trembled under the unceasing shock of our guns’ discharges, covered his eyes at night to shut out the flashing lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the sky. On the last march that had brought them into the trenches they had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first the huge monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little in advance of the great piles of shells and long roofed sidings crammed with more shells, then farther on past other monsters only less in comparison with those they had seen before, on again past whole batteries of 60-pounders and “six-inch” tucked away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses, and finally up through the field guns packed close in every corner that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in the open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined village—a street that was no more than a cleared strip of cobblestones bordered down its length on both sides by the piled or scattered heaps of rubble and brick that had once been rows of houses—with a mad chorus of guns roaring and cracking and banging in numberless scores about them, passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns ranged battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of flame jumping and flashing along their fronts. They found and settled into their trench with this unbroken roar of fire bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud and long that it seemed impossible to increase it. When their watches told them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned was the “zero hour,” the fixed moment of the attack, the sound of the gun-fire swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of fury that eclipsed all that had gone before. The men crouched in their trench listening in awed silence, and as the zero hour approached Ratty clambered and stood where he could look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn’t he heard the order to keep under cover? Ratty dropped back beside the others. “Lumme,” he said disgustedly, “I dunno wot this bloomin’ war’s comin’ to. Orders, orders, orders! You mustn’t get plunky well killed nowadays, unless you ’as orders to.”

“There they go,” said Johnny suddenly, and all strained their ears for the sound of rattling rifle-fire that came faintly through the roll of the guns. “An’ here they come,” said Ratty quickly, and all crouched low and listened to the rising roar of a heavy shell approaching, the heavy cr-r-rump of its fall. A message passed along, “Ready there. Move in five minutes.” And at five minutes to the tick, they rose and began to pass along the trench.

“Know where we are, Ratty?” asked Johnny. Ratty looked about him. “How should I know?” he shouted back, “I was never ’ere before.”

“You oughter,” returned Johnny. “This is the line we started from back in practice attack—the one that was taped out along by the stream.”

“I’m a fat lot better for knowin’ it too,” said Ratty sarcastically, and trudged on. They passed slowly forward and along branching trenches until they came at last to the front line, from which, after a short rest, they climbed and hoisted their machine-guns out into the open. From here for the first time they could see something of the battleground; but could see nothing of the battle except a drifting haze of smoke, and, just disappearing into it, a shadowy line of figures. The thunder of the guns continued, and out in front they could hear now the crackle of rifle fire, the sharp detonations of grenades. There were far fewer shells falling about the old “neutral ground” than Ratty had expected, and even comparatively few bullets piping over and past them. They reached the tumbled wreckage of shell-holes and splintered planks that marked what had been the front German line, clambered through this, and pushed on stumbling and climbing in and out the shell-holes that riddled the ground. “Where’s the Buffs that’s supposed to be in front o’ us,” shouted Ratty, and ducked hastily into a deep shell-hole at the warning screech of an approaching shell. It crashed down somewhere near and a shower of dirt and earth rained down on him. He climbed out. “Should be ahead about a——here’s some o’ them now wi’ prisoners,” said Johnny. They had a hurried glimpse of a huddled group of men in grey with their hands well up over their heads, running, stumbling, half falling and recovering, but always keeping their hands hoisted well up. There may have been a full thirty of them, and they were being shepherded back by no more than three or four men with bayonets gleaming on their rifles. They disappeared into the haze, and the machine-gunners dropped down into a shallow twisting depression and pressed on along it. “This is the communication trench that used to be taped out along the edge o’ that cornfield in practice attack,” said Johnny, when they halted a moment. “Trench?” said Ratty, glancing along it, “Strewth!” The trench was gone, was no more than a wide shallow depression, a tumbled gutter a foot or two below the level of the ground; and even the gutter in places was lost in a patch of broken earth-heaps and craters. It was best traced by the dead that lay in it, by the litter of steel helmets, rifles, bombs, gas-masks, bayonets, water-bottles, arms and equipment of every kind strewed along it.

By now Ratty had lost all sense of direction or location, but Johnny at his elbow was always able to keep him informed. Ratty at first refused to accept his statements, but was convinced against all argument, and it was always clear from the direct and unhesitating fashion in which they were led that those in command knew where they were and where to go. “We should pass three trees along this trench somewhere soon,” Johnny would say, and presently, sure enough, they came to one stump six foot high and two splintered butts just showing above the earth. They reached a wide depression, and Johnny pointed and shouted, “The sunk road,” and looking round, pointed again to some whitish-grey masses broken, overturned, almost buried in the tumbled earth, the remains of concrete machine-gun emplacements which Ratty remembered had been marked somewhere back there on the practice ground by six marked boards. “Six,” shouted Johnny, and grinned triumphantly at the doubter.

The last of Ratty’s doubts as to the correctness of battle plans, even of the German lines, vanished when they came to a bare stretch of ground which Johnny reminded him was where they had been warned they would most likely come under enfilading machine-gun fire. They halted on the edge of this patch to get their wind, and watched some stretcher-bearers struggling to cross and a party of men digging furiously to make a line of linked-up shell-holes, while the ground about them jumped and splashed under the hailing of bullets.

“Enfiladin’ fire,” said Ratty. “Should think it was too. Why the ’ell don’t they silence the guns doin’ it?”

“Supposed to be in a clump o’ wood over there,” said Johnny. “And it ain’t due to be took for an hour yet.”

The word passed along, and they rose and began to cross the open ground amongst the raining bullets. “There’s our objective,” shouted Johnny as they ran. “That rise—come into action there.” Ratty stared aghast at the rise, and at the spouting columns of smoke and dirt that leaped from it under a steady fall of heavy shells. “That,” he screeched back, “Gorstrewth. Good-bye us then.” But he ran on as well as he could under the weight of the gun on his shoulder. They were both well out to the left of their advancing line and Ratty was instinctively flinching from the direct route into those gusts of flame and smoke. “Keep up,” yelled Johnny. “Remember the trench. You’ll miss the end of it.” Ratty recalled vaguely the line of flags and tape that had wriggled over the practice ground to the last position where they had halted each day and brought their guns into mimic action. He knew he would have slanted to the right to hit the trench end there, so here he also slanted right and presently stumbled thankfully into the broken trench, and pushed along it up the rise. At the top he found himself looking over a gentle slope, the foot of which was veiled in an eddying mist of smoke. A heavy shell burst with a terrifying crash and sent him reeling from the shock. He sat down with a bump, shaken and for the moment dazed, but came to himself with Johnny’s voice bawling in his ear, “Come on, man, come on. Hurt? Quick then—yer gun.” He staggered up and towards an officer whom he could see waving frantically at him and opening and shutting his mouth in shouts that were lost in the uproar. He thrust forward and into a shell-hole beside Johnny and the rest of the gun detachment. His sergeant jumped down beside them shouting and pointing out into the smoke wreaths. “See the wood ... six hundred ... lay on the ground-line—they’re counter-attack——” He stopped abruptly and fell sliding in a tumbled heap down the crater side on top of the gun. The officer ran back mouthing unheard angry shouts at them again. Ratty was getting angry himself. How could a man get into action with a fellow falling all over his gun like that? They dragged the sergeant’s twitching body clear and Ratty felt a pang of regret for his anger. He’d been a good chap, the sergeant.... But anger swallowed him again as he dragged his gun clear. It was drenched with blood. “Nice bizness,” he said savagely, “if my breech action’s clogged up.” A loaded belt slipped into place and he brought the gun into action with a savage jerk on the loading lever, looked over his sights, and layed them on the edge of the wood he could just dimly see through the smoke. He could see nothing to fire at—cursed smoke was so thick—but the others were firing hard—must be something there. He pressed his thumbs on the lever and his gun began to spurt a stream of fire and lead, the belt racing and clicking through, the breech clacking smoothly, the handles jarring sharply in his fingers.

The hillock was still under heavy shell-fire. They had been warned in practice attack that there would probably be shell-fire, and here it was, shrieking, crashing, tearing the wrecked ground to fresh shapes of wreckage, spouting in fountains of black smoke and earth, whistling and hurtling in jagged fragments, hitting solidly and bursting in whirlwinds of flame and smoke. Ratty had no time to think of the shells. He strained his eyes over the sights on the foot of the dimly seen trees, held his gun steady and spitting its jets of flame and lead, until word came to him, somehow or from somewhere to cease firing. The attack had been wiped out, he heard said. He straightened his bent shoulders and discovered with immense surprise that one shoulder hurt, that his jacket was soaked with blood.

“Nothing more than a good Blighty one,” said the bearer who tied him up. “Keep you home two-three months mebbe.”

“Good enough,” said Ratty. “I’ll be back in time to see the finish,” and lit a cigarette contentedly.

Back in the Aid Post later he heard from one of the Jocks who had been down there in the smoke somewhere between the machine-guns and the wood, that the front line was already well consolidated. He heard too that the German counter-attack had been cut to pieces, and that the open ground before our new line front was piled with their dead. “You fellies was just late enough wi’ your machine-guns,” said the Highlander. “In anither three-fower meenits they’d a been right on top o’ us.”

“Late be blowed,” said Ratty. “We was on the right spot exackly at the programme time o’ the plan. We’d rehearsed the dash thing an’ clocked it too often for me not to be sure o’ that. We was there just when we was meant to be, an’ that was just when they knew we’d be wanted. Whole plunky attack went like clockwork, far’s our bit o’ the plans went.”

But it was two days later and snug in bed in a London hospital, when he had read the dispatches describing the battle, that he had his last word on “planned attacks.”

“Lumme,” he said to the next bed, “I likes this dispatch of ole ’Indenburg’s. Good mile an’ a half we pushed ’em back, an’ held all the ground, an’ took 6,000 prisoners; an’, says ’Indenburg, ‘the British attack was completely repulsed ... only a few crater positions were abandoned by us according to plan.’”

He dropped the paper and grinned. “Accordin’ to plan,” he said. “That’s true enough. But ’e forgot to say it was the same as it always is—accordin’ to the plan that was made by ‘Aig an’ us.”