To keep such immense preparations wholly a secret among any English-speaking people would be out of the question. Only the Japanese are mentally equipped for security of information. With other races it is a struggling effort. Can you imagine Washington keeping a military secret? You could hear the confidential whispers all the way from the War Department to the Capitol. In such a great movement as that of the Somme one weak link in a chain of tens of thousands of officers is enough to break it, not to mention a million or so of privates.
IV
READY FOR THE BLOW
French national spirit—Our gardeners—Tuning up for the attack—Policing the sky—Sausage balloons—Matter-of-fact, systematic war—A fury of trench raids—Reserves marching forward—Organized human will—Sons of the old country ready to strike—The greatest struggle of the war about to begin.
Our headquarters during my first summer at the front had been in the flat border region of the Pas de Calais, which seemed neither Flanders nor France. Our second summer required that we should be nearer the middle of the British line, as it extended southward, in order to keep in touch with the whole. In the hilly country of Artois a less comfortable chateau was compensated for by the smiling companionship of neighbors in the fields and villages of the real France.
The quality of this sympathetic appeal was that of the thoroughbred racial and national spirit of a great people, in the politeness which gave to a thickset peasant woman a certain grace, in the smiles of the land and its inhabitants, in that inbred patriotism which through the centuries has created a distinctive civilization called French by the same ready sacrifices for its continuity as those which were made on the Marne and at Verdun. Flanders is not France, and France is increasingly French as you proceed from Ypres to Amiens, the capital of Picardy. I was glad that Picardy had been chosen as the scene of the offensive. It made the blow seem more truly a blow for France. I was to learn to love Picardy and its people under the test of battle.
In order that we might be near the field of the Somme we were again to move our quarters, and we had the pang of saying good-by to another garden and another gardener. All the gardeners of our different chateaux had been philosophers. It was Louis who said that he would like to make all the politicians who caused wars into a salad, accompanying his threat with appropriate gestures; Charles who thought that once the "Boches" were properly pruned they might be acceptable second-rate members of international society; and Leon who wanted the Kaiser put to the plow in a coat of corduroy as the best cure for his conceit. That afternoon, when au revoirs were spoken and our cars wound in and out over the byroads of the remote countryside, not a soldier was visible until we came to the great main road, where we had the signal that peaceful surroundings were finally left behind in the distant, ceaseless roar of the guns, like some gigantic drumbeat calling the armies to combat.
A giant with nerves of telephone wires and muscles of steel and a human heart seemed to be snarling his defiance before he sprang into action. We knew the meaning of the set thunders of the preliminary bombardment. That night to the eastward the sky was an aurora borealis of flashes; and the next day we sought the source of the lightnings.
Seamed and tracked and gashed were the slopes behind the British line and densely peopled with busy men in khaki. Every separate scene was familiar to us out of our experience, but every one had taken on a new meaning. The whole exerted a majestic spell. Graded like the British social scale were the different calibers of guns. Those with the largest reach were set farthest back. Fifteen-inch howitzer dukes or nine-inch howitzer earls, with their big, ugly mouths and their deliberate and powerful fire, fought alone, each in his own lair, whether under a tree or in the midst of the ruins of a village. The long naval guns, though of smaller caliber, had a still greater reach and were sending their shells five to ten miles beyond the German trenches.
The eight-inch and six-inch howitzers were more gregarious. They worked in groups of four and sometimes a number of batteries were in line. Beyond them were those alert commoners, the field guns, rapid of fire with their eighteen-pound shells. These seemed more tractable and companionable, better suited for human association, less mechanically brutal. They were not monstrous enough to require motor tractors to draw them at a stately gait, but behind their teams could be up and away across the fields on short notice, their caissons of ammunitions creaking behind them. Along the communication trenches perspiring soldiers carried "plum puddings" or the trench-mortar shells which were to be fired from the front line and boxes of egg-shaped bombs which fitted nicely in the palm of the hand for throwing.
It seemed that all the guns in the world must be firing as you listened from a distance, although when you came into the area where the guns were in tiers behind the cover of a favorable slope you found that many were silent. The men of one battery might be asleep while its neighbor was sending shells with a one-two-three deliberation. Any sleep or rest that the men got must be there in the midst of this crashing babel from steel throats. Again, the covers were being put over the muzzles for the night, or, out of what had seemed blank hillside, a concealed battery which had not been firing before sent out its vicious puffs of smoke before its reports reached your ears. Every battery was doing as it was told from some nerve-center; every one had its registered target on the map—a trench, or a road, or a German battery, or where it was thought that a German battery ought to be.
The flow of ammunition for all came up steadily, its expenditure regulated on charts by officers who kept watch for extravagance and aimed to make every shell count. A fortune was being fired away every hour; a sum which would send a youth for a year to college or bring up a child went into a single large shell which might not have the luck to kill one human being as excuse for its existence; an endowment for a maternity hospital was represented in a day's belch of destruction from a single acre of trodden wheat land. One trench mortar would consume in an hour plum puddings for an orphan school. For you might pause to think of it in this way if you chose. Thousands do at the front.
Down on the banks of the Somme the blue uniforms of the French in place of the British khaki hovered around the gun-emplacements; the soixante-quinze with its virtuoso artistic precision was neighbor to the British eighteen-pounder. Guns, guns, guns—French and English! The same nests of them opposite Gommecourt and at Estrées thundered across at one another from either bank of the Somme through summer haze over the green spaces of the islands edged with the silver of its tranquil flow in the moonlight or its glare in the sunlight.
Not the least of the calculations in this activity was to screen every detail from aerial observation. New hangars had risen at the edge of level fields, whence the swift fighting machines of an aircraft concentration in keeping with the concentration of guns and all other material rose to reconnaissance, or to lie in wait as a falcon to pounce upon an invading German plane. Thus the sky was policed by flight against prying aerial eyes. If one German plane could descend to an altitude of a thousand feet, its photographs would reveal the location of a hundred batteries to German gunners and show the plan of concentration clearly enough to leave no doubt of the line of attack; but the anti-aircraft guns, plentiful now as other British material, would have caught it going, if not coming, provided it escaped being jockeyed to death by half a dozen British planes with their machine guns rattling.
To "camouflet" became a new English verb British planes tested out a battery's visibility from the air. Landscape painters were called in to assist in the deceit. One was set to "camouflet" the automobile van for the pigeons which, carried in baskets on the men's backs in charges, were released as another means of sending word of the progress of an attack obscured in the shell-smoke. This conscientious artist "camoufleted" the pigeon-van so successfully that the pigeons could not find their way home.
Night was the hour of movement. At night the planes, if they went forth, saw only a vague and shadowy earth. The sausage balloons, German and Allied, those monitors of the sky, a line of opaque, weird question marks against the blue, stared across at each other out of range