CHANGING POSITION
The preparation of a battery position is a business that requires much labour and considerable time, if anything more elaborate than mere screening from view is attempted. Deep pits must be dug for the guns, and slopes cut into these pits by which the said guns may be hauled in and out. These pits must be floored with an elaborate platform, their sides must be revetted, that is to say that boards, corrugated iron or some similar substance must be fixed against them to prevent their falling in, and, most difficult feat of all, they must be roofed over with as much earth as such roof beams as can be procured can be made to bear. When the pits are completed, deep caverns must be dug and prepared to serve as refuges for the detachments in case of the battery being shelled. Other shelters must be provided as magazines for ammunition, as a room for the telephone and its operators, as a refuge for the section commanders. Billets must be found for the men and officers, if no billets are available dug-outs must be made. Places must be found for cook-houses, washing-places, work-shops, stores. A battery position prepared for lengthy occupation is a most elaborate work, and one does not light-heartedly desert it for an open plain where everything remains to be done. But sooner or later the dread message comes: "The battery will be prepared to move at 6 p.m. to-morrow. An officer will proceed forthwith to such-and-such a place where he will be shown the new position selected." Off goes the officer in the car, he meets some deputy from headquarters, and the two trudge off together through the ever-present mud. "Here you are," says the deputy cheerfully; "how does this suit you? Splendid place. Look at that orchard; you could hide the guns under the trees." The battery officer stares glumly at a dozen apple trees, each of which is of a size to flourish contentedly in a fair-sized flower-pot, and makes some dubious reply. "I never knew such difficult fellows to please as you siege battery fellows are in my life! Well, come and look over here. There's a natural pit, ready dug for you; it'll hold all the battery easily." With this the guide indicates with no little pride a gully, at the bottom of which stagnates rather than flows a greenish liquid with an odour of the most clinging type. "Yes, it might be a bit difficult to get the guns in and out, certainly. What about concealment behind that hedge?" But the hedge proves to be separated from the only road by an impassable morass. At last the orchard is selected as the least impossible under the circumstances, and the officer returns to his battery thoroughly convinced that he has selected the worst possible position on the whole front, and wondering what on earth will be said to him when he exhibits it to the rest of the battery.
Or else the proposed site is in the middle of a village, a place with a reputation for being shelled that is notorious from Ypres to Loos. A fabulous arc of fire is demanded from the battery, and weary hours are spent looking for a more or less concealed spot that will allow of the trajectory clearing houses and trees in all the required directions. At last it is found, the necessary measurements made and found satisfactory, when an officer strolls up. "Good-afternoon. You're not going to stop here long, are you? Going to put a battery here! I wouldn't be you for something, then. I've been about here for weeks, and they always strafe the schoolhouse there every day about this time. Look out, here she comes——" and a "woolly bear" or a "whizz-bang" or some other fiendish and aptly named projectile bursts neatly over the building that one had appropriated in one's mind's eye for a mess. Wearily the search begins again—this might do, perhaps—but by now the "evening hate" is in full swing, and a heavy shell settles with a self-satisfied "crrrump!" in the middle of one's oasis, digging one's gun-pits before one's eyes, as it were.
On one occasion the position chosen for us was the really beautiful garden of a medium-sized chÂteau. The front was a well-planned mass of shrubbery, intersected with paths and flower-beds, the back a walled vegetable garden, most scrupulously maintained, planted with every sort of vegetable and fruit and provided with a good range of glass. The owner of the place lived in the chÂteau, and his gardener worked on the premises. The dismay of these good people when they were told that the place was to be turned into a battery and the men billeted in the chÂteau can better be imagined than described. The owner was a philosopher, and took matters calmly. "Enfin, c'est la guerre, que voulez-vous?" he said sadly as we expressed our horror at the necessity of ruining this little paradise. The gardener was no philosopher, and when I look back upon the mutilated shrubberies, the trodden-down grass plots, the hotbeds with their boarding torn up for revetment, the old wall breached in many places for easy access, the broken panes in the greenhouses and, worst of all, four yawning chasms where once the asparagus, the strawberries and the artichokes dwelt together in amity, I do not wonder at the hostile spirit he displayed. I can see him now dancing round the sergeant-major, an imperturbable person of few words in his own tongue, and of none in French, whom he found cutting a few cabbages for the sergeants' dinner. "SacrÉ nom d'un cochon, regardez-lÀ le voleur qui arrache mes petits choux! Ah, les anglais sont incroyables!" "No compree," says the sergeant-major, and goes on with his garnering. The gardener got something of his own back that night, however, for the garden had a very complete system of hydrants all over it, which same hydrants our friend stealthily visited with the turn-key, which he then disposed of and departed. It was pitch dark and we were all busy working, so that it was some time before we noticed the gathering floods, and the whole place was inches deep in mud and water by the time that we had discovered how to turn it off again. We never brought the crime home to the criminal, but a certain hidden gleam of triumph in that gardener's wholly disapproving eye has always convinced me of his guilt.
We had much to contend with in occupying that position. Several times we were held up in our work, first by somebody who said the situation was too exposed and that it was sheer suicide to occupy a house that was conspicuous for miles round; then by the urgent representations of a French officer who commanded a battery near by, and who declared that we should draw down fire upon the devoted heads of his people; and finally by a conference who debated for some time whether we were really required in that sector at all. However, we got all these matters satisfactorily settled at last, and set to work in earnest. And digging pits by night in the light of a few hurricane lamps is work indeed, especially if it rains persistently, as it almost invariably does. Unskilful wielders of the pick are apt to drive their lethal weapons into everything but the ground they mean to excavate, their favourite targets being such parts of their neighbours as get in their way. This leads to acrimonious wrangling and consequent delay. Better this, however, than the adventure of one lusty champion, who with a mighty effort drove his pick clean through the cast-iron main that supplied the delinquent hydrants, whereby he converted, in an incredibly short space of time, that half-completed pit into a sea of mud and water some four feet deep. To any one who expresses a fondness for bathing I recommend the plugging of a four-inch main, with a good pressure behind it, lying at the bottom of four feet of a cream-like mixture of chalk, clay and water at three o'clock on an autumn morning.
Geology, we are told, is the science that deals with the constitutents of the earth. A new chapter should be written to the text-books, a new branch of the science has been rendered necessary by the war, the study of the properties of mud. Mud is now elevated to the dignity of a fifth element, but surpasses the other four by its perpetual presence, equalled only by that of the ether which pervades everything we know. Mud shares its motto with the Royal Regiment of Artillery, one lives in it, sleeps in it, and not infrequently eats it—indeed, competent experts with carefully trained palates are said to be able to tell from the flavour of the bacon at breakfast the exact part of the line in which it has been rolled before issue. Surely in all the ancient mythologies some student may find for mud some presiding deity that we may suitably propitiate?
Nor were such more or less natural phenomena our only hindrances. No sooner were the pits completed, than somebody more perspicacious than his fellows discovered that we had been ordered to lay them out in the wrong direction, and they had to be cut out still further to allow the platforms to be slewed round through the required angle. This order reached us one evening just as we were promising ourselves a night in bed after our strenuous labours, and the despair of all ranks spread like a mephitic vapour over the country-side in a mist of strange profanity. The men, however, whose spirits are proof against continued despondency under the most depressing circumstances, set to work with a will, and the tedious digging was finished at last. Then came the far more interesting business of revetting and roofing. Now, obviously revetting and roofing require planks, beams, iron sheets, and material of that nature, and equally obviously the department that professes to provide stores of this description, and whose imagination rarely soars above the level of sandbags, is utterly unable to supply such things. The only course left is to find them for oneself, and fortunately a row of houses whose inhabitants had been evicted stood on this occasion near at hand, and these we gutted. Doors, shutters, floor-boards, rafters, everything but the bricks themselves, we contrived to utilize, until we had everything we could desire except girders for our roofs, which were to be of earth. Now a fifteen-foot span of earth two feet in thickness requires a good deal of supporting, and after several experiments with rafters, experiments that sometimes had unpleasant results for those who conducted them, we decided that something stronger was required. Here, again, almost in the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson, we found what we required at our very door, but not before one adventurous spirit had invited an early death (from which may he long be spared!) by driving a particularly noisy lorry into a coal mine overlooking the German lines in search of pit-props. Our discovery was due to an eagle eye that discovered a notice-board bearing the words "DÉfense de circuler sur la voie," whose owner, realizing that there could be no temptation to circulate on the line if there was no line upon which to circulate, investigated further and found a grass-grown colliery siding. Here were our long-sought girders, and with their discovery our troubles were practically over. Certainly the guns had yet to be lowered into the pits, and hauling heavy guns over soft garden mould on a dark night is an undertaking to try the most angelic patience, but on this occasion, for the first and last time, the Mud-god smiled upon us, and that midnight we knew the true happiness that comes of the successful completion of strenuous labour.
Here we remained for some weeks, until again disturbed by the order to change position. Again everything has to be done by night, the guns hauled out of the pits, the thousand and one small stores necessary to the interior economy of the battery packed each in its proper place, the heavy platforms raised and loaded into the lorries. The ease with which any particular article can be mislaid under those circumstances is incredible. Relative weight or importance seems to have no bearing on the matter at all, one is just as likely, upon arriving at dawn in some unknown land, to discover that one has left behind a spare wheel or a handcart or even a battery quartermaster-sergeant, as one is to find a small screwdriver missing. After a while the whole business becomes a nightmare in which one is condemned eternally to spend one's time counting handspikes and lorries and men, and to make the total utterly different every time. And then the line of march! A procession of heavy lorries, some drawing the guns, the rest laden with men, stores and ammunition, looking for all the world like some huge travelling circus, sets off upon a dark foggy night, carrying of course no lights, over roads already laden to their utmost capacity with troops and supply columns, and plentifully besprinkled with shell holes. At the head of the procession rides a group of officers in a car, one of whom has possibly been over the road once by daylight, and about the length of the convoy are scattered here and there men wrestling with recalcitrant motor-bicycles, which they vainly try to restrict to the speed of the column, perhaps four or five miles an hour. Much can happen under these circumstances. Perhaps the rearmost lorry has to stop for adjustment, and by the time the word has passed along the line the car at the head is far away, and the column strung out over a mile or so of road. Or the foremost lorry commences to boil frantically and slows down, whereupon the remainder tread upon one another's heels, until it stops altogether, when the column forms a compact mass that nothing can attempt to pass. Or the geographical instinct of the leader of the expedition fails at a cross-roads, and recourse has to be had to the sentry who stands there. One of two things then happens. Either the man does not know the way and says so, or he does not know the way and with the utmost positiveness declares the route to be by the first road that strikes his fancy. Those to whom the former of these certainties happens are by far the most fortunate, for the attempt to turn a column of lorries on a narrow road, especially if it consists, as it usually does, of a central strip of pavÉ bordered by fathomless mud, is certain to be fraught with disaster. A fully-loaded ammunition lorry stuck in a ditch is a most heartbreaking sight, particularly (if the bull may be forgiven) if the night is so dark that one cannot see it. It must be unloaded, dragged out by the help of another lorry, which sometimes slides into the ditch itself in the process, and then loaded up again, usually to the accompaniment of uncomplimentary observations from the traffic that it is holding up.
Certainly the accidents that may happen to mechanical transport are many and various, but there are some to which it is not liable. One of the first messages that we received upon our arrival in a certain new position ran as follows, "Report at once all cases of glanders occurring amongst your transport." One has trouble enough without infectious disease to contend with. A motor lorry is a capital thing on a road, even if that road is in a very bad state, but, once take it on to soft or slippery ground, and its imperfections become manifest. First of all its wheels start to slip, and chains are fixed round the felloes to give them a grip. This answers for a while, but suddenly the wheels begin to revolve at a terrific speed, and the chains fly hurtling through the air to the obvious disadvantage of any one who gets in their way. A few men with lamps are sent to look for these, whilst the rest endeavour to give the lorry a start by pushing behind. Start she does, with a sudden leap, and, before she can be stopped, finds the softest part of the whole field and sinks gently but firmly into it until supported on her axles. By this time the search party, having taken all the lanterns with them, is far away, and you feel the lorry sinking without a possibility of doing anything by the light of the one match that the battery possesses. The only thing left to do is to dig her out, support her wheels on planks, and haul her on to the road again with ropes.
But the march ends at last, usually at about two o'clock in the morning, and one arrives tired, cold and very sleepy, in the unknown land. This village is the place we were told to stop at, and the men's billets are said to be somewhere over there. Glad of a walk, I set out to find them, and find in succession a row of tents knee-deep in mud, apparently completely surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, a barn without a roof, and a shed tenanted by two inquisitive and particularly skittish cows. I return to the lorries and find the men drawn up at the side of the road. Having explained the situation, I call for volunteers to spend the night with the cows. The country-bred members of the battery fall out and are marched off to deal with the fierce beasts as best they can. The remainder are carefully shepherded into the roofless barn and the bottomless tents. Judging by the language that arises, this latter party are foiled in their first attack by the wire. But the gunner is an adaptable person, and all contrive to settle themselves as comfortably as possible in a wonderfully short time, leaving me free to find the officer's billet, which turns out to be the drawing-room of a small miller's house. The only corner left is under the grand piano, and there I lay out my valise and am soon fast asleep. Let the troubles of the morning care for themselves!
