appear as a half-holiday of sport. It seemed to me that this was in
keeping with their training; the fashionable attitude of the British
soldier toward a horrible business. If this helps him to endure what
these men had endured without flinching, with comrades being blown to
bits around them by shell-bursts, why, then, it is the attitude best
suited to develop the fighting quality of the British. They had it from
their officers who, in turn, perhaps, had it in part from such British
regulars as the brigadier, though mostly I think that it was inborn
racial phlegm.
I met the five officers who were the survivors of the twenty in one
battalion, the five who had "carried through." One was a barrister,
another just out of Oxford, a third, as I remember, a real estate broker
in a small town. They told their stories without a gesture, quite as if
they were giving an account of a game of golf. It might have seemed
callous, but you knew better.
You knew when they said that it was "a bit stiff," or "a bit thick," or
"it looked as if they had us," what inexpressible emotion lay behind the
accepted army phrases. The truth was they would not permit themselves to
think of the void in their lines made by the death of their comrades.
They had drawn the curtain on all incidents which had not the appeal of
action and finality as a part of the business of "going through." One
officer with a twitch of the lips remarked almost casually that new
officers and drafts were arriving and that it would seem strange to see
so many new faces in the mess.
Those of their old comrades who were not dead were already in hospital
in England. When an officer who had been absent joined the group he
brought the news that one of their number who had been badly hit would
live. The others' quiet ejaculation of "Good!" had a thrill back of it
which communicated its joy to me. Eight of the wounded had not been
seriously hit, which meant that these would return and that, after all,
only four were dead. This was the first intimate indication I had of how
the offensive exposing the whole bodies of men in a charge against the
low-velocity shrapnel bullets and high-velocity bullets from rifles and
machine guns must result in the old ratio of only one mortal wound for
every five men hit.
There was consolation in that fact. It was another advantage of the war
of movement as compared with the war of shambles in trenches. And none,
from the general down to the privates, had really any idea of how
glorious a part they had played. They had merely "done their bit" and
taken what came their way--and they had "gone through."
XII
THE STORMING OF CONTALMAISON
The mighty animal of war makes ready for another effort--New charts
at headquarters--The battle of the Somme the battle of woods and
villages--A terrible school of war in session--Mametz--A wood not
"thinned"--The Quadrangle--Marooned Scots--"Softening" a
village--Light German cigars--Going after Contalmaison--Aeroplanes in
the blue sky--Midsummer fruitfulness and war's destruction--Making
chaos of a village--Attack under cover of a wall of smoke--A
melodrama under the passing shells.
If the British and the French could have gone on day after day as they
had on July 1st they would have put the Germans out of France and
Belgium by autumn. Arrival at the banks of the Rhine and even the taking
of Essen would have been only a matter of calculation by a schedule of
time and distance. After the shock of the first great drive in which the
mighty animal of war lunged forward, it had to stretch out its steel
claws to gain further foothold and draw its bulky body into position for
another huge effort. Wherever the claws moved there were Germans, who
were too wise soldiers to fall back supinely on new lines of
fortifications and await the next general attack. They would parry every
attempt at footholds of approach for launching it; pound the claws as
if they were the hands of an invader grasping at a window ledge.
At headquarters there was a new chart with different colored patches
numbered by the days of the month beginning July 1st, each patch
indicating the ground that had been won on that day. Compare their order
with a relief map and in one-two-three fashion you were able to grasp
the natural tactical sequence; how one position was taken in order to
command another. Sometimes, though, they represented the lines of least
resistance. Often the real generals were the battalions on the battle
front who found the weak points and asked permission to press on. The
principle was the same as water finding its level as it spreads from a
reservoir.
I have often thought that a better name for the battle of the Somme
would be the battle of woods and villages. Their importance never really
dawned on the observer until after July 1st. Or, it might be called the
battle of the spade. Give a man an hour with a spade in that chalky
subsoil and a few sandbags and he will make a fortress for himself which
only a direct hit by a shell can destroy. He ducks under the sweep of
bullets when he is not firing and with his steel helmet is fairly safe
from shrapnel while he waits in his lair until the other fellow comes.
Thus the German depended on the machine gun and the rifle to stop any
charge which was not supported by artillery fire sufficient to crush in
the trenches and silence his armament. When it was, he had his own
artillery to turn a curtain of fire onto the charge in progress and to
hammer the enemy if he got possession. This was obviously the right
system--in theory. But the theory did not always work out, as we shall
see. Its development through the four months that I watched the Somme
battle was only less interesting than the development of offensive
tactics by the British and the French. Every day this terrible school of
war was in session, with a British battalion more skilful and cunning
every time that it went into the firing-line.
Rising out of the slopes toward the Ridge in green patches were three
large woods, not to mention small ones, under a canopy of shell-smoke,
Mametz, Bernafay and Trônes, with their orgies of combat hidden under
their screens of foliage. They recall the Wilderness--a Wilderness
lasting for days, with only one feature of the Wilderness lacking which
was a conflagration, but with lachrymatory and gas shells and a few
other features that were lacking in Virginia. In the next war we may
have still more innovations. Ours is the ingenious human race.
It is Mametz with an area of something over two hundred acres that
concerns us now. The Germans thought highly of Mametz. They were
willing to lose thousands of lives in order to keep it in their
possession. For two years it had not been thinned according to French
custom; now shells and bullets were to undertake the task which had been
neglected. So thick was the undergrowth that a man had to squeeze his
way through and an enemy was as well ambushed as a field mouse in high
grass.
The Germans had run barriers of barbed wire through the undergrowth.
They had their artillery registered to fringe the woods with curtains of
fire and machine guns nestling in unseen barricades and trenches.
Through the heart of it they had a light railway for bringing up
supplies. All these details had been arranged in odd hours when they
were not working on the main first- and second-line fortifications during
their twenty months of preparation. I think they must have become weary
at times of so much "choring," judging by a German general's order after
his inspection of the second line, in which he said that the battalions
in occupation were a lazy lot who were a disgrace to the Fatherland.
After the battle began they could add to the defenses improvements
adapted to the needs of the moment. Of course, large numbers of Germans
were killed and wounded by British shell fire in the process of
"thinning" out the woods; but that was to be expected, as the Germans
learned during the battle of the Somme.
How the British ever took Mametz Wood I do not understand; or how they
took Trônes Wood later, for that matter. A visit to the woods only
heightened perplexity. I have seen men walk over broken bottles with
bare feet, swallow swords and eat fire and knew that there was some
trick about it, as there was about the taking of Mametz.
The German had not enough barbed wire to go all the way around the
woods, or, at least, British artillery would not let him string any more
and he thought that the British would attack where they ought to
according to rule; that is, by the south. Instead, they went in by the
west, where the machine guns were not waiting and the heavy guns were
not registered, as I understand it. A piece of strategy of that kind
might have won a decisive battle in an old-time war, but I confess that
it did not occur to me to ask who planned it when I heard the story.
Strategists became so common on the Somme that everybody took them as
much for granted as that every battalion had a commander.
Mametz was not taken with the first attack. The British were in the
woods once and had to come out; but they had learned that before they
could get a proper _point d'appui_ they must methodically "clean up" a
small grove, a neighboring cemetery, an intricate maze of trenches
called the Quadrangle, and a few other outlying obstacles. In the first
rush a lot of Tyneside Scots were marooned from joining in the retreat.
They fortified themselves in German dugouts and waited in siege, these
dour men of the North. When the British returned eighty of the Scots
were still full of fight if short of food and "verra well" otherwise,
thank you. At times they had been under blasts of shells from both
sides, and again they had been in an oasis of peace, with neither
British nor German gunners certain whether they would kill friend or
foe.
Going in from the west while the Germans had their curtains of fire
registered elsewhere, the British grubbed their way in one charge
through most of Mametz and when night fell in the midst of the
undergrowth, with a Briton not knowing whether it was Briton or German
lying on the other side of a tree-trunk, they had the satisfaction of
possessing four big guns which the Germans had been unable to withdraw,
and had ascertained also that the Germans had a strong position
protected by barbed wire at the northern end of the woods.
"This will require a little thinking," as one English officer said, "but
of course we shall take it."
The purchase on Mametz and the occupation of Bailiff's Wood, the
Quadrangle, La Boisselle and Ovillers-la-Boisselle brought the circle
of advancing British nearer to Contalmaison, which sat up on the hills
in a sea of chalk seams. Contalmaison was being gradually "softened" by
the artillery. The chateau was not yet all down, but after each bite by
a big shell less of the white walls was visible when the clouds of smoke
from the explosion lifted. Bit by bit the guns would get the chateau,
just as bit by bit a stonemason chips a block down to the proper
dimensions to fit it into place in a foundation.
A visit to La Boisselle on the way to Contalmaison justified the
expectation as to what was in store for Contalmaison. I saw the
blackened and shell-whittled trunks of two trees standing in La
Boisselle. Once with many others they had given shade in the gardens of
houses; but there were no traces of houses now except as they were mixed
with the earth. The village had been hammered into dust. Yet some
dugouts still survived. Keeping at it, the British working around these
had eventually forced the surrender of the garrison, who could not raise
their heads to fire without being met by a bullet or a bomb-burst from
the watchful besiegers.
"Slow work, but they had to come out," was the graphic phrase of one of
the captors, "and they looked fed up, too. They had even run out of
cigars"--which settled it.
Oh, those light German cigars! Sometimes I believe that they were the
real mainstay of the German organization. Cigars gone, spirit gone! I
have seen an utterly weary German prisoner as he delivered his papers to
his captor bring out his last cigar and thrust it into his mouth to
forestall its being taken as tribute, with his captor saying with
characteristic British cheerfulness, "Keep it, Bochy! It smells too much
like a disinfectant for me, but let's have your steel helmet"--the
invariable prize demanded by the victor.
The British had already been in Contalmaison, but did not stay. "Too
many German machine guns and too much artillery fire and not enough
men," to put it with colloquial army brevity. It often happened that a
village was entered and parts of it held during a day, then evacuated at
night, leaving the British guns full play for the final "softening."
These initial efforts had the result of reconnaissances in force. They
permitted a thorough look around the enemy's machine gun positions so as
to know how to avoid their fire and "do them in," revealed the cover
that would be available for the next advance, and brought invaluable
information to the gunners for the accurate distribution of their fire.
Always some points important for future operations were held.
"We are going after Contalmaison this afternoon," said a staff officer
at headquarters, "and if you hurry you may see it."
As a result, I witnessed the most brilliant scene of battle of any on
the Somme, unless it was the taking of Combles. There was bright
sunshine, with the air luminously clear and no heat waves. From my
vantage point I could see clear to the neighborhood of Péronne. The
French also were attacking; the drumhead fire of their _soixante-quinze_
made a continuous roll, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke hung in a long,
gossamery cloud fringing the horizon and the canopy of the green ridges.
Every aeroplane of the Allies seemed to be aloft, each one distinct
against the blue with shimmering wings and the soft, burnished aureole
of the propellers. They were flying at all heights. Some seemed almost
motionless two or three miles above the earth, while others shot up from
their aerodromes.
Planes circling, planes climbing, planes slipping down aerial toboggan
slides with propellers still, planes going as straight as crows toward
the German line to be lost to sight in space while others developed out
of space as swift messengers bound for home with news of observations,
planes touring a sector of the front, swooping low over a corps
headquarters to drop a message and returning to their duty; planes of
all types, from the monsters with vast stretch of wing and crews of
three or more men, stately as swans, to those gulls, the saucy little
Nieuports, shooting up and down and turning with incredible swiftness,
their tails in the air; planes and planes in a fantastic aerial minuet,
flitting around the great sausage balloons stationary in the still air.
With ripening grain and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the
background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of
vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of
shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle
and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting
alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the
black bursts of the German high explosives hammering Mametz Wood, as if
in revenge for its loss, seemed uglier and more murderous than usual;
the light smoke of shrapnel had a softer, more lingering quality;
soldiers were visible distinctly at a great distance in their comings
and goings; the water carts carrying water up to the first line were a
kind of pilgrim circuit riders of that thirsty world of deadly strife; a
file of infantry winding up the slope at regular intervals were
silhouettes as like as beads on a string. The whole suggested a hill of
ants which had turned their habits of industry against an invader of
their homes in the earth, and the columns of motor trucks and caissons
ever flowing from all directions were as a tide, which halted at the
foot of the slope and then flowed back.
There were shell-bursts wherever you looked, with your attention drawn
to Contalmaison as it would be to a gathering crowd in the thick of city
traffic. All the steel throats in clumps of woods, under cover of road
embankments, in gullies and on the reverse side of slopes, were
speaking. The guns were giving to Contalmaison all they had to give and
the remaining walls of the chateau disappeared in a fog like a fishing
smack off the Grand Banks. Super-refined, man-directed hell was making
sportive chaos in the village which it hid with its steaming breath cut
by columns of black smoke from the H.E.'s and crowned with flashes of
shrapnel; and under the sun's rays the gases from the powder made
prismatic splendor in flurries and billows shot with the tints of the
rainbow.
Submerging a simple farming hamlet in this kind of a tempest was only
part of the plan of the gunners, who cut a pattern of fire elsewhere in
keeping with the patterns of the German trenches, placing a curtain of
fire behind the town and another on the edge, and at other points not a
curtain but steady hose-streams of fire. Answering German shells
revealed which of the chalky scars on the slope was the British
first-line trench, and from this, as steam from a locomotive runs in a
flying plume along the crest of a railway cutting, rose a billowing wall
of smoke which was harmless, not even asphyxiating, its only purpose
being to screen the infantry attack, with a gentle breeze sweeping it on
into the mantle over Contalmaison as the wind carries the smoke of a
prairie fire. Lookout Mountain was known as the battle in the clouds,
where generals could not see what their troops were doing. Now all
battles are in a cloud.
From the first-line British trench the first wave of the British attack
moved under cover of the smoke-screen and directly you saw that the
shells had ceased to fall in Contalmaison. Its smoke mantle slowly
lifting revealed fragmentary walls of that sturdy, defiant chateau still
standing. Another wave of British infantry was on its way. Four waves in
all were to go in, each succeeding one with its set part in supporting
the one in front and in mastering the dugouts and machine gun positions
that might have survived.
With no shells falling in Contalmaison, the bomb and the bayonet had the
stage to themselves, a stage more or less hemmed in by explosions and
with a sweep of projectiles from both sides passing over the heads of
the cast in a melodrama which had "blessed little comedy relief," as one
soldier put it. The Germans were already shelling the former British
first line and their supports, while the British maintained a curtain of
fire on the far side of the village to protect their infantry as it
worked its way through the débris, and any fire which they had to spare
after lifting it from Contalmaison they were distributing on different
strong points, not in curtains but in a repetition of punches. It was
the best artillery work that I had seen and its purpose seemed that of a
man with a stick knocking in any head that appeared from any hole.
Act III. now. The British curtain of fire was lifted from the far edge
of the village, which meant that the infantry according to schedule
should be in possession of all of the village. But they might not stay.
They might be forced out soon after they sent up their signals. When the
Germans turned on a curtain of fire succeeding the British fire this was
further evidence of British success sufficient to convince any skeptic.
The British curtain was placed beyond it to hold off any counter-attack
and prevent sniping till the new occupants of the premises had "dug
themselves in."
The Germans had not forgotten that it was their turn now to hammer
Contalmaison, through which they thought that British reserves and fresh
supplies of bombs must come; and I saw one of the first "krumps" of this
concentration take another bite out of the walls of the chateau.
By watching the switching of the curtains of fire I had learned that
this time Contalmaison was definitely held; and though they say that I
don't know anything about news, I beat the _communiqué_ on the fact as
the result of my observation, which ought at least to classify me as a
"cub" reporter.
XIII
A GREAT NIGHT ATTACK
Following hard blows with blows--Trônes Woods--Attack and
counter-attack--A heavy price to pay--"The spirit that quickeneth"
knew no faltering--Second-line German fortifications--A daringly
planned attack--"Up and at them!"--An attack not according to the
scientific factory system--The splendid and terrible hazard--Gun
flashes in the dark numerous as fireflies--Majestic, diabolical,
beautiful--A planet bombarding with aerolites--Signal flares in the
distance--How far had the British gone?--Sunrise on the attack--Good
news that day.
Of all the wonderful nights at the front that of July 13th-14th was
distinctive for its incomparable suspense. A great experiment was to be
tried; at least, so it seemed to the observer, though the staff did not
take that attitude. It never does once it has decided upon any daring
enterprise. When you send fifty thousand men into a charge that may fail
with a loss of half of their number or may brilliantly succeed with a
loss of only five per cent., none from the corps commanders and division
commanders, who await results after the plans are made, down to the
privates must have any thought except that the plan is right and that it
will go through.
There is no older military maxim than to follow up any hard blow with
other blows, in order that the enemy may have no time to recuperate;
but in moving against a frontal line under modern conditions the
congestion of transport and ammunition which must wait on new roads and
the filling in of captured trenches makes a difficult problem in
organization. Never had there been and never were there necessary such
numbers of men and such quantities of material as on the Somme front.
The twelve days succeeding July 1st had seen the taking of minor
position after position by local concentrations of troops and artillery
fire, while the army as a whole had been preparing for another big
attack at the propitious moment when these preliminary gains should
justify it.
Half a tactical eye could see that the woods of Mametz, Bernafay and
Trônes must be held in order to allow of elbow room for a mass movement
over a broad front. The German realized this and after he had lost
Mametz and Bernafay he held all the more desperately to Trônes, which,
for the time being, was the superlative horror in woods fighting, though
we were yet to know that it could be surpassed by Delville and High
Woods.
In Trônes the Germans met attack with counter-attack again and again.
The British got through to the east side of the woods, and in reply the
Germans sent in a wave forcing the British back to the west, but no
farther. Then the British, reinforced again, reached the east side.
Showers of leaves and splinters descended from shell-bursts and machine
guns were always rattling. The artillery of both sides hammered the
approaches of the woods to prevent reinforcements from coming up.
In the cellars of Guillemont village beyond Trônes the Germans had
refuges for concentrating their reserves to feed in more troops, whose
orders, as all the prisoners taken said, were to hold to the last man.
Trônes Wood was never to be yielded to the British. Its importance was
too vital. Grim national and racial pride and battalion pride and
soldierly pride grappled in unyielding effort and enmity. The middle of
the woods became a neutral ground where the wounded of the different
sallies lay groaning from pain and thirst. Small groups of British had
dug themselves in among the Germans and, waterless, foodless, held out,
conserving their ammunition or, when it was gone, waiting for the last
effort with the bayonet.
For several days the spare British artillery had been cutting the barbed
wire of the second line and smashing in the trenches; and the big guns
which had been advanced since July 1st were sending their shells far
beyond the Ridge into villages and crossroads and other vital points, in
order to interfere with German communications.