curiosity and intensifying the suspense before an attack. The world, its
appetite for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all about the
tanks; but instead of the expected mechanical details, censorship would
permit only vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, and
the tanks were really strong on psychology--subjectively and
objectively. It was the objective result in psychology that counted: the
effect on the fighting men. Human imagination immediately characterized
them as living things; monstrous comrades of infantry in attack.
Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh
after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over
incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style
of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the
theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave
increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action.
What would happen to the tanks? What would they do to the Germans?
The staff, which had carefully calculated their uses and limitations,
had no thought that the tanks would go to Berlin. They were simply a new
auxiliary. Probably the average soldier was skeptical of their
efficiency; but his skepticism did not interfere with his curiosity. He
wanted to see the beast in action.
Christopher Columbus crossing uncharted seas did not undertake a more
daring journey than the skippers of the tanks. The cavalryman who
charges the enemy's guns in an impulse knows only a few minutes of
suspense. A torpedo destroyer bent on coming within torpedo range in
face of blasts from a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in on an
enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the
tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus
had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a
destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the
skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship
on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests
sudden concentrations of shell fire.
The Germans might have full knowledge of the ships' character and await
their appearance with forms of destruction adapted to the purpose. All
was speculation and uncertainty. Officers and crew were sealed up in a
steel box, the sport of destiny. For months they had been preparing for
this day, the crowning experiment and test, and all seemed of a type
carefully chosen for their part, soldiers who had turned land sailors,
cool and phlegmatic like the monsters which they directed. Each one
having given himself up to fate, the rest was easy in these days of
war's superexaltation, which makes men appear perfectly normal when
death hovers near. Not one would have changed places with any
infantryman. Already they had _esprit de corps_. They belonged to an
exclusive set of warriors.
Lumberingly dipping in and out of shell-craters, which sometimes half
concealed the tanks like ships in a choppy sea, rumbling and wrenching,
they appeared out of the morning mist in face of the Germans who put up
their heads and began working their machine guns after the usual
artillery curtain of fire had lifted.
XXVII
THE TANKS IN ACTION
How the tanks attacked--A tank walking up the main Street of a
village--Effect on the Germans--Prussian colonel surrenders to a
tank--Tanks against trees--The tank in High Wood--The famous Crème de
Menthe--Demolishing a sugar factory--Germans take the tanks
seriously--Differences of opinion regarding tanks--Wandering
tanks--German attack on a stranded tank--Prehistoric turtles--Saving
twenty-five thousand casualties.
With the reverse slope of the Ridge to conceal their approach to the
battle line, the tanks squatting among the men at regular intervals over
a six-mile front awaiting the cue of zero for the attack at dawn and the
mist still holding to cover both tanks and men, the great Somme stage
was set in a manner worthy of the début of the new monsters.
A tactical system of coördinated action had been worked out for the
infantry and the untried auxiliary, which only experienced soldiers
could have applied with success. According to the nature of the
positions in front, the tanks were set definite objectives or left to
find their own objectives. They might move on located machine gun
positions or answer a hurry call for help from the infantry. Ahead of
them was a belt of open field between them and the villages whose
capture was to be the consummation of the day's work. While observers
were straining their eyes to follow the progress of the tanks and seeing
but little, corps headquarters eagerly awaited news of the most
picturesque experiment of the war, which might prove ridiculous, or be a
wonderful success, or simply come up to expectations.
No more thrilling message was ever brought by an aeroplane than that
which said that a tank was "walking" up the main street of Flers
surrounded by cheering British soldiers, who were in possession of the
village. "Walking" was the word officially given; and very much walking,
indeed, the tank must have seemed to the aviator in his swift flight. An
eagle looked down on a tortoise which had a serpent's sting. This tank,
having attended to its work on the way, passed on through Flers bearing
a sign: "Extra Special! Great Hun Victory!" Beyond Flers it found itself
alongside a battery of German field guns and blazed bullets into the
amazed and helpless gunners.
The enemy may have heard of the tanks, but meeting them was a different
matter. After he had fought shells, bullets, bombs, grenades, mortars,
bayonets and gas, the tank was the straw that broke the camel's back of
many a German. A steel armadillo laying its bulk across a trench and
sweeping it on both sides with machine guns brought the familiar
complaint that this was not fighting according to rules in a war which
ceased to have rules after the bombing of civilian populations, the
sinking of the _Lusitania_, and the gas attack at Ypres. It depends on
whose ox is gored. There is a lot of difference between seeing the enemy
slaughtered by some new device and being slaughtered by one yourself. No
wonder that German prisoners who had escaped alive from a trench filled
with dead, when they saw a tank on the road as they passed to the rear
threw up their hands with a guttural: "Mein Gott! There is another!
There is no fighting that! This is not war; it is butchery!" Yes, it was
butchery--and butchery is war these days. Wasn't it so always? And as a
British officer remarked to the protestants:
"The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague rules, being only armor,
machinery and machine guns."
Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after they saw the hopelessness
of turning their own machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide.
Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone like finding that his
blows go into the air and the other fellow's go home. There seemed a
strange loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered himself to a
tank, which took him on board and eventually handed him over to an
infantry guard; but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel
did not.
The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews
of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in
their armored shells after the day's fight was over, whether their ships
had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or
temporarily foundered in shell-holes. Bullets had merely made
steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and shrapnel had equally failed
to penetrate the armor.
Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's powers is that it "eats"
trees--that is to say, it can cut its way through a wood--and that it
can knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it cannot masticate
timber. All that it accomplishes must be done by ramming or by lifting
up its weight to crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall yields
before its mass.
As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High Wood, where the Germans
had held to the upper corner with their nests of machine guns which the
preliminary bombardment of British artillery had not silenced and they
began their murderous song immediately the British charge started. They
commanded the front and the flanks if the men continued to advance and
therefore might make a break in the whole movement, which was precisely
the object of the desperate resistance that had preserved this strong
point at any cost against the rushes of British bombers, trench mortars
and artillery shells for two months.
Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impossible. Nobody who is
sane will leap into a furnace with a cup of water to put out the fire.
Only a battalion commander who is a fool will refuse, in face of
concentrated machine gun fire, to stop the charge.
"Leave it to me!" was the unspoken message communicated to the infantry
by the sight of that careening, dipping, clambering, steel body as it
rumbled toward the miniature fortress. And the infantry, as it saw the
tank's machine guns blazing, left it to the tank, and, working its way
to the right, kept in touch with the general line of attack, confident
that no enemy would be left behind to fire into their backs. Thus, a
handful of men capable, with their bullet sprays, of holding up a
thousand men found the tables turned on them by another handful manning
a tank. They were simply "done in," as the tank officer put it. Safe
behind his armor, he had them no less at his mercy than a submarine has
a merchant ship. Even if unarmed, a tank could take care of an isolated
machine gun position by sitting on it.
One of the most famous tanks was Crème de Menthe. She had a good press
agent and also made good. She seemed to like sugar. At least, her
glorious exploit was in a sugar factory, a huge building of brick with a
tall brick chimney which had been brought down by shell fire. Underneath
the whole were immense dugouts still intact where German machine gunners
lay low, like Br'er Rabbit, as usual, while the shells of the artillery
preparation were falling, and came out to turn on the bullet spray as
the British infantry approached. British do the same against German
attacks; only in the battle of the Somme the British had been always
attacking, always taking machine gun positions.
Crème de Menthe, chosen comrade of the Canadians on their way to the
taking of Courcelette, was also at home among débris. The Canadians saw
that she was as she moved toward it with the glee of a sea lion toward a
school of fish. She did not go dodging warily, peering around corners
with a view to seeing the enemy before she was seen. Whatever else a
tank is, it is not a crafty boy scout. It is brazenly and nonchalantly
public in its methods, like a steam roller coming down the street into a
parade without regard to the rules of the road. Externally it is not
temperamental. It does not bother to follow the driveway or mind the
"Keep Off the Grass" sign when it goes up to the entrance of a dugout.
And Crème de Menthe took the sugar factory and a lot of prisoners. "Why
not?" as one of the Canadians said. "Who wouldn't surrender when a beast
of that kind came up to the door? It was enough to make a man who had
drunk only light Munich beer wonder if he had 'got 'em!'"
Prisoners were a good deal of bother to the tanks. Perhaps future tanks
will be provided with pockets for carrying prisoners. But the future of
tanks is wrapped in mystery at the present.
This is not taking them seriously, you may say. In that case, I am only
reflecting the feelings of the army. Even if the tanks had taken Bapaume
or gone to the Kaiser's headquarters, the army would have laughed at
them. It was the Germans who took the tanks seriously; and the more
seriously the Germans took the tanks the more the British laughed.
"Of all the double-dyed, ridiculous things, was the way that Crème de
Menthe person took the sugar factory!" said a Canadian, who broke into a
roar at the recollection of the monster's antics. "Good old girl, Crème
de Menthe! Ought to retire her for life and let her sit up on her
haunches in a café and sip her favorite tipple out of barrel with a
garden hose for a straw--which would be about her size."
However, there was a variation of opinions among soldiers about tanks
drawn from personal experience, when life and death form opinions, of
the way it had acted as an auxiliary to their part of the line. A tank
that conquered machine-gun positions and enfiladed trenches was an
heroic comrade surrounded by a saga of glorious anecdotes. One which
became stalled and failed in its enterprise called for satirical comment
which was applied to all.
We did not personify machine guns, or those monstrous, gloomy, big
howitzers with their gaping maws, or other weapons; but every man in the
army personified the tanks. Two or three tanks, I should have remarked,
did start for Berlin, without waiting for the infantry. The temptation
was strong. All they had to do was to keep on moving. When Germans
scuttling for cover were the only thing that the skippers could see,
they realized that they were in the wrong pew, or, in strictly military
language, that they had got beyond their "tactical objective."
Having left most of their ammunition where they thought that it would do
the most good in the German lines, these wanderers hitched themselves
around and waddled back to their own people. For a tank is an auxiliary,
not an army, or an army staff, or a curtain of fire, and must coöperate
with the infantry or it may be in the enemy's lines to stay. There was
one tank which found itself out of gasoline and surrounded by Germans.
It could move neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned on a
hostile shore, it would have to yield when the crew ran out of food.
The Germans charged the beast, and got under its guns, pounded at the
door, tried to bomb and pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the
top looking for dents in the armor with the rage of hornets, but in
vain. They could not harm the crew inside and the crew could not harm
them.
"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper.
Tactical objective be--British soldiers went to the rescue of their
tank. Secure inside their shell, the commander and crew awaited the
result of the fight. After the Germans were driven away, someone went
for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast the breath of life to
retreat to its "correct tactical position."
Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have
regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way
of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to
draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own
power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the
landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian
helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of
German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole
which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint
melting into the earth, are hard to locate.
Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary roads and traveled
routes, the tanks' slatey backs seemed like prehistoric turtles whose
natural habitat is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in the
business of modern war, symbolic of its satire and the old strife
between projectile and armor, offensive and defensive. If two tanks were
to meet in a duel, would they try to ram each other after ineffectually
rapping each other with their machine guns?
"I hope that it knows where it is going!" exclaimed a brigadier-general,
as he watched one approach his dugout across an abandoned trench,
leaning over a little as it dipped into the edge of a shell-crater some
fifteen feet in diameter with its sureness of footing on a rainy day
when a pedestrian slipped at every step.
There was no indication of any guiding human intelligence, let alone
human hand, directing it; and, so far as one could tell, it might have
mistaken the general's underground quarters for a storage station where
it could assuage its thirst for gasoline or a blacksmith's shop where it
could have a bent steel claw straightened. When, finally, it stopped at
his threshold, the general expressed his relief that it had not tried to
come down the steps. A door like that of a battleship turret opened, and
out of the cramped interior where space for crew and machinery is so
nicely calculated came the skipper, who saluted and reported that his
ship awaited orders for the next cruise.
Soon the sight of tanks became part of the routine of existence, and
interest in watching an advance centered on the infantry which they
supported in a charge; for only by its action could you judge whether or
not machine gun fire had developed and, later, whether or not the tanks
were silencing it. The human element was still supreme, its movement and
its losses in life the criterion of success and failure, with an eternal
thrill that no machine can arouse. If the tanks had accomplished nothing
more than they did in the two great September attacks they would have
been well worth while. I think that they saved twenty-five thousand
casualties, which would have been the additional cost of gaining the
ground won by unassisted infantry action. When machines manned by a few
men can take the place of many battalions in this fashion they exemplify
the essential principle of doing the enemy a maximum of damage with a
minimum to your own forces.
XXVIII
CANADA IS QUICK
Canada's first offensive--The "surprise party"--Over nasty
ground--Canada's hour--Germans amazed--Business of the Canadians to
"get there"--Two difficult villages--Canadians make new
rules--Canada's green soldiers accomplish an unheard of
feat--Attacking on their nerve--The last burst--Fewer Canadians than
Germans, but--"Mopping up"--Rounding up the captives--An aristocratic
German and a democratic Canadian--French-Canadians--Thirteen
counter-attacks beaten--Quickness and adaptability--Canada's soldiers
make good.
The tanks having received their theatric due, we come to other results
of Sept. 14th when the resistance of the right was stiff and Canada had
her turn of fortune in sharing in the brilliant success on the left.
It was the Canadians' first offensive. They knew that the eyes of the
army were upon them. Not only for themselves, after parrying blows
throughout their experience at the front, but in the name of other
battalions that had endured the remorseless grind of the Ypres salient
they were to strike the blows of retribution. The answer as to how they
would charge was written in faces clear-cut by the same climate that
gave them their nervous alertness.
On that ugly part of the Ridge where no stable trench could be made
under the vengeful German artillery fire and small numbers were shrewdly
distributed in shell-craters and such small ditches as could be
maintained, they crept out in the darkness a few days before the attack
to "take over" from the Australians and familiarize themselves with this
tempest-torn farming land which still heaved under tornadoes of shells.
The men from the faraway island continent had provided the jumping-off
place and the men from this side of the Pacific and the equator were to
do the jumping, which meant a kind of overseas monopoly of Pozières
Ridge.
The Germans still hated the idea of yielding all the crest that stared
down on them and hid the slope beyond which had once been theirs. They
would try again to recover some of it, but chose a time for their effort
which was proof enough that they did not know that a general attack was
coming. Just before dawn, with zero at dawn, when the Canadians were
forming on the reverse slope for their charge, the Germans laden with
bombs made theirs and secured a footing in the thin front line among the
shell-craters and, grim shadows in the night lighted by bursts of bombs
and shells, struggled as they have on many similar occasions.
Then came the "surprise party." Not far away the Canadian charge waited
on the tick of the second which was to release the six-mile line of
infantry and the tanks.
"We were certainly keyed up," as one of the men said. "It was up to us
all right, now."
Breasting the tape in their readiness for the word, the dry air of North
America with its champagne exhilaration was in their lungs whipping
their red corpuscles. They had but one thought and that was to "get
there." No smooth drill-ground for that charge, but earth broken with
shell-craters as thick as holes in a pepper-box cover! A man might
stumble into one, but he must get up and go on. One fellow who twisted
his ankle found it swollen out of all shape when the charge was over. If
he had given it such a turn at home he would not have attempted to move
but would have called for a cab or assistance. Under the spell of action
he did not even know that he was hurt.
It was Canada's hour; all the months of drill at home, all the dreams on
board the transport of charges to come, all the dull monotony of
billets, all the slimy vigil of trenches, all the labor of preparation
come to a head for every individual. Such was the impulse of the tidal
wave which broke over the crest upon the astounded Germans who had
gained a footing in the trench, engulfing them in as dramatic an
episode as ever occurred on the Somme front.
"Give yourselves up and be quick about it! We've business elsewhere!"
said the officers.
Yes, they had business with the German first-line trench when the
artillery curtain lifted, where few Germans were found, most of them
having been in the charge. The survivors here put up their hands before
they put up their heads from shelter and soon were on their way back to
the rear in the company of the others.
"I guess we had the first batch of prisoners to reach an inclosure on
the morning of the 14th," said one Canadian. "We had a start with some
coming into our own front line to be captured."
On the left Mouquet Farm, which, with its unsurpassed dugouts and
warrens surrounded by isolated machine gun posts, had repulsed previous
attacks, could not resist the determined onslaught which will share
glory, when history is written, with the storming of Courcelette. Down
hill beside the Bapaume Road swept the right and center, with
shell-craters still thick but growing fewer as the wave came out into
open fields in face of the ruins of the sugar factory, with the tank
Crème de Menthe ready to do her part. She did not take care of all the
machine guns; the infantry attended to at least one, I know. The German
artillery turned on curtains of fire, but in one case the Canadians
were not there when the curtain was laid to bar their path. They had
been too rapid for the Germans. No matter what obstacle the Germans put
in the way the business of the Canadians was to "get there"--and they
"got there." The line marked on their map from the Bapaume Road to the
east of the sugar factory as their objective was theirs. In front of
them was the village of Courcelette and in front of the British line
linked up on their right was Martinpuich.
Spades now! Dig as hard as you have charged in order to hold the freshly
won position, with "there" become "here" and the Ridge at your backs!
The London song of "The Byng Boys are Here," which gave the name of the
Byng Boys to the Canadians after General Byng took command of their
corps, had a most realistic application.
With the news from the right of the six-mile front that of a continuing
fierce struggle, word from the left had the definite note of success.
Was General Byng pleased with his Byng Boys? Was his superior, the army
commander, pleased with the Canadians? They had done the trick and this
is the thing that counts on such occasions; but when you take trenches
and fields, however great the gain of ground, they lack the concrete
symbol of victory which a village possesses.