September 27, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
According to Plan 
By Boyd Cable 
15 
R 
ATTY"TRAVERS dropped his load with a grunt 
of satisfaction, squatted down on the ground, and 
tilting back his shrapnel helmet mopped a stream- 
_.ing brow. As the line in which he had moved 
dropped to cover, another line rose out of the ground ahead 
of them and commenced to push forward. Some distance 
beyond a wave of kilted Highlanders pressed on at a steady 
walk up to within about hfty paces of the string of flickering, 
jumping white patches that marked the edge of the "artillery 
barrage." The machine gun company being in support had . 
a good view of the lines attacking ahead of them. 
" Them Jocks is goin' along nicely," said the man who 
had dropped beside Ratty Travers. Ratty grunted scorn- 
fully. " Beautiful," he said. " An" we're doin" wondertul 
well ourselves. I never remember gettin' over the No Man's 
Land so easy, or seein' a trench took so quick an' simple in 
my life as this one we're in ; .or seein' a 'tillery barrage move- 
so nice an' even and steady to time." 
" You've seed a lot Ratty," said his companion. " But 
you ain't seed everything." 
" That's true," said Ratty. " I've never seen a lot o' 
grown men playin' lets-pretend like a lot of school kids. 
Just look at that fool wi' the big drum. Johnny." 
Johnny looked and had to laugh. The man with the big 
drum was doubling oH from the kilted line, and strung out to 
either side of him there raced a scattered line of men armed 
witlj sticks and biscuit-tins and tin cans. Ratty and his 
companions were clothed in full fighting kit and equipment, 
and bore boxes of very real ammunition. In the " trenches " 
ahead of them, or moving over the open, were other m^n 
similarly equipped ; rolling back to them came a clash and 
clatter, a dull prolonged boom-boom-boom. In every detail, 
so far as the men were concenjed, an attack was in full swing ; 
but there was no yell and crash of falling shells, no piping 
whistle and sharp crack of bullets, no deafening, shaking 
thunder of artillery (except that steady boom-boom), no 
shell-scorched strip of battered ground. The warm sun 
shone on trim green fields, on long twisting lines of flags and 
tapes strung on sticks, on ranks of perspiring men in khaki 
with rifles and bombs and machine-guns and ammunition 
and stretchers and all the other accoutrements of battle. 
There wx-re no signs of death or wounds, none of the horror 
of war, because this was merely a " practice attack," 
a full-dress rehearsal of the real thing, full ten miles behind 
the front. The trenches were marked out by flags and tapes, 
the artillery barrage was a line of men hammering biscuit- 
tins and a big drum, and waving fluttering white flags. The 
kilts came to a halt fifty paces short of them, and a moment 
later, the " barrage " sprinted off ahead one or two score 
yards, halted, and fell to banging and battering tins and 
drum and waving flags, while the kilts solemnly moved on 
after them, to halt again at their measured distance until the 
next ' lift " of the " barrage." It looked sheer chijd's play, 
a silly elaborate game ; and yet there was no sign of laughter 
or play about the men taking part in it — except on the part of 
Rally Travers. 
Ratty was openly scornful. " Ready there," said a 
sergeant rising and pocketing the notebook he had been 
studying. " We've only five minutes in this trench. 
And remember yoii move half right when you leave here, 
an' the next line o' flags is the sunk road wi' six machine-gun 
emplacements along the edge." 
Ratty chuckled sardonically. " I 'ope that in the real 
thing them machine-guns won't 'ave nothing to say to us 
inovin' half-right across their front," he said. 
" They've been straffed out wi' the guns," said Johnny 
simply, " an' the Jocks 'as mopped up any that's left. \Vc 
was told that yesterdsv^ '■' 
" I daresay," retorted Ratty. " An' I hopes the Huns 
'ave been careful instructed in the same. It 'ud be a pity 
if tluy went an' did anything to spoil all the plans. But 
thev wouldn't do that. Oh, no, of course, not." 
He iiad a good deal more to say in the same strain — with 
especially biting criticism on the " artillery barrage " and 
the red-faced big drummer who played lead in it-nluring 
the rest of the practice and at the end of it when they lay in 
their " final objective " and rested, smoking and cooling off 
with the top buttons of tunics imdone, while the officers 
gathered roimd tlie, CO. and listened to criticism and made 
notes in their booTs. 
" I'll admit," he said, " they might plan out the trenches 
l»?re the sam*; as the one's we're to attack from. It's this rot 
o' fayin' out the Fritz trenches gets me. An' this attack - 
it's' about as like a real attack as mv gasper's like a machine- 
gun. Huh ! Wi' one bloke clockin' you on a stop-watch, 
an' another countin' the paces between the trenches — Boche 
trenches a mile behind their front line mind you — an' another 
whackin' a big drum like a kid in a nursery. An' all this 
' Go steady here, this is a sharp rise,' or ' hurry this bit 'cos 
most likely it'll be open to enfiladin' machine-gun fire,' or 
' this here's the sunk road wi' six machine-gun emplace- 
ments — huh! Plunky rot, I calls it." 
The others heard him in silence or with mild chaffing 
replies. Ratty was new to this planned-attack game, of 
course, but since he had been out and taken his whack of the 
early days he was entitled to a certain amount of excusing. 
Johnny summed it up for them. " We've moved a bit 
since the Noove Chapelle days, you know," he said. " You 
didn't have no little lot like this then, did you ? " jerking 
his head at the bristling line of their machine-guns. " An' 
you didn't have creepin' barrages, an' more shells than you 
could fire, eh ? Used to lose Seventy an' eighty per cent, o' 
the battalion's strength goin' over the bags them da\'s, didn't 
you ? Well, we've changed that a bit, thank Gawd. You'll 
see the differ presently." 
Later on Ratty had to admit a considerable " differ " and 
a great improvement on old ways. He and his company 
moved up towards the front leisurely and certainly, without 
haste and without confusion, having the orders detailed 
overnight for the next day's march, finding meals cooked 
and served regularly, travelling by roads obviously known 
and " detailed " for them, coming at night to camp or billet 
places left vacant for them immediately before, finding every- 
thing planned and prepared, foreseen and provided for. But, 
although he admitted all this, he stuck to his belief that 
beyond the front line this carefully planned moving must 
cease abruptly. " It'll be the same plunky old scramble 
an' scrap I'll bet," he said. We'll see then if all the Fritz 
trenches is just where we've fixed 'em. an' if we runs to a 
regular time-table and follows the laid-down route an' first- 
tum-to-the-right-an'-mind-the-step-performance vfSve been 
practisin." 
But it was as they approached the fighting zone and finally 
when they found themselves installed in a support trench 
on the morning of the Push that Ratty came to understand 
the full difference between old battles and this new style. 
For'days on end he heard such gun-fire as he had never 
dreamed 61, heard it continue without ceasing or slackening 
day and night. By day he saw the distant German ground 
veiled in a drifting fog-bank of smoke, saw it by night starred 
with winking and splashing gusts of flame from our high- 
explosives. He walked or lay on a ground that quivered 
and trembled under the unceasing shock 6f our guns' dis- 
charges, and covered his eyes at night to shut out the flashing 
lights that pulsed and throbbed constantly across the sky. 
The last march up that had brought them into the trenches 
had passed through guns and guns and yet again guns, first 
the huge monsters lurking hidden well back and only a little 
in advance of the great piles of shells and long roofed sidings 
crammed with more shells ; then further on past other monsters 
only less in comparison with those they had seen before, on 
agaiin past whole batteries of 6o-pounders and six-incli tucked 
away in corners of woods or amongst broken houses, and 
finally up through the field gun;^ packed close in every corner 
that would more or less hide a battery, or brazenly lined up in 
the open. They tramped down the long street of a ruined 
village — a street that' was no more than a cleared strip of 
cobble-stones bordered down its length on both sides by the 
piled or scattered heaps of rubble and brick that had once 
been rows of houses — with a mad chorus of guns roarin,i< and 
cracking and banging in numberless scores about them, 
passed over the open behind the trenches to find more guns 
ranged battery after battery, and all with sheeting walls of 
flame jumping and flashing along their fronts. They found 
and settled into their trench with this unbroken roar of fire 
bellowing in their ears, a roar so loud and long that it seemed 
impossible to increase it. But when their watches told 
them it was an hour to the moment they had been warned 
was the " zero hour," tht fixed moment of the attack, the 
sound of the gun-lire swelled suddenly and rose to a pitch of 
fury that eclipsed all that had gone before. The men crouched 
in their trench listening in awed silence, and as the zero 
hour apjiroached Ratty clainbered and stood where he could 
look over the edge towards the German lines. A sergeant 
shouted at him angrily to get down, and hadn't he heard the 
order to keep imdcr cover. Ratty dropped back beside the 
others. " Lumme," he said disgustedly, " I dunno wot this 
hloomin" war's comin' to. Orders, orders, orders ! Yon 
