Tommy (56 page)

It was officially advised that men should keep 50 yards behind an 18-pounder barrage. Varying standards of shell manufacture, and the fact that gun barrels lost minuscule amounts of rifling each time they fired a shell, thus becoming less accurate with each shot until their ‘barrel life' was expired, helped widen the ‘zone' of the gun, the cigar-shaped area into which its shells would fall even if it was perfectly laid for each shot. Nevertheless, many experienced infantry officers thought it worth closing up to a mere 20 yards behind the rear edge of the barrage.

It was all but impossible, even at the end of the war, to vary the speed of a creeping barrage once it had begun, so careful liaison between infantry and gunners was required in the first place. Shrapnel was originally the preferred projectile for creeping barrages, but, on 14 July 1916, 9th Scottish Division used high explosive to good effect, keeping the Germans in their dugouts until the infantry had arrived. In 1917 the new, quick-acting 106 Fuse was popular, and adding smoke shells to the barrage, first tried at Arras in April 1917, produced good results, not least because the defenders, unsure whether it was smoke or gas, donned their gas masks and lost fighting efficiency.

Defensive artillery tactics evolved in tandem with offensive tactics, with the box barrage as a common feature. This, as its name suggests, boxed off a sector of the front. It could either be an open-sided box, with friendly troops attacking into the open end, or a solid box which completely surrounded a hostile unit – for instance, a counter attack division moving up at Ypres in 1917. A standing barrage, maintained on a particular feature for a specified time, acted like a breakwater, diverting or canalising an enemy attack or protecting a friendly flank.

This steady improvement of artillery technique owed much, as we have seen, to the development of artillery staffs at division, corps and army level. It also reflected the growing expertise of artillery observers, who were so much harder to train than gun numbers. They had to know precisely where they were, no easy task in an unfamiliar trench, and if an observer's assessment of his own position was wrong his fire control was certain to be wrong too. Walter Guinness complained, in August 1916, that: ‘Our gunners seem not to be a patch on the French. It is of course impossible to train artillery in a few months and I suspect that some of the trouble is due to bad work on the part of the FOOs [forward observation officers].'
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An artillery battery – horse, field or heavy – would always deploy with its gun-line some distance behind the trenches in a defensive battle, or the forward elements of advancing troops in an advance. Guns needed to be far enough forward to make the best use of their range – 6,525 yards for an 18-pounder and 7,300 for a 4.5-inch howitzer – but not so close to the front as to become involved in the infantry battle. For much of the war the 18-pounders and 4.5-inch howitzers would be perhaps two miles behind the front, with medium guns (such as 6-inch and 8-inch) further back, and heavies such as the 9.2-inch howitzer, tractor-drawn and transported in three large sections, up to five miles behind the front. Lieutenant R. B. Talbot Kelly emphasised that it was no use for an 18-pounder battery to be 3,700 yards from German trenches, as his was in early 1917: ‘we were often unable to do anything with tantalising targets behind German lines that we saw from our OP [observation post].'
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Field batteries had six guns, in three two-gun sections – left, right and centre – each commanded by a subaltern, and generally deployed with the whole battery together, under the command of its major – although it was possible to detach sections, or more rarely individual guns, for specific tasks. Two to three miles behind the gun-line were the wagon-lines, commanded by the battery's second in command, the battery captain. The battery's horses, wagons and administrative staff – its sergeant-major, clerk, shoeing-smith, veterinary sergeant, storemen and cooks – were to be found there. Signallers, that special tribe with their own rights, privileges and language, were split between gun-and wagon-lines, and responsible for keeping the telephone wire going forward in good repair, and in assisting signallers from brigade to maintain those running back. ‘They were a group of men apart,' wrote David Jones,

Subalterns and gunners were rotated between gun and wagon-lines to rest them, and very often the battery commander and his captain swapped for the same reason. Wagon-lines were places of comparative comfort and relative safety, usually with huts and dugouts for officers and men and hard standing for the horses. Officers messed together, and in a quiet sector one battery captain made the point that the Royal Regiment could show form even in the midst of a major war by dining nightly in his blue patrol jacket, with high-collared tunic and tight red-striped overalls.

In 1917 Second Lieutenant P.J. Campbell had just joined a battery still recognisably composed of Yorkshire territorials. His chronicling of his first few weeks with his battery, learning the rules in the wagon-lines, gives a clear picture of the pattern of a gunner's life. First, there was the element of risk, rarely wholly absent. A whiz-bang, the German 77mm (roughly equivalent to the 18-pounder) was unlikely to hurt you if it landed more than 20–30 yards away. Decent overhead cover would keep out a 4.2-inch shell, but the 5.9-inch, the ‘five-nine', workhorse of German medium guns, was an unwelcome visitor, and one falling even 100 yards away would wreck many defences. Big guns like the 8-inch and 11-inch were far worse, but the Germans tended to use them only against British heavy gun positions further back.

Campbell was given command of the left section of his battery, with two experienced sergeants, Denmark and Feuerbach (the latter's German-sounding name had, it was said, prevented him from getting a commission), two 18-pounders, fifty gunners and drivers and fifty horses. Sergeant Denmark quickly put him in the picture: ‘all in all the battery is good, Sir … I don't believe there's a better one in France. Officers and men have always worked together, they trust one another, you'll never be let down by anyone in C Battery.'
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Sergeant Thirsk, the battery's signals sergeant, was ‘one of the best non-commissioned officers in the battery and one of the nicest of men. I never heard him raise his voice or speak angrily, but his signallers were so well trained and so devoted to him that they knew what to do before they were told.'
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Campbell was given the nightly task of taking ammunition forward to the battery, just as a subaltern's detachment from the divisional ammunition column (his previous posting on the Western Front) unloaded its ammunition at the battery's wagon-lines. He was relieved to be able to cope with being shelled, welcomed the strength and confidence of his men, and marvelled at the way his battery commander seemed to know everybody's name and chatted with an easy familiarity without ever compromising his authority. Campbell read his letters at breakfast after a busy night. ‘I was as happy as I had ever been,' he wrote.

He was glad to have been brought into the war so gradually, and the gun-line held few terrors when he reached it. His first task was to fire harassing missions of 250 rounds per night: bearings and elevations to random targets were worked out, and then passed to his Nos 1. This did not please the battery commander. ‘Chuck the stuff where you like,' he ordered. ‘You're just as likely to hit Fritzes in one place as in another. But don't take any risks with the range, don't shoot short, that's the only thing for which there is no forgiveness.' And he was to get it all over by 2.00 am: ‘It's the Fritzes who are to be harassed, not us.'
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Finally, Campbell accompanied Edward, the senior subaltern, to an observation post, just behind the forward trenches, where Edward shot the battery to ensure that lines of fire were parallel and to record targets with individual corrections for each gun. His helmet protectively tilted low over his eyes, Campbell saw his first view of the front:

Forward observers, the eyes of the guns behind them, might spend their time in a purpose-built or improvised observation post, be attached to an infantry battalion headquarters as a liaison officer (though here too communications were vital, and a forward observation officer without them would not be well received), or be sent forward with an attack to organise protective fire the minute the objective was secured. Forward observer H. M. Stanford was in a static observation post during the first week of the Somme.

In describing the same incident to his mother Stanford apologised for sounding ‘very beastly and bloodthirsty', but ‘the whole thing is so impersonal that one thinks no more of it at the time than shooting rabbits. It is only afterwards, when you hear our wounded calling for help in no-man's land that you realise the horror of it…'
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Stanford was using established communications to a well-prepared gun-line. The German spring offensives of 1918 bit deep into the British positions, disrupting the communications on which effective indirect fire depended, and causing some battery commanders to look over their shoulders earlier than they might. Lieutenant Campbell was sent forward as an observer on 21 March and felt unusually frightened, not just because of the shelling. ‘That was nothing,' he wrote, ‘that stopped as soon as the shelling stopped. This was a new fear and it was not going to stop, it lasted for more than four months, it was the fear of the unknown'. There was visible panic amongst some of the infantry, who told him: ‘Jerry's through. He's in Epéhy; we've got no officers left.' Gunner Aubrey Wade, in another battery, saw broken infantry ‘throwing away their rifles as they ran, coming down through the guns at the double in two and threes, hatless and wholly demoralised, calling out to us as they passed that Jerry was through and it was all over …'
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Then Campbell saw wave after wave of Germans coming in in good order, but his battery commander was reluctant to engage because he sensed the need to withdraw. Eventually Campbell was given just two guns. ‘Shrapnel was the right weapon to use against enemy troops in the open,' he wrote, ‘but the shells should burst fifteen feet above them, not a hundred. I corrected the fire. I had to make use of three or four corrections before the shells were bursting at the right height.' He was awarded the MC for his action that day, but for months the sight of its ribbon made him unhappy: he felt that the battery could have done better.
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The story was repeated all along 5th Army's front, with indirect fire first losing much effectiveness as communications were cut, and then becoming impossible as batteries were pushed off their maps. Campbell saw the men of a 60-pounder battery on their way back, and an officer told him that they would have to use the
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war map if they wanted to use indirect fire: they had nothing else. But good batteries kept trying. The three surviving guns of a field battery came into action near Arthur Behrend's headquarters, quickly laid out their lines of fire and ‘ten minutes later they were shooting madly away'. The battery commander, a subaltern, looked so dazed that Behrend's comrades gave him a good feed. He spoke to the youngster: ‘The Germans had overrun them early in the day, he said, but not before the gunners had twice repulsed them with rifles and Lewis guns. How they managed to get any guns away he didn't know – only three had been fit to move and the other three were lying smashed on the position.' When he left Behrend looked back: ‘and saw the vivid flashes from the field guns firing away in the midst of our once spotless headquarters it seemed – as it so nearly was – the beginning of the end of all things'.
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