Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  As time went on, I found that there was one situation in which I did not at all enjoy finding myself. I did not like to be subjected to indiscriminate shell-fire when undressed. Lay me to rest in a flea-bag and I jib at shelling. Most of the shelling was at night. In view of the particular position of my sleeping-shack I never knew, when it started, whether it was (1) the road that was being shelled, or (2) the gun in front of me, or (3) our dugouts behind me. Not that it mattered a great deal, from my point of view. But if it was the gun in front, my companions behind would regard it as no business of theirs (though it was of mine—seeing the electric nature of my position) : whereas if it happened to be us who were to be bombarded, then it was our habit (the officers) to collect in the officers' Mess and have a whisky and a smoke. What the men did was somewhat their own affair.

  The men's quarters were big and of course unsafe dugouts. Life in them cannot have been pleasant. In my own battery— which as I have said I joined later—there was a gunner whom I had noticed before we came out to France. He was very 'nicely-spoken'—much too nicely-spoken to be comfortable in such a class-conscious country in England, and seeing that none of the officers were particularly nicely-spoken except myself. Later on in France he became the victim of panic. He nursed a shell-shock. Huddled at night in the men's quarters, in a position that was constantly shelled, the other men complained that he kept them awake at night by his shivering. They said his tin hat rattled against his dickie all night long. At last he had to be sent back to England.

  The disadvantage of these conditions of the siege-gunner's service is obvious. He was always 'in the Line', he had no spells of rest 'behind the Line'. Where he slept, often for a year on end, was in the midst of nests of batteries which were one of the main objectives of the enemy shelling.

  THE AUTHOR OF TARR

 
  Of course my tin house—rather like a suburban garden-coal-cellar—was a palace in comparison with what I should have got as a gunner. When it had been stuck together, the O.G. remarked casually that it was awkwardly placed. I said that was all right: one place was much the same as another.

  When the first shell would come over, I would roll swiftly out of the flea-bag and pull on my trenchboots. That is really all I worried about. I think the whole of his feet are man's 'Achilles heel'. I would hate to face a firing squad in my stocking-feet! Clothing and its part in the psychology of war is a neglected subject. I would have braved an eleven-inch shell in my trenchboots, but would have declined an encounter with a pipsqueak in my bare feet.

  From my standpoint the worst shelling here was road-shelling since I was more or less in the road. I preferred a bad shelling of the dugouts at my back, when we were assembled In the mess, which was more matey. It doesn't matter a bit if everybody's being shelled.

  This battery had among its officers—he was I believe second-in-command—an eminent young mathematician. I knew he was a good mathematician because he was unable to do/a simple addition sum, and as to the august operations of subtraction and division, they were entirely beyond him. /

  While I was reading in my flea-bag by the light/of a candle one night—it was the Chartreuse de Parme I had just begun, and I was for the second time upon the field of Waterloo— down came the shells, and there was no mistake that this time it was us they were after. All were going back of my shack. As I made for the mess I came upon the mathematician. Shells were coming over pretty fast, but he had placed himself in as exposed a position as possible, and was watching them narrowly, as they arrived. With a look of eager surprise he was darting his head round as one fell behind him, and back again to the front as one fell ahead. Something was amiss in his calculations, it seemed, and the position of the bursts was profoundly puzzling, if not unsatisfactory. I could not imagine what he was doing. The laws of probability, or something of that sort, were at stake, I deduced. Nature was behaving eccentrically, affronting, perhaps, laws with which I was totally unacquainted. Something was undoubtedly wrong; for he ought by all the rules to have been hit by this time, as a shell splinter had nearly hit me, and I had only just arrived.

  The mess was a long open dugout, high enough to stand up in, and was reputed to be a good dugout; the only good one we had. I don't know why it was supposed to be good, but we were all persuaded that it could be hit by a five-nine with impunity. (The 'five-nine' shell was the German equivalent of the six-inch English. And practically all the shelling we had to expect was from the five-nines.)

  After a bit the mathematician came slowly in, looking very disquietened, sat down and rolled a cigarette. I did not like to question him, though I saw the shells had been falling in a very unorthodox sequence; and I longed to ask him why a shell never hit the Mess. That was what puzzled me. Indeed they never hit a dugout. They made holes all round them, but never got a bull's eye. But I suppose it is like a game of darts in a pub.

  CHAPTER III

  How the Gunner 'Fights'

  You -may have asked how it is, now that I was at the Front, I was not at least firing a gun or doing something except reading La Chartreuse de Parme by candlelight, to earn my handsome salary. What did I do in the daytime? All that I have told you about happened at night. Was I fighting the German from sunrise till nightfall? Well, as a matter of factI was doing nothing at all, most of the time.

  First of all, I was a supernumary officer, come in as a replacement for a casualty, and there was very little for me to do except hang about and smoke cigarettes. I

  Probably the casualty, in his turn, was a quite futile and irrational casualty—this is no reflection upon his/competence, but he probably got hit while he was performing/some entirely useless routine function. He would have been better employed, it is quite likely, house-agenting or clerking/somewhere in England, rather than shrouding himself in military mystery 'somewhere in France'.

  The trouble about all these batteries was that they were overburdened with officers. The Germans arm a 'five-nine' battery —our opposite number—with one officer and two or three N.G.O.'s. If the officer became a casualty, it didn't matter. While waiting for another officer, the N.C.O.'s carried on.

  We had six officers in this battery. Five too many. We had no more casualties while I was there in spite of a good deal of desultory shelling. It is astonishing how many shells it takes to get one casualty.

  The next battery to us, on the other hand, lost a couple of officers a week after I arrived. As usual, 'reinforcements' were available almost at once, in the shape of a buxom little subaltern with cane and kitbag complete, who stepped briskly out of the battery sidecar, before their Mess dugout, took a couple of steps forward, and was hit in the jaw by a splinter from a 'five-nine', which had unexpectedly landed a few yards away. He was put back—but this time in a recumbent position—in the sidecar, and returned at top-speed to the base from which he had arrived. He had spent exactly twelve minutes and a half in the Line, and would probably never see it again, as he was badly wounded.

  Such are the chances of this sort of war. I was in the Line for about a year, on and off. I had shells burst within a couple of feet of my head. Splinters of every possible size have whisked around me, at every possible angle and at every variety of speed, grazing my coat, and smacking my tinhat, but I was never wounded. Yet I did not 'bear a charmed life', as our fathers called it, I was just difficult to hit, like most other people. Only a few were easy—I mean with a shell.

  I see however that in order to understand this part of my life-story, as many readers will not have first-hand acquaintance with even the simplest facts regarding war, it is probably desirable to give you a little explanatory data.

  Most modern war seems destined to be what is called a 'war of positions', or what is technically siege-warfare. A Civil War is no exception to this rule, events in Spain suggest. Endless positional or trench warfare appears to be unavoidable. The Western Front, at the time of my service, was purely siege warfare. We might as well have been before a city which we were investi
ng—except that we were both besieging armies, as it were; besieging each other.

  On this principle what would be the 'Assaults', if it were a regular old-fashioned siege of a place-forte, were the 'Attacks'; namely the infantry-attacks. These were interminable attempts to put an end to the 'Stalemate'. Throughout 1917 when I was there this was what was happening. Passchendaele—at which I was present—was the culmination of this. The British Army sustained enormous losses, to no purpose. It was the worst battle of the War, and the stupidist, which is saying a lot.

  Serving as a 'combatant' in a modern war is referred to as 'fighting'. But of course the only people who fight in the most rigorous acceptance of that term are the infantry. A gunner does not fight. He merely shells and is shelled. He discharges a large metal cylinder, aiming it by means of a delicately-adjusted mechanism, to fall at a certain spot which he cannot see, in the hope that he may kill somebody he hopes is there. He himself suffers from the desire of the other, enemy, gunners, a long way away, to ^achieve the same object with respect to himself.

  The gunner rarely if ever sees the enemy, except prisoners, when the infantry succeed in capturing some, and they are sent behind the Line, in small herds. The exception to this rule is the gunner-officer, who as an 'observer' sometimes sees the animal he is opposing in a free state—that is not in captivity. For instance I have seen Germans in their natural state, walking about behind their lines, and even popping about in their trenches. But that was only because I was an officer.

  It is one of the tasks of an artillery officer to go up to observation-posts, as they are called ('O.Pip', for short). But I have never engaged in personal combat with a German in a trench or anywhere else. So I have: not 'fought' the Germans, except in the more abstract sense that I have been responsible for the dispatch of unlimited numbers of shells in their direction, and as a result of the explosion of these shells (when they were not duds) I may have done these foemen more injury than I ever could have done them, I am sure, with my strong right arm.

  In the old days of open battle, gunjners did on occasion come into personal contact with the enemy—never with the infantry, but sometimes with the cavalry. These cavalry must have been extremely unpleasant customers, prancing and plunging about upon excited horses and waving over their heads long shining knives that they called 'sabres', or armed with barbarous spears, like an intoxicated picador.

  You may have read accounts of how a cavalry charge— say in the Indian Mutiny or in the campaigns against the Mahratta Princes—carried these impetuous horse-soldiers right amongst the guns, where the gun-crews were peaceably blazing away, as defenceless as civilians—never dreaming of any unorthodox disturbance, or anticipating strong-arm tactics on the part of the Nosey Parkers on horseback. How they 'cut down' the Sepoy gunners may have been represented to you—it probably was in your history-book—as a dashing and praiseworthy exploit.

  My feeling about horses extends to those who sit on them. And whenever I read of the cavalry doing as above, I experience, I am bound to say, much fellow-feeling for the unfortunate gunners. Cavalry should not interfere with gunners in that way, is my feeling. And the exploits of Lake or of French are spoilt for me by these unseemly attacks upon unarmed Sepoy and Boer artillerymen: though on occasion the gunners have given these curvetting musical-riders a warmer welcome than they expected. The old-time ramrod was at times as good at jousting from the ground with, as the sabre was for 'cutting down' from up above.

  Still, it was done, now and then, in the past—the mounted-arm did run amok among the artillery, having cut its way through the infantry. Apart from Tanks and of course the machine-guns of the air-arm (but this hardly applies at all in the war of 1914-18) the gunner has nothing to fear with regard to personal encounters with the enemy. He is a fighting-man only in name. The infantry do the common-or-garden fighting. They are the gladiators.

  It is my business here to give an intelligent record if possible of the sort of war I know about. An infantryman's expedience is of an entirely different order. A sapper has again a different tale to tell. An airman's is so different that I could not guess at much that he would have to recount. This is a gunner's tale, under conditions of siege warfare, in the commissioned ranks.

  Where the officer's experience differs from that of the rank and file is that he leaves the guns and goes up to what is called an observation post. It is in the course of this latter duty that his experience merges somewhat with that of the infantry. A bombardier in a battery, for instance, could go through numerous campaigns, and be wounded a half-dozen times, without ever having been near a front-line trench.

  As a battery officer at the Front my main duties were to mouch about the battery, and to go up before daybreak with a party of signallers to an observation post. This was usually just behind the Front Line trench—in the No Man's Land just behind it. For there were blanks behind as before.

  This O. Pip work was hard and often very dangerous. The former, the work at the battery position, was not work at all, and was only spasmodically dangerous.

  Nearly half the time of a siege-battery subaltern was spent at the observation post. Quite ninety per cent of that time was wasted. In an active part of the Front the telephone wires would never remain intact for long, as they would be cut by shell-fire. It might have been quite useful if the enemy had not persisted in destroying the wires, or if they had left the observation post itself in peace. But this they would not do. They spotted an observation post within a half-hour at the outside and would shell it to pieces. They even shelled anything that looked like an observation post. A half-dozen stumps of trees in what once was a wood they would never let alone. When I said ninety per cent of 'O. Pip' duty was liable to be time wasted —at the climax of the War, on the Western Front, that is—I was not exaggerating. Usually ohe would have been as well occupied picking one's teeth at the rest billet or reading La Chartreuse de Parme in a cafe at Baitteul.

  When I attested, I selected the Artillery. Afterwards I concluded that I could not have been in the infantry: I am not nearly bloodthirsty enough. You can, 1 know, have seen a good deal of service as an infantry officer without ever having been called upon to do anything bloodthirsty. But as an infantryman you have to be prepared to behave with savagery, if the occasion arises. And I am the opposite of a savage.

  There is no rule about the position of guns, except that the smaller guns, with a shorter range, have to be nearer the front line. The Field Artillery is placed as near behind the infantry as is considered desirable, or the nature of the ground suggests, and behind them come the smallest howitzers. These are the six-inch howitzers, like ours.

  If a six-inch howitzer battery found itself 'up amongst the Field', it considered it was being exposed to unnecessary risk.

  Often the casualties were extremely heavy when this occurred, as it did quite often in the crowded conditions of the intensive warfare of the last two years. Naturally a larger gun firing too near 'the line' would attract undue attention from the enemy. And when you consider that the Germans had their sausage-balloons practically over the Front Line, and that they would be looking down into a battery of troublesome howitzers placed beneath them in this way, and directing fire on it all the time, you can imagine how undesirable a prominence this might be considered, for those whom it most concerned.

  We were 'up amongst the Field' on the Flanders coast, for instance. But this was because we were there for an Attack (which never materialized) and ours was a silent battery at the time, so we were not exposed to aggressive shelling.

  In a war of the type with which I am acquainted, therefore, a gunner is a very dangerous type of spectator—without intermission throwing murderous missiles into the bullring below (to illustrate what I mean), and over at the banks of equally active spectators opposite, who are of course doing the same thing. It is 'active service' all right. But it is not strictly speaking 'fighting'. I have said that I am no friend of war, and I am not. What is more, I never discovered in my
self any of those instincts that go to the making of 'the perfect soldier'. When from above a front-line trench (at Passchendaele) I was 'registering' batteries on what was left of a village, I was glad to think that none of the enemy were in it. As our shells fell, and I watched them through my field-glasses, it was a satisfaction to me to know (as we had been told) that it was only brick-and-mortar that was being 'strafed'. By no means a soldierly reflection! I should add, perhaps, that of course this was particular to myself, and that many of my companions were, I am quite sure, the most bloodthirsty people, and determined to wash out Fritz's sins in his own blood.

  After all that has been written about the War it seems absurd that all this mere information should be necessary. But I have not so far seen a book in which the gunners' habits have been described. And if such books exist, I will be prepared to wager that at the end of them the reader would be little more able than when he started to know exactly what the gunners' life entailed, or what sort of 'fighting' he'd been doing. If I have debunked the gunner, forgive me, if you are a gunner.

  CHAPTER IV

  A Day of Attack

  It was a Day of Attack—'somewhere in France', and the O.G. Battery had himself decided to go to an observation-post, and observe a bit of what was going forward. He took me with him. It was a reasonably distant one, and we saw what we had come to see without too much interference. We saw the battle: there had been no break-through, but a push-back. When it was evident that something had happened, and that the new front line would not be where the old front line had been, he turned to me and said :