Читать книгу: «Front Lines», страница 5

VI
SEEING RED

The Mess, having finished reading the letters just brought in, were looking through the home papers. Harvey, who used to be a bank clerk, giggled over a page in Punch and passed it round. “Pretty true, too, isn’t it?” he said. The page was one of those silly jolly little drawings by Bateman of men with curly legs, and the pictures showed typical scenes from the old life of an average City clerk, trotting to business, playing dominoes, and so on, and the last one of a fellow tearing over the trenches in a charge with a real teeth-gritted, blood-in-his-eye look, and the title of the lot was “It’s the Same Man.”

Everyone grinned at it and said “Pretty true,” or something like that. “It reminds me …” said the Australian.

Now this is the Australian’s story, which he said he had got from one of the fellows in the show. For the truth or untruth I give no guarantee, but just tell the tale for what it’s worth.

Teddy Silsey was an Australian born and bred, but he could not be called a typical Australian so far as people in the Old Country count him “typical.” With them there is a general impression that every real Australian can “ride and shoot,” and that men in Australia spend the greater part of their normal existence galloping about the “ranch” after cattle or shooting kangaroos. Teddy Silsey wasn’t one of that sort. He was one of the many thousands of the other sort, who have been reared in the cities of Australia, and who all his life had gone to school and business there and led just as humdrum and peaceable a life as any London City clerk of the Punch picture.

When the War came, Teddy was thirty years of age, married, and comfortably settled in a little suburban house outside Sydney, and already inclined to be – well, if not fat, at least distinctly stout. He had never killed anything bigger than a fly or met anything more dangerous than a mosquito; and after an unpleasant episode in which his wife had asked him to kill for the Sunday dinner a chicken which the poultry people had stupidly sent up alive, an episode which ended in Teddy staggering indoors with blood-smeared hands and chalky face while a headless fowl flapped round the garden, both Teddy and his wife settled down to a firm belief that he “had a horror of blood,” and told their friends and neighbours so with a tinge of complacency in the fact.

Remembering this, it is easy to understand the consternation in Mrs. Teddy’s mind when, after the War had been running a year, Teddy announced that he was going to enlist. He was firm about it too. He had thought the whole thing out – house to be shut up, she to go stay with her mother, his separation allowance so much, and so much more in the bank to draw on, and so on. Her remonstrances he met so promptly that one can only suppose them anticipated. His health? Never had a day’s sickness, as she knew. His business prospects? The country’s prospects were more important, and his Country Wanted Him. His “horror of blood”? Teddy twisted uneasily. “I’ve a horror of the whole beastly business,” he said – “of war and guns and shooting, of being killed, and … of leaving you.” This was diplomacy of the highest, and the resulting interlude gently slid into an acceptance of the fact of his going.

He went, and – to get along with the War – at last came to France, and with his battalion into the trenches. He had not risen above the rank of private, partly because he lacked any ambition to command, and in larger part because his superiors did not detect any ability in him to handle the rather rough-and-ready crowd who were in his lot. Far from army training and rations doing him physical harm, he throve on them, and even put on flesh. But because he was really a good sort, was always willing to lend any cash he had, take a fatigue for a friend, joke over hardships and laugh at discomforts, he was on excellent terms with his fellows. He shed a good many, if not all, of his suburban peace ways, was a fairly good shot on the ranges, and even acquired considerable skill and agility at bayonet practice. But he never quite shed his “horror of blood.” Even after he had been in action a time or two and had fired many rounds from his rifle, he had a vague hope each time he pulled trigger that his bullet might not kill a man, might at most only wound him enough to put him out of action. The first shell casualty he saw in their own ranks made him literally and actually sick, and even after he had seen many more casualties than he cared to think about he still retained a squeamish feeling at sight of them. And in his battalion’s share of The Push, where there was a good deal of close-quarter work and play with bombs and bayonet, he never had urgent need to use his bayonet, and when a party of Germans in a dug-out refused to surrender, and persisted instead in firing up the steps at anyone who showed at the top, Teddy stood aside and left the others to do the bombing-out.

It was ridiculous, of course, that a fighting man who was there for the express purpose of killing should feel any qualms about doing it, but there it was.

Then came the day when the Germans made a heavy counter-attack on the positions held by the Australians. The positions were not a complete joined-up defensive line along the outer front. The fighting had been heavy and bitter, and the German trenches which were captured had been so thoroughly pounded by shell fire that they no longer existed as trenches, and the Australians had to be satisfied with the establishment of a line of posts manned as strongly as possible, with plenty of machine-guns.

Teddy’s battalion was not in this front fringe when the counter-attack, launched without any warning bombardment, flooded suddenly over the outer defences, surged heavily back, drove in the next lines, and broke and battered them in and down underfoot.

Something like a couple of thousand yards in over our lines that first savage rush brought the Germans, and nearly twoscore guns were in their hands before they checked and hesitated, and the Australian supports flung themselves in on a desperate counter-attack. The first part of the German programme was an undoubted and alarming success. The posts and strong points along our front were simply overwhelmed, or surrounded and cut off, and went under, making the best finish they could with the bayonet, or in some cases – well, Teddy Silsey and a good many other Australians saw just what happened in these other cases, and are not likely ever to forget it. The German attack – as in many historic cases in this war – appeared to fizzle out in the most amazing fashion after it had come with such speed and sweeping success for so far. Our guns, of course, were hard at work, and were doing the most appalling damage to the dense masses that offered as targets; but that would hardly account for the slackening of the rush, because the guns had waked at the first crash of rifle and bomb reports, and the Germans were under just about as severe a fire for the second half of their rush as they were at the end of it when they checked. There appeared to be a hesitation about their movements, a confusion in their plans, a doubt as to what they ought to do next, that halted them long enough to lose the great advantage of their momentum. The first hurried counter-attack flung in their face was comparatively feeble, and if they had kept going should easily have been brushed aside. Thirty-odd guns were in their hands; and, most dangerous of all, one other short storm forward would have brought them swamping over a whole solid mass of our field guns – which at the moment were about the only thing left to hold back their attack – and within close rifle and machine-gun range of the fringe of our heavies. But at this critical stage, for no good reason, and against every military reason, they, as so often before, hesitated, and were lost. Another Australian counter-attack, this time much better organised and more solidly built, was launched headlong on their confusion. They gave ground a little in some places, tried to push on in others, halted and strove to secure positions and grip the trenches in others. The Australians, savagely angry at being so caught and losing so much ground, drove in on them, bombing, shooting, and bayoneting; while over the heads of the front-rank fighters the guns poured a furious tempest of shrapnel and high explosive on the masses that sifted and eddied behind. The issue hung in doubt for no more than a bare five minutes. The Germans who had tried to push on were shot and cut down; the parties that held portions of trench were killed or driven out; the waverers were rushed, beaten in, and driven back in confusion on the supports that struggled up through the tornado of shell-fire. Then their whole front crumpled, and collapsed, and gave, and the Australians began to recover their ground almost as quickly as they had lost it.

Now Teddy Silsey, while all this was going on, had been with his company in a position mid-way across the depth of captured ground. He and about forty others, with two officers, had tried to hold the battered remnant of trench they were occupying, and did actually continue to hold it after the rush of the German front had swept far past them. They were attacked on all sides, shot away their last cartridge, had their machine-guns put out of action by bombs, had about half their number killed, and almost every man of the remainder wounded. They were clearly cut off, with thousands of Germans between them and their supports, could see fresh German forces pressing on past them, could hear the din of fighting receding rapidly farther and farther back. The two officers, both wounded, but able more or less to stand up, conferred hastily, and surrendered.

Of this last act Teddy Silsey was unaware, because a splinter of some sort, striking on his steel helmet, had stunned him and dropped him completely insensible. Two dead men fell across him as he lay, and probably accounted for the Germans at the moment overlooking him as they collected their prisoners.

Teddy wakened to dim consciousness to find a number of Germans busily and confusedly engaged in setting the bit of trench in a state of defence. They trod on him and the two dead men on top of him a good deal, but Teddy, slowly taking in his situation, and wondering vaguely what his next move should be, did the wisest possible thing under the circumstances – lay still.

A little before this the Australian counter-attack had been sprung, and before Teddy had made up his mind about moving he began to be aware that the battle was flooding back on him. The Germans beside him saw it too, and, without any attempt to defend their position, clambered from the trench and disappeared from Teddy’s immediate view. Teddy crawled up and had a look out. It was difficult to see much at first, because there was a good deal of smoke about from our bursting shells, but as the counter-attack pushed on and the Germans went back, the shells followed them, and presently the air cleared enough for Teddy to see glimpses of khaki and to be certain that every German he saw was getting away from the khaki neighbourhood as rapidly as possible. In another minute a couple of Australians, hugging some machine-guns parts, tumbled into his trench, two or three others arrived panting, and in a moment the machine-gun was in action and streaming fire and bullets into the backs of any parties of Germans that crossed the sights.

One of the new-comers, a sergeant, looked round and saw Teddy squatting on the broken edge of the trench and looking very sick and shaken. “Hullo, mate,” said the sergeant, glancing at the patch of coloured cloth on Teddy’s shoulder that told his unit. “Was you with the bunch in this hole when Fritz jumped you?” Teddy gulped and nodded. “You stopped one?” said the sergeant. “Where’d it get you?”

“No,” said Teddy; “I – I think I’m all right. Got a bit of a bump on the head.”

“’Nother bloke to say ‘Go’ bless the tin-’at makers’ in ’is prayers every night.” He turned from Teddy. “Isn’t it time we humped this shooter a bit on again, boys?” he said.

“Looks like the Boche was steadyin’ up a bit,” said a machine-gunner. “An’ our line’s bumped a bit o’ a snag along on the left there. I think we might spray ’em a little down that way.”

They slewed the gun in search of fresh targets, while from a broken trench some score yards from their front a gathering volume of rifle-fire began to pelt and tell of the German resistance stiffening.

“Strewth,” growled the sergeant, “this is no bon! If we give ’em time to settle in – Hullo,” – he broke off, and stared out in front over the trench edge – “wot’s that lot? They look like khaki. Prisoners, by cripes!”

Every man peered out anxiously. Two to three hundreds yards away they could see emerging from the broken end of a communication trench a single file of men in khaki without arms in their hands, and with half a dozen rifle- and bayonet-armed Germans guarding them. Teddy, who was watching with the others, exclaimed suddenly. “It’s my lot,” he said. “That’s the captain – him with the red hair; and I recognise Big Mick, and Terry – Terry’s wounded – see him limp. That’s my mate Terry.”

The firing on both sides had slacked for a moment, and none of the watchers missed one single movement of what followed. It is unpleasant telling, as it was unutterably horrible watching. The prisoners, except the two officers, who were halted above ground, were guided down into a portion of trench into which they disappeared. The guards had also remained above. What followed is best told briefly. The two officers, in full view of the watchers, were shot down as they stood, the rifle muzzles touching their backs. The Germans round the trench edge tossed bombs down on the men penned below. Before the spurting smoke came billowing up out of the trench, Teddy Silsey leaped to his feet with a scream, and flung himself scrambling up the trench wall. But the sergeant, with a gust of bitter oaths, gripped and held him. “Get to it there,” he snarled savagely at the men about the gun. “D’you want a better target?” The gun muzzle twitched and steadied and ripped out a stream of bullets. The Germans about the trench lip turned to run, but the storm caught and cut them down – except one or two who ducked down into the trench on top of their victims. Teddy found them there three minutes after, stayed only long enough to finish them, and ran on with the other Australians who swarmed yelling forward to the attack again. Others had seen the butchery, and those who had not quickly heard of it. Every group of dead Australians discovered as the line surged irresistibly forward was declared, rightly or wrongly, to be another lot of murdered prisoners. The advance went with a fury, with a storming rage that nothing could withstand. The last remnant of organised German defence broke utterly, and the supports coming up found themselves charged into, hustled, mixed up with, and thrown into utter confusion by the mob of fugitives and the line of shooting, bombing, bayoneting Australians that pressed hard on their heels.

The supports tried to make some sort of stand, but they failed, were borne back, bustled, lost direction, tried to charge again, broke and gave, scattering and running, were caught in a ferocious flank fire, reeled and swung wide from it, and found themselves penned and jammed back against a broad, deep, and high belt of their own barbed wire. Some of them, by quick work and running the gauntlet of that deadly flanking fire, won clear and escaped round the end of the belt. The rest – and there were anything over two thousand of them – were trapped. The Australian line closed in, pouring a storm of rifle fire on them. Some tried to tear a way through, or over, or under the impenetrable thicket of their own wire; others ran wildly up and down looking for an opening, for any escape from those pelting bullets; others again held their hands high and ran towards the crackling rifles shrieking “Kamerad” surrenders that were drowned in the drumming roll of rifle fire; and some few threw themselves down and tried to take cover and fire back into the teeth of the storm that beat upon them. But the Australian line closed in grimly and inexorably, the men shooting and moving forward a pace or two, standing and shooting – shooting – shooting. … Teddy Silsey shot away every round he carried, ceased firing only long enough to snatch up a fresh supply from a dead man’s belt, stood again and shot steadily and with savage intensity into the thinning crowd that struggled and tore at the tangled mass of wire.

And all the time he cursed bitterly and abominably, reviling and pouring oaths of vengeance on the brutes, the utter savages who had murdered his mates in cold blood. To every man who came near him he had only one message – “Kill them out. They killed their prisoners. I saw them do it. Kill the – !” with a shot after each sentence.

And there was a killing. There were other results – the lost ground recaptured and made good; the taken guns retaken, five of them damaged and others with the unexploded destroying charges set and ready for firing; some slight gains made at certain points. But the Australians there will always remember that fight for the big killing, for those murderer Huns pinned against their own wire, for the burning hot barrels of the rifles, for the scattered groups of their own dead – their murdered-prisoner dead – and for the two thousand-odd German bodies counted where they fell or hung limp in the tangles of their barbed wire.

And next day Teddy Silsey volunteered for the Bombing Company, the Suicide Club, as they call themselves. He wanted close-up work, he explained. With a rifle you could never be sure you got your own man. With a bomb you could see him – and he detailed what he wanted to see. He appeared to have completely forgotten his “horror of blood.”

VII
AN AIR BARRAGE

The Gunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work – in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seen in the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.”

Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning and an appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up.

It sounds crazy, but then, as the Squadron protested, they, Guns especially, were crazy, and that’s all there was to it.

But with these notions of theirs about the infallibility of machine-guns, and the range of their usefulness, you will understand how their minds leaped to machine-gun tactics when the Hun night-fliers began to come over and bomb around the ’drome. The first night they came Guns nearly broke his neck by falling into a deep hole in his mad rush to get to the anti-aircraft machine-guns on the ‘drome near the sheds, and he alternated between moping and cursing for three days because the Huns had gone before he could get a crack at them. He cheered up a lot when they came the next time and he and the R.O. shot away a few-million rounds, more or less. But as he didn’t fetch a feather out of them, and as the Huns dropped their eggs horribly close to the hangars, the two were not properly satisfied, and began to work out all sorts of protective schemes and sit up as long as the moon was shining in hopes of a bit of shooting.

Their hopes were fully satisfied, or anyhow the Squadron’s more than were, because the Huns made a regular mark of the ’drome and strafed it night after night. And for all the rounds they shot, neither Guns nor the R.O. ever got a single bird, although they swore more than once that they were positive they had winged one. As none came down on our side of the lines, this claim was a washout, and the two got quite worried about it and had to stand an unmerciful amount of chaff from the others on the dud shooting.

After a bit they evolved a new plan. Careful investigation and inquiry of different pilots in the Squadron gave them the groundwork for the plan. In answer to questions, some of the pilots said that if they were in the place of the Huns and wanted to find the ‘drome in the dark, they would steer for the unusual-shaped clump of wood which lay behind the ’drome. Some said they would follow the canal, others the road, others various guides, but all agreed that the wood was the object the Huns would steer for. This found, all the pilots again agreed it was a simple matter to coast along the edge of the wood, which would show up a black blot on the ground in the moonlight, find the tongue or spur of trees that ran straight out towards the ’drome, and, keeping that line, must fly exactly over the hangars. One or two nights’ careful listening to the direction of the approaching and departing Hun engines confirmed the belief that the Huns were working on the lines indicated, and after this was sure the plan progressed rapidly.

The two machine-guns on the ’drome were trained and aimed in daylight to shower bullets exactly over the tip of the tongue of wood. A patent gadget invented by Guns allowed the gun-muzzles a certain amount of play up and down, play which careful calculation showed would pour a couple of streams of bullets across the end of the wood up and down a height extending to about a thousand feet, that is, 500 above and 500 below the level at which it was estimated the Huns usually flew on these night raids. It simply meant that as soon as the sound was judged to be near enough the two guns only had to open fire, to keep pouring out bullets to make sure that the Huns had to fly through the stream and “stop one” or more. It was, in fact, a simple air barrage of machine-gun bullets.

With the plan perfected, the two enthusiasts waited quite impatiently for the next strafe. Fortunately the moon was up fairly early, so that now there was no need to sit up late for the shoot, and the second night after the preparations were complete, to the joy of Guns and the R.O. (and the discomfort of the others), there was a beautiful, still, moonlight night with every inducement for the Huns to come along.

The two ate a hurried dinner with ears cocked for the first note of the warning which would sound when the distant noise of engines was first heard. Sure enough they had just reached the sweets when the signal went, and the two were up and off before the lights could be extinguished. They arrived panting at their stations to find the gun-crews all ready and waiting, made a last hasty examination to see everything was in order, and stood straining their ears for the moment when they reckoned the Huns would be approaching the barrage area, and when they judged the moment had arrived opened a long steady stream of fire. The drone of the first engine grew louder, passed through the barrage, and boomed on over the ’drome without missing a beat. There came the old familiar “Phe-e-e-w – BANG! … e-e-e-ew – BANG!” of a couple of falling bombs, and the first engine droned on and away. Two minutes later another was heard, and Guns and the R.O., no degree disheartened or discouraged by their first failure, let go another stream of lead, keeping the gun-muzzles twitching up and down as rapidly as they could. The second Hun repeated the performance of the first; and a third did likewise. After it was all over Guns and the R.O. held a council and devised fresh and more comprehensive plans, which included the use of some extra guns taken from the machines. For the moment we may leave them, merely mentioning that up to now and even in their newer plans they entirely neglected any consideration of rather an important item in their performance, namely, the ultimate billet of their numerous bullets.

From the point of view of the defence it is an important and unpleasant fact that an air barrage eventually returns to the ground. Guns and the R.O. had been pumping out bullets at a rate of some hundreds per minute each, and all those bullets after missing their target had to arrive somewhere on the earth. The gunners’ interest in them passed for the moment as soon as the bullets had failed to hit their mark, and afterwards they came to remember with amazement that ever they could have been so idiotically unconsidering.

Some distance from the ’drome, and in a line beyond the tip of the wood, there stood a number of Nissen huts which housed a Divisional Staff, and the inevitable consequence was that those up-and-down twitching gun-muzzles sprayed showers of lead in gusts across and across the hutments. The General Commanding the Division was in the middle of his dinner with about five staff officers round the table when the first “aeroplane over” warning went on this particular night of the new air barrage. The lights in the Mess hut were not extinguished, because full precautions had been taken some nights before to have the small window-space fully and closely screened against the possibility of leakage of a single ray of light. One or two remarks were made quite casually about the nasty raiding habits of the Huns, but since no bombs had come near in the earlier raids, and the conclusion was therefore reasonable that the Divisional H.Q. had not been located, nobody there worried much over the matter, and dinner proceeded.

They all heard the drone of the Hun engine, and, because it was a very still night, they heard it rather louder than usual. Someone had just remarked that they seemed to be coming closer to-night, when the further remarks were violently interrupted by a clashing and clattering B-bang … br-r-rip-rap, ba-bang-bang, the splintering, ripping sound of smashed wood, the crash, clash tinkle of a bottle burst into a thousand fragments on the table under their startled eyes. The barrage bullets had returned to earth.

The group at the table had time for no more than a pause of astonishment, a few exclamations, a hasty pushing back of chairs, when rip-rap-bang-bang-bang down came the second spray of bullets from those jerking muzzles over on the ’drome. Now a bullet hitting any solid object makes a nasty and most disconcerting sort of noise; but when it hits the tin roof of a Nissen hut, tears through it and the wood lining inside, passes out again or comes to rest in the hut, the noises become involved and resemble all sorts of queer sounds from kicking a tea-tray to treading on an empty match-box. The huts were solidly sand-bagged up their outside walls to a height of some feet, but had no overhead cover whatever. The third burst from Guns and the R.O. arrived on the hut at exactly the same moment as the General and his Staff arrived on the floor as close as they could get to the wall and the protecting sandbags. They stayed there for some exciting minutes while Guns shot numerous holes in the roof, splintered the furniture, and shot the dinner piecemeal off the table.

The shooting and the hum of the enemy engine ceased together, and the General and his Staff gathered themselves off the floor and surveyed the wreckage about them. “I just moved in time,” said the Brigade-Major, and pointed to a ragged hole in the seat of his chair. “D’you suppose it was a fluke, or have they got this place spotted?” asked the Captain. “Nasty mess of the roof,” said someone else. The General confined himself to less coherent but much more pungent remarks on all Huns in general, and night-raiders in particular. They seated themselves, and the waiter was just beginning to mop up the smashed bottle of red wine, when the distant hum of another engine was heard. This time the barraged ones reached the floor just a shade ahead of the first tearing burst from Guns and the R.O., and again they held their breath and cowered while the bullets clashed and banged on the tin roof, smacked and cracked on the ground outside, beat another noisy banging tattoo across the next-door huts. The group stayed prone rather longer after the ceasing of fire and engine hum, and had little more than risen to their feet when the third outbreak sent them flinging down into cover again.