The Last Full Measure (30 page)

The soldiers’ almost jocular familiarity served to disarm, in the only way they could, weapons of such terrifying destruction. And so the soldiers gave the different shells nicknames: “A Lazy
Eliza was a long-range shell, probably destined for a distant battery, that rustled harmlessly overhead. But Pissing Jenny and Whistling Percy were shells from German 9-inch naval guns, and the Wipers Express was a heavy gun notably used at the second battle of Ypres. A whiz-bang or a pip-squeak was the shell from a German 77-mm field gun, often fired at such close range that the whistle of the shell’s arrival almost coincided with the sound of its explosion.… A Coal Box or a Jack Johnson was a heavy shell which burst with a cloud of black smoke.”
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There was a careful appreciation of the gradations of lethality: “Of a single whiz-bang they would take no notice, but a dozen at the same time could be frightening. Whiz-bangs were the smallest German shells.… Next in size were the four-twos. They were more disagreeable, but unless one burst within twenty or thirty yards it was unlikely to hurt you, and a good shelter was proof even against a direct hit by a four-two. But only the strongest kept out a five-nine falling even a hundred yards away … there were bigger ones, eight-inch and eleven-inch. These were terrifying.”
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Technological development in the latter part of the nineteenth century made artillery massively more lethal than earlier guns. From the 1880s the development of advanced explosives such as melenite and lyddite took artillery into another realm, in terms of both range and explosive impact. In the American Civil War, 2,000 yards was about maximum range for most guns, and a very few breech-loading cannon could reach 4,000 yards.
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In World War I the workhorse British 18-pounder could throw an 18-pound shell 7,000 yards—4 miles—while its German equivalent, the 77-millimeter, could send its 15-pound shell up to 11,700 yards (6.6 miles).
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The largest guns, such as the French 520-millimeter (20.8-inch) Schneider howitzer, were capable of hurling massive shells vast distances. The Schneider fired a 3,130-pound projectile 11 miles; the American and British 14-inch cannon could send shells weighing 1,400–1,560 pounds
between 20 and 30 miles, while the famous German “Paris” gun sent its 264-pound shell about 80 miles, the longest range of the war, and in such a high trajectory that the unfortunate citizens of the City of Light thought they were being bombed by unseen zeppelins.
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Other improvements increased artillery lethality. Hydraulic recoil systems made for faster gun laying after each round and speeded up the rate of fire in the hands of an experiencd crew (the famous French 75 could get off twenty-five to thirty rounds a minute).
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Increasingly sophisticated target location through map reference, aerial photography, and sound ranging with the Tucker microphone, which could pinpoint enemy batteries by listening to the frequencies of incoming shells, made it possible for gunners to locate targets that were far out of sight with much more accuracy. Percussion fuses such as the British 106 and its German equivalent ensured that high-explosive shells detonated immediately on impact to send devastating shock waves horizontally rather than, as before, vertically and less harmfully, when shells often buried themselves in the ground before exploding.

Added to these innovations was the breathtaking amount of ordnance expended. Prior to the Allied attack at Messines (May 26–June 6, 1917), for example, the British fired more than 3.5
million
shells,
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and to “read the detailed barrage arrangements at Arras, Messines and Third Ypres (Passchendaele) is to stand in awe and trembling before the sheer scale and power of the aggression.”
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The Germans estimated that in the first year of the war the ratio of casualties caused by artillery compared with infantry was two to one in artillery’s favor, but by the last year of the war that ratio had increased to 14 to 1.
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Artillery may have been the single-largest killer in the war, but as in earlier and later wars, the amount of ammunition needed to kill a single enemy was startlingly high. Captain J. C. Dunn remarked on November 17, 1915 (admittedly before many of the
innovations noted earlier came into effect): “An immense amount of metal can, in fact, be flung about trenches without doing much harm. In the front of a lively sector our casualties … have been 1 killed by rifle-bullet and 2 wounded by shell-splinters.”
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Estimates vary from thirty to fourteen hundred shells
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(an astonishing profligacy exceeded only in the Vietnam War) for one kill, mainly because so much ordnance was used for other purposes, like cutting or, more often than not, failing to cut barbed-wire defenses.
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Such statistics, to the dispassionate observer, may seem rather comforting, but to those at the sharp end they had the same actuarial reassurance as Russian roulette. To endure a heavy bombardment was to live in a cacophonous, stinking, screaming madness punctuated by arbitrary obliteration. It was an experience unlike anything in combat before this war. For some, death would have been a blessed relief: “There were times,” Corporal Clifford Lane remembered, “after being shelled for hours on end during the latter part of the Somme battle, that all I wanted was to be blown to bits.”
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To be in this maelstrom was to be suffocated in a violence so profound that time itself was transformed: “Suddenly in front of us and along the whole breadth of the hill, dark flames burst out,” remembers Henri Barbusse, “striking the air with appalling explosions. Across the line, from left to right, timed shells fall from the sky and explosives rise from the earth. They form a terrifying curtain that separates us from the world, separates us from the past and the future.”
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British gunner P. J. Cambell described being caught in a heavy bombardment:

A twenty-year-old junior corporal of the German Ninety-Ninth Reserve Infantry Regiment suffered through the British barrage near Thiepval during the softening-up prior to the battle of the Somme in 1916: “One’s head is like a madman’s. The tongue sticks to the mouth in terror. Continual bombardment and nothing to eat or drink and little sleep for five days and nights. How much longer can this go on?” For him it ended the next day, when he was killed.
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High explosives killed and wounded with terrible violence, but a violence not always manifested by a destroyed body. Captain Dunn records that his battalion was “lightly shelled” at Polygon Wood but “one 4.2 that burst among 3 men sitting in a shell-hole killed them with no more visible mark than some singeing of their clothing.”
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Blast waves had destroyed their vital organs while leaving their outer bodies unnervingly intact. Ernst Jünger described the remarkable effect of a big shell that exploded in the middle of his men: “My one, feeble, consolation was that it might have been even worse. Fusilier Rust, for instance, was standing so close to the bomb blast that the straps on his munitions box caught fire. NCO Pregau, who, admittedly, went on to lose his life the next day, was not even scratched as he stood between two comrades who were torn to ribbons.”
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But this was freakishly unusual. More often than not, high
explosive ripped men apart. Henri Barbusse re-creates the debate between two French soldiers about whether gas or high explosive was more or less disgusting:

Their argument is at the core of combat experience in the First World War. The ways in which men were killed all too often robbed them of even a vestige of heroic dignity. They were destroyed within the colorless, featureless anonymity of great numbers, and by weapons of such range and power that they could not so much be engaged on any individual level. Their deaths were due not so much to human acts but to mechanized processes. A reflection of this atomization was the great dread soldiers had not so much about being killed but about being blown to bits. A medical officer in the Royal Fusiliers, Charles Wilson (later to become Lord Moran, Winston Churchill’s private physician), observed:

Those killed by high explosive could be transmogrified into something bizarrely awesome, even gruesomely aesthetic. Captain Dunn saw the effect of a shell burst: “On the way, two men suddenly rose into the air vertically, 15 feet perhaps, amid a spout of soil.… They rose and fell with the easy, graceful poise of acrobats. A rifle, revolving slowly, rose high above them before, still revolving, it fell. The sight recalled, even in these surroundings, a memory of boyhood: a turn that thrilled me in a travelling circus at St. Andrews.”
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And Henri Barbusse describes a comrade hit by high explosive: “I saw his body rising, upright, black, his two arms fully outstretched and a flame in place of his head!”
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Shells turned the places of protection—trenches and dugouts—into graves, killing and burying the victim in one instant and convenient act: “Men just disappeared and no one saw them go. A weary Tommy would scratch a hole in the side of the trench’s bottom to get out of the way of trampling feet. A minnie would explode, and the earth above him would quietly subside on him. Even if the exact spot was known, what was the good of digging him out? In one stroke he was dead and buried.”
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It was not always as gentle: “He got it the next morning … in the dugout that was caved in by a shell. He was lying down and
his chest was crushed. Did they tell you about Franco, who was next to Mondain? The roof falling in broke his spine. He talked after they dug him out and sat him down on the ground. He put his head on one side and said: ‘I’m dying.’ Then he died. Vigile was with them, too. His body was untouched, but his head was completely flattened, like a pancake, and huge, as wide as this. Seeing him lying on the ground, black and changed in shape, you could have taken him for his shadow.”
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Shrapnel shells (“woolly bears”) exploded above the troops (20 feet was optimum) and pelted them with balls (about 270 per shell) and pieces of shell casing: “A young gunner Subaltern was on his way up to observe a machine-gun position. Just as he got outside my door a shrapnell [
sic
] shell burst full in front of him. The poor fellow was brought in to me absolutely riddled. He lay in my arms until he died, shrieking in his agony and said he hoped I would excuse him for making such a noise as he really could not help it. Pitiful as nothing could be done for him except an injection of morphia.”
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