demolished by shell fire and in nowise properly softened according to
the usual requirements for capitulation, with their cellars doubtless
heavily reinforced as dugouts. Officers studying the villages through
their glasses believed that they could be taken. Why not try? To try
required nerve, when it was against all tactical experience to rush on
to a new objective over such a broad front without taking time for
elaborate artillery preparation. General Byng, who believed in his men
and understood their initiative, their "get there" quality, was ready to
advance and so was the corps commander of the British in front of
Martinpuich. Sir Douglas Haig gave consent.
"Up and at them!" then, with fresh battalions hurried up so rapidly that
they had hardly time to deploy, but answering the order for action with
the spirit of men who have been stalled in trenches and liked the new
experience of stretching their legs. With a taste of victory, nothing
could stop these highstrung reserves, except the things that kill and
wound. The first charge had succeeded and the second must succeed.
German guns had done the customary thing by laying barrages back of the
new line across the field and shelling the crest of the Ridge to prevent
supports from coming up. It was quite correct form for the German
commander to consider the ceremony of the day over. The enemy had taken
his objective. Of course, he would not try for another immediately.
Meanwhile, his tenure of new line must be made as costly as possible.
But this time the enemy did not act according to rules. He made some new
ones.
The reserve battalions which were to undertake the storming of the
village had gone over the ground under the barrages and were up to the
first objective, and when through the new line occupied by the men who
made the first charge they could begin their own charge. As barrages are
intermittent, one commander had his men lie down behind one until it had
ceased. Again, after waiting on another for a while he decided that he
might be late in keeping his engagement in Courcelette and gave the
order to go through, which, as one soldier said, "we did in a
hundred-yard dash sprinting a double quick--good reason why!" When the
fresh wave passed the fellows in the new line the winners of the first
objective called, "Go to it!" "You'll do it!" "Hurrah for Canada!" and
added touches of characteristic dry humor which shell fire makes a
little drier, such as a request to engage seats for the theatre at
Courcelette that evening.
Consider that these battalions which were to take Courcelette had to
march about two miles under shell fire, part of the way over ground
that was spongy earth cut by shell-craters, before they could begin
their charge and that they were undertaking an innovation in tactics,
and you have only half an understanding of their task. Their officers
were men out of civil life in every kind of occupation, learning their
war in the Ypres salient stalemate, and now they were to have the
severest possible test in directing their units in an advance.
There had been no time to lay out pattern plans for each company's
course in this second rush according to map details, which is so
important against modern defenses. The officers did not know where
machine guns were hidden; they were uncertain of the strength of the
enemy who had had all day to prepare for the onslaught on his bastions
in the village. It was pitched battle conditions against set defenses.
Under curtains of fire, with the concentration heavy at one point and
weak at another, with machine gun or sniping fire developing in some
areas, with the smoke and the noise, with trenches to cross, the
business of keeping a wave of men in line of attack for a long
distance--difficult enough in a manoeuver--was possible only when the
initiative and an understanding of the necessities of the situation
exist in the soldiers themselves. If one part of the line was not up, if
a section was being buffeted by salvos of shells, the officers had to
meet the emergency; and officers as well as men were falling, companies
being left with a single officer or with only a "non-com" in charge.
Unless a man was down he knew that his business was to "get there" and
his direction was straight ahead in line with the men on his right and
left.
With dead and wounded scattered over the field behind them, all who
could stand on their feet, including officers and men knocked over and
buried by shells and with wounds of arms and heads and even legs which
made them hobble, reached the edge of the village on time and lay down
to await the lifting of the fire of their own guns before the final
rush.
After charging such a distance and paying the toll of casualties exacted
they enjoyed a breathing space, a few minutes in which to steady their
thoughts for the big thing before, "lean for the hunt," they sprang up
to be in for the fray with the burst of the last shells from their guns.
They knew what to do. It had been drilled into them; they had talked it
and dreamed it in billets when routine became humdrum, these men with
practical minds who understood the essentials of their task.
There were fewer Canadians charging through the streets than there were
Germans in the village at that moment. The Canadians did not know it,
but if they had it would have made no difference, such was their spirit.
Secure in their dugouts from bombardment, the first that the Germans, in
their systematized confidence that the enemy would not try for a second
objective that day, knew of the presence of the Canadians was when the
attackers were at the door and a St. Lawrence River incisiveness was
calling on the occupants to come out as they were prisoners--which
proves the advantage of being quick. The second wave was left to "mop
up" while the first wave passed on through the village to nail down the
prize by digging new trenches. Thus, they had their second objective,
though on the left of the line where the action had been against a part
of the old first-line system of trenches progress had been slow and
fighting bitter.
The Canadians who had to "mop up" had the "time of their lives" and some
ticklish moments. What a scene! Germans in clean uniforms coming out of
their dugouts blinking in surprise at their undoing and in disgust,
resentment and suppressed rage! Canadians, dust-covered from
shell-bursts, eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in the
midst of shouts of congratulation and directions to prisoners among the
ruins, and the German commander so angered by the loss of the village
that he began pouring in shells on Germans and Canadians at the same
time! Two colonels were among the captured, a regimental and a battalion
commander. The senior was a baron--one cannot leave him out of any
narrative--and inclined to bear himself with patrician contempt toward
the Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons in his situation
with every Canadian more or less of a king that day. When he tried to
start his men into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the result
that the uprising was nipped in the bud and the baron was shot through
the leg, leaving him still "fractious and patronizing." Then the little
colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you
in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the
point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself.
One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian. No
other Canadian battalion will deny them the glory that they won that
day, and it must have been irritating to the German baron to surrender
superior numbers to the stocky type that we see in New England factory
towns and on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the battalion,
the frontiersmen, the _courrier de bois_, having been mostly killed in
the salient. Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he
were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit
of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked
him how he felt after he received the clout from a shell-fragment,
remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache!
"You have the military cross!" I said.
"Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria Cross!" he replied, saluting.
Talk about "the spirit that quickeneth!"
Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how
he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line
beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen
counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point
establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of
wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naïve
unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding,
"'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the
French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had
taken hold of them as it had of the rest of Canada they would not have
been found wanting.
"'I golly!" they had to fight from the very fact that there were only a
few to strike for old France and for the martial honor of Quebec. And
they held all they took as sturdily as the other Canadian battalion in
front of the village when the Germans awakened to revenge for the loss
of Courcelette.
From start to finish of that great day it had been quickness that
counted; quickness to realize opportunities; alertness of individual
action in "mopping up" after the village was taken; prompt adaptability
to situations which is the gift of the men of a new country; and that
individual confidence of the Canadian once he was not tied to a trench
and might let his initiative have full play, man to man, which is not a
thing of drill or training but of inheritance and environment. On the
right, Martinpuich was taken by the British and also held.
It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on
the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian
charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when
I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another;
wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor,
tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole
business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after
the war had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, mud-spattered,
but in the joy of having made good when their turn came, and in a way
that was an exemplification of Canadian character in every detail. "Heap
good!" I suppose that big Sioux Indian, looking as natural seated in a
trench in his imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his
tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange business, but high
explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling
in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion.
With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell,
and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly
experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of the
_Fleur-de-lis_. Officers and men of every walk of life called to a new
occupation, a democracy out of the west submitting to discipline had
been inured and trained to a new life of risk and comradeship and
sacrifice for a cause. It will seem strange to be out of khaki and to go
to the office, or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn;
"but," as one man said, "we'll manage to adapt ourselves to it without
spending nights in a mud hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs
over the fence in order to make the change gradual."
XXIX
THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES
High and low visibilities--Low Visibility a pro-German--High
Visibility and his harvest smile--Thirty villages taken by the
British--The 25th of September--The Road of the Entente--Twelve miles
of artillery fire--Two villages taken--Combles--British and French
meet in a captured village--English stubbornness--Dugouts holding a
thousand men--Capture of Thiepval.
Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought
of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and
the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see
which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the "zero" of an
attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun
gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave
those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.
Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his element in the Ypres salient
in midwinter, delighted in rain, mist, fog and thick summer
haze--anything that prevented observers from seeing the burst of shells,
transformed shell-craters into miniature lakes and fields into mire to
founder charges, and stalled guns.
High Visibility was as merry as his wicked brother was dour. He sent the
sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of
particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at long range, and
favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire--the patron
saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona
where you could carry on an offensive the year around.
During September his was a glad harvest smile which revealed figures on
the chalk welts a mile away as clearly as if within a stone's throw
under the glasses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined villages in sharp
outlines. He was your companion now when you might walk up the Ridge
and, standing among shell-craters still as a frozen sea where but lately
an inferno had raged, look out across the fields toward new lines of
shell fire and newly won villages on lower levels. He helped to make the
month of September when he was most needed the most successful month of
the offensive, with its second great attack on the 25th turning the
table of losses entirely against the Germans and bringing many guests to
the prisoners' inclosures.
These were days that were rich with results, days of harvest, indeed,
when the ceaseless fighting on the Ridge and the iron resolution of a
commander had its reward; when advances gathered in villages till the
British had taken thirty and the French, with fresh efforts after their
own chipping away at strong points, also had jumping-off places for
longer drives as they swung in with their right on the Somme in
combination with British attacks.
The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. The scene recalled the
splendor of the storming of Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and
horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory of the
panorama--glorious to the observer in this instance when he thought only
of the spectacle, in a moment of oblivion to the hard work of
preparation and the savage work of execution. Our route to a point of
observation for the attack which was at midday took us along the Road of
the Entente, as I called it, where French battalions marched with
British battalions, stately British motor trucks mixed with the lighter
French vehicles, and Gaul sat resting on one side of the road and Briton
on the other as German prisoners went by, and there was a mingling of
blue and khaki which are both of low visibility against the landscape
yet as distinct as the characters of the two races, each with its own
way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplishing its purpose.
Just under the slope where we sat the British guns linked up with the
French. To the northward the British were visible right away past Ginchy
and Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the Somme. We were
almost midway of a twelve-mile stretch of row upon row of flashes of
many calibers, the French more distinct at the foot of a slope
fearlessly in the open like the British, a long machine-loom of gunnery
with some monsters far back sending up great clouds of black smoke from
Mt. St. Quentin which hid our view of Péronne.
Now it was all together for the guns in the preliminary whirlwind, with
_soixante-quinzes_ ahead sparkling up and down like the flashes of an
automatic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat of sound in the
valley, and the 120's near by doing their best, too, with their wicked
crashes, while the ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming,
curling smoke. The units of the two armies might have been wired to a
single switchboard with heartbeats under blue and khaki jackets timed
together in the final expression of _entente cordiale_ become _entente
furieuse_.
The sunlight had the golden kindness of September and good Brother High
Visibility seemed to make it a personal matter to-day against the
Kaiser. Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was
the gleam of the empty shells dropping out of the breach of the
_soixante-quinze_ as the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded
shells going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail
of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were
sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds,
which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a
few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war's
landmarks.
The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the
eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for
want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master
hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of
crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical
precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German
artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with
guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to the French.
They did not like that stretch of five hundred yards behind a slope
where they thought that the most troublesome batteries were, and the
puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the flashes from the bursting
jackets until a wall of mist hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines
was tearing up fresh craters with high explosives back of other gun
positions, and between the columns of smoke we saw the French gunners
going on unconcerned by this plowing of the landscape which was not
disturbing them.
Far off on the plain where a British ammunition train was visible the
German loosed more anger, whipping the fields into geysers; but the
caissons moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for the next
station without the Germans being aware that their target was gone. A
British battery advancing at another point evidently was not in view of
the Germans two thousand yards away, though good Brother High Visibility
gave our glasses the outline of the horses at five thousand yards.
Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were shooting at, with
suspense at one point and at another the joy of the observer who sees
the one who is "it" in blind man's buff missing his quarry. Some
shrapnel searching a road in front and a scream overhead indicated a
parcel of high explosives for a village at the rear. In Morval where
houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the
glasses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a shell but
prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant
that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned
afterward.
Reserves were filing along a road between the tiers of guns, helmets on
the backs of heads French fashion when there is no fire, with the easy
marching stride of the French and figures disappeared and reappeared on
the slope as they advanced. Wounded were coming along the winding gray
streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy of prisoners passed led
by a French guard whose attitude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of "See
who's here and see what I've got!" Not far away was a French private at
a telephone.
"It goes well!" he said. "Rancourt is taken and we are advancing on
Frégicourt. Combles is a ripe plum."
All the while Combles had been an oasis in the shell fire, the one place
that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the
imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English.
They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its
fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position
which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would
become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the
conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no
responsive thrill.
Combles was a village and a large village, its size perhaps accounting
for the importance associated with it when it had almost none in a
military sense. Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast
table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the
Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no
meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged
and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches. This town
nestling in a bowl was not worth the expenditure of much ammunition when
what the Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French troops to gain was
the hills around it. Rancourt was the other side of Combles, which
explains the plum simile.
The picturesque thing was that the British troops were working up on one
side of Combles and the French on the other side; and the next morning
after the British had gathered in some escaping Germans who seemed to
have lost their way, the blue and the khaki met in the main street
without indulging in formal ceremonies and exchanged a "Good morning!"
and "_Bon jour!_" and "Here we are! Voyla! Quee pawnsays-vous!" and "Ça
va bien! Oh, yais, I tink so!" and found big piles of shells and other
munitions which the Germans could not take away and cellars with many
wounded who had been brought in from the hills--and that was all there
was to it: a march in and look around, when for glory's sake, at least,
the victors ought to have delivered congratulatory addresses. But tired
soldiers will not do that sort of thing. I shall not say that they are
spoiling pictures for the Salon, for there are incidents enough to keep
painters going for a thousand years; which ought to be one reason for
not having a war for another thousand!
As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate of the correspondents
this time--they really were not conducting the war for us--did not
inform us of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages and
trenches after they were over the Ridge while High Visibility had Low
Visibility shut up in the guardhouse. Besides, the British were so near
Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances that its taking was
only another step forward, one of savage fighting, however, in the same
kind of operations that I have described in the chapter on "Watching a
Charge." The débris beaten into dust had been so scattered that one
could not tell where the village began or ended, but the smudge was a
symbol to the army no less than to the British public--a symbol of the
boasted impregnability of the first-line German fortifications which had
resisted the attack of July 1st--and its capture a reward of English
stubbornness appealing to the race which is not unconscious of the
characteristic that has carried its tongue and dominion over the world.
Point was given, too, by the enormous dugouts, surpassing previous
exhibits, capable of holding a garrison of a thousand men and a hospital
which, under the bursts of huge shells of the months of British
bombardment, had been safe under ground. The hospital was equipped with
excellent medical apparatus as well as anæsthetics manufactured in
Germany, of which the British were somewhat short. The German battalion
that held the place had been associated with the work of preparing its
defenses and were practically either all taken prisoner or killed, so
far as could be learned. They had sworn that they would never lose
Thiepval; but the deeper the dugouts the farther upstairs men inside
have to climb in order to get to the door before the enemy, who arrives
at the threshold as the whirlwind barrage lifts.