work, about details of discipline which make for homogeneity of action,
and the divisions that came to join the first one learned their lessons
in the Ypres salient school, which gave hard but lasting tuition. I was
away when at St. Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient
can provide. The time was winter, when chill water filled the
shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a
cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate
better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian.
There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level
and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this,
holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans
had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the
offensive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. The Canadians
proved that they could be stubborn and that their soldiers, even if they
had not had the directing system of an army staff that had prepared for
forty years, with two years of experience could act on their own in
resisting as well as in attacking. "Our men! our men!" the officers
would say. That was it: Canada's men, learning tactics in face of German
tactics and holding their own!
When all was peaceable up and down the line, with the Grand Offensive a
month away, the Germans once more "tried it on" the Canadians in the
Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the positions were all in favor of
the Germans with room to plant two guns to one around the bulging
British line. For many days they had been quietly registering as they
massed their artillery for their last serious effort during the season
of 1916 in the north.
Anything done to the Canadians always came close home to me; and news of
this attack and of its ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was
bound to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned that the
Canadians were already counter-attacking, which set your pulse tingling
and little joy-bells ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the
Germans could not have developed any offensive that would be serious to
the situation as a whole at that moment, in the midst of preparations
for the Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even had one known
that it was coming, in that flat region where everyone has to follow a
communication trench with only the sky directly overhead visible.
There was an epic quality in the story of what happened as you heard it
from the survivors. It was an average quiet morning in the first-line
trenches when the German hurricane broke from all sides; but first-line
trenches is not the right phrase, for all the protection that could be
made was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled to a thickness
sufficient to stop a bullet at short range.
What luxury in security were the dugouts of the Somme hills compared to
the protection that could be provided here! When the first series of
bursts announced the storm you could not descend a flight of steps to a
cavern whose roof was impenetrable even by five-hundred-pound shells.
Little houses of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some instances
level with the earth, which any direct hit could "do in" were the best
that generous army resources could permit. High explosive shells must
turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. There was nothing to
shoot at if a man tried to stick to the parapet, for fresh troops fully
equipped for their task back in the German trenches waited on demolition
of the Canadian breastworks before advancing under their own barrage.
Shrapnel sent down its showers, while the trench walls were opened in
great gaps and tossed heavenward. Officers clambered about in the midst
of the spouts of dust and smoke over the piles and around the craters,
trying to keep in touch with their men, when it was a case of every man
taking what cover he could.
"The limit!" as the men said. "The absolute limit in an artillery
concentration!"
But they did not go--not until they had orders. This was their kind of
discipline under fire; they "stayed on the job." One group charged out
beyond the swath of fire to meet the Germans in the open and there
fought to the death in expression of characteristic initiative. When
word was passed to retire, some grudgingly held on to fight the
outnumbering Germans in the midst of the débris and escaped only by
passing through the German barrage placed between the first and second
line to cover the German advance on the second. The supports themselves
under the carefully arranged pattern of shell fire held as the
rallying-points of the survivors, who found the communication trenches
so badly broken that it was as well to keep in the open. Little knots of
men with their defenses crushed held from the instinctive sense of
individual stubbornness.
To tell the whole story of that day as of many other days where a few
battalions were engaged, giving its fair due to each group in the
struggle, is not for a correspondent who had to cover the length of the
battle line and sees the whole as an example of Maple Leaf spirit. The
rest is for battalion historians, who will find themselves puzzled about
an action where there was little range of vision and this obscured by
shell-smoke and the preoccupation of each man trying to keep cover and
do his own part to the death.
In the farmhouses afterward, as groups of officers tried to assemble
their experiences, I had the feeling of being in touch with the proof of
all that I had seen in Canada months previously. Losses had been heavy
for the battalions engaged though not for the Canadian corps as a whole,
no heavier than British battalions or the Germans had suffered in the
salient. Canada happened to get the blow this time.
The men, after a night's sleep and writing home that they were safe and
how comrades had died, might wander about the roads or make holiday as
they chose. They were not casual about the fight, but outspoken and
frank, Canadian fashion. They realized what they had been through and
spoke of their luck in having survived. From the fields came the cry of,
"Leave that to me!" as a fly rose from the bat, or, "Out on first!" as
men took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives with baseball
curves and hot liners between the bases, which was very homelike there
in Flanders. Which of the players was American one could not tell by
voice or looks, for the climate along the border makes a type of
complexion and even of features with the second generation which is
readily distinguished from the English type.
"What part of Canada do you come from?" asked an officer of a private.
"Out west, sir!"
"What part of the west?"
"'Way out west, sir!"
"An officer is asking you. Be definite."
"Well, the State of Washington, sir."
There was a good sprinkling of Americans in the battle, including
officers; but on the baseball field and the battlefield they were a part
of the whole, performing their task in a way that left no doubt of
their quality. Whether the spirit of adventure or the principle at stake
had brought her battalions to Flanders, Canada had proved that she could
be stubborn. She was to have her chance to prove that she could be
quick.
XXVI
THE TANKS ARRIVE
The New Army Irish--Irish wit--And Irish courage--Pompous Prussian
Guard officer--The British Guards and their characteristics--Who
invented the tank?--The great secret--Combination of an armadillo, a
caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car and a traveling
circus--Something really new on the front--Gas attacks--A tank in the
road--A moving "strong point"--Making an army laugh--Suspense for the
inmates of the untried tanks.
The situation on the Ridge was where we left it in a previous chapter
with all except a few parts of it held, enough for a jumping-off place
at all points for the sweep down into the valley toward Bapaume. In the
grim preliminary business of piecemeal gains which should make possible
an operation over a six-mile front on Sept. 15th, which was the first
general attack since July 14th, the part that the Irish battalions
played deserves notice, where possibly the action of the tried and
sturdy English regiments on their flanks need not be mentioned, as being
characteristic of the work they had been doing for months.
They were the New Army Irish, all volunteers, men who had enlisted to
fight against Germany when their countrymen were largely disaffected,
which requires more initiative than to join the colors when it is the
universal passion of the community. Many stories were told of this Irish
division. If there are ten Irishmen among a hundred soldiers the stories
have a way of being about the ten Irishmen.
I like that one of the Connaught man who, on his first day in the
trenches, was set to digging out the dirt that had been filled into a
trench by a shell-burst. Along came another shell before he was half
through his task; the burst of a second knocked him over and doubled the
quantity of earth before him. When he picked himself up he went to the
captain and threw down his spade, saying:
"Captain, I can't finish that job without help. They're gaining on me!"
Some people thought that the Sinn Fein movement which had lately broken
out in the Dublin riots would make the new Irish battalions lukewarm in
any action. They would go in but without putting spirit into their
attack. Other skeptics questioned if the Irish temperament which was
well suited to dashing charges would adapt itself to the matter-of-fact
necessities of the Somme fighting. Their commander, however, had no
doubts; and the army had none when the test was made.
Through Guillemont, that wicked resort of machine guns, which had been
as severely hammered by shell fire after it had repulsed British attacks
as any village on the Somme, the Irish swept in good order, cleaning up
dugouts and taking prisoners on the way with all the skill of veterans
and a full relish of the exploit, and then forward, as a well-linked
part of a successful battle line, to the sunken road which was the
second objective.
"I thought we were to take a village, Captain," said one of the men,
after they were established in the sunken road. "What are we stopping
here for?"
"We have taken it. You passed through it--that grimy patch
yonder"--which was Guillemont's streets and houses mixed in ruins five
hundred yards to the rear.
"You're sure, Captain?"
"Quite!"
"Well, then, I'd not like to be the drunken man that tried to find his
keyhole in that town!"
It was a pity, perhaps, that the Irish who assisted in the taking of
Ginchy, which completed the needful mastery of the Ridge for British
purposes, could not have taken part in the drive that was to follow. We
had looked forward to this drive as the reward of a down hill run after
the patient labor of wrenching our way up hill. Even the Germans, who
had suffered appalling losses in trying to hold the Ridge, must have
been relieved that they no longer had to fight against the inevitable.
Again the clans were gathering and again there ran through the army the
anticipation which came from the preparation for a great blow. The
Canadians were appearing in billets back of the front. If in no other
way, I should have known of their presence by their habit of moving
about roads and fields getting acquainted with their surroundings and
finding out if apples were ripe. For other portions of the country it
was a little unfair that these generous and well-paid spenders should
take the place of the opulent Australians in villages where small boys
already had hordes of pennies and shopkeepers were hastening to
replenish their stocks to be equal to their opportunities.
At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, but not to go in
against the Prussian Guard, which those with a sense of histrionic
fitness desired. When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at
Contalmaison he had said, "The Prussian Guard feels that it is
surrendering to a foe worthy of its steel when it yields to superior
numbers of the English Guard!" or words to that effect according to
reports, only to receive the answer that his captors were English
factory hands and the like of the New Army, whose officers excused
themselves, in the circumstances, for their identity as politely as
they could.
Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the Guards were the Guards,
England's crack regiments, the officers of each wearing their buttons in
a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with the distinctive
Guards' salute. In the Guards the old spirit of gaiety in face of danger
survived. Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of fire
joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender
man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset
man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel
blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner
worthy of tradition.
Though the English would have been glad to go against the Prussian Guard
with bayonet or bomb or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days
are not signaling to the enemy, "Let us have a go between your Guards
and our Guards!" but are putting crack regiments and line regiments in a
battle line to a common task, where the only criterion is success.
The presence of the Guards, however, yielded interest to another new
arrival on the Somme front. When the plan for a style of armored motor
car which would cross shell-craters and trenches was laid before an
eminent general at the War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from
further consideration might have been more blasphemous if he could have
spared the time to be anything but satirically brief. Such conservatives
probably have prevented many improvements from materializing, and
probably they have also saved the world from many futile creations which
would only have wasted time and material.
Happily both for geniuses and fools, who all, in the long run, let us
hope, receive their just deserts, there is no downing an idea in a free
country where continued knocking at doors and waiting in hallways
eventually secure it a trial. Then, if it succeeds, the fellow who
thought that the conception was original with him finds his claims
disputed from all points of the compass. If it fails, the poor thing
goes to a fatherless grave.
I should like to say that I was the originator of the tank--one of the
originators. In generous mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals
too numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land
toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a
machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is
usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the
Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every
soldier.
Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was
the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was
considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the
aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists
are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I
found myself so poor at it that I did not even pass on my plan to the
staff, which had already considered a few thousand plans. Ericsson
conceiving a gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man as
Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine of war.
To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, was given the task of
transforming blue-print plans into reality. There was no certainty that
he would succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for every foundry
and every skilled finger in the land, was enterprising enough to give
him a chance. He and thousands of workmen spent months at this most
secret business. If one German spy had access to one workman, then the
Germans might know what was coming. Nobody since Ericsson had a busier
time than Swinton without telling anybody what he was doing. The
whisperers knew that some diabolical surprise was under way and they
would whisper about it. No censor regulations can reach them. Sometimes
the tribe was given false information in great confidence in order to
keep it too occupied to pass on the true.
The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it
seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a
receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of
armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would
have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or
a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary.
Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult
as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on
the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has
become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine
danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the front
unheralded.
One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the
experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of
thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?"
was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their
own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar
way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me.
Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this
writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank
resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a
traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have
steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant
than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus
jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more
phlegmatic.
In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the
shell clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on
for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by
a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had
cumulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into
position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the
front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the
same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had
become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas
shells, lachrymatory shells and _Flammenwerfer_ were as old-fashioned as
high explosives and shrapnel. Bombing encounters in saps had no
variation. The ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told from
the one taken yesterday except by its location on the map. Even the
aeroplanes had not lately developed any sensational departures from
habit. One paid little more attention to them than a gondolier pays to
the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of fire all looked alike. There was
no new way of being killed--nothing to break the ghastly monotony of
charges and counter-charges.
All the brains of Europe had been busy for two years inventing new forms
of destruction, yet no genius had found any sinuous creature that would
creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was no antidote.
Everybody was engaged in killing, yet nobody was able to "kill to his
satisfaction," as the Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were
the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles
propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty
thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or
rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars
coughing balls of explosives for one thousand yards.
True, the gas attack at Ypres had been an innovation. It was not a
discovery; merely an application of ghastliness which had been
considered too horrible for use. As a surprise it had been
successful--once. The defense answered with gas masks, which made it
still more important that soldiers should not be absent-minded and leave
any of their kit out of reach. The same amount of energy put into
projectiles would have caused more casualties. Meanwhile, no staff of
any army, making its elaborate plans in the use of proved weapons, could
be certain that the enemy had not under way, in this age of invention
which has given us the wireless, some new weapon which would be
irresistible.
Was the tank this revolutionary wonder? Its sponsors had no such hope.
England went on building guns and pouring out shells, cartridges and
bombs. At best, the tanks were another application of an old,
established form of killing in vogue with both Daniel Boone and
Napoleon's army--bullets.
The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the monster was blocking
a road gorged with transport had something of the ludicrousness of, say,
a pliocene monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly lain down
at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck
drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the
delay. Those near by were sufficiently entertained by the spectacle
which stopped them. They gathered around the tank and gaped and grinned.
The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark-haired Englishman, with a
face of oriental stolidity. Questions were shot at him, but he would not
even say whether his beast would stand without hitching or not; whether
it lived on hay, talcum powder, or the stuff that bombs are made of; or
what was the nature of its inwards, or which was the head and which the
tail, or if when it seemed to be backing it was really going forward.
By the confession of some white lettering on its body, it was officially
one of His Majesty's land ships. It no more occurred to anyone to
suggest that it move on and clear the road than to argue with a bulldog
which confronts you on a path. I imagined that the feelings of the young
officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a
man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a
section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in
the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered
life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to
master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives
of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind
the curtain of military secrecy into the full blaze of staring,
inquiring publicity.
The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. Its body hugged the earth
in order to expose as little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it
was mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to its low
visibility, and there was no more hop in it than in the Gila monster.
The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide being proof against the
bullets of machine guns and rifles, it was a moving "strong point" which
could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, where machine guns
were emplaced to mow down infantry charges, with its own machine guns.
Only now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical product it was no
more remarkable than a steam shovel. The wonder was in the part that it
was about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, and this a
soldier-saving, device.
For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead weight in the path of traffic.
If it could not move of itself, the only way for traffic to pass was to
build a road around it. Then there was a rumbling noise within its body
which sounded like some unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself
around with the ponderosity of a canal boat being warped into a dock and
proceeded on its journey to take its appointed place in the battle line.
Did the Germans know that the tanks were building? I think that they had
some inkling a few weeks before the tanks' appearance that something of
the sort was under construction. There was a report, too, of a German
tank which was not ready in time to meet the British. Some German
prisoners said that their first intimation of this new affliction was
when the tanks appeared out of the morning mist, bearing down on the
trenches; others said that German sausage observation balloons had seen
something resembling giant turtles moving across the fields up to the
British lines and had given warning to the infantry to be on the
lookout.