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Once we heard a skylark, an English skylark, singing over No-Man's-Land! I scarcely know which gave me more pleasure, the song, or the sight of the faces of those English lads as they listened. I was deeply touched when one of them said: "Ain't 'e a plucky little chap, singin' right in front of Fritzie's trenches fer us English blokes?"
War, with a No-Man's-Land of eighty miles and a very doubtful enemy at the far end, is war at its very best even though we did have only marmalade and nothing but marmalade.
If we admit the possibility of a persistent lethal compound, this question of critical range assumes outstanding importance. The New No-Man's-Land. The recent war witnessed a rather sudden adoption of trench warfare, during a period in which the artillery strengths of both sides were relatively feeble, when compared with the later stages of the war.
Lunching with a talented English comedian and his wife the other day, the conversation turned on Bohemia, the evasive no-man's-land that Thackeray referred to, in so many of his books, and to which he looked back lovingly in his later years, when, as he said, he had forgotten the road to Prague. The lady remarked: "People have been more than kind to us here in New York.
Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the walls of the cave roof above the spring.
The laissez-passer I've picked up, or forged, no matter which, takes me straight through to the Front; and I've got friends even in the trenches. Before the Frenchies know it I'll be across no-man's-land and inside the German lines!" For a moment, as I listened, I was dangerously near admiring him. He was certainly exaggerating; but it couldn't all be brag.
And he proceeded to carefully spiral down as gently as he could, no easy job when all motive power is suddenly exhausted. He landed in a broad shell-hole and at once began to apply restoratives to Stanley who, very weak yet undaunted, asked where they were. "Why, we're somewhere behind the Allied drive in what was No-Man's-Land. But don't you bother!
It was in the form of a little sortie from the trench to a stumpy willow in "No-Man's-Land," a willow that bore a striking resemblance to some giant cacti and was called by us the "Cactus Treen." From this point it was possible to bomb the German trench, and a little excursion of this sort generally satiated the visitor's curiosity. Incidentally, it kept the Hun from coming out and bombing us.
Believe me, unless things have changed mightily, there isn't much there in the way of reinforcements or more planes or anything." "You've been back there since?" "You bet! Finzer and I went over there the day before you left the hospital. The Boches have no notion that our side is doing anything here, except air-raiding in No-Man's-Land or using our planes.
Indeed, one of the most important functions of the tank will be to carry the advance guard of an army beyond the infected No-Man's-Land, and such an advance will occur behind a series of smoke barrages created, in the first place, by the artillery, and, later, by the advance of tanks themselves. Tanks in the Great War, Col. J. F. C. Fuller., D.S.O. The "Alert Gas Zone."
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