Chapter IX: Part 9

Some people might ask why Canada should be pouring out her blood in Europe; what had Flanders to do with her? England was fighting to save her island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what was Canada fighting for? As I understood it, she was fighting for Canada. A blow had been struck against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic, and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back.

She had had no great formative war. Pardeburg was a kind of expedition of brave men, like the taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep into the consciousness of the average Canadian, who knew only that some neighbor of his had been in South Africa. Our own formative war was the Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought brother. The Revolution made a mold which, perhaps, instead of being impressed upon succeeding generations of immigrants may have only given a veneer to them. A war may be necessary to make them molten for another shaping.

No country wanted war less than Canada, but when war came its flame made Canada molten with Canadian patriotism. As George III. brought the Carolinas and Massachusetts together, so the Kaiser has brought the Canadian provinces together. The men from that cultivated, rolling country of Southern Ontario, from New Brunswick and the plains and the coast and a quota from the neat farms of Quebec have met face to face, not on railroad trains, not through representatives in Parliament or in convention, but in billets and trenches. Whatever Canada is, she is not small. She is particularly the land of immense distances; her breadth is greater than that of the United States. All of the great territorial expanse of Canada in its manhood, in the thoughts of those at home, was centered in a few square miles of Flanders.

I was in Canada when only the first division had had its trial and recruiting was at full blast; and again when three hundred and fifty thousand had joined the colors and Canada, now feeling the full measure of loss of life, seemed unfaltering, which was the more remarkable in a new country where livelihood is easy to gain and Opportunity knocks at the door of youth if he has only the energy to take her by the hand and go her way. I may add that not all the youth about Toronto or any other town who gave as their reason for not enlisting that they were American citizens actually were. They were not "too _proud_ to fight," whatever other reason they had, for they had no pride; and if honest Quakers they would not have given a lying excuse.

Out in France I heard talk about this Canadian brigade being better than that one, and that an Eastern Canada man wanted no leading from a Western Canada man, and that not all who were winning military crosses were hardy frontiersmen but some were lawyers and clerks in Montreal or Toronto--or should I put Toronto first, or perhaps Ottawa or Winnipeg--and more talk expressive of the rivalry which generals say is good for spirit of corps. Moose Jaw Street was across from Halifax Avenue and Vancouver Road from Hamilton Place in the same community.

As I was not connected with any part of Canada, the Canadians, with their Maple Leaf emblem, were all Canadians to me; men across the border which we pass in coming and going without change of language or steam-heated cars or iced-water tanks. Some Canadians think that the United States with its more than a hundred millions may feel patronizing toward their eight millions, when after Courcelette if a Canadian had patronized the United States I should not have felt offended. I have even heard some fools say that the two countries might yet go to war, which shows how absurd some men have to be in order to attract attention. All of this way of thinking on both sides should be placed on a raft in the middle of Lake Erie and supplied with bombs to fight it out among themselves under a curtain of fire; and their relatives ought to feel a deep relief after the excursion steamers that came from Toronto, Cleveland and Buffalo to see the show had returned home.

To listen to certain narrators you might think that it was the Allies who always got the worst of it in the Ypres salient, but the German did not like the salient any better than they. I never met anybody who did like it. German prisoners said that German soldiers regarded it as a sentence of death to be sent to the salient. There are many kinds of mud and then there is Ypres salient mud, which is all kinds together with a Belgian admixture. I sometimes thought that the hellish outbreaks by both sides in this region were due to the reason which might have made Job run amuck if all the temper he had stored up should have broken out in a storm.

This is certain, that the Canadians took their share in the buffets in the mud, not through any staff calculation but partly through German favoritism and the workings of German psychology. Consider that the first volunteer troops to be put in the battle line in France weeks before any of Kitchener's Army was the first Canadian division, in answer to its own request for action, which is sufficient soldierly tribute of a commander to Canadian valor! That proud first division, after it had been well mud-soaked and had its hand in, was caught in the gas attack. It refused to yield when it was only human to yield, and stood resolute in the fumes between the Germans and success and even counter-attacked. Moreover, it was Canadians who introduced the trench raid.

If the Canadians did not particularly love the Germans, do you see any reason why the Germans should love the Canadians? It was unpleasant to suffer repulse by troops from an unmilitary, new country. Besides, German psychology reasoned that if Canadians at the front were made to suffer heavy losses the men at home would be discouraged from enlisting. Why not? What had Canada to gain by coming to fight in France? It does not appear an illogical hypothesis until you know the Canadians.

However, it must not be understood that other battalions, brigades and divisions, English and Scotch, did not suffer as heavily as the Canadians. They did; and do not forget that in the area which has seen the hardest, bloodiest, meanest, nastiest, ghastliest fighting in the history of the world the Germans, too, have had their full share of losses. The truth is that if any normal man was stuck in the mud of the Ypres salient and another wanted his place he would say, "Take it! I'm only trying to get out! We've got equally bad morasses in the Upper Yukon;" and retire to a hill and set up a machine gun.

When a Canadian officer was asked if he had organized some trenches that his battalion had taken his reply, "How can you organize pea soup?" filled a long-felt want in expression to characterize the nature of trench-making in that kind of terrain. Yet in that sea of slimy and infected mush men have fought for the possession of cubic feet of the mixture as if it had the qualities of Balm of Gilead--which was also logical. What appears most illogical to the outsider is sometimes most logical in war. It was a fight for mastery, and mastery is the first step in a war of frontal positions.

Many lessons the Canadians had to learn about organization and staff work, about details of discipline which make for homogeneity of action, and the divisions that came to join the first one learned their lessons in the Ypres salient school, which gave hard but lasting tuition. I was away when at St. Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient can provide. The time was winter, when chill water filled the shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this, holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the offensive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. The Canadians proved that they could be stubborn and that their soldiers, even if they had not had the directing system of an army staff that had prepared for forty years, with two years of experience could act on their own in resisting as well as in attacking. "Our men! our men!" the officers would say. That was it: Canada's men, learning tactics in face of German tactics and holding their own!

When all was peaceable up and down the line, with the Grand Offensive a month away, the Germans once more "tried it on" the Canadians in the Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the positions were all in favor of the Germans with room to plant two guns to one around the bulging British line. For many days they had been quietly registering as they massed their artillery for their last serious effort during the season of 1916 in the north.

Anything done to the Canadians always came close home to me; and news of this attack and of its ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was bound to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned that the Canadians were already counter-attacking, which set your pulse tingling and little joy-bells ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the Germans could not have developed any offensive that would be serious to the situation as a whole at that moment, in the midst of preparations for the Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even had one known that it was coming, in that flat region where everyone has to follow a communication trench with only the sky directly overhead visible.

There was an epic quality in the story of what happened as you heard it from the survivors. It was an average quiet morning in the first-line trenches when the German hurricane broke from all sides; but first-line trenches is not the right phrase, for all the protection that could be made was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled to a thickness sufficient to stop a bullet at short range.

What luxury in security were the dugouts of the Somme hills compared to the protection that could be provided here! When the first series of bursts announced the storm you could not descend a flight of steps to a cavern whose roof was impenetrable even by five-hundred-pound shells. Little houses of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some instances level with the earth, which any direct hit could "do in" were the best that generous army resources could permit. High explosive shells must turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. There was nothing to shoot at if a man tried to stick to the parapet, for fresh troops fully equipped for their task back in the German trenches waited on demolition of the Canadian breastworks before advancing under their own barrage. Shrapnel sent down its showers, while the trench walls were opened in great gaps and tossed heavenward. Officers clambered about in the midst of the spouts of dust and smoke over the piles and around the craters, trying to keep in touch with their men, when it was a case of every man taking what cover he could.

"The limit!" as the men said. "The absolute limit in an artillery concentration!"

But they did not go--not until they had orders. This was their kind of discipline under fire; they "stayed on the job." One group charged out beyond the swath of fire to meet the Germans in the open and there fought to the death in expression of characteristic initiative. When word was passed to retire, some grudgingly held on to fight the outnumbering Germans in the midst of the débris and escaped only by passing through the German barrage placed between the first and second line to cover the German advance on the second. The supports themselves under the carefully arranged pattern of shell fire held as the rallying-points of the survivors, who found the communication trenches so badly broken that it was as well to keep in the open. Little knots of men with their defenses crushed held from the instinctive sense of individual stubbornness.

To tell the whole story of that day as of many other days where a few battalions were engaged, giving its fair due to each group in the struggle, is not for a correspondent who had to cover the length of the battle line and sees the whole as an example of Maple Leaf spirit. The rest is for battalion historians, who will find themselves puzzled about an action where there was little range of vision and this obscured by shell-smoke and the preoccupation of each man trying to keep cover and do his own part to the death.

In the farmhouses afterward, as groups of officers tried to assemble their experiences, I had the feeling of being in touch with the proof of all that I had seen in Canada months previously. Losses had been heavy for the battalions engaged though not for the Canadian corps as a whole, no heavier than British battalions or the Germans had suffered in the salient. Canada happened to get the blow this time.

The men, after a night's sleep and writing home that they were safe and how comrades had died, might wander about the roads or make holiday as they chose. They were not casual about the fight, but outspoken and frank, Canadian fashion. They realized what they had been through and spoke of their luck in having survived. From the fields came the cry of, "Leave that to me!" as a fly rose from the bat, or, "Out on first!" as men took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives with baseball curves and hot liners between the bases, which was very homelike there in Flanders. Which of the players was American one could not tell by voice or looks, for the climate along the border makes a type of complexion and even of features with the second generation which is readily distinguished from the English type.

"What part of Canada do you come from?" asked an officer of a private.

"Out west, sir!"

"What part of the west?"

"'Way out west, sir!"

"An officer is asking you. Be definite."

"Well, the State of Washington, sir."

There was a good sprinkling of Americans in the battle, including officers; but on the baseball field and the battlefield they were a part of the whole, performing their task in a way that left no doubt of their quality. Whether the spirit of adventure or the principle at stake had brought her battalions to Flanders, Canada had proved that she could be stubborn. She was to have her chance to prove that she could be quick.

XXVI

THE TANKS ARRIVE

The New Army Irish--Irish wit--And Irish courage--Pompous Prussian
Guard officer--The British Guards and their characteristics--Who
invented the tank?--The great secret--Combination of an armadillo, a
caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car and a traveling
circus--Something really new on the front--Gas attacks--A tank in the
road--A moving "strong point"--Making an army laugh--Suspense for the
inmates of the untried tanks.

The situation on the Ridge was where we left it in a previous chapter with all except a few parts of it held, enough for a jumping-off place at all points for the sweep down into the valley toward Bapaume. In the grim preliminary business of piecemeal gains which should make possible an operation over a six-mile front on Sept. 15th, which was the first general attack since July 14th, the part that the Irish battalions played deserves notice, where possibly the action of the tried and sturdy English regiments on their flanks need not be mentioned, as being characteristic of the work they had been doing for months.

They were the New Army Irish, all volunteers, men who had enlisted to fight against Germany when their countrymen were largely disaffected, which requires more initiative than to join the colors when it is the universal passion of the community. Many stories were told of this Irish division. If there are ten Irishmen among a hundred soldiers the stories have a way of being about the ten Irishmen.

I like that one of the Connaught man who, on his first day in the trenches, was set to digging out the dirt that had been filled into a trench by a shell-burst. Along came another shell before he was half through his task; the burst of a second knocked him over and doubled the quantity of earth before him. When he picked himself up he went to the captain and threw down his spade, saying:

"Captain, I can't finish that job without help. They're gaining on me!"

Some people thought that the Sinn Fein movement which had lately broken out in the Dublin riots would make the new Irish battalions lukewarm in any action. They would go in but without putting spirit into their attack. Other skeptics questioned if the Irish temperament which was well suited to dashing charges would adapt itself to the matter-of-fact necessities of the Somme fighting. Their commander, however, had no doubts; and the army had none when the test was made.

Through Guillemont, that wicked resort of machine guns, which had been as severely hammered by shell fire after it had repulsed British attacks as any village on the Somme, the Irish swept in good order, cleaning up dugouts and taking prisoners on the way with all the skill of veterans and a full relish of the exploit, and then forward, as a well-linked part of a successful battle line, to the sunken road which was the second objective.

"I thought we were to take a village, Captain," said one of the men, after they were established in the sunken road. "What are we stopping here for?"

"We have taken it. You passed through it--that grimy patch yonder"--which was Guillemont's streets and houses mixed in ruins five hundred yards to the rear.

"You're sure, Captain?"

"Quite!"

"Well, then, I'd not like to be the drunken man that tried to find his keyhole in that town!"

It was a pity, perhaps, that the Irish who assisted in the taking of Ginchy, which completed the needful mastery of the Ridge for British purposes, could not have taken part in the drive that was to follow. We had looked forward to this drive as the reward of a down hill run after the patient labor of wrenching our way up hill. Even the Germans, who had suffered appalling losses in trying to hold the Ridge, must have been relieved that they no longer had to fight against the inevitable.

Again the clans were gathering and again there ran through the army the anticipation which came from the preparation for a great blow. The Canadians were appearing in billets back of the front. If in no other way, I should have known of their presence by their habit of moving about roads and fields getting acquainted with their surroundings and finding out if apples were ripe. For other portions of the country it was a little unfair that these generous and well-paid spenders should take the place of the opulent Australians in villages where small boys already had hordes of pennies and shopkeepers were hastening to replenish their stocks to be equal to their opportunities.

At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, but not to go in against the Prussian Guard, which those with a sense of histrionic fitness desired. When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at Contalmaison he had said, "The Prussian Guard feels that it is surrendering to a foe worthy of its steel when it yields to superior numbers of the English Guard!" or words to that effect according to reports, only to receive the answer that his captors were English factory hands and the like of the New Army, whose officers excused themselves, in the circumstances, for their identity as politely as they could.

Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the Guards were the Guards, England's crack regiments, the officers of each wearing their buttons in a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with the distinctive Guards' salute. In the Guards the old spirit of gaiety in face of danger survived. Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of fire joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner worthy of tradition.

Though the English would have been glad to go against the Prussian Guard with bayonet or bomb or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days are not signaling to the enemy, "Let us have a go between your Guards and our Guards!" but are putting crack regiments and line regiments in a battle line to a common task, where the only criterion is success.

The presence of the Guards, however, yielded interest to another new arrival on the Somme front. When the plan for a style of armored motor car which would cross shell-craters and trenches was laid before an eminent general at the War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from further consideration might have been more blasphemous if he could have spared the time to be anything but satirically brief. Such conservatives probably have prevented many improvements from materializing, and probably they have also saved the world from many futile creations which would only have wasted time and material.

Happily both for geniuses and fools, who all, in the long run, let us hope, receive their just deserts, there is no downing an idea in a free country where continued knocking at doors and waiting in hallways eventually secure it a trial. Then, if it succeeds, the fellow who thought that the conception was original with him finds his claims disputed from all points of the compass. If it fails, the poor thing goes to a fatherless grave.

I should like to say that I was the originator of the tank--one of the originators. In generous mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals too numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every soldier.

Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I found myself so poor at it that I did not even pass on my plan to the staff, which had already considered a few thousand plans. Ericsson conceiving a gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man as Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine of war.

To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, was given the task of transforming blue-print plans into reality. There was no certainty that he would succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for every foundry and every skilled finger in the land, was enterprising enough to give him a chance. He and thousands of workmen spent months at this most secret business. If one German spy had access to one workman, then the Germans might know what was coming. Nobody since Ericsson had a busier time than Swinton without telling anybody what he was doing. The whisperers knew that some diabolical surprise was under way and they would whisper about it. No censor regulations can reach them. Sometimes the tribe was given false information in great confidence in order to keep it too occupied to pass on the true.

The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary.

Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the front unheralded.

One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?" was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me. Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more phlegmatic.

In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the shell clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had cumulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas shells, lachrymatory shells and _Flammenwerfer_ were as old-fashioned as high explosives and shrapnel. Bombing encounters in saps had no variation. The ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told from the one taken yesterday except by its location on the map. Even the aeroplanes had not lately developed any sensational departures from habit. One paid little more attention to them than a gondolier pays to the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of fire all looked alike. There was no new way of being killed--nothing to break the ghastly monotony of charges and counter-charges.

All the brains of Europe had been busy for two years inventing new forms of destruction, yet no genius had found any sinuous creature that would creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was no antidote. Everybody was engaged in killing, yet nobody was able to "kill to his satisfaction," as the Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing balls of explosives for one thousand yards.

True, the gas attack at Ypres had been an innovation. It was not a discovery; merely an application of ghastliness which had been considered too horrible for use. As a surprise it had been successful--once. The defense answered with gas masks, which made it still more important that soldiers should not be absent-minded and leave any of their kit out of reach. The same amount of energy put into projectiles would have caused more casualties. Meanwhile, no staff of any army, making its elaborate plans in the use of proved weapons, could be certain that the enemy had not under way, in this age of invention which has given us the wireless, some new weapon which would be irresistible.

Was the tank this revolutionary wonder? Its sponsors had no such hope. England went on building guns and pouring out shells, cartridges and bombs. At best, the tanks were another application of an old, established form of killing in vogue with both Daniel Boone and Napoleon's army--bullets.

The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the monster was blocking a road gorged with transport had something of the ludicrousness of, say, a pliocene monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly lain down at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the delay. Those near by were sufficiently entertained by the spectacle which stopped them. They gathered around the tank and gaped and grinned.

The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark-haired Englishman, with a face of oriental stolidity. Questions were shot at him, but he would not even say whether his beast would stand without hitching or not; whether it lived on hay, talcum powder, or the stuff that bombs are made of; or what was the nature of its inwards, or which was the head and which the tail, or if when it seemed to be backing it was really going forward.

By the confession of some white lettering on its body, it was officially one of His Majesty's land ships. It no more occurred to anyone to suggest that it move on and clear the road than to argue with a bulldog which confronts you on a path. I imagined that the feelings of the young officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the curtain of military secrecy into the full blaze of staring, inquiring publicity.

The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. Its body hugged the earth in order to expose as little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it was mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to its low visibility, and there was no more hop in it than in the Gila monster.

The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide being proof against the bullets of machine guns and rifles, it was a moving "strong point" which could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, where machine guns were emplaced to mow down infantry charges, with its own machine guns. Only now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical product it was no more remarkable than a steam shovel. The wonder was in the part that it was about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, and this a soldier-saving, device.

For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead weight in the path of traffic. If it could not move of itself, the only way for traffic to pass was to build a road around it. Then there was a rumbling noise within its body which sounded like some unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself around with the ponderosity of a canal boat being warped into a dock and proceeded on its journey to take its appointed place in the battle line.

Did the Germans know that the tanks were building? I think that they had some inkling a few weeks before the tanks' appearance that something of the sort was under construction. There was a report, too, of a German tank which was not ready in time to meet the British. Some German prisoners said that their first intimation of this new affliction was when the tanks appeared out of the morning mist, bearing down on the trenches; others said that German sausage observation balloons had seen something resembling giant turtles moving across the fields up to the British lines and had given warning to the infantry to be on the lookout.

Thus, something new had come into the war, deepening the thrill of curiosity and intensifying the suspense before an attack. The world, its appetite for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all about the tanks; but instead of the expected mechanical details, censorship would permit only vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, and the tanks were really strong on psychology--subjectively and objectively. It was the objective result in psychology that counted: the effect on the fighting men. Human imagination immediately characterized them as living things; monstrous comrades of infantry in attack.

Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action. What would happen to the tanks? What would they do to the Germans?

The staff, which had carefully calculated their uses and limitations, had no thought that the tanks would go to Berlin. They were simply a new auxiliary. Probably the average soldier was skeptical of their efficiency; but his skepticism did not interfere with his curiosity. He wanted to see the beast in action.

Christopher Columbus crossing uncharted seas did not undertake a more daring journey than the skippers of the tanks. The cavalryman who charges the enemy's guns in an impulse knows only a few minutes of suspense. A torpedo destroyer bent on coming within torpedo range in face of blasts from a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden concentrations of shell fire.

The Germans might have full knowledge of the ships' character and await their appearance with forms of destruction adapted to the purpose. All was speculation and uncertainty. Officers and crew were sealed up in a steel box, the sport of destiny. For months they had been preparing for this day, the crowning experiment and test, and all seemed of a type carefully chosen for their part, soldiers who had turned land sailors, cool and phlegmatic like the monsters which they directed. Each one having given himself up to fate, the rest was easy in these days of war's superexaltation, which makes men appear perfectly normal when death hovers near. Not one would have changed places with any infantryman. Already they had _esprit de corps_. They belonged to an exclusive set of warriors.

Lumberingly dipping in and out of shell-craters, which sometimes half concealed the tanks like ships in a choppy sea, rumbling and wrenching, they appeared out of the morning mist in face of the Germans who put up their heads and began working their machine guns after the usual artillery curtain of fire had lifted.

XXVII

THE TANKS IN ACTION

How the tanks attacked--A tank walking up the main Street of a
village--Effect on the Germans--Prussian colonel surrenders to a
tank--Tanks against trees--The tank in High Wood--The famous Crème de
Menthe--Demolishing a sugar factory--Germans take the tanks
seriously--Differences of opinion regarding tanks--Wandering
tanks--German attack on a stranded tank--Prehistoric turtles--Saving
twenty-five thousand casualties.

With the reverse slope of the Ridge to conceal their approach to the battle line, the tanks squatting among the men at regular intervals over a six-mile front awaiting the cue of zero for the attack at dawn and the mist still holding to cover both tanks and men, the great Somme stage was set in a manner worthy of the début of the new monsters.

A tactical system of coördinated action had been worked out for the infantry and the untried auxiliary, which only experienced soldiers could have applied with success. According to the nature of the positions in front, the tanks were set definite objectives or left to find their own objectives. They might move on located machine gun positions or answer a hurry call for help from the infantry. Ahead of them was a belt of open field between them and the villages whose capture was to be the consummation of the day's work. While observers were straining their eyes to follow the progress of the tanks and seeing but little, corps headquarters eagerly awaited news of the most picturesque experiment of the war, which might prove ridiculous, or be a wonderful success, or simply come up to expectations.

No more thrilling message was ever brought by an aeroplane than that which said that a tank was "walking" up the main street of Flers surrounded by cheering British soldiers, who were in possession of the village. "Walking" was the word officially given; and very much walking, indeed, the tank must have seemed to the aviator in his swift flight. An eagle looked down on a tortoise which had a serpent's sting. This tank, having attended to its work on the way, passed on through Flers bearing a sign: "Extra Special! Great Hun Victory!" Beyond Flers it found itself alongside a battery of German field guns and blazed bullets into the amazed and helpless gunners.

The enemy may have heard of the tanks, but meeting them was a different matter. After he had fought shells, bullets, bombs, grenades, mortars, bayonets and gas, the tank was the straw that broke the camel's back of many a German. A steel armadillo laying its bulk across a trench and sweeping it on both sides with machine guns brought the familiar complaint that this was not fighting according to rules in a war which ceased to have rules after the bombing of civilian populations, the sinking of the _Lusitania_, and the gas attack at Ypres. It depends on whose ox is gored. There is a lot of difference between seeing the enemy slaughtered by some new device and being slaughtered by one yourself. No wonder that German prisoners who had escaped alive from a trench filled with dead, when they saw a tank on the road as they passed to the rear threw up their hands with a guttural: "Mein Gott! There is another! There is no fighting that! This is not war; it is butchery!" Yes, it was butchery--and butchery is war these days. Wasn't it so always? And as a British officer remarked to the protestants:

"The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague rules, being only armor, machinery and machine guns."

Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after they saw the hopelessness of turning their own machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide. Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone like finding that his blows go into the air and the other fellow's go home. There seemed a strange loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered himself to a tank, which took him on board and eventually handed him over to an infantry guard; but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel did not.

The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in their armored shells after the day's fight was over, whether their ships had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or temporarily foundered in shell-holes. Bullets had merely made steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and shrapnel had equally failed to penetrate the armor.

Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's powers is that it "eats" trees--that is to say, it can cut its way through a wood--and that it can knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it cannot masticate timber. All that it accomplishes must be done by ramming or by lifting up its weight to crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall yields before its mass.

As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High Wood, where the Germans had held to the upper corner with their nests of machine guns which the preliminary bombardment of British artillery had not silenced and they began their murderous song immediately the British charge started. They commanded the front and the flanks if the men continued to advance and therefore might make a break in the whole movement, which was precisely the object of the desperate resistance that had preserved this strong point at any cost against the rushes of British bombers, trench mortars and artillery shells for two months.

Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impossible. Nobody who is sane will leap into a furnace with a cup of water to put out the fire. Only a battalion commander who is a fool will refuse, in face of concentrated machine gun fire, to stop the charge.

"Leave it to me!" was the unspoken message communicated to the infantry by the sight of that careening, dipping, clambering, steel body as it rumbled toward the miniature fortress. And the infantry, as it saw the tank's machine guns blazing, left it to the tank, and, working its way to the right, kept in touch with the general line of attack, confident that no enemy would be left behind to fire into their backs. Thus, a handful of men capable, with their bullet sprays, of holding up a thousand men found the tables turned on them by another handful manning a tank. They were simply "done in," as the tank officer put it. Safe behind his armor, he had them no less at his mercy than a submarine has a merchant ship. Even if unarmed, a tank could take care of an isolated machine gun position by sitting on it.

One of the most famous tanks was Crème de Menthe. She had a good press agent and also made good. She seemed to like sugar. At least, her glorious exploit was in a sugar factory, a huge building of brick with a tall brick chimney which had been brought down by shell fire. Underneath the whole were immense dugouts still intact where German machine gunners lay low, like Br'er Rabbit, as usual, while the shells of the artillery preparation were falling, and came out to turn on the bullet spray as the British infantry approached. British do the same against German attacks; only in the battle of the Somme the British had been always attacking, always taking machine gun positions.

Crème de Menthe, chosen comrade of the Canadians on their way to the taking of Courcelette, was also at home among débris. The Canadians saw that she was as she moved toward it with the glee of a sea lion toward a school of fish. She did not go dodging warily, peering around corners with a view to seeing the enemy before she was seen. Whatever else a tank is, it is not a crafty boy scout. It is brazenly and nonchalantly public in its methods, like a steam roller coming down the street into a parade without regard to the rules of the road. Externally it is not temperamental. It does not bother to follow the driveway or mind the "Keep Off the Grass" sign when it goes up to the entrance of a dugout.

And Crème de Menthe took the sugar factory and a lot of prisoners. "Why not?" as one of the Canadians said. "Who wouldn't surrender when a beast of that kind came up to the door? It was enough to make a man who had drunk only light Munich beer wonder if he had 'got 'em!'"

Prisoners were a good deal of bother to the tanks. Perhaps future tanks will be provided with pockets for carrying prisoners. But the future of tanks is wrapped in mystery at the present.

This is not taking them seriously, you may say. In that case, I am only reflecting the feelings of the army. Even if the tanks had taken Bapaume or gone to the Kaiser's headquarters, the army would have laughed at them. It was the Germans who took the tanks seriously; and the more seriously the Germans took the tanks the more the British laughed.

"Of all the double-dyed, ridiculous things, was the way that Crème de Menthe person took the sugar factory!" said a Canadian, who broke into a roar at the recollection of the monster's antics. "Good old girl, Crème de Menthe! Ought to retire her for life and let her sit up on her haunches in a café and sip her favorite tipple out of barrel with a garden hose for a straw--which would be about her size."

However, there was a variation of opinions among soldiers about tanks drawn from personal experience, when life and death form opinions, of the way it had acted as an auxiliary to their part of the line. A tank that conquered machine-gun positions and enfiladed trenches was an heroic comrade surrounded by a saga of glorious anecdotes. One which became stalled and failed in its enterprise called for satirical comment which was applied to all.

We did not personify machine guns, or those monstrous, gloomy, big howitzers with their gaping maws, or other weapons; but every man in the army personified the tanks. Two or three tanks, I should have remarked, did start for Berlin, without waiting for the infantry. The temptation was strong. All they had to do was to keep on moving. When Germans scuttling for cover were the only thing that the skippers could see, they realized that they were in the wrong pew, or, in strictly military language, that they had got beyond their "tactical objective."

Having left most of their ammunition where they thought that it would do the most good in the German lines, these wanderers hitched themselves around and waddled back to their own people. For a tank is an auxiliary, not an army, or an army staff, or a curtain of fire, and must coöperate with the infantry or it may be in the enemy's lines to stay. There was one tank which found itself out of gasoline and surrounded by Germans. It could move neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned on a hostile shore, it would have to yield when the crew ran out of food.

The Germans charged the beast, and got under its guns, pounded at the door, tried to bomb and pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the top looking for dents in the armor with the rage of hornets, but in vain. They could not harm the crew inside and the crew could not harm them.

"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper.

Tactical objective be--British soldiers went to the rescue of their tank. Secure inside their shell, the commander and crew awaited the result of the fight. After the Germans were driven away, someone went for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast the breath of life to retreat to its "correct tactical position."

Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint melting into the earth, are hard to locate.

Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary roads and traveled routes, the tanks' slatey backs seemed like prehistoric turtles whose natural habitat is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in the business of modern war, symbolic of its satire and the old strife between projectile and armor, offensive and defensive. If two tanks were to meet in a duel, would they try to ram each other after ineffectually rapping each other with their machine guns?

"I hope that it knows where it is going!" exclaimed a brigadier-general, as he watched one approach his dugout across an abandoned trench, leaning over a little as it dipped into the edge of a shell-crater some fifteen feet in diameter with its sureness of footing on a rainy day when a pedestrian slipped at every step.

There was no indication of any guiding human intelligence, let alone human hand, directing it; and, so far as one could tell, it might have mistaken the general's underground quarters for a storage station where it could assuage its thirst for gasoline or a blacksmith's shop where it could have a bent steel claw straightened. When, finally, it stopped at his threshold, the general expressed his relief that it had not tried to come down the steps. A door like that of a battleship turret opened, and out of the cramped interior where space for crew and machinery is so nicely calculated came the skipper, who saluted and reported that his ship awaited orders for the next cruise.

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. If the tanks had accomplished nothing more than they did in the two great September attacks they would have been well worth while. I think that they saved twenty-five thousand casualties, which would have been the additional cost of gaining the ground won by unassisted infantry action. When machines manned by a few men can take the place of many battalions in this fashion they exemplify the essential principle of doing the enemy a maximum of damage with a minimum to your own forces.

XXVIII

CANADA IS QUICK

Canada's first offensive--The "surprise party"--Over nasty
ground--Canada's hour--Germans amazed--Business of the Canadians to
"get there"--Two difficult villages--Canadians make new
rules--Canada's green soldiers accomplish an unheard of
feat--Attacking on their nerve--The last burst--Fewer Canadians than
Germans, but--"Mopping up"--Rounding up the captives--An aristocratic
German and a democratic Canadian--French-Canadians--Thirteen
counter-attacks beaten--Quickness and adaptability--Canada's soldiers
make good.

The tanks having received their theatric due, we come to other results of Sept. 14th when the resistance of the right was stiff and Canada had her turn of fortune in sharing in the brilliant success on the left.

It was the Canadians' first offensive. They knew that the eyes of the army were upon them. Not only for themselves, after parrying blows throughout their experience at the front, but in the name of other battalions that had endured the remorseless grind of the Ypres salient they were to strike the blows of retribution. The answer as to how they would charge was written in faces clear-cut by the same climate that gave them their nervous alertness.

On that ugly part of the Ridge where no stable trench could be made under the vengeful German artillery fire and small numbers were shrewdly distributed in shell-craters and such small ditches as could be maintained, they crept out in the darkness a few days before the attack to "take over" from the Australians and familiarize themselves with this tempest-torn farming land which still heaved under tornadoes of shells. The men from the faraway island continent had provided the jumping-off place and the men from this side of the Pacific and the equator were to do the jumping, which meant a kind of overseas monopoly of Pozières Ridge.