ONE by one our party left us, turning off along side-roads to search for the particular map-locations which had been suggested as positions for their batteries. At last only I and one other officer, named Strong, remained together. The spot for which we were looking was an orchard to the right of the road along the ridge which we were travelling.

We walked on and on. It seemed an interminable distance. A fine rain began to descend, which had the effect of mist, blurring the few landmarks which one could still identify as though a muslin curtain had been drawn across them. Every now and then the humpy figure of a man with a ground-sheet flung over his rifle and shoulders, would loom up out of the dark and pass us. It seemed as though he was always the same man, working like a beast of prey round and round us in circles, waiting for us to drop. We spoke to him several times, but he never deigned to answer. Men rarely answer when they are spoken to on the road up front at night. Whether it is that they enjoy the luxury which darkness affords them of not recognising authority, or that the sullenness of night has entered into their souls, or that they are afraid of being delayed one extra minute from the much needed sleep which awaits them in some wretched kennel, I do not know. But the effect of this silence on anyone who is travelling a country with which he is unfamiliar, is to arouse the suspicion that he may, unwittingly, have gone too far and have wandered behind the enemy’s line. This has happened quite often. Many an officer has started out on a night reconnaissance and disappeared as completely as if the ground had swallowed him up. In some cases the next news has been from a prisoners’ camp in Germany. In others a spy has been captured wearing his uniform; the presumption has been that he was murdered by a Hun agent on our side of the line and that his body has been tossed into some lonely shell-hole. On account of this danger no man or officer is allowed to go unaccompanied within two miles of the Front—a rule which is invariably broken.

We had walked so far that we had begun to think that we had passed our orchard, when quite suddenly we stumbled across it. It consisted of about a hundred trees. The first position lay behind the orchard in a wheat-field; the second in front, strung out along a dyke, with the whole of the Hun country staring at it. From every theoretical point of view the first position was the better, as the trees afforded it a certain amount of cover; on the other hand it had the disadvantage of being too obviously a good gun-position. If the Hun were to study his map for a likely place to shell a battery, he would be sure to pick on the rear of the orchard. The position was too ideal to be safe. Experience has proved that a bad position is often more healthy in the long run. It can be so damned bad that it’s almost good. The enemy would scarcely believe that any battery-commander would be fool enough to select it. Another disadvantage of the first position was that the wheat, while it would hide the guns, might easily be set on fire and be converted from a protection into a trap.

Strong and I tossed for the choice; when I won, rather to his amazement I chose the bad position in front of the orchard. How bad it was I had not realized till the dawn began to rise. Then I discovered that the muzzles of our guns would poke out straight across the valley. The road, from the Gentelles Woods to Domart, skirted the left of the position, dipped down into the valley across No Man’s Land and climbed the further slope by a mass of trees, marked on the map as Dodo Wood. From Dodo Wood the enemy could have watched a cat washing itself on the ground where our guns were to come into action. One false step and the entire position could be wiped out. On the other hand, if we could contrive to lie doggo until the show commenced, the smoke of battle would confuse an enemy observer, so that he would be likely to mistake our flash for the flash of the battery in the wheatfield behind the orchard—in which case it would be they and not we who would be knocked out. That was the gamble one had to take. If one guessed wrong, he brought down death on most of his chaps.

As day commenced to whiten, it became unwise to hang about in so exposed a place. All the transport that had creaked and thundered through the night, had vanished from sight and sound for over an hour. Under the sickly pallor which was spreading through the sky, the landscape looked afraid and haggard. One saw now for the first time how horribly it had been battered. Not a tree on the road along the ridge had escaped; they tottered like old prizefighters too proud to run away, with their arms drooping by their sides, waiting for the knock-out blow to fell them.

The rain had ceased, the smell of death was in the air. The ground seemed soaked with men who had died. Mingled with this smell was the sickly sweetness of gas and the suffocating fumes of explosives. The blanket of mist which had made us safe, was breaking up and drifting away in little ghostly clouds. It was the hour when the gunners on either side of No-Man’s-Land stand down on their harassing fire and wait breathlessly for the S. O. S. which betokens an attack. When that comes, they open up at an intense rate of fire, four rounds per gun per minute. To be caught in such a hail-storm of destruction is not pleasant, and especially unpleasant when you know that you are serving no good purpose by your presence. We gazed behind us at the Gentelles Woods; the shells had ceased to burst and all was quiet. “Let’s make our get-away while the going is good,” Strong said.

Crouching and running low along the ground, we scrambled through the orchard and plunged into the wheat-field. In order that we might reconnoitre a new route of approach to the positions, we struck off to the left, entering a ravine which led down to a lower road which paralleled the shell-torn highway along the ridge. From a distance the ravine looked wild and forsaken; not a plume of smoke rose; nothing stirred. As we walked down it, we discovered that what we had mistaken for rocks and patches of brush, were actually carefully camouflaged ammunition-dumps and battery positions. Not only this ravine, but every hill and slope was stiff with guns of every calibre, lying masked and silent, waiting for the great hour to strike when they would blow the Hun out of his strongholds. In rabbit-warrens dug far down beneath the surface, the French artillery-men bided their time. Some of them peeped out to watch us pass, with eyes uninterested and fatalistic.

Our idea of the scope of the attack which was planned grew as we investigated further. We also began to get a picture of what these preparations had already cost in lives. Horses and men lay strewn about in every stage of decomposition. Some had only been dead for hours; others were the skeletons of those who had fallen in the fierce counter-drive, which had halted the Huns’ rush towards Amiens. One wondered how that rush had ever been halted and, when it had been halted, how the line had been held. Every bit of high ground in our hands was over-topped by a higher point in the hands of the enemy. From all directions on the eastern horizon, from woods and coppices in a great semi-circle, the Hun gazed down; it was impossible to avoid his eyes. Every now and then a scurry of bullets or a whizz-bang bursting near us would remind us of this fact, and we would flatten ourselves.

It took us two hours to regain the town from which we had started where, by pre-arrangement, we were to make our reports to the Colonel. From him we learnt that our batteries had marched in during the night and had set up their horse-lines in the Boves Woods. That these woods should have been chosen for our camp was the crowning stroke of audacity; how audacious we did not realise until we saw the camp itself.

All the woods of this district are on hill-tops, the slopes of the valleys and the valleys themselves being cleared for agriculture; it is therefore a very difficult country in which to hide from the planes of the enemy. Infantry can keep out of sight in the villages and towns, taking their chances of shell-fire and digging themselves in beneath the houses. But the horse-lines of mounted troops are unmistakable when seen from the air, and almost impossible to disguise. To take to the woods was our only choice. The enemy was aware of this: he bombed every cluster of trees as soon as night had fallen, and raked them both day and night with shell-fire.

The Boves Woods lay behind the town. To reach them it was necessary to climb a bald ascent of chalk, almost incandescently white, and to cross a plateau which was as open and conspicuous as a parade-ground. In the old days of hand-to-hand fighting and cavalry charges the height must have been well-nigh impregnable. In general formation it was not unlike the Heights of Abraham, even to having a river for its defence, which wound about its foot. The ascent, the plateau and the woods were full in sight of the enemy on their eastward side. To select such a landmark for one’s horselines was the last word in foolhardiness. A water-cart wandering out on to the plateau in full daylight would have given the secret away. Had the enemy once started shelling, he would have discovered all that was necessary to make public the attack. The night-marches, the decoys sent up to Yprhs, the whole web of strategy, the object of which was to make him muster his reserves opposite to the most remote part of the line, would all have proved useless. In choosing the Boves Woods as our place of hiding we were staking our own foolishness against the enemy’s common-sense; he would never credit us with being so reckless. We were attempting to defeat his cleverness by our own seeming stupidity. Our chance of getting away with such a trick was one in a thousand. In the choice of our gun-positions and in all that we were attempting, it was on the thousandth chance that we were gambling.

On leaving the Colonel, since it was daylight, we had to work our way round the hill and approach our camp from the westward slope. We found that the town had been badly hammered, and except for the troops who hid like rats beneath the fallen roofs, was entirely deserted. We found also that a river which wandered through it, cut it in two, and was crossed by a single bridge, which was quite incapable of taking all the traffic. This bridge had to be shared by both ourselves and the French, and had evidently been responsible for the delays and congestions which we had noticed on the night of our arrival. One wondered what would happen if the attack failed, and a retreat became necessary. How could we get the guns away across a single bridge which the enemy would certainly keep under fire? It was plain that failure and retreat had not entered into the vision of our present strategy. It was neck or nothing. We were staking our all on success.

At the entrance to the woods Strong and I parted company and went in search of our respective batteries. The undergrowth was drenched and had been trampled into boggy lanes where the horses had been led down to water. Everything was dark and dank. The overhead foliage was so dense that heat and light never permeated. A cathedral dusk and chill mounted from the roots of the trees to the topmost branches. Distantly, at the end of the long aisles of trunks, the day shone like stained-glass windows.

I had to hunt for some time before I found my unit. The place was packed with weary horses and sleeping men. At last I came across them, the horses tethered to ropes stretched between the wheels of the limbers, and the men rolled in blankets, mud-splashed and motionless. Everything was so still that I might have stumbled across a refuge of the dead. There were no fires burning; without being told, I knew that fires were not allowed. We might be storm-troops, but we looked neither triumphant nor terrible.... beneath a stretch of canvas I espied my sleeping-sack. Without more ado, removing my boots and tunic, I tumbled into bed. My last conscious thought was of the gun-position, with Dodo Wood glaring down at it. Would it have been better to have chosen the other position behind the orchard?

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