only after they were taken. A battalion could find absolute security in
them. Long galleries ran back to entrances in areas safe from shell
fire. Overhead no semblance of farm buildings was left by British and
Australian guns. When I visited the ruins later I could not tell how
many buildings there had been; and Mouquet Farm was not the only strong
point that the Germans had to fall back on, let it be said. In the
underground tunnels and chambers the Germans gathered for their
counter-attacks, which they attempted with something of their old
precision and courage.
This was the opportunity of the machine gunners in shell-craters and the
snipers and the curtain of artillery fire. Sometimes the Australians
allowed the attack to get good headway. They even left gaps in their
lines for the game to enter the net before they began firing; and again,
when a broken German charge sought flight its remnants faced an
impassable curtain of fire which fenced them in and they dropped into
shell-craters and held up their hands, which was the only thing to do.
Soon the Germans learned, too, how to make the most of shell-craters.
The harder the Australians fought the greater the spur to German pride
not to be beaten by these supposedly undisciplined, untrained men. The
Germans called for more guns and got them. Mouquet Farm became a
fortress of machine guns. It was not taken by the Australians--their
successors took what was left of it. The nearer they came to the crest
which was their supreme goal the ghastlier and more concentrated grew
the shell fire, as the German guns had only to range on the skyline. But
this equally applied to Australian gunners as the Germans were crowded
toward the summit where the débris of the windmill remained, till
finally they had to fall back to the other side.
Then they tried sweeping over the Ridge from the cover of the reverse
slope in counter-attacks, only to be whipped by machine gun fire, lashed
by shrapnel and crushed by high explosives--themselves mixed with the
ruins of the windmill. At last they gave up the effort. It was not in
German discipline to make any more attempts.
The Australians had the windmill as much as anyone had it as, for a
time, it was in No Man's Land where blasts of shells would permit of no
occupation. But the symbol for which it stood was there in readiness as
a jumping-off place for the sweep-down into the valley later on when the
Canadians should take the place of the Australians; and before they
retired they could look in triumph across at Thiepval and down on
Courcelette and Martinpuich and past the valley to Bapaume.
The development of the campaign had given the Australians work suited to
their bent when this war of machinery, attaining its supreme complexity
on the Somme, left the human machine between walls of shell fire to
fight it out individually against the human machine, in a contest of
will, courage, audacity, alertness and resource, man to man. "Advance,
Australia!" is the Australian motto; and the Australians advanced.
The New Zealanders had their part elsewhere and played it in the New
Zealand way.
"They have never failed to take an objective set them," said a general
after the taking of Flers, "and they have always gained their positions
with slight losses."
Could there be higher praise? Success and thrift, courage and skill in
taking cover! For the business of a soldier is to do his enemy the
maximum of damage with the minimum to himself, as anyone may go on
repeating. Probably the remark of the New Zealanders in answer to the
commander's praise would be, "Thank you. Why not?" as if this were what
the New Zealanders expected of themselves. They take much for granted
about New Zealand, without being boastful.
"A blooming quiet lot that keeps to themselves," said a British soldier,
"but likable when you get to know them."
You might depend upon the average New Zealand private for an interesting
talk about social organization, municipal improvements, and human
welfare under government direction. The standard of individual
intelligence and education was high and it seemed to make good fighting
men.
The Australians had had to grub their way foot by foot, and the South
Africans on July 15th with veldt gallantry had swept into Delville Wood,
which was to be a shambles for two months, and stood off with a thin
line the immense forces of hastily gathered reserves which the Germans
threw at this vital point which had been lost in a surprise attack.
All this on the way up to the Ridge. The New Zealanders were to play a
part in the same movement as the Canadians after the Ridge was taken.
They were in the big sweep down from the Ridge over a broad front.
Across the open for about two miles they had to go, fair targets for
shell fire; and they went, keeping their order as if on parade, working
out each evolution with soldierly precision including coöperation with
the "tanks." They were at their final objective on schedule time,
accomplishing the task with amazingly few casualties and so little fuss
that it seemed a kind of skilful field-day manoeuver. All that they took
they held and still held it when the mists of autumn obscured artillery
observation and they were relieved from the quagmire for their turn of
rest.
XVII
THE HATEFUL RIDGE
Grinding of courage of three powerful races--A ridge that will be
famous--Germans on the defensive--Efforts to maintain their
_morale_--Gas shells--Summer heat, dust and fatigue--Prussian hatred
of the British--Dead bodies strapped to guns--Guillemont a
granulation of bricks and mortar and earth--"We've only to keep at
them, sir"--Stalking machine guns--Machine guns in craters--British
cheerfulness--The war will be over when it is won--Soldiers talk
shop--An incident of brutal militarism--Simple rules for surviving
shell fire--A "happy home" with a shell arriving every
minute--Business-like monotony of the battle--Insignificance of one
man among millions--A victory of position, of will, of _morale_!
Sometimes it occurred to one to consider what history might say about
the Ridge and also to wonder how much history, which pretends to know
all, would really know. Thus, one sought perspective of the colossal
significance of the uninterrupted battle whose processes numbed the mind
and to distinguish the meaning of different stages of the struggle.
Nothing had so well reflected the character of the war or of its
protagonists, French, British and German, as this grinding of resources,
of courage, and of will of three powerful races.
We are always talking of phases as the result of natural human
speculation and tendency to set events in groups. Observers also may
gratify this inclination as well as the contemporaneous military expert
writing from his maps. It is historically accepted, I think, that the
first decisive phase was the battle of the Marne when Paris was saved.
The second was Verdun, when the Germans again sought a decision on the
Western front by an offensive of sledgehammer blows against frontal
positions; and, perhaps, the third came when on the Ridge the British
and the French kept up their grim, insistent, piecemeal attacks, holding
the enemy week in and week out on the defensive, aiming at mastery as
the scales trembled in the new turn of the balance and initiative passed
from one side to the other in the beginning of that new era.
This scarred slope with its gentle ascent, this section of farming land
with its woods growing more ragged every day from shell fire, with its
daily and nightly thunders, its trickling procession of wounded and
prisoners down the communication trenches speaking the last word in
human bravery, industry, determination and endurance--this might one day
be not only the monument to the positions of all the battalions that had
fought, its copses, its villages, its knolls famous to future
generations as is Little Round Top with us, but in its monstrous realism
be an immortal expression, unrealized by those who fought, of a
commander's iron will and foresight in gaining that supremacy in arms,
men and material which was the genesis of the great decision.
The German had not yielded his offensive at Verdun after the attack of
July 1st. At least, he still showed the face of initiative there while
he rested content that at the same time he could maintain his front
intact on the Somme. The succeeding attack of July 15th broke his
confidence with its suggestion that the confusion in his lines would be
too dangerous if it happened over a broader front for him to consider
anything but the defensive. Thus, the Allied offensive had broken his
offensive.
Now he began drawing away his divisions from the Verdun sector, bringing
guns to answer the British and French fire and men whose prodigal use
alone could enforce his determination to maintain _morale_ and prevent
any further bold strokes such as that of July 15th.
His sausage balloons began to reappear in the sky as the summer wore on;
he increased the number of his aeroplanes; more of his five-point-nine
howitzers were sending their compliments; he stretched out his shell
fire over communication trenches and strong points; mustered great
quantities of lachrymatory shells and for the first time used gas shells
with a generosity which spoke his faith in their efficacy. The
lachrymatory shell makes your eyes smart, and the Germans apparently
considered this a great auxiliary to high explosives and shrapnel. Was
it because of the success of the first gas attack at Ypres that they now
placed such reliance in gas shells? The shell when it lands seems a
"dud," which is a shell that has failed to explode; then it blows out a
volume of gas.
"If one hit right under your nose," said a soldier, "and you hadn't your
gas mask on, it might kill you. But when you see one fall you don't run
to get a sniff in order to accommodate the Boche by asphyxiating
yourself."
Another soldier suggested that the Germans had a big supply on hand and
were working off the stock for want of other kinds. The British who by
this time were settled in the offensive joked about the deluge of gas
shells with a gallant, amazing humor. Going up to the Ridge was going to
their regular duty. They did not shirk it or hail it with delight. They
simply went, that was all, when it was a battalion's turn to go.
July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners
worked in their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped
the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of
dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged
from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of
gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain came as a blessing to
Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had
complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary
sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the
defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of
the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will not
cure; something fixed in their beings.
It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it,
they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the war
their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had been
killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the
compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed,
from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to
urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them
that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British
and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to
their own.
Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by
their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it
was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore,
in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a
few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on
for years.
Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened to
the vast preparations behind the British lines to carry on the
offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the
proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their
"system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I
saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion
along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck in
the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin and
dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ----, you English!"
The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense.
Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first!
said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but
among the mixed troops--the old and the young, the hollow-chested and
the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers
of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still on
their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east and
west--they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies
despite the iron discipline.
It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every
hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who
would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid; and
armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make them
into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had supplied
supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a machine; yet
its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell fire and the
dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.
It became apparent through those two months of piecemeal advance that
the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty
"funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if they
were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters--well, human
psychology does not change. They were the type that made the
professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of
every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation
approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.
Such became members of the machine gun corps, which took an oath never
to surrender, and led bombing parties and posted themselves in
shell-craters to face the charges while shells fell thick around them,
or remained up in the trench taking their chances against curtains of
fire that covered an infantry charge, in the hope of being able to turn
on their own bullet spray for a moment before being killed. Sometimes
their dead bodies were found strapped to their guns, more often probably
by their own request, as an insurance against deserting their posts,
than by command.
Shell fire was the theatricalism of the struggle, the roar of guns its
thunder; but night or day the sound of the staccato of that little arch
devil of killing, the machine gun, coming from the Ridge seemed as true
an expression of what was always going on there as a rattlesnake's
rattle is of its character. Delville and High Woods and Guillemont and
Longueval and the Switch Trench--these are symbolic names of that
attrition, of the heroism of British persistence which would not take No
for answer.
You might think that you had seen ruins until you saw those of
Guillemont after it was taken. They were the granulation of bricks and
mortar and earth mixed by the blasts of shell fire which crushed solids
into dust and splintered splinters. Guillemont lay beyond Trônes Wood
across an open space where the German guns had full play. There was a
stone quarry on the outskirts, and a quarry no less than a farm like
Waterlot, which was to the northward, and Falfemont, to the southward
and flanking the village, formed shelter. It was not much of a quarry,
but it was a hole which would be refuge for reserves and machine guns.
The two farms, clear targets for British guns, had their deep dugouts
whose roofs were reinforced by the ruins that fell upon them against
penetration even by shells of large caliber. How the Germans fought to
keep Falfemont! Once they sent out a charge with the bayonet to meet a
British charge between walls of shell fire and there through the mist
the steel was seen flashing and vague figures wrestling.
Guillemont and the farms won and Ginchy which lay beyond won and the
British had their flank on high ground. Twice they were in Guillemont
but could not remain, though as usual they kept some of their gains. It
was a battle from dugout to dugout, from shelter to shelter of any kind
burrowed in débris or in fields, with the British never ceasing here or
elsewhere to continue their pressure. And the débris of a village had
particular appeal; it yielded to the spade; its piles gave natural
cover.
A British soldier returning from one of the attacks as he hobbled
through Trônes Wood expressed to me the essential generalship of the
battle. He was outwardly as unemotional as if he were coming home from
his day's work, respectful and good-humored, though he had a hole in
both arms from machine gun fire, a shrapnel wound in the heel, and
seemed a trifle resentful of the added tribute of another shrapnel wound
in his shoulder after he had left the firing-line and was on his way to
the casualty clearing station. Insisting that he could lift the
cigarette I offered him to his lips and light it, too, he said:
"We've only to keep at them, sir. They'll go."
So the British kept at them and so did the French at every point. Was
Delville Wood worse than High Wood? This is too nice a distinction in
torments to be drawn. Possess either of them completely and command of
the Ridge in that section was won. The edge of a wood on the side away
from your enemy was the easiest part to hold. It is difficult to range
artillery on it because of restricted vision, and the enemy's shells
aimed at it strike the trees and burst prematurely among his own men.
Other easy, relatively easy, places to hold are the dead spaces of
gullies and ravines. There you were out of fire and there you were not;
there you could hold and there you could not. Machine gun fire and shell
fire were the arbiters of topography more dependable than maps.
Why all the trees were not cut down by the continual bombardments of
both sides was past understanding. There was one lone tree on the
skyline near Longueval which I had watched for weeks. It still had a
limb, yes, the luxury of a limb, the last time that I saw it, pointing
with a kind of defiance in its immunity. Of course it had been struck
many times. Bits of steel were imbedded in its trunk; but only a direct
hit on the trunk will bring down a tree. Trees may be slashed and
whittled and nicked and gashed and still stand; and when villages have
been pulverized except for the timbering of the houses, a scarred shade
tree will remain.
Thus, trees in Delville Wood survived, naked sticks among fallen and
splintered trunks and upturned roots. How any man could have survived
was the puzzling thing. None could if he had remained there continuously
and exposed himself; but man is the most cunning of animals. With gas
mask and eye-protectors ready, steel helmet on his head and his faithful
spade to make himself a new hole whenever he moved, he managed the
incredible in self-protection. Earth piled back of a tree-trunk would
stop bullets and protect his body from shrapnel. There he lay and there
a German lay opposite him, except when attacks were being made.
Not getting the northern edge of the woods the British began sapping out
in trenches to the east toward Ginchy, where the map contours showed the
highest ground in that neighborhood. New lines of trenches kept
appearing on the map, often with group names such as Coffee Alley, Tea
Lane and Beer Street, perhaps. Out in the open along the irregular
plateau the shells were no more kindly, the bombing and the sapping no
less diligent all the way to the windmill, where the Australians were
playing the same kind of a game. With the actual summit gained at
certain points, these had to be held pending the taking of the whole, or
of enough to permit a wave of men to move forward in a general attack
without its line being broken by the resistance of strong points, which
meant confusion.
Before any charge the machine guns must be "killed." No initiative of
pioneer or Indian scout surpassed that exhibited in conquering machine
gun positions. When a big game hunter tells you about having stalked
tigers, ask him if he has ever stalked a machine gun to its lair.
As for the nature of the lair, here is one where a Briton "dug himself
in" to be ready to repulse any counter-attack to recover ground that the
British had just won. Some layers of sandbags are sunk level with the
earth with an excavation back of them large enough for a machine gun
standard and to give the barrel swing and for the gunner, who back of
this had dug himself a well four or five feet deep of sufficient
diameter to enable him to huddle at the bottom in "stormy weather." He
was general and army, too, of his little establishment. In the midst of
shells and trench mortars, with bullets whizzing around his head, he had
to keep a cool aim and make every pellet which he poured out of his gun
muzzle count against the wave of men coming toward him who were at his
mercy if he could remain alive for a few minutes and keep his head.
He must not reveal his position before his opportunity came. All around
where this Briton had held the fort there were shell-craters like the
dots of close shooting around a bull's-eye; no tell-tale blood spots
this time, but a pile of two or three hundred cartridge cases lying
where they had fallen as they were emptied of their cones of lead. Luck
was with the occupant, but not with another man playing the same game
not far away. Broken bits of gun and fragments of cloth mixed with earth
explained the fate of a German machine gunner who had emplaced his piece
in the same manner.
Before a charge, crawl up at night from shell-crater to shell-crater and
locate the enemy's machine guns. Then, if your own guns and the trench
mortars do not get them, go stalking with supplies of bombs and remember
to throw yours before the machine gunner, who also has a stock for such
emergencies, throws his. When a machine gun begins rattling into a
company front in a charge the men drop for cover, while officers
consider how to draw the devil's tusks. Arnold von Winkelried, who
gathered the spears to his breast to make a path for his comrades, won
his glory because the fighting forces were small in his day. But with
such enormous forces as are now engaged and with heroism so common, we
make only an incident of the officer who went out to silence a machine
gun and was found lying dead across the gun with the gunner dead beside
him.
Those whose business it was to observe, the six correspondents,
Robinson, Thomas, Gibbs, Philips, Russell and myself, went and came
always with a sense of incapacity and sometimes with a feeling that
writing was a worthless business when others were fighting. The line of
advance on the big map at our quarters extended as the brief army
reports were read into the squares every morning by the key of figures
and numerals with a detail that included every little trench, every
copse, every landmark, and then we chose where we would go that day. At
corps headquarters there were maps with still more details and officers
would explain the previous day's work to us. Every wood and village,
every viewpoint, we knew, and every casualty clearing station and
prisoners' inclosure. At battalion camps within sight of the Ridge and
within range of the guns, where their blankets helped to make shelter
from the sun, you might talk with the men out of the fight and lunch and
chat with the officers who awaited the word to go in again or perhaps to
hear that their tour was over and they could go to rest in Ypres sector,
which had become relatively quiet.