IN FRENCH TERRITORY
At the beginning of October our battery, owing to reasons of strategy and convenience, changed its position by a matter of about a mile-and-a-half, and by so doing entered an area where the right of the British line joined the left of the French line. The actual point of junction of the lines varies from time to time, as much owing to the two armies' requirements in the matter of billets as for any other reason, and, as it happened, on the very day we moved into our new position, this point was in process of being moved a mile or so northwards. We saw, therefore, the familiar khaki give place to the looped-up blue greatcoat, and when, the desperate struggle to get the battery in order in the minimum time being over, we had time to look round and take note of our surroundings, we found ourselves in French Territory.
I think that the weeks we spent there were the happiest we have ever known, although the life of a gunner is a rough paradise for a man with health and strength—plenty of work, plenty of sport, and complete freedom from the cares of an artificial existence, there being nothing artificial about war. Our position was amongst ruined corons, not so badly damaged but that they could with very little trouble be made into very comfortable billets, and owing to the fact that it was in French territory, was immune from the visits of predatory "brass hats." Further, in our group commander we had a strong buckler against interference and aggression, and one in whom we all placed implicit confidence. His kindness to us all will be amongst the most precious memories of those happy days.
We found the change of tenants in the villages round us extremely advantageous in many ways, not the least of which was the amount of loot we acquired. It seems curious that the British Army, equipped as it is with a more copious transport than has ever before been imagined, should invariably leave in its wake enormous quantities of perfectly serviceable stores. On this particular occasion we found abandoned more than enough overcoats and waterproof capes to fit out the whole battery, and collected from the billets into which we moved over a hundred thousand rounds of small-arm ammunition alone. Although these matters were reported, no steps were ever taken to remove the stores, and subsequent discoveries of hundreds of boxes of unused bombs met with the same indifference. What wonder that the thrifty French regard it as the best fortune that can befall them to take over any part of our line, or that French officers to whom I have spoken are inclined to base their opinions of our conduct of the war upon such indications of our national habits. "No army before has ever wasted as you waste," said one to me; "the food you reject would feed half the French Forces, the rifles you failed to collect after Loos would equip many battalions of your New Army. What is your proverb—'Straws show which way the wind blows'—is it not?" Nor did the British troops leave only stores behind in their evacuation. Two days after the exchange, an officer arrived in the battery with a strange tale of woe. He was in command of a picquet in a certain village, from where he had watched his own people depart and the French arrive, expecting every moment to be relieved. Since that time he had received neither orders nor rations, and he and his men had lived upon the charity of a French regiment. We fed him and sent him back to his lonely vigil with an armful of provisions and a promise to report his troubles through our headquarters. I heard subsequently that his patrol had been forgotten and never missed, so presumably he might have been there now but for his own action.
The first and greatest Commandment when on active service is this, "Thou shalt covet thy neighbour's goods, and if he doesn't keep his eye on them, thou shalt possess them." Nationality seems to have no effect upon the speed with which the soldier assimilates this doctrine. The French piou-piou is as great a follower of it as the British Tommy, but his native politeness lends to the act a more distinguished air. Of course, British troops with their wasteful ways are to him lawful game, and the first couple of days in his company taught our people habits of carefulness that were never learnt before. Our most experienced marauders returned empty-handed from raids into the French lines, and this bred a respect for our Allies that rapidly blossomed into genuine friendship. And undoubtedly the French soldier, taking him all round, is a most charming person and an almost perfect fighting man. He takes life very seriously, and is frequently scandalized by our behaviour, not quite understanding that a mask of frivolity may be only the result of a desire to make light of difficulties and to hearten others, hiding in reality an immovable determination to do one's duty. "Pour vous, la guerre n'est pas sÉrieuse," said a big Breton to me once, and I, knowing the melancholy tendencies of his race, knew not what to reply. But next day a party of which he formed one, doubled past the battery. "Que faites-vous?" I called as he passed. With a face wreathed in smiles he replied, "Nous allons donner aux Bosches un petit coup de fusil, Ça sera trÈs amusant, hein?"
Of the picturesque appearance of these French troops a few words may be said. There is an entry in my diary about this time, "Walked down to headquarters this morning. Saw two Frenchmen dressed alike." And to the eyes of those accustomed to unvarying khaki, the extraordinary kaleidoscopic effect of steel helmet, kÉpi, coats of all conceivable colours, breeches and trousers likewise, putties that shame the rainbow, and an increasing note of khaki with a dash of colour on the collar or sleeve, strikes very strangely. Even the men of the same regiment do not seem to wear the same kit. One will be met in steel helmet, dark blue coat and red trousers, the next in kÉpi, light blue coat and breeches, and grass-green putties. The authorities knew better than to waste the stocks of clothing that they already had on hand.
It would be impertinent to discuss the fighting qualities of these superb troops. The English Tommy, invariably a keen and usually a perspicacious critic of everything that comes into his range of vision, is apt to comment unfavourably upon what appears to his eye as an undisciplined mob strolling along the roads. But his eyes are gradually opened as first of all he discovers that these men, laden with a far greater weight than he is ever called upon to carry, are travelling quite as fast as he cares to, and then, at the end of the day, he finds that they have made themselves thoroughly comfortable and are enjoying a good meal long before he has thought of anything but the contents of his water-bottle. After that the revelation of their fighting qualities does not come as such a shock to him. Who that has seen them at work, for instance round Souchez or in their magnificent attack on the Double Crassier on October 11, can refrain from blessing our historic national luck for the Allies it has brought us?
And throughout his nature runs the Frenchman's traditional love for the turning of an honest penny. No sooner were we settled in our position than a bearded French soldier, probably a newsvendor in civil life, saw his golden opportunity. In his hours off duty he used to walk back many miles from the position, and return with an armful of English newspapers of the day before. How he procured them was a mystery we never solved, for he always arrived with them hours before we could obtain them anywhere ourselves. "DÉlÉ peppers!" he would cry, and the whole battery turned out as one man to greet him and buy his wares, which, by the way, he sold cheaper than their price in the neighbouring towns. How much English he understood I never knew; he would talk it freely with the men, but never with the officers—"Non compris" and a shake of the head was his invariable reply to our advances in this direction. But he always knew the contents of the papers he sold, especially the Daily Mail. Certainly his ideas occasionally got a little mixed. I am convinced, for instance, that he was under the impression that Lord Northcliffe was either Dictator of England or had changed places with Lord Kitchener. "Monsieur Lor' Notcliffe il va bien ce matin!" he would say with great satisfaction, "il va finir la guerre sur-le-champ." His politics swayed him to the extent that he always refused to bring us French dailies. "Mais non, je vous dis, monsieur. Vous aimez les journaux franÇais? Bien, demain je vous apporterai peut-Être La Vie Parisienne, Le Rire, ce que vous voulez. Mais Le Temps, Le Matin? Ceux sont les organes honteuses des capitalistes. L'Homme EnchaÎnÉ, si vous voulez——"
He or one of his assistants (for it always seemed to me that half the French Army helped to carry his papers round for him) it was that first introduced us to the fascinations of the ring-making industry. It appears that an industrious Frenchman, one supposes a jeweller by trade, early in the war hit upon the idea of collecting the fuses of hostile shells that fell near him, melting down the aluminium of which they are largely made, and casting it into rings, which he ornamented by letting in pieces of brass or copper, also components of the fuse. The practice spread like wildfire through the French troops, it gave a congenial occupation to their busy fingers, and brought them a gratifying increase of income. Our men were at first ready customers—there was little enough for them to spend money upon, the inhabitants had been cleared out of the surrounding villages, and no civilian population means no estaminets. But some of the more commercially-minded among us—the whole story is as a microcosm of our commercial supremacy as a nation—loath to see this profitable trade passing them by, determined to enter into competition. The first experiments were dramatic enough. A band of telephonists collected a large store of wood torn from ruined houses, and of coal, fetched at no small risk from a mine that was usually under fire, in the observation post, which happened then to be a fairly large house well back from the hostile lines, so that a fire was allowed in the telephonists' room. Here one evening they collected, like a band of alchemists for the fusion of the Philosopher's Stone, and here I chanced upon them, the room lit only by the glare of a huge fire, around which they all crouched, their eyes fixed upon a saucepan that held in its depths one small fuse, which the Master of the Black Arts periodically poked enquiringly with the point of his bayonet. I believe that attempt ended in the necessity for a sudden and disastrous quenching, brought about by the fact that the house itself showed ominous signs of catching fire. After many vicissitudes the art became centred in the battery cooks, who, having the unfair advantage that in the natural course of events they worked by a fire all day, formed a sort of Guild of Ring Makers, and some very creditable work was produced. Their first step was to undersell the French, and they succeeded to such an extent that the cook-house became a miniature Birmingham, and orders had to be placed early to secure delivery. Souvenirs these rings became in a land where everybody seems to ask everybody else for a "souvenir," a term that has become so wide that it covers everything portable. One day I was standing in a doorway when surely the youngest soldier in the French army—he could not have been more than fourteen; I suppose he was a drummer boy, but how he reached so close to the firing line has always puzzled me—passed me and saluted gravely. My smile must have reassured him, for he stopped and after some hesitation looked at me and saluted again. "Souvenir, monsieur!" he blurted out at last. "Souvenir?" said I, "Quelle espÈce de souvenir dÉsirez-vous?" With a grin that threatened to sever the top of his head from the rest of his body, he replied, "Souvenir de bully-beef, monsieur!" He got it.
The flies that marred the soothing ointment of this position were certain mysterious bullets that flew about at strange hours of the night and day. Nobody was ever actually hit, but people strolling about between the guns heard a whirr overhead that made then duck involuntarily, and heated officers would dash into the mess swearing that they had seen bullets flatten themselves against brick walls within an inch of their noses. Scepticism, or even a suggestion that they were spent bullets from the firing line, was treated as insubordination. A sniper it must be, a snark who crept into our lines, shot his bolt, then softly and silently vanished away. One evening the combined patience of the battery could bear it no longer—I think somebody had staggered into the mess in a condition of collapse, and upon being revived with a rum ration, proceeded to explain how his cigarette had been shot out of his mouth by a bullet that passed between his teeth. At all events, it was decided to inform the French and request them to take steps to abate the nuisance. They, in the expressive jargon of the day, were all over it. Parties of men from their lines and our own crept out in the dusk to hunt the sniper—what a glorious opportunity of winning fame by returning with his scalp, or one of his ears, or whatever part of a sniper one does bring back as a trophy! Dozens of parties, each more subtle than the other in their proposed methods of action, crept out in the rapidly-falling dusk, and with them the greater number of our officers, armed with looted rifles and more subtlety than all the rest of the parties put together. Then night fell dark and moonless, and the fun began. Each party, busily engaged in its own game of blind-man's-buff, caught sight of some other party, and opened a hot and furious fire upon them. The remaining parties, seeing the flashes, emptied their magazines in their direction. By an hour or so after dark, the battle was in full swing. At ten o'clock such of the battery as were not engaged in the chase were cowering in their dug-outs and there was not a whole pane of glass for miles around. At half-past ten, a telephonist going to the O.P. to relieve his comrade was forced to take shelter in a disused communication trench, and to remain there all night, any attempt on his part to climb out being met by rapid fire from every direction at once. At eleven, a mitrailleuse was dragged up by an excited knot of men, and opened fire in the direction from which there seemed to come most noise. At half-past, fire had become general all along the line, everybody, supposing that his neighbour knew what he was aiming at, firing in the same direction as he did. At midnight the Germans, thinking it a shame to be left so long out of the picture, and possibly tired of being kept awake, opened with a field battery, an inconsiderate action that effectually damped the proceedings. By one o'clock all was quiet again, and, much to my astonishment, every one returned whole, each man having seen the sniper and had at least a dozen shots at him, every one of which by his own account must have been fatal. Subsequent inquiries revealed the amazing fact that the French also had suffered no casualties. Yet alas! no more, apparently, had the sniper, for the bullets continued to whizz and valuable officers to have hair-breadth escapes until the time came for us to leave the place.
On the next night we were shelled, probably by way of retaliation for the disturbance of the previous night. The enemy seemed to know our approximate position, and "searched and swept" all round us with heavy shell, but never contrived to burst one within twenty yards of the guns. It happened to be my business to walk about the battery, exhorting men to keep under cover. In the middle of it all a party of French soldiers walked nonchalantly through our lines. "Prenez garde," I shouted, "Il y a des obus qui tombe par ici, descendez dans les abris!" They thanked me and ran into the dug-outs. The next shell burst pretty close, covering everything with fragments. Out dashed my Frenchmen, and in answer to my expostulations, "Nous en voulons un souvenir," they replied, and forthwith began to hunt for the fuse.
Magnificent as are the French infantry, their artillery far surpass them. To those who have any knowledge of artillery work, the French appear as performers of miracles. Their equipment, their incomparable soixante-quinze, is a frail-looking cheaply constructed affair, giving the impression of weakness and inefficiency. Their personnel seems utterly inadequate, both in men and officers, their methods of ammunition supply are rudimentary. But a French battery will come into action in an inconceivably short time, and will continue in action night and day at a rate of fire that is unbelievable to one who has not heard it. Minor technical details, such as sights, are far in advance of our own, even in the case of some old heavy pieces, whose mirror sight utterly shames by its convenience and simplicity our extraordinary device for the same purpose. And the officers, how keen they were! Scarcely a day passed but some two or three came into the battery and courteously enquired if they might examine les piÈces. Of course they could, we were only too happy to exhibit them, and then what explanations and comparisons between theirs and ours! "Ce frein-ci n'est pas mal, mais pourquoi les ressorts sont-ils d'une telle longueur?" or "Mon dieu, que cet appareil de portage est compliquÉ!" Keen men and keen critics, equally eager to show us their weapons and to hear our criticisms upon them. Their colonel included us in his command at such times as we supported the French batteries, which was fairly frequently. A spare figure in a close-fitting jacket, a bullet-shaped head set with a pair of piercing eyes that discovered everything without the assistance of the tongue, he was the ideal of an artillery officer. He had the scientific mind that absorbs every detail and stores it away in a pigeon-hole ready for immediate use. Never once after the first time that I was introduced to him, did he fail, wherever we met, to stop, shake hands and address me by name. In a hurried quarter of an hour I once recited to him all the technical details of the howitzer with which we were armed. Weeks afterwards I heard him repeat faultlessly all the details, with others which he had noticed for himself. If he be a type of the senior artillery officer, happy are our Allies in the possession of such men.
Another incident that occurred to us will show the unvarying promptitude and courtesy with which the French treated us. It happened that close to the battery and in the middle of the French infantry billets was a ruined church tower, of which a certain portion still stood, enough, we discovered, to make it worth our while to build a series of ladders within it, and to use the bell-beam as an emergency observation post. But Monsieur le Poilu thought that this was a capital spot into which to climb, and from thence to wave his kÉpi to his friends and generally to behave in such a manner as to attract the attention of hostile observers, with the not unnatural result that one fine evening the enemy fired a few rounds at it, narrowly missing our senior subaltern, and, which was a matter for far deeper concern, the ration lorry. Complaint being made to the colonel, he, after several complimentary remarks as to our skill in using so unfavourable a place, promised that there should be no repetition of the offence. Ever afterwards an armed guard was posted at the base of the tower, with orders to admit no one but ourselves.
Those French soldiers, what children they were, as their behaviour in the tower showed! Whenever we were in action, a crowd of them would gather behind the guns to watch the shell in its flight, as is perfectly easy with any low-velocity howitzer. "Venez voir l'obus!" they would cry, and, as the gun fired, "Le voila, voyez, voyez! ah, il tombe——" and a shriek of delight would almost drown one's subsequent orders. What children and what men! Perfect fighters, eager to rush to the attack, yet patient under the iron discipline of the trenches, easily moved to a wild display of nervous energy, possessing creative imagination, yet stoical under agony to a surpassing degree. And not the men only, but every class—peasants, doctors, priests, each in his own sphere, are imbued with the highest spirit of which man can boast, the spirit of self-sacrifice. I hold no brief for any form of doctrine, being one of those who hold that all religions are nothing but quibbles round a central truth that no sane man denies, but the devotion of the French priest strikes me with the deepest admiration. I have seen a battery heavily shelled and suffer many casualties, so that the detachments were forced to take to their dug-outs. The doctor galloped up on horseback, but the priest on foot, running with his soutane tucked up round his waist, was there first, out in the open administering extreme unction to the mortally wounded, helping others to a place of safety. "Greater love hath no man than this——"
