Frederick Palmer

“ Scattered with British wounded taking cover in new and old shell-craters was No Man's Land as the living passed. A Briton and his prisoner would take cover together. An explosion and the prisoner might be blown to bits, or if the captor were, another Briton took charge of the prisoner. Persistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to prisoners who were trophies out of that inferno, and when a Briton was back in the first-line trench with his German his delight was greater in delivering his man alive than in his own safety. ”

“ Yet it was a poignantly live world where the old trench lines had been a dead world—a world alive in the dots of men strung along the crest, in others digging new trenches, in messengers and officers on the move, in clumps of reserves behind a hillock or in a valley. Though bursting shrapnel jackets whipped out the same kind of puffs as always from a flashing center which spread into nimbus radiant in the sunlight and the high explosives sent up the same spouts of black smoke as if a stick of dynamite had burst in a coal box, the shell fire seemed different ”

“ Before the offensive new aerodromes began to appear along the front at the same time that new roads were building. An army that had lacked both planes and guns at the start now had both. Every aviator knew that he was expected to gain and hold the mastery; his part was set no less than that of the infantry. Where should "the spirit that quickeneth" dwell if not with the aviators? No weary legs hamper him; he does not have to crawl over the dead or hide in shell-craters or stand up to his knees in mire. He is the pampered aristocrat of war, the golden youth of adventure. ”

“ The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to the French. ”

“ More than ever you rejoiced in every one of the bursts of stored lightning thick as fireflies in the blanket of smoke over the German trench, for every one meant a shower of bullets to keep down enemy machine guns. The French say "Belle!" when they see such a barrage, and beautiful is the word for it to those men who were going across the field toward this shell-made nimbus looking too soft in the bright sunlight to have darts of death. ”

“ From my vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Péronne. The French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their soixante-quinze made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long, gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges.
Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, each one distinct against the blue with shimmering wings and the soft, burnished aureole of the propellers. They were flying at all heights. Some seemed almost motionless two or three miles above the earth, while others shot up from their aerodromes. ”

“ It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. ”

“ The infantry is the Oliver Twist of incessant demand. It would like a score of batteries turned on one machine gun, all the batteries in the army against a battalion front, and a sheet of shells in the air night and day, as you yourself would wish if you were up in the firing-line.
Guardians of the precious lives of their own men and destroyers of the enemy's, the guns keep vigil. Every night the flashes on the horizon are a reminder to those in the distance that the battle never ends. Their voices are like none other except guns ”

“ Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and Longueval and the Switch Trench—these are symbolic names of that attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No for answer. ”

“ You could follow for miles the ruins of the first line, picking your way among German dead in all attitudes, while a hand or a head or a foot stuck out of the shell-hammered chalk mixed with flesh and fragments of clothing, the thing growing nauseatingly horrible and your wonder increasing as to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and how men had been able to conquer the remains that the shells had left. ”

“ Covered with chalk dust from crawling, their bandages blood-soaked, bespattered with the blood of comrades as they lay on litters or hobbled down a communication trench, they looked blank when they mentioned the scenes that they had witnessed; but they gave no impression of despair. It did not occur to them that they had been beaten; they had been roughly handled in one round of a many-round fight. Had a German counter-attack developed they would have settled down, rifle in hand, to stall through the next round. ”

“ To make certain of clearness about fundamentals familiar to those at the front but to the general public only a symbol for something not understood, a curtain of fire is a swath of fragments and bullets from bursting projectiles which may stop a charge or prevent reserves from coming to the support of the front line. It is a barrier of death, the third rail of the battlefield. From the sky shrapnel descend with their showers of bullets, while the high explosives heave up the earth under foot. ”

“ If I had no more interest in the success of one European people than another, then as a spectator I should choose that it should be to the French, provided that I was permitted to be present. They make victory no raucous-voiced, fleshy woman, shrilly gloating, no superwoman, cold and efficient, who considers it her right as a superior being, but a gracious person, smiling, laughing, singing in a human fashion, whether she is greeting winning generals or privates or is looking in at the door of a chateau or a peasant's cottage. ”

“ One company was more horrified over having found a German tied to a trench parados to be killed by British shell fire as a field punishment than by the horrors of other men equally mashed and torn, or at having crawled over the moist bodies of the dead, or slept among them, or been covered with spatters of blood and flesh—for that incident struck home with a sense of brutal militarism which was the thing in their minds against which they were fighting. ”

“ Leaving behind the Ridge and the scarred slope and the crowding motor trucks in their cloud of dust, you were in a green world soothing to eyes which were painful from watching shell-blasts. Along the banks of the Somme on a hot day you might see white figures of muscle-armored youth washed clean of the grime of the firing-line in the exhilaration of minutes, seconds, glowingly lived without regard to the morrow, shaking drops of water free from white skins, under the shade of trees untouched by shell fire, after a plunge in cool waters. ”

“ All the while Combles had been an oasis in the shell fire, the one place that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English. They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no responsive thrill. ”

“ There was no more sign of an earthly storm brewing as one looked at the field than of a thunderstorm as one looked at the sky. Perfect soporific tranquillity possessed the surroundings except for shell-bursts, and their meagerness intensified the aspect, strangely enough, on that battlefield where I had never seen a quieter afternoon since the Somme offensive had begun. One could ask nothing better than that the tranquillity should put the Germans to sleep. To the staff expert, however, the dead world lived without the sight of men. ”

“ We were not long out of sight of land and water, but long enough to make one wish to fly over the channel again, the next time at ten thousand feet, when it was a gleaming swath hidden at times by patches of luminous nimbus.
The engine stopped. There was the silence of the clouds, cushioned silence, cushioned by the mist. Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan and when we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet or more, France loomed ahead with its lacework of surf and an expanse of chalk cliffs at an angle and landscape rising out of the haze. ”

“ Men crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible.
From a certain artillery observation post in a tree you had a good view of Thiepval, already a blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau showing white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like trunks of trees denuded of their limbs, which were to become such a familiar sight on the battlefield. It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the British. ”

“ Signs tell you where those black mouths which you might not see are hidden, lest you walk straight into one as it belches flame. When you have seen guns firing by thousands as far as the eye can reach from a hill; when you have seen every caliber at work and your head aches from the noise, the thing becomes overpowering and monotonous. Yet you return again, drawn by the uncanny fascination of artillery power.
Riding home one day after hours with the guns in an attack, I saw for the first time one of the monster railroad guns firing as I passed by on the road. ”

“ You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual; the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality; soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings and goings ”

“ All very simple reasoning, this, yet hardly reason: the second nature of training and spirit. How officers had studied the details of their objectives on the map in order to recognize them when they were reached! How like drill it was the way that those human waves moved forward! But they were not waves for long in some instances, only survivors still advancing as if they were parts of a wave, unseen by their commanders in the shell-smoke, buffeted by bursts of high explosives, with every man simply keeping on toward the goal till he arrived or fell. ”

“ In the gunner's skill life that is young and sturdy, muscles that are hardened by exercise and drill, manhood in its pink, must place its trust. A little carelessness or the slightest error and monsters with their long, fiery reach may strike you in the back instead of the enemy in front, and instead of dead and wounded and capitulation among smashed dugouts and machine gun positions you may be received by showers of bombs. ”

“ All this may seem rambling, but to a spectator of war indulging in a little philosophy it goes to the kernel of the meaning of victory to the French and to my own happiness in seeing the French win. Sometimes the Frenchman seems the most soldierly of men; again, a superficial observer might wonder if the French Army had any real discipline. And there, again, you have French temperament; the old civilization that has defined itself in democracy. For the French are the most democratic of all peoples, not excluding ourselves. ”

“ There cannot be too many. Plant them as thick as trees in a forest for a depth of six or eight miles and there would not be enough by the criterion of the infantry, to whom the fortunes of war increasingly related to the nature of the artillery support. He must have smiled with the satisfaction of a farmer over a big harvest yield that filled the granary as the stack of shells at an ammunition depot spread over the field, and he could go among his guns with the pride of a landowner among his flocks. He knew all the diseases that guns were heir to and their weaknesses of temperament. ”

“ The French peasant, tilling his fields within range of the guns, the market gardener bringing his products down the Somme in the morning to Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman—they are France and the French Army. But the heart-strength and character-strength of France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. It is repeating a commonplace to say that he always has a few gold pieces in his stocking. He yields one only on a critical occasion and then a little grumblingly, with the thrift of the bargainer who means that it shall be well spent. ”

“ How any man could have survived was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made. ”

“ Should the German line ever be broken and all that earth-tied, enormous, complicated organization, with guns emplaced and its array of congested ammunition dumps and supply depots, try to move on sudden demand, what added confusion ten thousand cavalry would bring! What rich prizes would await it as it galloped through the breach and in units, separating each to its objective according to evolutions suited to the new conditions, dismounted machine guns to cover roads and from chosen points sweep their bullets into wholesale targets! ”

“ Soon the sight of tanks became part of the routine of existence, and interest in watching an advance centered on the infantry which they supported in a charge; for only by its action could you judge whether or not machine gun fire had developed and, later, whether or not the tanks were silencing it. The human element was still supreme, its movement and its losses in life the criterion of success and failure, with an eternal thrill that no machine can arouse. ”

“ As the gun-blasts began I saw some figures rise up back of the German trench. I judged that they were the relief coming up or a working party that had been under cover. These Germans had to make a quick decision: Would they try a leap for the dugouts or a leap to the rear? They decided on flight. A hundred-yard sprint and they would be out of that murderous swath laid so accurately on a narrow belt. They ran as men will only run from death. ”