A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

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CHAPTER XVI

It had turned very hot, now, at the full of the day. Indeed, it was
grilling weather, and there in the battery, in a hollow, close down
beside a little run or stream, it was even hotter than on the
shell-swept bare top of the ridge. So the Canadian gunners had
stripped down for comfort. Not a man had more than his under-shirt on
above his trousers, and many of them were naked to the waist, with
their hide tanned to the color of old saddles.

These laddies reminded me of those in the first battery I had seen.
They were just as calm, and just as dispassionate as they worked in
their mill--it might well have been a mill in which I saw them
working. Only they were no grinding corn, but death--death for the
Huns, who had brought death to so many of their mates. But there was
no excitement, there were no cries of hatred and anger.

They were hard at work. Their work, it seemed, never came to an end
or even to a pause. The orders rang out, in a sort of sing-song
voice. After each shot a man who sat with a telephone strapped about
his head called out corrections of the range, in figures that were
just a meaningless jumble to me, although they made sense to the men
who listened and changed the pointing of the guns at each order.

[ILLUSTRATION: Capt. John Lauder and Comrades Before The Trenches In
France (See Lauder07.jpg)]

Their faces, that, like their bare backs and chests, looked like
tanned leather, were all grimy from their work among the smoke and
the gases. And through the grime the sweat had run down like little
rivers making courses for themselves in the soft dirt of a hillside.
They looked grotesque enough, but there was nothing about them to
make me feel like laughing, I can tell you! And they all grinned
amiably when the amazed and disconcerted Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P.,
Tour came tumbling in among them. We all felt right at hame at once--
and I the more so when a chap I had met and come to know well in
Toronto during one of my American tours came over and gripped my hand.

"Aye, but it's good to see your face, Harry!" he said, as he made
me welcome.

This battery had done great work ever since it had come out. No
battery in the whole army had a finer record, I was told. And no one
needed to tell me the tale of its losses. Not far away there was a
little cemetery, filled with doleful little crosses, set up over
mounds that told their grim story all too plainly and too eloquently.

The battery had gone through the Battle of Vimy Ridge and made a
great name for itself. And now it was set down upon a spot that had
seen some of the very bloodiest of the fighting on that day. I saw
here, for the first time, some of the most horrible things that the
war holds. There was a little stream, as I said, that ran through the
hollow in which the battery was placed, and that stream had been
filled with blood, not water, on the day of the battle.

Everywhere, here, were whitened bones of men. In the wild swirling of
the battle, and the confusion of digging in and meeting German
counter attacks that had followed it, it had not been possible to
bury all the dead. And so the whitened bones remained, though the
elements had long since stripped them bare. The elements--and the
hungry rats. These are not pretty things to tell, but they are true,
and the world should know what war is to-day.

I almost trod upon one skeleton that remained complete. It was that
of a huge German soldier--a veritable giant of a man, he must have
been. The bones of his feet were still encased in his great boots,
their soles heavily studded with nails. Even a few shreds of his
uniform remained. But the flesh was all gone. The sun and the rats
and the birds had accounted for the last morsel of it.

Hundreds of years from now, I suppose, the bones that were strewn
along that ground will still be being turned up by plows. The
generations to come who live there will never lack relics of the
battle, and of the fighting that preceded and followed it. They will
find bones, and shell cases, and bits of metal of all sorts. Rusty
bayonets will be turned up by their plowshares; strange coins, as
puzzling as some of those of Roman times that we in Britain have
found, will puzzle them. Who can tell how long it will be before the
soil about Vimy Ridge will cease to give up its relics?

That ground had been searched carefully for everything that might
conceivably be put to use again, or be made fit for further service.
The British army searches every battlefield so in these days. And
yet, when I was there, many weeks after the storm of fighting had
passed on, and when the scavengers had done their work, the ground
was still rather thickly strewn with odds and ends that interested me
vastly. I might have picked up much more than I did. But I could not
carry so very much, and, too, so many of the things brought grisly
thoughts to my mind! God knows I needed no reminders of the war! I
had a reminder in my heart, that never left me. Still, I took some
few things, more for the sake of the hame folks, who might not see,
and would, surely, be interested. I gathered some bayonets for my
collection--somehow they seemed the things I was most willing to take
along. One was British, one German--two were French.

But the best souvenir of all I got at Vimy Ridge I did not pick up.
It was given to me by my friend, the grave major--him of whom I would
like some famous sculptor to make a statue as he sat at his work of
observation. That was a club--a wicked looking instrument. This club
had a great thick head, huge in proportion to its length and size,
and this head was studded with great, sharp nails. A single blow from
it would finish the strongest man that ever lived. It was a fit
weapon for a murderer--and a murderer had wielded it. The major had
taken it from a Hun, who had meant to use it--had, doubtless, used
it!--to beat out the brains of wounded men, lying on the ground. Many
of those clubs were taken from the Germans, all along the front, both
by the British and the French, and the Germans had never made any
secret of the purpose for which they were intended. Well, they picked
poor men to try such tactics on when they went against the Canadians!

The Canadians started no such work, but they were quick to adopt a
policy of give and take. It was the Canadians who began the trench
raids for which the Germans have such a fierce distaste, and after
they had learned something of how Fritz fought the Canadians took to
paying him back in some of his own coin. Not that they matched the
deeds of the Huns--only a Hun could do that. But the Canadians were
not eager to take prisoners. They would bomb a dugout rather than
take its occupants back. And a dugout that has been bombed yields few
living men!

Who shall blame them? Not I--nor any other man who knows what lessons
in brutality and treachery the Canadians have had from the Hun. It was
the Canadians, near Ypres, who went through the first gas attack--that
fearful day when the Germans were closer to breaking through than they
ever were before or since. I shall not set down here all the tales I
heard of the atrocities of the Huns. Others have done that. Men have
written of that who have firsthand knowledge, as mine cannot be. I
know only what has been told to me, and there is little need of hearsay
evidence. There is evidence enough that any court would accept as hanging
proof. But this much it is right to say--that no troops along the Western
front have more to revenge than have the Canadians.

It is not the loss of comrades, dearly loved though they be, that
breeds hatred among the soldiers. That is a part of war, and always
was. The loss of friends and comrades may fire the blood. It may lead
men to risk their own lives in a desperate charge to get even. But it
is a pain that does not rankle and that does not fester like a sore
that will not heal. It is the tales the Canadians have to tell of
sheer, depraved torture and brutality that has inflamed them to the
pitch of hatred that they cherish. It has seemed as if the Germans
had a particular grudge against the Canadians. And that, indeed, is
known to be the case. The Germans harbored many a fond illusion before
the war. They thought that Britain would not fight, first of all.

And then, when Britain did declare war, they thought they could
speedily destroy her "contemptible little army." Ah, weel--they did
come near to destroying it! But not until it had helped to balk them
of their desire--not until it had played its great and decisive part
in ruining the plans the Hun had been making and perfecting for
forty-four long years. And not until it had served as a dyke behind
which floods of men in the khaki of King George had had time to arm
and drill to rush out to oppose the gray-green floods that had swept
through helpless Belgium.

They had other illusions, beside that major one that helped to wreck
them. They thought there would be a rebellion and civil war in
Ireland. They took too seriously the troubles of the early summer of
1914, when Ulster and the South of Ireland were snapping and snarling
at each other's throats. They looked for a new mutiny in India, which
should keep Britain's hands full. They expected strikes at home. But,
above all, they were sure that the great, self-governing dependencies
of Britain, that made up the mighty British Empire, would take no
part in the fight.

Canada, Australasia, South Africa--they never reckoned upon having to
cope with them. These were separate nations, they thought,
independent in fact if not in name, which would seize the occasion to
separate themselves entirely from the mother country. In South Africa
they were sure that there would be smoldering discontent enough left
from the days of the Boer war to break out into a new flame of war
and rebellion at this great chance.

And so it drove them mad with fury when they learned that Canada and
all the rest had gone in, heart and soul. And when even their poison
gas could not make the Canadians yield; when, later still, they
learned that the Canadians were their match, and more than their
match, in every phase of the great game of war, their rage led them
to excesses against the men from overseas even more damnable than
those that were their general practice.

These Canadians, who were now my hosts, had located their guns in a
pit triangular in shape. The guns were mounted at the corners of the
triangle, and along its sides. And constantly, while I was there they
coughed their short, sharp coughs and sent a spume of metal flying
toward the German lines. Never have I seen a busier spot. And,
remember--until I had almost fallen into that pit, with its
sputtering, busy guns, I had not been able to make even a good guess
as to where they were! The very presence of this workshop of death
was hidden from all save those who had a right to know of it.

It was a masterly piece of camouflage. I wish I could explain to you
how the effect was achieved. It was all made plain to me; every step
of the process was explained, and I cried out in wonder and in
admiration at the clever simplicity of it. But that is one of the
things I may not tell. I saw many things, during my time at the
front, that the Germans would give a pretty penny to know. But none
of the secrets that I learned would be more valuable, even to-day,
than that of that hidden battery. And so--I must leave you in
ignorance as to that.

The commanding officer was most kindly and patient in explaining
matters to me.

"We can't see hide nor hair of our targets here, of course," he said,
"any more than Fritz can see us. We get all our ranges and the
records of all our hits, from Normabell."

I looked a question, I suppose.

"You called on him, I think--up on the Pimple. Major Normabell, D.S.O."

That was how I learned the name of the imperturbable major with whom
I had smoked a pipe on the crest of Vimy Ridge. I shall always
remember his name and him. I saw no man in France who made a livelier
impression upon my mind and my imagination.

"Aye," I said. "I remember. So that's his name--Normabell, D.S.O.
I'll make a note of that."

My informant smiled.

"Normabell's one of our characters," he said. "Well, you see he
commands a goodish bit of country there where he sits. And when he
needs them he has aircraft observations to help him, too. He's our
pair of eyes. We're like moles down here, we gunners--but he does all
our seeing for us. And he's in constant communication--he or one of
his officers."

I wondered where all the shells the battery was firing were headed
for. And I learned that just then it was paying its respects
particularly to a big factory building just west of Lens. For some
reason that had been marked for destruction, but it had been
reinforced and strengthened so that it was taking a lot of smashing
and standing a good deal more punishment than anyone had thought it
could--which was reason enough, in itself, to stick to the job until
that factory was nothing more than a heap of dust and ruins.

The way the guns kept pounding away at it made me think of firemen in
a small town drenching a local blaze with their hose. The gunners
were just so eager as that. And I could almost see that factory,
crumbling away. Major Normabell had pointed it out to me, up on the
ridge, and now I knew why. I'll venture to say that before night the
eight-inch howitzers of that battery had utterly demolished it, and
so ended whatever usefulness it had had for the Germans.

It was cruel business to be knocking the towns and factories of our
ally, France, to bits in the fashion that we were doing that day--
there and at many another point along the front. The Huns are fond of
saying that much of the destruction in Northern France has been the
work of allied artillery. True enough--but who made that inevitable
And it was not our guns that laid waste a whole countryside before
the German retreat in the spring of 1917, when the Huns ran wild,
rooting up fruit trees, cutting down every other tree that could be
found, and doing every other sort of wanton damage and mischief their
hands could find to do.

"Hard lines," said the battery commander. He shrugged his shoulders.
"No use trying to spare shells here, though, even on French towns.
The harder we smash them the sooner it'll be over. Look here, sir."

He pointed out the men who sat, their telephone receivers strapped
over their ears. Each served a gun. In all that hideous din it was of
the utmost importance that they should hear correctly every word and
figure that came to them over the wire--a part of that marvelously
complete telephone and telegraph system that has been built for and
by the British army in France.

"They get corrections on every shot," he told me. "The guns are
altered in elevation according to what they hear. The range is
changed, and the pointing, too. We never see old Fritz--but we know
he's getting the visiting cards we send him."

They were amazingly calm, those laddies at the telephones. In all
that hideous, never-ending din, they never grew excited. Their voices
were calm and steady as they repeated the orders that came to them. I
have seen girls at hotel switchboards, expert operators, working with
conditions made to their order, who grew infinitely more excited at a
busy time, when many calls were coming in and going out. Those men
might have been at home, talking to a friend of their plans for an
evening's diversion, for all the nervousness or fussiness they showed.

Up there, on the Pimple, I had seen Normabell, the eyes of the
battery. Here I was watching its ears. And, to finish the metaphor,
to work it out, I was listening to its voice. Its brazen tongues were
giving voice continually. The guns--after all, everything else led up
to them. They were the reason for all the rest of the machinery of
the battery, and it was they who said the last short word.

There was a good deal of rough joking and laughter in the battery.
The Canadian gunners took their task lightly enough, though their
work was of the hardest--and of the most dangerous, too. But jokes
ran from group to group, from gun to gun. They were constantly
kidding one another, as an American would say, I think. If a
correction came for one gun that showed there had been a mistake in
sighting after the last orders--if, that is, the gunners, and not the
distant observers, were plainly at fault--there would be a
good-natured outburst of chaffing from all the others.

But, though such a spirit of lightness prevailed, there was not a
moment of loafing. These men were engaged in a grim, deadly task,
and every once in a while I would catch a black, purposeful look
in a man's eyes that made me realize that, under all the light
talk and laughter there was a perfect realization of the truth.
They might not show, on the surface, that they took life and their
work seriously. Ah, no! They preferred, after the custom of their
race, to joke with death.

And so they were doing quite literally. The Germans knew perfectly
well that there was a battery somewhere near the spot where I had
found my gunners. Only the exact location was hidden from them, and
they never ceased their efforts to determine that. Fritz's airplanes
were always trying to sneak over to get a look. An airplane was the
only means of detection the Canadians feared. No--I will not say they
feared it! The word fear did not exist for that battery! But it was
the only way in which there was a tolerable chance, even, for Fritz
to locate them, and, for the sake of the whole operation at that
point, as well as for their own interest, they were eager to avoid
that.

German airplanes were always trying to sneak over, I say, but nearly
always our men of the Royal Flying Corps drove them back. We came as
close, just then, to having command of the air in that sector as any
army does these days. You cannot quite command or control the air. A
few hostile flyers can get through the heaviest barrage and the
staunchest air patrol. And so, every once in a while, an alarm would
sound, and all hands would crane their necks upward to watch an
airplane flying above with an iron cross painted upon its wings.

Then, and, as a rule, then only, fire would cease for a few minutes.
There was far less chance of detection when the guns were still. At
the height at which our archies--so the anti-aircraft guns are called
by Tommy Atkins--forced the Boche to fly there was little chance of
his observers picking out this battery, at least, against the ground.
If the guns were giving voice that chance was tripled--and so they
stopped, at such times, until a British flyer had had time to engage
the Hun and either bring him down or send him scurrying for the safe
shelter behind his own lines.

Fritz, in the air, liked to have the odds with him, as a rule. It was
exceptional to find a German flyer like Boelke who really went in for
single-handed duels in the air. As a rule they preferred to attack a
single plane with half a dozen, and so make as sure as they could of
victory at a minimum of risk. But that policy did not always work--
sometimes the lone British flyer came out ahead, despite the odds
against him.

There was a good deal of firing on general principles from Fritz. His
shells came wandering querulously about, striking on every side of
the battery. Occasionally, of course, there was a hit that was
direct, or nearly so. And then, as a rule, a new mound or two would
appear in the little cemetery, and a new set of crosses that, for a
few days, you might easily enough have marked for new because they
would not be weathered yet. But such hits were few and far between,
and they were lucky, casual shots, of which the Germans themselves
did not have the satisfaction of knowing.

"Of course, if they get our range, really, and find out all about us,
we'll have to move," said the officer in command. "That would be a
bore, but it couldn't be helped. We're a fixed target, you see, as
soon as they know just where we are, and they can turn loose a
battery of heavy howitzers against us and clear us out of here in no
time. But we're pretty quick movers when we have to move! It's great
sport, in a way too, sometimes. We leave all the camouflage behind,
and some-times Fritz will spend a week shelling a position that was
moved away at the first shell that came as if it meant they really
were on to us."

I wondered how a battery commander would determine the difference
between a casual hit and the first shell of a bombardment definitely
planned and accurately placed.

"You can tell, as a rule, if you know the game," he said. "There'll
be searching shells, you see. There'll be one too far, perhaps. And
then, after a pretty exact interval, there'll be another, maybe a bit
short. Then one to the left--and then to the right. By that time
we're off as a rule--we don't wait for the one that will be scored a
hit! If you're quick, you see, you can beat Fritz to it by keeping
your eyes open, and being ready to move in a hurry when he's got a
really good argument to make you do it."

But while I was there, while Fritz was inquisitive enough, his
curiosity got him nowhere. There were no casual hits, even, and there
was nothing to make the battery feel that it must be making ready for
a quick trek.

Was that no a weird, strange game of hide and seek that I watched
being played at Vimy Ridge? It gave me the creeps, that idea of
battling with an enemy you could not see! It must be hard, at times,
I think, for, the gunners to realize that they are actually at war.
But, no--there is always the drone and the squawking of the German
shells, and the plop-plop, from time to time, as one finds its mark
in the mud nearby. But to think of shooting always at an enemy you
cannot see!

It brought to my mind a tale I had heard at hame in Scotland. There
was a hospital in Glasgow, and there a man who had gone to see a
friend stopped, suddenly, in amazement, at the side of a cot. He
looked down at features that were familiar to him. The man in the cot
was not looking at him, and the visitor stood gaping, staring at him
in the utmost astonishment and doubt.

"I say, man," he asked, at last, "are ye not Tamson, the baker?"

The wounded man opened his eyes, and looked up, weakly.

"Aye," he said. "I'm Tamson, the baker." His voice was weak, and he
looked tired. But he looked puzzled, too.

"Weel, Tamson, man, what's the matter wi' ye?" asked the other. "I
didna hear that ye were sick or hurt. How comes it ye are here? Can
it be that ye ha' been to the war, man, and we not hearing of it,
at all?"

"Aye, I think so," said Tamson, still weakly, but as if he were
rather glad of a chance to talk, at that.

"Ye think so?" asked his friend, in greater astonishment than ever.
"Man, if ye've been to the war do ye not know it for sure and
certain?"

"Well, I will tell ye how it is," said Tamson, very slowly and
wearily. "I was in the reserve, do ye ken. And I was standin' in
front of my hoose one day in August, thinkin' of nothin' at all. I
marked a man who was coming doon the street, wi' a blue paper in his
hand, and studyin' the numbers on the doorplates. But I paid no great
heed to him until he stopped and spoke to me.

"He had stopped outside my hoose and looked at the number, and then
at his blue paper. And then he turned to me.

"'Are ye Tamson, the baker?' he asked me--just as ye asked me that
same question the noo.

"And I said to him, just as I said it to ye, 'Aye, I'm Tamson,
the baker.'

"'Then it's Hamilton Barracks for ye, Tamson,' he said, and handed me
the blue paper.

"Four hours from the time when he handed me the blue paper in front
of my hoose in Glasgow I was at Hamilton Barracks. In twelve hours I
was in Southhampton. In twenty hours I was in France. And aboot as
soon as I got there I was in a lot of shooting and running this way
and that that they ha' told me since was the Battle of the Marne.

"And in twenty-four hours more I was on my way back to Glasgow! In
forty-eight hours I woke up in Stobe Hill Infirmary and the nurse was
saying in my ear: 'Ye're all richt the noon, Tamson. We ha' only just
amputated your leg!'

"So I think I ha' been to the war, but I can only say I think so. I
only know what I was told--that ha' never seen a damn German yet!"

That is a true story of Tamson the baker. And his experience has
actually been shared by many a poor fellow--and by many another who
might have counted himself lucky if he had lost no more than a leg,
as Tamson did.

But the laddies of my battery, though they were shooting now at
Germans they could not see, had had many a close up view of Fritz in
the past, and expected many another in the future. Maybe they will
get one, some time, after the fashion of the company of which my boy
John once told me.

The captain of this company--a Hieland company, it was, though not of
John's regiment--had spent must of his time in London before the war,
and belonged to several clubs, which, in those days, employed many
Germans as servants and waiters. He was a big man, and he had a deep,
bass voice, so that he roared like the bull of Bashan when he had a
mind to raise it for all to hear.

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