July 1st had reverted to something approaching stalemate conditions,
with the usual exchange of artillery fire, and it was along the broader
front where the old German first line had been broken through that the
main concentrations of men and guns were being made in order to continue
the advance for the present through the opening won on July 1st. The
price paid for the taking of the woods and for repeated attacks where
initial attacks had failed might seem to the observer--unless he knew
that the German losses had been equally heavy if not heavier since July
1st--disproportionate not only to the ground gained but also to general
results up to this time which, and this was most important, had
demonstrated, as a promise for the future, that the British New Army
could attack unremittingly and successfully against seasoned German
troops in positions which the Germans had considered impregnable.
"The spirit that quickeneth" knew no faltering. Battle police were
without occupation. There were no stragglers. With methodical,
phlegmatic steadiness the infantry moved up to the firing-line when its
turn came.
The second-line German fortifications, if not as elaborate, were even
better situated than the first; not on the crest of the Ridge, of
course, where they would be easily swept by artillery blasts, but where
the latest experience demonstrated that they could make the most of the
commanding high ground with the least exposure. Looking through my
glasses I could see the portion of the open knoll stretching from
Longueval to High Wood which was to be the object of the most extensive
effort since July 1st.
As yet, except in trench raids over narrow fronts, there had been no
attempt to rush a long line under cover of darkness because of the
difficulty of the different groups keeping touch and identifying their
objectives.
The charge of July 1st had been at seven-thirty in the morning.
Contalmaison had been stormed in the afternoon. Fricourt was taken at
midday. When the bold suggestion was made that over a three-mile front
the infantry should rush the second-line trenches in the darkness,
hoping to take the enemy by surprise, it was as daring a conception
considering the ground and the circumstances as ever came to the mind of
a British commander and might be said to be characteristic of the dash
and so-called "foolhardiness" of the British soldier, accustomed to
"looking smart" and rushing his enemy from colonial experiences. Nelson
had the "spirit that quickeneth" when he turned his blind eye to the
enemy. The French, too, are for the attack. It won Marengo and
Austerlitz. No general ever dared more than Frederick the Great, not
even Cæsar. Thus the great races of history have won military dominion.
"Up and at them!" is still the shibboleth in which the British believe,
no less than our pioneers and Grant and Stonewall Jackson believed in
it, and nothing throughout the Somme battle was so characteristically
British as not only the stubbornness of their defense when small parties
were surrounded, but the way in which they would keep on attacking and
the difficulty which generals had not in encouraging initiative but in
keeping battalions and brigades from putting into practice their
conviction that they could take a position on their own account if they
could have a chance instead of waiting on a systematic advance.
Thus, an attack on that second line on the Ridge after the Germans had
had two weeks of further preparation was an adventure of an order, in
the days of mechanical transport, aeroplanes and indirect artillery fire
when all military science is supposed to be reduced to a factory system,
worthy of the days of the sea-rovers and of Clive, of Washington's
crossing of the Delaware or of the storming of Quebec, when a bold
confidence made gamble for a mighty stake.
So, at least, it seemed to the observer, though, as I said, the staff
insisted that it was a perfectly normal operation. The Japanese had
made many successful night attacks early in the Russo-Japanese war, but
these had been against positions undefended by machine gun fire and
curtains of artillery fire. When the Japanese reached their objective
they were not in danger of being blasted out by high explosives and
incidentally they were not fighting what has been called the most highly
trained army on earth on the most concentrated front that has ever been
known in military history.
But "Up and at them!" Sir Douglas Haig, who had "all his nerve with
him," said to go ahead. At three-thirty a.m., a good hour before dawn,
that wave of men three miles long was to rush into the night toward an
invisible objective, with the darkness so thick that they could hardly
recognize a figure ten yards away. Yet as one English soldier said, "You
could see the German as soon as he saw you and you ought to be able to
throw a bomb as quickly as he and a bayonet would have just as much
penetration at three-thirty in the morning as at midday."
When I saw the battalions who were to take part in the attack marching
up I realized, as they did not, the splendid and terrible hazard of
success or failure, of life or death, which was to be theirs. Along the
new roads they passed and then across the conquered ground, its uneven
slopes made more uneven by continued digging and shell fire, and
disappeared, and Night dropped her curtain on the field with no one
knowing what morning would reveal.
The troops were in position; all was ready; all the lessons learned from
the attack of July 1st were to be applied. At midnight there was no
movement except of artillery caissons; gunners whose pieces two hours
later were to speak with a fury of blasts were sound asleep beside their
ammunition. The absolute order in this amazing network of all kinds of
supplies and transport contributed to the suspense. Night bombardments
we had already seen, and I would not dwell on this except that it had
the same splendor by night that the storming of Contalmaison had by day.
The artillery observer for a fifteen-inch gun was a good-humored host.
He was putting his "bit," as the British say, into Bazentin-le-Petit
village and the only way we knew where Bazentin was in the darkness was
through great flashes of light which announced the bursting of a
fifteen-hundred-pound shell that had gone hurtling through the air with
its hoarse, ponderous scream. All the slope up to the Ridge was merged
in the blanket of night. Out of it came the regular flashes of guns for
a while as the prelude to the unloosing of the tornado before the
attack.
Now that we saw them all firing, for the first time we had some idea of
the number that had been advanced into the conquered territory since
July 1st. The ruins and the sticks of trees of Fricourt and Mametz with
their few remaining walls stood out spectral in the flashes of batteries
that had found nesting places among the débris. The whole slope had
become a volcanic uproar. One might as well have tried to count the
number of fireflies over a swamp as the flashes. The limitation of
reckoning had been reached. Guns ahead of us and around us and behind us
as usual, in a battle of competitive crashes among themselves, and near
by we saw the figures of the gunners outlined in instants of weird
lightning glow, which might include the horses of a caisson in a flicker
of distinct silhouette flashed out of the night and then lost in the
night, with the riders sitting as straight as if at drill. Every voice
had one message, "This for the Ridge!" which was crowned by hell's
tempest of shell-bursts to prepare the way for the rush by the infantry
at "zero."
The thing was majestic, diabolical, beautiful, absurd--anything you
wished to call it. Look away from the near-by guns where the faces of
the gunners were illumined and you could not conceive of the scene as
being of human origin; but mixing awed humility with colossal egoism in
varying compounds of imagination and fact, you might think of your
little group of observers as occupying a point of view in space where
one planet hidden in darkness was throwing aerolites at another hidden
in darkness striking it with mighty explosions, and the crashes and
screams were the sound of the missiles on their unlighted way.
It was still dark when three-thirty came and pyrotechnics were added to
the display, which I could not think of as being in any sense
pyrotechnical, when out of the blanket as signals from the planet's
surface in the direction of some new manoeuver appeared showers of
glowing red sparks, which rose to a height of a hundred feet with a
breadth of thirty or forty feet, it seemed at that distance. One shower
was in the neighborhood of Ovillers, one at La Boisselle and one this
side of Longueval. Then in the distance beyond Longueval the sky was
illumined by a great conflagration not on the fireworks program, which
must have been a German ammunition dump exploded by British shells.
It was our planet, now, and a particular portion of it in Picardy. No
imaginative translation to space could hold any longer. With the charge
going in, the intimate human element was supreme. The thought of those
advancing waves of men in the darkness made the fiery display a
dissociated objective spectacle. On the Ridge more signal flares rose
and those illumining the dark masses of foliage must be Bazentin Wood
gained, and those beyond must be in the Bazentin villages, Little
Bazentin and Big Bazentin, though neither of them, like most of the
villages, numbering a dozen to fifty houses could be much smaller and be
called villages.
This was all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as
the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be
true. And that hateful Trônes Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of
the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take it piecemeal?
Our suspense was intensified by the thought that this action might be
the turning-point in the first stage of the great Somme battle. We
strained our eyes into the darkness studying, as a mariner studies the
sky, the signs with which we had grown familiar as indicative of
results. There was a good augury in the comparatively slight German
shell fire in response, though we were reminded that it might at any
minute develop with sudden ferocity.
Now the flashes of the guns grew dim. A transformation more wonderful
than artillery could produce, that of night into day, was in process.
Not a curtain but the sun's ball of fire, undisturbed by any efforts of
the human beings on a few square miles of earth, was holding to his
schedule in as kindly a fashion as ever toward planets which kept at a
respectful distance from his molten artillery concentration.
Out of the blanket which hid the field appeared the great welts of chalk
of the main line trenches, then the lesser connecting ones; the woods
became black patches and the remaining tree-trunks gaunt, still and
dismal sentinels of the gray ruins of the villages, until finally all
the conformations of the scarred and tortured slope were distinct in the
first fresh light of a brilliant summer's day. Where the blazes had been
was the burst of black smoke from shells and we saw that it was still
German fire along the visible line of the British objective, assuring us
that the British had won the ground which they had set out to take and
were holding it.
"Up and at them!" had done the trick this time, and trick it was; a
trick or stratagem, to use the higher sounding word; a trick in not
waiting on the general attack for the taking of Trônes according to
obvious tactics, but including Trônes in the sweep; a trick in the
daring way that the infantry was sent in ahead of the answering German
curtain of fire.
All the news was good that day. The British had swept through Bazentin
Wood and taken the Bazentin villages. They held Trônes Wood and were in
Delville and High Woods. A footing was established on the Ridge where
the British could fight for final mastery on even terms with the enemy.
"Slight losses" came the reports from corps and divisions and
confirmation of official reports was seen in the paucity of the wounded
arriving at the casualty clearing stations and in the faces of officers
and men everywhere. Even British phlegm yielded to exhilaration.
XIV
THE CAVALRY GOES IN
The "dodo" band--Cavalry a luxury--Cavalry, however, may not be
discarded--What ten thousand horse might do--A taste of action for the
cavalry--An "incident"--Horses that had the luck to "go in"--Cavalrymen
who showed signs of action--The novelty of a cavalry action--A camp
group--Germans caught unawares--Horsemen and an aeroplane--Retiring in
good order--Just enough casualties to give the fillip of danger to
recollection.
Sometimes a squadron of cavalry, British or Indian, survivors of the
ardent past, intruded in a mechanical world of motor trucks and tractors
drawing guns. With outward pride these lean riders of burnished, sleek
horses, whose broad backs bore gallantly the heavy equipment, concealed
their irritation at idleness while others fought. They brought
picturesqueness and warm-blooded life to the scene. Such a merciless war
of steel contrivances needed some ornament. An old sergeant one day,
when the cavalry halted beside his battalion which was resting, in an
exhibit of affectionate recollection exclaimed:
"It's good to stroke a horse's muzzle again! I was in the Dragoon Guards
once, myself."
Sometimes the cavalry facetiously referred to itself as the "Dodo"
band, with a galling sense of helplessness under its humor; and others
had thought of it as being like the bison preserved in the Yellowstone
Park lest the species die out.
A cynical general said that a small force of cavalry was a luxury which
such a vast army of infantry and guns might afford. In his opinion, even
if we went to the Rhine, the cavalry would melt in its first charge
under the curtains of fire and machine gun sprays of the rearguard
actions of the retreating enemy. He had never been in the cavalry, and
any squadron knew well what he and all of those who shared his views
were thinking whenever it passed over the brow of a hill that afforded a
view of the welter of shell fire over a field cut with shell-craters and
trenches which are pitfalls for horses. Yet it returned gamely and with
fastidious application to its practice in crossing such obstacles in
case the command to "go in" should ever come. Such preparations were
suggestive to extreme skeptics of the purchase of robes and the
selection of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has appointed
the day for ascension.
Excepting a dash in Champagne, not since trench warfare began had the
cavalry had any chance. The thought of action was an hypothesis
developed from memory of charges in the past. Aeroplanes took the
cavalry's place as scouts, machine guns and rifles emplaced behind a
first-line trench which had succumbed to an attack took its place as
rearguard, and aeroplane patrols its place as screen.
Yet any army, be it British, French, or German, which expected to carry
through an offensive would not turn all its cavalry into infantry. This
was parting with one of the old three branches of horse, foot and gun
and closing the door to a possible opportunity. If the Japanese had had
cavalry ready at the critical moment after Mukden, its mobility would
have hampered the Russian retreat, if not turned it into a rout. When
you need cavalry you need it "badly," as the cowboy said about his
six-shooter.
Should the German line ever be broken and all that earth-tied, enormous,
complicated organization, with guns emplaced and its array of congested
ammunition dumps and supply depots, try to move on sudden demand, what
added confusion ten thousand cavalry would bring! What rich prizes would
await it as it galloped through the breach and in units, separating each
to its objective according to evolutions suited to the new conditions,
dismounted machine guns to cover roads and from chosen points sweep
their bullets into wholesale targets! The prospect of those few wild
hours, when any price in casualties might be paid for results, was the
inspiration of dreams when hoofs stamped in camps at night or bits
champed as lances glistened in line above khaki-colored steel helmets on
morning parade.
A taste, just a taste, of action the cavalry was to have, owing to the
success of the attack of July 14th, which manifestly took the Germans by
surprise between High and Delville Woods and left them staggering with
second-line trenches lost and confusion ensuing, while guns and
scattered battalions were being hurried up by train in an indiscriminate
haste wholly out of keeping with German methods of prevision and
precision. The breach was narrow, the field of action for horses
limited; but word came back that over the plateau which looked away to
Bapaume between Delville and High Woods there were few shell-craters and
no German trenches or many Germans in sight as day dawned.
Gunners rubbed their eyes at the vision as they saw the horsemen pass
and infantry stood amazed to see them crossing trenches, Briton and
Indian on their way up the slope to the Ridge. How they passed the crest
without being decimated by a curtain of fire would be a mystery if there
were any mysteries in this war, where everything seems to be worked out
like geometry or chemical formulæ. The German artillery being busy
withdrawing heavy guns and the other guns preoccupied after the
startling results of an attack not down on the calendar for that day
did not have time to "get on" the cavalry when they were registered on
different targets--which is suggestive of what might come if the line
were cleft over a broad front. A steel band is strong until it breaks,
which may be in many pieces.
"Did you see the charge?" you ask. No, nor even the ride up the slope,
being busy elsewhere and not knowing that the charge was going to take
place. I could only seek out the two squadrons who participated in the
"incident," as the staff called it, after it was over. Incident is the
right word for a military sense of proportion. When the public in
England and abroad heard that the cavalry were "in" they might expect to
hear next day that the Anglo-French Armies were in full pursuit of the
broken German Armies to the Rhine, when no such outcome could be in the
immediate program unless German numbers were cut in two or the Prussian
turned Quaker.
An incident! Yes, but something to give a gallop to the pen of the
writer after the monotony of gunfire and bombing. I was never more eager
to hear an account of any action than of this charge--a cavalry charge,
a charge of cavalry, if you please, on the Western front in July, 1916.
In one of the valleys back of the front out of sight of the battle there
were tired, tethered horses with a knowing look in their eyes, it
seemed to me, and a kind of superior manner toward the sleek, fresh
horses which had not had the luck to "go in"; and cavalrymen were lying
under their shelters fast asleep, their clothing and accoutrements
showing the unmistakable signs of action. We heard from their officers
the story of both the Dragoon Guards and the Deccan Horse (Indian) who
had known what it was to ride down a German in the open.
The shade of Phil Sheridan might ponder on what the world was coming to
that we make much of such a small affair; but he would have felt all the
glowing satisfaction of these men if he had waited as long as they for
any kind of a cavalry action. The accounts of the two squadrons may go
together. Officers were shaving and aiming for enough water to serve as
a substitute for a bath. The commander with his map could give you every
detail with a fond, lingering emphasis on each one, as a battalion
commander might of a first experience in a trench raid when later the
same battalion would make an account of a charge in battle which was
rich with incidents of hand-to-hand encounters and prisoners breached
from dugouts into an "I-came-I-saw" narrative, and not understand why
further interest should be shown by the inquirer in what was the
everyday routine of the business of war. For the trite saying that
everything is relative does not forfeit any truth by repetition.
The cavalry had done everything quite according to tactics, which would
only confuse the layman. The wonder was that any of it had come back
alive. On that narrow front it had ridden out toward the Germany Army
with nothing between the cavalry and the artillery and machine guns
which had men on horses for targets. In respect to days when to show a
head above a trench meant death the thing was stupefying, incredible.
These narrators forming a camp group, with lean, black-bearded,
olive-skinned Indians in attendance bringing water in horse-buckets for
the baths, and the sight of kindly horses' faces smiling at you, and the
officers themselves horsewise and with the talk and manner of
horsemen--only they made it credible. How real it was to them! How real
it became to me!
There had been some Germans in hiding in the grass who were taken
unawares by this rush of gallopers with lances. Every participant agreed
as to the complete astonishment of the enemy. It was equivalent to a
football player coming into the field in ancient armor and the more of a
surprise considering that those Germans had been sent out after a
morning full of surprises to make contact with the British and
reëstablish the broken line.
Not dummies of straw this time for the lance's sharp point, but
startled men in green uniform--the vision which had been in mind when
every thrust was made at the dummies! This was what cavalry was for, the
object of all the training. It rode through quite as it would have
ridden fifty or a hundred years ago. A man on the ground, a man on a
horse! This feature had not changed.
"You actually got some?"
"Oh, yes!"
"On the lances?"
"Yes."
From the distance came the infernal sound of guns in their threshing
contest of explosions which made this incident more impressive than any
account of a man buried by shells, of isolated groups holding out in
dugouts, or of venturesome soldiers catching and tossing back German
bombs at the man who threw them, because it was unique on the Somme.
Both British and Indians had had the same kind of an opportunity. After
riding through they wheeled and rode back in the accepted fashion of
cavalry.
By this time some of the systematic Germans had recollected that a part
of their drill was how to receive a cavalry charge, and when those who
had not run or been impaled began firing and others stood ready with
their bayonets but with something of the manner of men who were not
certain whether they were in a trance or not, according to the account,
a German machine gun began its wicked staccato as another feature of
German awakening to the situation.
This brings us to the most picturesque incident of the "incident." Most
envied of all observers of the tournament was an aviator who looked down
on a show bizarre even in the annals of aviation. The German planes had
been driven to cover, which gave the Briton a fair field. A knightly
admiration, perhaps a sense of fellowship not to say sympathy with the
old arm of scouting from the new, possessed him; or let it be that he
could not resist a part in such a rare spectacle which was so tempting
to sporting instinct. He swooped toward that miserable, earth-tied
turtle of a machine gun and emptied his drum into it. He was not over
three hundred feet, all agree, above the earth, when not less than ten
thousand feet was the rule.
"It was jolly fine of him!" as the cavalry put it. To have a charge and
then to have that happen--well, it was not so bad to be in the cavalry.
The plane drew fire by setting all the Germans to firing at it without
hitting it, and the machine gun, whether silenced or not, ceased to
bother the cavalry, which brought back prisoners to complete a
well-rounded adventure before withdrawing lest the German guns, also
entering into the spirit of the situation, should blow men and horses
off the Ridge instead of leaving them to retire in good order.