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It came at last, and the men breathed a sigh of relief at the escape it meant from the rain of high-explosives. It was their turn now, and the roar of their rifle-fire rang out and the bomb-throwers raised themselves to hurl their carefully-saved missiles on the advancing mass.
To these, high-explosives are a welcome relief. The trenches themselves are no garden city, like those at Armentières. They were sited and dug in the dark, not many weeks ago, to secure two hundred yards of French territory recovered from the Bosche by bomb and bayonet. The parapet in many places is too low.
The mendacious Press talked much about a "dishonourable peace," as though any peace could be as dishonourable as a prolonged war. But the immediate reality became too overwhelming. Grey multitudes were sweeping khaki multitudes before them. High-explosives, shrapnel, grenades, bombs, bullets were rending, piercing, and shattering the living flesh and muscle and bone.
Had the fiber of our women weakened since then? But he knew it had not. All day, in the new plant, women were working with high-explosives quite calmly. And there were Audrey and the Haverford women, strong enough, in all conscience. Every mental path, those days, somehow led eventually to Audrey. She was the lighted window at the end of the long trail.
The day before all her cows had been killed by shell-fire in the paddock behind the farmhouse, but if she and her elderly husband let their land go out of cultivation, how were they to live, and if they left, where could they go? When high-explosives blew great holes in their sown land they just filled in the holes and ploughed and sowed the place over again.
Immediately the British set about rebuilding their shattered trench and parapet; but before they had well begun the spades had to be flung down again and the rifles snatched to repel another fierce assault. This time a storm of bombs, hand grenades, rifle grenades, and every other fiendish device of high-explosives, preceded the attack.
The first great disillusionment of the war was at hand, and its promised beginning in May looked uncommonly like a repetition of the previous August. Popular discontent focused itself on the lack of munitions, and especially of high-explosives, which "The Times" military correspondent declared on 14 May to have been a fatal bar to our success.
We lived a truly Robinson Crusoe life, with the addition of Turkish high-explosives, and bully-beef-and-biscuit stew. Our dug-out was back to the firing-line, and at night we looked out upon the bay. We lay in our blankets watching the white moonlight on the waves, and the black shadows of our ambulance wagons on the silver sand.
I forgot to tell you that night comin' on didn't matter much, because the place was alight. The sky was full of shrapnel, and the high-explosives were falling in the houses on fire, and spreading the red stuff like fireworks.
If the war was to be won this condition had to be changed and at once. Two men in England Lloyd George and Lord Northcliffe understood this situation. Fortunately they are both men of courageous mould and unwavering purpose. He found that the greatest need of the English Army was for high-explosives. They were as necessary as bread. Into less than a quarter of a column he compressed this news.
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