delimiting the boundaries of a narrow sector. He had nothing to do with
what lay to the right and left--other sectors, other men's business--of
the area inclosed in the clear, heavy lines crosswise of British and
German trenches--a slice out of the front, as it were. Speaking over the
telephone to the blind guns, he was interested only in the control of
gunfire in this sector. The charge to him was lines on the map parallel
with the trenches which would be at given points at given moments--lines
which he must support when their soldier counterparts were invisible
through the shell-smoke in the nice calculation of time and range which
should put the shells into the enemy and never into the charging man.
To infantry commanders with similar maps those lines were breathing
human lines of men whom they had trained, and the gunfire a kind of
spray which the gunners were to adjust for the protection of the
battalions when they should cross that dead space. Once the British were
in the German front trenches, details which had been told off for the
purpose were to take possession of the dugouts and "breach" them of
prisoners and disarm all other Germans, lest they fire into the backs of
those who carried the charge farther on to the final stage of the
objective. What awaited them they would know only when they climbed over
the parapet and became silhouettes of vulnerable flesh in the open. Yes,
one had the system in the large and the small, by the army, the corps,
the division, the brigade, the battalion, and the man, the individual
infantryman who was to suffer that hazard of marching in the open toward
the trenches which not guns, or motor trucks, or trench-mortar shells
could take, but only he could take and hold.
The advantage of watching the attack from this O.P. in comparison with
that of other points was mooted; for the spectator had to choose his
seat for the panorama. This time we sought a place where we hoped to
see something of the battle as a whole.
"_C'est arrivé!_" said the old porter to me at the door when I left the
hotel before dawn. The great day had arrived!
Amiens was in darkness, with the lightnings of the guns which had never
ceased their labors through the night flashing in the heavens their
magnetic summons to battle. When a dip into a valley shut out their roar
a divine hush lay over the world. On either side of the main road was
the peace of the hour before the dawn which would send the peasants from
their beds to the fields. There were no lights yet in the villages. It
had not occurred to the inhabitants to try to see the battle. They knew
that they would be in the way; sentries or gunners would halt them.
The traffic was light and all vehicles, except a flying staff officer's
car, were going their methodical way. Vaguely, as an aviation station
was passed, planes were visible being pushed out of their sheds; the hum
of propellers being tried out was faintly heard. The birds of battle
were testing their wings before flight and every one out of the hundreds
which would take part that day had his task set, no less than had a
corps, a regiment of artillery, or the bombers in a charge.
"This is the place," was the word to the chauffeur as we swept up a
grade in the misty darkness.
Stretched from trunk to trunk of the trees beside the road were canvas
screens to hide the transport from enemy observation. Passing between
them had the effect of going through the curtains into a parterre box.
Light was just breaking and we were in a field of young beets on the
crest of a rise, with no higher ground beyond us all the way to
Thiepval, which was in the day's objective, and to Pozières, which was
beyond it. Ordinarily, on a clear day we should have had from here a
view over five or six miles of front and through our glasses the action
should have been visible in detail.
This morning the sun was not showing his head and the early mist lay
opaque over all the positions, holding in place the mighty volume of
smoke from bursting shells. As it was not seven o'clock the sun might
yet realize its duty in July and dissipate this shroud, which was so
thick that it partially obscured the flashes of the guns and the
shell-bursts.
Seven-ten came and seven-twenty and still no more light. It was too late
now to seek another hill and, if we had sought one, we should have had
no better view. At least, we were seeing as much as the Commander of the
Fourth Army in his dugout near by. The artillery fire increased. Every
gun was now firing, all stretching their powers to the maximum. The
mist and smoke over the positions seemed to tremble with the blasts.
Near-by shells, especially German, broke brilliantly against a
background so thick that it swallowed up the flashes of more distant
shells in its garishly illumined density. Thousands of officers were
studying their wrist watches for the tick of "zero" as the minute-hands
moved on with merciless fatalism; and hundreds of thousands of men who
had come into position overnight were in line in the trenches looking to
their officers for the word.
Our little group in the beet field was restless and silent; or if we
spoke it was not of what was oppressing our minds and stilling our
heartbeats. Our glasses gave no aid; they only made the fog thicker. Had
we been in the first-line British trenches we could hardly have seen the
men who left them through this wall of smoke and mist as they entered
the German first line and the answering German "krumps" would have
driven us to the dugouts and German curtains of fire held us prisoner.
One of us called attention to a lark that had risen and was singing with
all the power in his little throat. Another mentioned a squadron of
aeroplanes against the background of a soft and domeless sky, flying
with the precision of wild geese. We knew that the German guns were
responding now, for the final blasts of British concentration had been
a sufficient signal of attack if some British prisoner taken in a trench
raid had not revealed the hour.
Seven-twenty-five! someone said, but not one of us needed any reminder.
Five minutes more and the great experiment would begin. Had Sir Douglas
Haig made an army equal to the task? What would be the answer to
skeptics who said that the London cockneys and the Manchester factory
hands and all the others without military training could not be made
into a force skilful enough to take those trenches? Was the feat of
conquering those fortifications within the bounds of human courage,
skill and resource?
Not what one saw but what one felt and knew counted. A crowd is
spellbound in watching a steeplejack at work, or an aviator doing a
"loop-the-loop," or an acrobat swinging from one bar to another above
the sawdust ring, or the "leap of death" of the movies; and here we were
in the presence of a multitude who were running a far greater risk in an
untried effort, with their inspiration not a breathless audience but
duty. For none wanted to die. All were human in this. None had any sense
of the glorious sport of war, only that of grim routine.
Our group was not particularly religious, but I think that we were all
uttering a prayer for England and France. At seven-thirty something
seemed to crack in our brains. There was no visible sign that a wave of
men twenty-five miles long, reaching from Gommecourt to Soyecourt,
wherever the trenches ran across fields, through villages and along
slopes to the banks of the Somme and beyond, had left their parapets. I
knew the men who were going into that charge too well to have any
apprehension that any battalion would falter. The thing was to be done
and they were to do it. Now they were out in No Man's Land; now they
were facing the reception prepared for them. Thousands might already be
down. We could discern that the German guns, long waiting for their
prey, were seeking it in eager ferocity as they laid their curtains of
fire on the appointed places which they had registered. The hell of the
poets and the priests must have some emotion, some temperamental
variation. This was sheer mechanical hell, its pulse that of the dynamo
and the engine.
Seven-forty-five! Helplessly we stared at the blanket. If the charge had
gone home it was already in the German trenches. For all we knew it
might have been repulsed and its remnants be struggling back through the
curtains of artillery fire and the sweep of machine gun fire. As the sun
came out without clearing away the mist and shell-smoke over the field
we had glimpses of some reserves who had looked like a yellow patch
behind a hill deploying to go forward, suggestive of yellow-backed
beetles who were the organized servitors of a higher mind on some other
planet.
This was all we saw; and to make more of it would not be fair to other
occasions when views of attacks were more intimate. Yet I would not
change the impression now. It has its place in the spectator's history
of the battle.
VI
FIRST RESULTS OF THE SOMME
At the little schoolhouse--Twenty miles of German fortifications
taken--Doubtful situation north of Thiepval--Prisoners and
wounded--Defeat and victory--The topography of Thiepval--Sprays of
bullets and blasts of artillery fire--"The day" of the New Army--The
courage of civilized man--Fighting with a kind of divine
stubbornness--Braver than the "Light Brigade"--Died fighting as final
proof of the New Army's spirit--Crawling back through No Man's
Land--Not beaten but roughly handled.
In the room at the head of the narrow stairs in the schoolhouse of the
quiet headquarters town we should have the answer to the question, Has
the British attack succeeded? which was throbbing in our pulsebeats. By
the same map on the table in the center of the room showing the plan of
attack with its lines indicating the objectives we should learn how many
of them had been gained. The officer who had outlined the plan of battle
with fine candor was equally candid about its results, so far as they
were known. Not only did he avoid mincing words, but he avoided wasting
them.
From Thiepval northward the situation was obscure. The German artillery
response had been heavy and the action almost completely blanketed from
observation. Some detachments must have reached their objective, as
their signals had been seen. From La Boisselle southward the British had
taken every objective. They were in Mametz and Montauban and around
Fricourt. For the French it had been a clean sweep, without a single
repulse. Twenty miles of those formidable German fortifications were in
the possession of the Allies.
On the ledge of the schoolroom window, with the shrill voices of the
children at recess playing in the yard below rising to my ears, I wrote
my dispatch for the press at home, less conscious then than now of the
wonder of the situation. Downstairs the curé of the church next door was
standing on the steps, an expectant look in his eyes. When I told him
the news his smile and the flash of his eye, which lacked the meekness
usually associated with the Church, were good to see.
"And the French?" he asked.
"All of their objectives!"
"Ah!" He drew a deep breath and rubbed his hands together softly. "And
prisoners?"
"A great many."
"Ah! And guns?"
"Yes."
Thus he ran up the scale of happiness. I left him on the steps of the
church with a proud, glad, abstracted look.
Beyond the town peaceful fields stretched away to the battle area, where
figures packed together inside the new prisoners' inclosures made a
green blot. Litters were thick in the streets of the casualty clearing
stations which had been empty yesterday. There were no idle ambulances
now. They had passengers in green as well as in khaki. The first
hospital trains were pulling out from the rail-head across from a
clearing station. Thus promptly, as foreseen, the processes of battle
had worked themselves out.
From "light" cases and from "bad" cases, from officers and men, you had
the account of an individual's supreme experience, infinitesimal
compared to the whole but when taken together making up the whole. The
wounded in the Thiepval-Gommecourt sector spoke of having "crawled" back
across No Man's Land. South of Thiepval they had "walked" back. This,
too, told the story of the difference between repulse and victory.
As the fight went for each man in the fray, so the battle went to his
conception. The spectator going here and there could hear accounts at
one headquarters of battalions that were beyond the first-line trenches
and at another of battalions whose survivors were back in their own
trenches. He could hear one wounded man say: "It was too stiff, sir.
There was no getting through their curtains of fire against their
machine guns, sir;" and another: "We went into their first line without
a break and right on, gathering in Boches on the way."
Victory is sweet. It writes itself. Perhaps because failure is harder to
write, though in this case it is equally glorious, we shall have this
first. To make the picture of that day clearer, imagine a movement of
the whole arm, with the shoulder at Gommecourt and the fist swinging in
at Montauban, crushing its way against those fortifications. It broke
through for a distance of more than from the elbow to the fingers' ends
twenty miles southward from Thiepval--a name to bear in mind. Men
crossing the open under protecting waves of shell fire had proved that
men in dugouts with machine guns were not invincible.
From a certain artillery observation post in a tree you had a good view
of Thiepval, already a blackened spot with the ruins of the chateau
showing white in its midst and pricked by the toothpick-like trunks of
trees denuded of their limbs, which were to become such a familiar sight
on the battlefield. It was uphill all the way to Thiepval for the
British. A river so-called, really a brook, the Ancre, runs at the foot
of the slope and turns eastward beyond Thiepval, where a ridge called
Crucifix Ridge north-east of the village takes its name from a Christ
with outstretched arms visible for many miles around. Then on past the
bend of the Ancre the British and the German positions continued to the
Gommecourt salient.
Along these five miles the odds of terrain were all against the British.
The high ground which they sought to gain was of supreme tactical value.
Nature was an ally of soldierly industry in constructing defenses. The
German staff expected the brunt of the offensive in this sector and
every hour's delay in the attack was invaluable for their final
preparations. Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and Gommecourt would not be
yielded if there were any power of men or material at German command to
keep them. Indeed, the Germans said that Thiepval was impregnable. Their
boast was good on July 1st but not in the end, as we shall see, for,
before the summer was over, Thiepval was to be taken with less loss to
the British than to the defenders.
At Beaumont-Hamel and Thiepval, particularly, and in all villages house
cellars had been enlarged and connected by new galleries, the débris
from the buildings forming a thicker roof against penetration by shells.
Where there had seemed no life in Beaumont-Hamel battalions were snug in
their refuges as the earth around trembled from the explosions. Those
shell-threshed parapets of the first-line German trenches which appeared
to represent complete destruction had not filled in all the doorways of
dugouts which big shells had failed to reach. The cut and twisted
fragments of barbed wire which were the remains of the maze of
entanglements fringing the parapets no longer protected them from a
charge; but the garrisons depended upon another kind of defense which
sent its deadly storms against the advancing infantry.
The British battalions that went over the parapet from Thiepval
northward were of the same mettle as those that took Montauban and
Mametz; their training and preparation the same. Where battalions to the
southward swept forward according to plan and the guns' pioneering was
successful, those on this front in many cases started from trenches
already battered in by German shell fire. A few steps across that dead
space and officers knew that the supporting artillery, working no less
thoroughly in its preliminary bombardment here than elsewhere, had not
the situation in hand.
All the guns which the Germans had brought up during the time that
weather delayed the British attack added their weight to the artillery
concentration. Down the valley of the Ancre at its bend they had more or
less of an enfilade. Machine guns had survived in their positions in the
débris of the trenches or had been mounted overnight and others appeared
from manholes in front of the trenches. Sprays of bullets cut crosswise
of the blasts of the German curtains of artillery fire. How any men
could go the breadth of No Man's Land and survive would have been called
miraculous in other days; in these days we know that it was due to the
law of chance which will wound one man a dozen times and never bark the
skin of another.
Any troops might have been warranted in giving up the task before they
reached the first German trench. Veterans could have retired without
criticism. This is the privilege of tried soldiers who have won
victories and are secured by such an expression as, "If the Old Guard
saw that it could not be done, why, then, it could not." But these were
New Army men in their first offensive. Their victories were yet to be
won. This was "the day."
Each officer and each man had given himself up as a hostage to death for
his cause, his pride of battalion and his manhood when he went over the
parapet. The business of the officers was to lead their men to certain
goals; that of the men was to go with the officers. All very simple
reasoning, this, yet hardly reason: the second nature of training and
spirit. How officers had studied the details of their objectives on the
map in order to recognize them when they were reached! How like drill it
was the way that those human waves moved forward! But they were not
waves for long in some instances, only survivors still advancing as if
they were parts of a wave, unseen by their commanders in the
shell-smoke, buffeted by bursts of high explosives, with every man
simply keeping on toward the goal till he arrived or fell. Foolhardy,
you say. Perhaps. It is an easy word to utter over a map after the
event. You would think of finer words if you had been at the front.
Would England have wanted her New Army to act otherwise?--the first
great army that she had put into the field on trial on the continent of
Europe against an army which had, by virtue of its own experience, the
right to consider the newcomers as amateurs? They became more skilful
later; but in war all skill is based on such courage as these men showed
that day. Those who sit in offices in times of peace and think otherwise
had better be relieved. It is the precept that the German Army itself
taught and practiced at Ypres and Verdun. On July 1st a question was
answered for anyone who had been in the Manchurian war. He learned that
those bred in sight of cathedrals in the civilization of the epic poem
can surpass without any inspiration of oriental fatalism or religious
fanaticism the courage of the land of Shintoism and Bushido.
In most places the charge reached the German trenches. There, frequently
outnumbered by the garrison, the men stabbed and bombed, fought to put
out machine guns that were turned on them and so stay the tide coming
out of the mouths of dugouts--simply fought and kept on fighting with a
kind of divine stubbornness.
Tennyson's "Light Brigade" seems bombast and gallery play after July
1st. In that case some men on horses who had received an order rode out
and rode back, and verse made ever memorable this wild gallop of
exhilaration with horses bearing the men. The battalions of July 1st
went on their own feet driven by their own will toward their goals,
without turning back. Surviving officers with objectives burned in their
brains led the surviving men past the first-line trenches if the
directions required this. "Theirs not to reason why--theirs but to do
and die--cannon to right of them volleyed and thundered,"--old-fashioned,
smoke-powder cannon firing round shot for the Light Brigade; for these
later-day battalions every kind of modern shell and machine guns, showers
of death and sheets of death!
The goal--the goal! Ten men out of a hundred reached it in a few cases
and when they arrived they sent up rocket signals to say that they were
there! there! there! Two or three battalions literally disappeared into
the blue. I thought that the Germans might have taken a considerable
number of prisoners, but not so. Those isolated lots who went on to
their objectives regardless of every other thought died fighting, as
final proof of the New Army's spirit, against the Germans enraged by
their heavy losses from the preliminary British bombardment.
It was where gaps existed and gallantry went blindly forward, unable in
the fog of shell-smoke to see whether the units on the right or the left
were up, that these sacrifices of heroism were made; but where command
was held over the line and the opposition was not of a variable kind
counsel was taken of the impossible and retreat was ordered. That is,
the units turned back toward their own trenches under direction. They
had to pass through the same curtain of shell fire in returning as in
charging, and ahead of them through the blasts they drove their
prisoners.
"Never mind. It's from your own side!" said one Briton to a German who
had been knocked over by a German "krump" when he picked himself up; and
the German answered that this did not make him like it any better.
Scattered with British wounded taking cover in new and old shell-craters
was No Man's Land as the living passed. A Briton and his prisoner would
take cover together. An explosion and the prisoner might be blown to
bits, or if the captor were, another Briton took charge of the prisoner.
Persistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to prisoners who
were trophies out of that inferno, and when a Briton was back in the
first-line trench with his German his delight was greater in delivering
his man alive than in his own safety. Out in No Man's Land the wounded
hugged their shell-craters until the fire slackened or night fell, when
they crawled back.
Where early in the morning it had appeared as if the attack were
succeeding reserve battalions were sent in to the support of those in
front, and as unhesitatingly and steadily as at drill they entered the
blanket of shell-smoke with its vivid flashes and hissing of shrapnel
bullets and shell-fragments. Commanders, I found, stood in awe of the
steadfast courage of their troops. Whether officers or men, those who
came out of hell were still true to their heritage of English phlegm.
Covered with chalk dust from crawling, their bandages blood-soaked,
bespattered with the blood of comrades as they lay on litters or hobbled
down a communication trench, they looked blank when they mentioned the
scenes that they had witnessed; but they gave no impression of despair.
It did not occur to them that they had been beaten; they had been
roughly handled in one round of a many-round fight. Had a German
counter-attack developed they would have settled down, rifle in hand, to
stall through the next round. And that young officer barely twenty,
smiling though weak from loss of blood from two wounds, refusing
assistance as he pulled himself along among the "walking wounded,"
showed a bravery in his stoicism equal to any on the field when he said,
"It did not go well this time," in a way that indicated that, of course,
it would in the end.