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Round about Poperinghe, by Reninghelst and Locre, long convoys of motor-wagons, taking up a new day's rations from the rail-heads, raised clouds of dust which powdered the hedges white. Flemish cart-horses with huge fringes of knotted string wended their way between motor-lorries and gun-limbers.
The movements of troops and the preparations for big events revealed to every British soldier in France the "secret" of the coming battle. Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big numbers of wounded. That was always one of the first signs of approaching massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being brought up to the rail-heads and stacked in the "dumps."
Breaking bells, twisting knockers, and "knapping" rail-heads, has descended so low of late that the fast fellows are ashamed of it, and have resigned it to the medical students, patriotic young members of Parliament, and others of the imitative classes; but there yet exists, or very lately existed, a collection of these and various other surreptitiously acquired properties, known among the fast fellow by the title of 's Museum, every article being ticketed artistically, and the whole presenting an example of devotion to the cause of science, we believe, without a parallel.
His trial revealed to the world the secret which his every effort had sought to keep inviolate, and the horde of vultures from the gold city were breaking the trail in their surging lust. Word flashed down the boulevards. It flew through the slums. It sung on the wires to the rail-heads at the coast. It reached the wealthy headquarters at Seattle.
Often, as I know, they were detrained at rail-heads in the wind and rain and by ghastly errors of staff-work kept waiting for their food until they were weak and famished.
While the enemy was being fought down, bombs were dropped not by pounds but by tons on villages and billets, on ammunition dumps and rail-heads, adding their destruction to that of the shells. There was more value in mastery than in destruction or in freedom of observation, for it affected the enemy's morale. A soldier likes to see his own planes in the air and the enemy's being driven away.
For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-heads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing flights over railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down which the German troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley between Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and many other places on the lines of route.
We knew, and could see at any moment in the mind's eye even in the darkness of an Amiens night the vastness of the human energy which was in motion along all the roads to Paris and from Boulogne and Dieppe and Havre to the fighting-lines, and in every village on the way the long columns of motor-lorries bringing up food and ammunition, the trains on their way to the army rail-heads with material of war and more food and more shells, the Red Cross trains crowded with maimed and injured boys, the ambulances clearing the casualty stations, the troops marching forward from back roads to the front, from which many would never come marching back, the guns and limbers and military transports and spare horses, along hundreds of miles of roads all the machinery of slaughter on the move.
Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at rail-heads and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organization may well have seemed flawless before the attack began. When they began they found that in "heavies" and in expenditure of high explosives they were outclassed.
They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners, whom they had scorned as "amateurs," and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, "spotting" for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads, rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in the German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the Ancre.
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