THE HINDENBURG LINE.
(_August 27th to October 8th, 1918._)
We had become masters of our tanks. Faults had been traced and
eliminated; defective parts had been replaced--three tanks had received
complete new engines--and invaluable experience had been acquired not
only in the upkeep and repair of tanks, but in the art of extorting
"spares" from Field Stores, in preserving the necessary "stock" in
the Technical Quartermaster-Sergeant's stores, and in arranging for
the correct "part," even if it were an engine complete, to be rushed
forward by lorry to the invalid tank. I knew now that, if I ordered
a tank or a section of tanks to trek any reasonable distance within
a reasonable time, there was no need for me to wonder how many of my
tanks would reach their destination. This may seem a small thing, but
you must remember that five months before not half a dozen of my men
had had the slightest idea of a petrol-engine's insides.
So it mattered little that, when I received instructions to
entrain at Villers-Brettoneux, my tanks were scattered over the
countryside--Ryan's at Hamelet, Harland's and Westbrook's in the Cérisy
Valley, and Ritchie's survivors at Querrieu Wood. On the 26th, the
tanks trekked without incident to an orchard half a mile from the ramp,
camouflaged and, pushing in their sponsons, made ready to entrain,
while Mac, with an advance party, dashed away to Boisleux-au-Mont, our
destination.
On the 30th, after I had seen Harland and Westbrook entrained in great
style from a travelling ramp, I drove north to Boisleux, which lies
just half-way between our old friends, Wailly and Behagnies. There
I discovered Mac weary and wrathful after a tussle with a battalion
commander over some choice dug-outs which we coveted. We consoled
ourselves with a clean stretch of turf at the back of some old
trenches, against the parados of which we afterwards constructed shacks
and stores, and fortunately well away from the village.
At 1 A.M. on the 31st Westbrook's train pulled in to the ramp at
Boisleux. Read, Mac, and I had been waiting for it since 9 P.M. After
we had spent an hour or so in listening to German aeroplanes, admiring
the ineffective patterns which the searchlights made, and wondering
whether the ramp might not be bombed, we procured some chairs and dozed.
We were suddenly awakened by a hideous crash, the grinding of enormous
timbers and frightened shouts. We listened for the noise of the engine
and the hiss of the next bomb--until in the blackness of the night we
realised that it was only a tank train which a foolish engine-driver
had driven into the ramp....
At Boisleux we rested pleasantly after we had thoroughly overhauled
our tanks, fitted grids inside the sponsons to prevent the loads from
falling into the engines or the crew, and drilled a little. There were,
of course, minor diversions. On two or three nights the village was
bombed, but we, who were in the open, escaped. We did not escape so
easily from a storm which blew down the majority of our numerous tents.
There was much shouting for batmen that night.
I took the opportunity of indulging in a little Paris leave. On the
second night Paris was bombed. I was awakened by a discreet tap at the
door of my room. Sleepily I heard the calm voice of the unruffled Swede
who owned my favourite hotel in Montparnasse--
"It is an air-raid, and my clients gather below; but M. le Commandant,
who is accustomed to war's alarms, will doubtless prefer to continue
his sleep."
It was too absurd to be bombed when stretched comfortably in the
softest of beds with a private bathroom next door.... I thought that
I must be dreaming. Anyway, nothing on earth or above it could have
induced me to leave that bed.
My car met me at Amiens on September 25th. The driver told me that my
Company had moved forward to Manancourt, a village a few miles south
of Ytres, and was expecting shortly to take part in an attack. So with
the famous air from that sophisticated operetta, "La Petite Femme de
Loth," running in my head, I drove through Villers-Brettoneux and
Warfusée to Proyart, where I dropped an austere American Staff Officer,
who had come with me in the train from Paris, and thence over the Somme
through the outskirts of Peronne, to a tidy little camp on clean grass
by a small coppice half-way between Manancourt and Nurlu. I found the
Company making ready for action.
At Boisleux we had come under the orders of the 4th Tank Brigade, which
had suffered such heavy losses during the battle of Amiens, both in a
series of actions with the Canadians and later in the Happy Valley,
that it had been placed in reserve. The stern defence of Bullecourt
by the enemy, who held it as desperately in 1918 as they had in 1917,
nearly drew the Brigade from its rest; but at last even Bullecourt
fell, and the British Armies swept on to the suburbs of Cambrai and the
Hindenburg Line.
It was with the Hindenburg Line that the 4th Tank Brigade was concerned.
On the front of the 4th Army, with which our Brigade was now operating,
the Hindenburg Line, a series of defences 7,000 to 10,000 yards in
depth, was itself defended by the St Quentin Canal. For three and a
half miles, between Vendhuille and Bellicourt, the canal passes through
a tunnel, and this stretch it was determined to attack. But before the
main operation could take place, it was urgently necessary to capture
certain outlying points of vantage known as The Knoll and Quennemont
and Guillemont Farms. Already we had attempted unsuccessfully on three
occasions to carry them by storm. A final attempt was to be made by
the 108th American Infantry Regiment on September 27th, and one section
of Carrier tanks was ordered to assist. Ryan, who had been in command
of the company during my absence, had detailed his own section for the
job.
On the afternoon of the 25th, Ryan and I reported at the Headquarters
of the American Division concerned, the 27th. The American Staff was a
little flustered and confused, ... but we found to our gratification
that Australian Staff Officers were "nursing" the Americans--there were
a number of Australians with each American unit--and we soon obtained
the orders and the information which we required. The Australians
knew us and we knew the Australians: nothing could have been more
satisfactory. The Americans, on the other hand, had never heard of
Carrier tanks, although they appreciated in theory their use at once.
Ryan's tanks moved by easy stages to a copse three-quarters of a
mile from Villers-Faucon, where they were loaded on the 26th with
ammunition, wire, water, and sandbags. They were joined by unloading
parties of American infantry, eight men to each tank, bright young
fellows who had not previously been in action. I doubted whether they
would be of use: to follow a slow Carrier tank into action and to
unload it in sight of the enemy under heavy fire needs the coolness and
skill of veterans.
It was a little characteristic that, while the quartermaster who
brought the supplies to Ryan's tanks was more than eager to help and
almost embarrassed me with his explanations and suggestions, the
unloading parties gave us a sad fright by arriving at the last moment.
They had received no written orders, and, after wandering aimlessly
round the country "for some other tanks," came in at dusk dead-tired.
On the night before the battle the tanks moved up to points in the
rear of our posts, and thirty minutes after "zero" they followed the
fighting tanks and the infantry. The shelling was severe.
The first tank under Sergeant Broughton reached its objective, but,
as the unloading party had lost touch with it on the trek forward,
the crew were compelled themselves to unload the tank. Apparently the
attack had been checked, for Sergeant Broughton found that he was so
close to the enemy that he could see them firing. He completed the
dump, swinging the tank to give the men as much cover as possible
from machine-gun bullets, though without help it was painfully slow
work, and half his men were wounded. On the way back the tank struck a
land-mine, and it was set on fire. The survivors crawled back into camp
late in the afternoon.
The second tank, under Thomas,[35] became "ditched" in a huge crater a
few hundred yards from its objective. It was so heavy loaded that the
unditching beam could not be used, and such intense machine-gun fire
was directed at the tank that Thomas quite properly did not ask his
men to attempt to unload the roof. It would, in any case, have been
a laborious job, since the unloading party had missed the way. Three
attempts were made to extricate the tank from the crater into which
it had slipped, but each attempt failed. The German gunners were more
successful, for by dusk they had blown the tank into a fantastic tangle
of twisted wreckage.
The third tank struck a land-mine on the way forward. Two of the crew
were killed instantly, and a third man was severely wounded. Ryan, who
was walking beside the tank, was badly injured--his ankle was shattered
by the force of the explosion.
Read and I had tramped up to Ronssoy, a large industrial village in
which were the headquarters of the 108th Regiment. It was a damp steamy
day. The Americans were puzzled and disconsolate. Their infantry, led
gallantly by tanks of the 4th Battalion, had undoubtedly advanced,
but the reports were so conflicting that no one could say definitely
how the line ran. It appeared that the Americans had not "mopped up"
with any success, since there were parties of the enemy between the
Americans who had attacked and the posts which they had left at "zero."
In places the Germans seemed to be farther forward than they had
been before the attack commenced. Of the fighting tanks the majority
had received direct hits,[36] and the crews, mostly wounded, were
staggering back by twos and threes into Ronssoy. It was no wonder that
Sergeant Broughton had found himself under the very noses of the enemy.
With the main attack still to come, the situation could not have been
more unsatisfactory.
Even the headquarters of the 108th Regiment were to suffer. We had
noticed a little nervously that although a German observation balloon
was looking into Ronssoy, a crowd of orderlies and officers were
collected in the road outside the headquarters. The lesson was sharp.
Twenty minutes after we had left the village in an ammunition lorry a
salvo of 5.9's, entirely without warning, burst among the crowd.
Of the land-mines which had proved fatal to two of my tanks and to
several tanks of the 4th Battalion we had received information, but the
information was found to be inaccurate. Warning had reached us of a
British anti-tank minefield laid in March, and we had marked the mines
on our maps. The minefield, however, was in fact five hundred yards
from its supposed position, and its full extent was not discovered
until on the 29th ten American tanks endeavoured to pass across it and
were destroyed.
On the 28th it was clear enough that, although parties of American
infantry were out in front of their original line, The Knoll, together
with Quennemont and Guillemont Farms, remained in German hands. The
attack of the 108th Regiment was more than unsuccessful. If it had
never been launched the attack on the 29th might have taken place
at least under cover of a barrage; but now that scattered bodies of
Americans, surrounded by the enemy, were ahead, no barrage could be
employed.
While the survivors of Ryan's section, under the command of Thomas,
were salving what remained of their tank equipment, the three
remaining sections moved forward from Manancourt with the battalions
to which they had been allotted. Fortunately, my officers reconnoitred
their own routes, for two of the convoys with which they were trekking
temporarily lost their way.[37] My tanks were detailed once again to
carry supplies for the fighting tanks, a dull and thankless task.
Two hours after "zero," on the 29th, my car felt its way through
thick mist into Hargicourt, a dilapidated village a mile or so from
the "infantry start line." The Brigade had ordered that the Refilling
Point for tanks should be an open stretch of rough pasture on the
farther side of the village. The map reference of the point was
L5b4.1. It was intended that on the afternoon of the battle lorries
should bring supplies to the Refilling Point, that the loads should
there be transferred to my tanks, and that my tanks with a day's
supplies on board should follow the fighting tanks across the broken
desolate country of the Hindenburg system of trenches. I had decided in
consequence to make L5b4.1 my headquarters.
The enemy did not approve of this decision. As soon as the mist began
to clear Hargicourt itself was shelled methodically, while the proposed
Refilling Point, which was surrounded by a number of half-concealed
batteries, was the object of a bitter hate. A wireless tank, destined
for the same unhappy spot, had retired into the garden of a cottage,
and I accompanied the wireless tank. It belonged to my old battalion.
We heard all the news, and the driver knew how to make tea.
Soon it became clear that for once the battle was not proceeding in
accordance with plan. Obviously the enemy was still clinging to the
Quennemont Ridge, and the left flank of the attacking infantry was
uncovered. The direction from which the bulk of the shelling came could
not be mistaken. Hargicourt itself was being shelled with light stuff,
while, if we had reached our objectives to time, the village would by
now have been out of range.
The news was melancholy. The wounded, streaming back through the
village, told us that the enemy machine-guns were murderous; reports
from tank officers showed that an appalling number of tanks had
received "direct hits"; of the Americans nothing had been heard. From
our right, however, came the astounding rumour that the 46th Division
had achieved the impossible by forcing the passage of the canal and
capturing Bellenglise.
A gunner officer was being carried down the street of the village on
a stretcher. He was so badly wounded that his nerve was gone, and he
asked me piteously as he passed me whether he was now quite safe. I had
left him and was fifty yards or so away when a field-gun shell burst
close to the stretcher. For a moment the smoke enveloped the little
group. Then it blew away--the stretcher-bearers were standing quite
still. I hurried to them. Not one of them had been touched. Mercifully
the officer had lost consciousness. The stretcher-bearers just grinned,
gave their straps a hitch, and strode off down the street again.
Soon Ritchie, Harland, and Parslow reported to me that they had dumped
their loads and, seeing that the proposed refilling point was being
heavily shelled, had come to me for orders.
I instructed my sections-commanders to concentrate at certain points in
the rear of the village, and pushed forward along the Quennemont road
myself. In a few minutes I met Major Hotblack, the intelligence officer
at Tank Corps Headquarters. He had been wounded in the head. Later I
learned that he with two tanks had just captured Quennemont Ridge,
which for so long had defied us. And the tank crews had held the ridge
until they were relieved.
I obtained as much information as I could from the many walking
wounded--our attack on the left had been checked--and returning to my
headquarters, which were rapidly becoming distasteful to me, despatched
a report by wireless.
There was an element of humour in this delay to our advance. It was
so unexpected that many headquarters found themselves farther forward
than they had intended. Puzzled mess-sergeants, pushing on blindly to
villages which were still in the enemy's hands, were hurt and indignant
when they were warned to return. The neighbourhood of Hargicourt
was crowded with pathetic little camps, disconsolate staff-captains
and suspended headquarters. Personally I had no wish to remain even
in Hargicourt. The enemy had begun to use gas shells, and one heavy
howitzer at least made Hargicourt its target for a time. The Refilling
Point could not come into operation; the surviving tanks would find
plentiful supplies at the dumps which my section had already made. On
the other hand, two miles back, there were some excellent quarries at
Templeux-le-Guérard, where we could rest in safety and comfort until we
were wanted. You will remember that, as we were not "fighting troops,"
but merely a humble collection of "supply tanks," we could retire from
the fray without hurt to our self-respect.
I was fortunate enough to meet the General's car between Templeux and
Roisel. He approved of my suggestion. I returned rapidly to Hargicourt,
and withdrew my miserable headquarters to a grassy depression near the
quarries, where Harland's section had rallied. Mac went in search of
suitable dug-outs, while I listened to Harland's report.
Harland, like a good section commander, had given his men an excellent
breakfast before the day's work--fried bacon, hot toast, and tea,
followed by rum.[38] Each tank had been loaded at Manancourt Copse
with 240 gallons of petrol, 40 gallons of oil, 80 gallons of water, 40
lb. of grease, 20,000 rounds of Hotchkiss ammunition, and 400 rounds
of 6-pdr. ammunition. Thus heavily laden, they crawled on for three
hours, until they reached the appointed spot for unloading, immediately
behind our original line. They were noticed by an enemy aeroplane
flying low, and shelled heavily in consequence. Small dumps were
formed in shell-holes--the operation was completed with astonishing
celerity--and the tanks, running light, raced away. One man had been
gassed and one wounded.
Within the next two hours the German gunners destroyed half the
supplies which had been dumped, but they were not required, since the
majority of the American tanks, for whose benefit the dumps had been
formed, lay derelict on the minefield, which had blown up two of my
tanks on the 27th.
Ritchie's section had experienced no adventures. They had dumped their
supplies punctually, and rallied without hindrance from the enemy.
We retired at dusk to our dug-outs in the quarries above the village
of Templeux-le-Guérard.[39] These quarries penetrated confusedly
into a steep and isolated hill, upon which a stout castle might have
been built. The workings were approached by slippery paths. The hill
was a very maze of tunnels, ravines, pits, shelters, which provided
impenetrable cover for numerous guns and a brigade or more of infantry.
The enemy appreciated its qualities, and refused to waste shells upon
it. Their gunners confined themselves to the lower slopes and to the
level-crossing in Templeux itself.
The quarries were tenanted with wrathful Australians. It had been
planned that the Americans should storm the first trench-system
of the Hindenburg Line, and that the Australians, passing through
the Americans, should continue the attack by storming the second
trench-system. But when the Australians went forward an hour or so
after "zero," they discovered to their cost that in many places the
enemy infantry were sitting happily in the trenches which the Americans
had captured. Large numbers of Americans had disappeared. Not even our
aeroplanes could tell us what points they had reached, or how many had
survived. The result was that the Australians, with an unknown quantity
of Americans "out in front," did not dare to use their artillery. They
resigned themselves to the inevitable, and attacked the Hindenburg Line
grimly with bomb and bayonet. They hammered in little wedges of men,
and foot by foot, with savage cunning and merciless determination,
fought their way through the gigantic system of intricate defences,
often coming suddenly upon detached bodies of Americans, helplessly
surrounded, but still holding out.
It was indeed true that on our right the 46th Division, "equipped with
lifebelts, and carrying mats and rafts," by a gallant feat of arms had
crossed the St Quentin Canal and established themselves on the eastern
bank,--the right flank of the Australians was thus secured; but to my
mind even the feat of the 46th Division did not surpass the astonishing
exploits of the Australians, who took disaster by the throat and
choked victory out of it. For various reasons this phase of the battle
has been somewhat obscured.... By October 5th the Australians had
broken through the Hindenburg Line, and with the help of tanks stormed
Montbrehain. They had fought continuously since September 29th.
In these intermediate actions we took no part. After two nights in the
quarries I moved my company to Haute Wood, a stunted copse sheltering
a quiet grassy slope, a couple of miles out of Templeux, on the Roisel
road. There we remained placidly until October 7th in the multitudinous
tents which we had by this time collected, overhauling our tanks,
playing a little football, and visiting as frequently as our duties
permitted the strictly rationed canteen at Peronne. We were disturbed
only by an occasional shell from a long-range gun.
Once Montbrehain was stormed the enemy could cling only to the farther
fringes of the Hindenburg Line, and on October 8th we drove them out
of organised trenches altogether into the clean open country. My tanks
were again employed to follow the fighting tanks with supplies, but
on this occasion my sections were not allocated to battalions, but
remained under my own command, so that we were able to choose our own
times and places, and by "pooling" supplies to effect very necessary
economies.
On the 5th I had reconnoitred with Mac and my section commander a route
forward from Haute Wood to the vicinity of Bellicourt. It was a dismal
tramp over ground shelled to utter destruction--a maze of crumbling
trenches and forgotten posts, strewn with derelict equipment, deserted
dumps of ammunition, dead stinking horses, and too often the corpses of
unburied Germans. Here and there ran light railways, which we did not
desire to damage in case they should be needed; and near Bellicourt was
a wilderness of sidings and stores and huts and roadways.
From the high ground above Bellicourt we looked across the log-road to
Quennemont Ridge--outwardly a peaceful dark-green down, but in fact a
loathsome graveyard on which the corpses lay scattered in handfuls, and
blackened metal tombs that had been tanks. The distant gunners were
still tormenting this hill, which was already dead, and shells, lazily
exploding, stirred again the loose mud, rotting bodies, and rusted
rifles.
The log-road over the trenches, narrow and insecure, was crammed with
thick traffic moving at less than walking pace, for it was the only
road from Hargicourt to Bellicourt. It might have been a bridge over a
river impassable to all transport except tanks.
To the south were low dark ridges stretching to St Quentin. They were
fringed with bursting shells. And in front of us was Bellicourt,
tattered, but with red-brick cheerful in a gleam of sun--not utterly
submerged by war, and with but a faint spirit of the place hovering
above the levelled ruins, as were those ravished places which had known
war for year after year. Bellicourt, shattered but undismayed, still
lived to point gallantly to the tracks of the retiring enemy and the
goal for which we had always fought--open country.
On the 6th my tanks moved into the trenches, spending the night near
Hargicourt, and on the night of the 7th trekked down a valley, less
destroyed than others, to Bellicourt, and over the tunnel canal and
the main St Quentin road. The sections pitched their tents by some
trenches. I had advanced my headquarters meanwhile to a clean stretch
of turf by the St Quentin road, just outside Bellicourt, leaving at
Haute Wood my stores and heavy baggage, which I had been able only
within the last few days to bring forward from the copse at Manancourt.
Lorries were none too plentiful, and I had collected a great quantity
of stores in case I should find myself out of touch with the sources of
supply.
The night was noisy, but no damage was done, and the morning was
splendidly fine. My sections had moved soon after dawn. I followed
later in my car.
We drove along the canal to Bellenglise, then, bearing to the left,
took to the old Roman Road, along which the 5th and 3rd Divisions,
defeated, broken, and more weary than I could describe, poured
confusedly through the rain on the night of August 26th, 1914. We
passed by the strange cottage, still unharmed, where we despatch-riders
had given stew and hot coffee to the bedraggled Staff and had slept
amongst the straw, and came to Harland's tanks a mile or so short
of Estrées, waiting dully to supply the tanks of the 301st American
Battalion. So we arrived at the dismal dilapidated village itself,
momentarily empty except for innumerable notices in German and a
derelict whippet tank standing in the little square in which our Signal
Company had rallied four years since. We slipped into a byroad, left
the car, and walked across country to a half-grown copse under the
shadow of Beaurevoir. There we found Ritchie's four tanks with that
excellent Mac of the 1st Battalion, who had helped us to detrain at
Achiet-le-Grand. While we were consuming tea and sandwiches with
them, it was reported that certain tanks had run short of petrol near
Serain, the first of the redeemed villages. I sent two of Ritchie's
tanks forward to help.... Ritchie's tanks duly arrived at Serain, where
they were overwhelmed by the embraces of the pale hysterical villagers.
Both Ritchie's and Harland's tanks trekked back that afternoon to
Bellicourt. Two of Harland's tanks passed through a valley crammed with
a brigade of cavalry, who at the eleventh hour of the war were hoping
for an old-fashioned, sabre-waving pursuit. It was a little ludicrous
to think that my old supply-tanks could have put to flight the brigade
in the valley. As it was, they merely gave the horses a severe fright.
We completed our round, gathering the news and calling at various
necessary headquarters. Finally we returned in gentlemanly fashion for
lunch....
That night we began to realise the unbelievable--there was not a trench
between us and Germany. And yet this thing, for which we had been
yearning four long years, had come about in the ordinary course of the
day's work. That gay, splendid break-through of our imaginations was in
fact but the successful completion of a day's fighting disappointingly
like any other day's fighting. We could just repeat the words again
and again, doubting their truth, yet rejoicing soberly in their
significance--
"We are through to the open country!"