您可以在百度里搜索“Now It Can Be Told 艾草文学(www.321553.xyz)”查找最新章节！

　　CHAPTER XVII

　　Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our side of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.

　　Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly behind the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells, saving them up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the enemy was concentrating “hate.”

　　Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer telephone messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were being shelled to pieces by long—range howitzers, or from engineers whose working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns, or from a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a certain trench and piling up the casualties. It was hard to say: “Sorry!... We've got to go slow with ammunition.”

　　That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great rate the “heavies” had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the battlefields by day and night.

　　There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, and no longer the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for artillery support. Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the enemy asked for trouble by any special show of “hate” he got it quickly and with a double dose.

　　Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except in places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down at them from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every battery. Going round the salient one day with General Burstall—and a very good name, too!—who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our guns and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.

　　Here and there our amateur gunners—quick to learn their job—found a good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and give praise to the little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later they were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not caught too soon.

　　So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village, where I went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet Street.

　　He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it—that was before his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic case of shell-shock—and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked in a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a pleasant place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to bits, except where, on the outskirts, the chateau with its racing-stables remained untouched—“German spies!” said the boy—and where a little grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church was battered and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits in the churchyard and open vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of their tombs. We walked along a sunken road and then to a barn in open fields. The roof was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the rain on wet days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the room above the ladder where the officers had their mess. There were some home-made chairs up there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies were tacked up to the beams, among the trench maps, and round the fireplace where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let down at night. A gramophone played merry music and gave a homelike touch to this parlor in war.

　　“A good spot!” I said. “Is it well hidden?”

　　“As safe as houses,” said the captain of the battery. “Touching wood, I mean.”

　　There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces and embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

　　“What's happened?” I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.

　　“Nothing,” said the boy, “except touching wood. The captain spoke too loudly.”

　　We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill showed black as ink.

　　The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the angle of fire.

　　“It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench,” said a bright-eyed boy by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he became a gunner officer in Flanders). “With any luck we shall get 'em in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal... And my gun's ready first, as usual.”

　　The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval, with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than the dull roar of a “heavy.”

　　A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a mile away.

　　Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

　　“Repeat!”

　　“We've got'em,” said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful way.

　　The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

　　“We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit.”

　　A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns fired together. “Repeat!” came the high voice through the megaphone.

　　The still air was rent again... In a waterlogged trench, which we could not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

　　The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the billet below.

　　The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.

　　The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above or a little mining operation underneath.

　　He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat there very solitary and watchful.

　　The rats worried him a little—they were bold enough to bare their teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to kill... until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the boy was broken.

　　It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in evening dress—boiled shirt, white tie, and all—with a bowler hat bent to the storm.

　　Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

　　“It isn't true,” he said. “I don't believe it... We're mad, that's all!... The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?”

　　We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow.

　　A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.

　　Cimetiere reserve

　　Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed.

　　“Mad!” he said. “We're all mad!” Now It Can Be Told