_April 26th_, 1917.
DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,--Amid the rushing events of these days--America
rousing herself like an eagle "with eyes intentive to bedare the sun";
the steady and victorious advance along the whole front in France, which
day by day is changing the whole aspect of the war; the Balfour Mission;
the signs of deep distress in Germany--it is sometimes difficult to
throw oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago! History is
coming so fast off the loom! And yet six weeks ago I stood at the
pregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frost
and slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull was
over, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great things
were stirring.
Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already
reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre
during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our
efforts in the summer of 1916. That is to say, after three months of
trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to
have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and
darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had
moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November.
Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during
these three months strange things had been happening.
About the middle of November, after General Gough's brilliant strokes on
the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont
Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the _Frankfurter
Zeitung_ wrote--"For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are
over. Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their
countries here. They will not thereby achieve anything more." Yet when
this was written the German Higher Command was already well aware that
the battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would be
impossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against another
similar attack.
Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them a
respite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people. The
preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of
January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have
actually begun not many weeks after General Gough's last successes on
the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather,
before Grandcourt and Bapaume. So that in the latter half of February,
when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German line
yielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme,
it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what the
retreat meant.
Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing,
which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture of
that Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance,
from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette. If on the Somme the anvil
was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of
Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.
These things, however, were still hidden from all but the few, and in
the first days of March the Germans had not yet begun to retire in front
of the French line further south. The Somme advance was still the centre
of things, and Bapaume had not yet fallen. As we drove on towards Albert
we knew that we should be soon close behind our own guns, and within
range of the enemy's.
No one who has seen it in war-time will ever forget the market-place of
Albert--the colossal heaps of wreck that fill the centre of it; the new,
pretentious church, rising above the heaps, a brick-and-stucco building
of the worst neo-Catholic taste, which has been so gashed and torn and
broken, while still substantially intact, that all its mean and tawdry
ornament has disappeared in a certain strange dignity of ruin; and last,
the hanging Virgin, holding up the Babe above the devastation below, in
dumb protest to God and man. The gilded statue, which now hangs at right
angles to the tower, has, after its original collapse under shell-fire,
been fixed in this position by the French Engineers; and it is to be
hoped that when the church comes to be rebuilt the figure will be left
as it is. There is something extraordinarily significant and dramatic in
its present attitude. Whatever artistic defects the statue may have are
out of sight, and it seems as it hangs there, passionately hovering,
above the once busy centre of a prosperous town, to be the very symbol
and voice of France calling the world to witness.
A few more minutes, and we are through the town, moving slowly along the
Albert-Bapaume road, that famous road which will be a pilgrims' way for
generations to come.
"To other folk," writes an officer quoted by Mr. Buchan in his _Battle
of the Somme_, "and on the maps, one place seems just like another, I
suppose; but to us--La Boisselle and Ovillers--my hat!"
To walk about in those hells! I went along the "sunken road" all the way
to Contalmaison. Talk about sacred ground! The new troops coming up now
go barging across in the most light-hearted way. It means no more to
them than the roads behind used to mean to us. But when I think how we
watered every yard of it with blood and sweat! Children might play there
now, if it didn't look so like the aftermath of an earthquake. I have a
sort of feeling it ought to be marked off somehow, a permanent memorial.
The same emotion as that which speaks in this letter--so far, at least,
as it can be shared by those who had no part in the grim scene
itself--held us, the first women-pilgrims to tread these roads and
trampled slopes since the battle-storm of last autumn passed over them.
The sounds of an immortal host seemed to rush past us on the
air--mingled strangely with the memory of hot July days in an English
garden far away, when the news of the great advance came thundering in
hour by hour.
"The aftermath of an earthquake!" Do the words express the reality
before us as we move along the mile of road between Albert and La
Boisselle? Hardly. The earth-shudder that visits a volcanic district may
topple towns and villages into ruins in a few minutes. It does not tear
and grind and pound what it has overturned, through hour after hour,
till there is nothing left but mud and dust.
Not only all vegetation, but all the natural surface of the ground here
has gone; and the villages are churned into the soil, as though some
"hundred-handed Gyas" had been mixing and kneading them into a devil's
dough. There are no continuous shell-holes, as we had expected to see.
Those belong to the ground further up the ridge, where fourteen square
miles are so closely shell-pocked that one can hardly drive a stake
between the holes. But here on the way to La Boisselle and Contalmaison
there is just the raw tumbled earth, from which all the natural covering
of grass and trees and all the handiwork of man have been stripped and
torn and hammered away, so that it has become a great dark wound on the
countryside.
Suddenly we see gaping lines of old trenches rising on either side of
the road, the white chalk of the subsoil marking their course.
"British!" says the officer in front--who was himself in the battle.
Only a few steps further on, as it seems, we come to the remains of the
German front line, and the motor pauses while we try to get our
bearings. There to the south, on our right, and curving eastward, are
two trench lines perfectly clear still on the brown desolation, the
British and the enemy front lines. From that further line, at half-past
seven on the summer morning for ever blazoned in the annals of our
people, the British Army went over the parapet, to gather in the victory
prepared for it by the deadly strength and accuracy of British guns;
made possible in its turn by the labour in far-off England of millions
of workers--men and women--on the lathes and in the filling factories of
these islands.
We move on up the road. Now we are among what remains of the trenches
and dug-outs described in Sir Douglas Haig's despatch. "During nearly
two years' preparations the enemy had spared no pains to render these
defences impregnable," says the Commander-in-Chief; and he goes on to
describe the successive lines of deep trenches, the bomb-proof shelters,
and the wire entanglements with which the war correspondence of the
winter has made us at home--on paper--so familiar. "The numerous woods
and villages had been turned into veritable fortresses." The deep
cellars in the villages, the pits and quarries of a chalk country,
provided cover for machine guns and trench mortars. The dug-outs were
often two storeys deep, "and connected by passages as much as thirty
feet below the surface of the ground." Strong redoubts, mine-fields,
concrete gun emplacements--everything that the best brains of the German
Army could devise for our destruction--had been lavished on the German
lines. And behind the first line was a second--and behind the second
line a third. And now here we stand in the midst of what was once so
vast a system. What remains of it--and of all the workings of the German
mind that devised it? We leave the motor and go to look into the
dug-outs which line the road, out of which the dazed and dying Germans
flung themselves at the approach of our men after the bombardment, and
then Captain F. guides us a little further to a huge mine crater, and we
sink into the mud which surrounds it, while my eyes look out over what
once was Ovillers, northward towards Thiépval, and the slopes behind
which runs the valley of the Ancre; up and over this torn and naked
land, where the new armies of Great Britain, through five months of some
of the deadliest fighting known to history, fought their way yard by
yard, ridge after ridge, mile after mile, caring nothing for pain,
mutilation and death so that England and the cause of the Allies
might live.
"_There were no stragglers, none_!" Let us never forget that cry of
exultant amazement wrung from the lips of an eye-witness, who saw the
young untried troops go over the parapet in the July dawn and disappear
into the hell beyond. And there in the packed graveyards that dot these
slopes lie thousands of them in immortal sleep; and as the Greeks in
after days knew no nobler oath than that which pledged a man by those
who fell at Marathon, so may the memory of those who fell here burn ever
in the heart of England, a stern and consecrating force.
"Life is but the pebble sunk,
Deeds the circle growing!"
And from the deeds done on this hillside, the suffering endured, the
life given up, the victory won, by every kind and type of man within the
British State--rich and poor, noble and simple, street-men from British
towns, country-men from British villages, men from Canadian prairies,
from Australian and New Zealand homesteads--one has a vision, as one
looks on into the future, of the impulse given here spreading out
through history, unquenched and imperishable. The fight is not over--the
victory is not yet--but on the Somme no English or French heart can
doubt the end.
The same thoughts follow one along the sunken road to Contalmaison.
Here, first, is the cemetery of La Boisselle, this heaped confusion of
sandbags, of broken and overturned crosses, of graves tossed into a
common ruin. And a little further are the ruins of Contalmaison, where
the 3rd Division of the Prussian Guards was broken and 700 of them taken
prisoners. Terrible are the memories of Contalmaison! Recall one letter
only!--the letter written by a German soldier the day before the attack:
"Nothing comes to us--no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our
approaches--it is horrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days
since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything
is shot to pieces." And from another letter: "Every one of us in these
five days has become years older--we hardly know ourselves."
It was among these intricate remains of trenches and dug-outs, round the
fragments of the old chateau, that such things happened. Here, and among
those ghastly fragments of shattered woods that one sees to south and
east--Mametz, Trônes, Delville, High Wood--human suffering and heroism,
human daring and human terror, on one side and on the other, reached
their height. For centuries after the battle of Marathon sounds of armed
men and horses were heard by night; and to pry upon that sacred
rendezvous of the souls of the slain was frowned on by the gods. Only
the man who passed through innocently and ignorantly, not knowing where
he was, could pass through safely. And here also, in days to come, those
who visit these spots in mere curiosity, as though they were any
ordinary sight, will visit them to their hurt.
* * * * *
So let the first thoughts run which are evolved by this brown and torn
devastation. But the tension naturally passes, and one comes back,
first, to the _victory_--to the results of all that hard and relentless
fighting, both for the British and the French forces, on this memorable
battlefield north and south of the Somme. Eighty thousand prisoners,
between five and six hundred guns of different calibres, and more than a
thousand machine guns, had fallen to the Allies in four months and a
half. Many square miles of French territory had been recovered.
Verdun--glorious Verdun--had been relieved. Italy and Russia had been
helped by the concentration of the bulk of the German forces on the
Western front. The enemy had lost at least half a million men; and the
Allied loss, though great, had been substantially less. Our new armies
had gloriously proved themselves, and the legend of German
invincibility was gone.
So much for the first-fruits. The _ultimate results_ are only now
beginning to appear in the steady retreat of German forces, unable to
stand another attack, on the same line, now that the protection of the
winter pause is over. "How far are we from our guns?" I ask the officer
beside me. And, as I speak, a flash to the north-east on the higher
ground towards Pozières lights up the grey distance. My companion
measures the hillside with his eyes. "About 1,000 yards." Their
objective now is a temporary German line in front of Bapaume. But we
shall be in Bapaume in a few days. And then?
_Death_--_Victory_--_Work_; these are the three leading impressions that
rise and take symbolic shape amid these scenes. Let me turn now to the
last. For anyone with the common share of heart and imagination, the
first thought here must be of the dead--the next, of swarming life. For
these slopes and roads and ruins are again alive with men. Thousands and
thousands of our soldiers are here, many of them going up to or coming
back from the line, while others are working--working--incessantly at
all that is meant by "advance" and "consolidation."
The transformation of a line of battle into an efficient "back of the
Army" requires, it seems, an amazing amount of human energy,
contrivance, and endurance. And what we see now is, of course, a second
or third stage. First of all there is the "clearing up" of the actual
battlefield. For this the work of the men now at work here--R.E.'s and
Labour battalions--is too skilled and too valuable. It is done by
fatigues and burying parties from the battalions in occupation of each
captured section. The dead are buried; the poor human fragments that
remain are covered with chlorate of lime; equipments of all kinds, the
litter of the battlefield, are brought back to the salvage dumps, there
to be sorted and sent back to the bases for repairs.
Then--or simultaneously--begins the work of the Engineers and the Labour
men. Enough ground has to be levelled and shell-holes filled up for the
driving through of new roads and railways, and the provision of places
where tents, huts, dumps, etc., are to stand. Roughly speaking, I see,
as I look round me, that a great deal of this work is here already far
advanced. There are hundreds of men, carts, and horses at work on the
roads, and everywhere one sees the signs of new railway lines, either of
the ordinary breadth, or of the narrow gauges needed for the advanced
carriage of food and ammunition. Here also is a great encampment of
Nissen huts; there fresh preparations for a food or an ammunition dump.
With one pair of eyes one can only see a fraction of what is in truth
going on. But the whole effect is one of vast and increasing industry,
of an intensity of determined effort, which thrills the mind hardly less
than the thought of the battle-line itself. "Yes, war _is_ work," writes
an officer who went through the Somme fighting, "much more than it is
fighting. This is one of the surprises that the New Army soldiers find
out here." Yet for the hope of the fighting moment men will go
cheerfully through any drudgery, in the long days before and after; and
when the fighting comes, will bear themselves to the wonder of
the world.
On we move, slowly, towards Fricourt, the shattered remnants of the
Mametz wood upon our left. More graveyards, carefully tended; spaces of
peace amid the universal movement. And always, on the southern horizon,
those clear lines of British trenches, whence sprang on July 1st, 1916,
the irresistible attack on Montauban and Mametz. Suddenly, over the
desolate ground to the west, we see a man hovering in mid-air,
descending on a parachute from a captive balloon that seems to have
suffered mishap. The small wavering object comes slowly down; we cannot
see the landing; but it is probably a safe one.
Then we are on the main Albert road again, and after some rapid miles I
find myself kindly welcomed by one of the most famous leaders of the
war. There, in a small room, which has surely seen work of the first
importance to our victories on the Somme, a great General discusses the
situation and the future with that same sober and reasoned confidence I
have found everywhere among the representatives of our Higher Command.
"Are we approaching victory? Yes; but it is too soon to use the great
word itself. Everything is going well; but the enemy is still very
strong. This year will decide it; but may not end it."
* * * * *
So far my recollections of March 3rd. But this is now April 26th, and
all the time that I have been writing these recollections, thought has
been leaping forward to the actual present--to the huge struggle now
pending between Arras and Rheims--to the news that comes crowding in,
day by day, of the American preparations in aid of the Allies--to all
that is at stake for us and for you. Your eyes are now turned like ours
to the battle-line in France. You triumph--and you suffer--with us!