July heat became August heat as the grinding proceeded. The gunners
worked in their shirts or stripped to the waist. Sweat streaks mapped
the faces of the men who came out of the trenches. Stifling clouds of
dust hung over the roads, with the trucks phantom-like as they emerged
from the gritty mist and their drivers' eyes peered out of masks of
gray which clung to their faces. A fall of rain comes as a blessing
to Briton and German alike. German prisoners worn with exhaustion had
complexions the tint of their uniforms. If the British seemed weary
sometimes, one had only to see the prisoners to realize that the
defensive was suffering more than the offensive. The fatigue of some of
the men was of the kind that one week's sleep or a month's rest will
not cure; something fixed in their beings.
It was a new kind of fighting for the Germans. They smarted under it,
they who had been used to the upper hand. In the early stages of the
war their artillery had covered their well-ordered charges; they had
been killing the enemy with gunfire. Now the Allies were returning the
compliment; the shoe was on the other foot. A striking change, indeed,
from "On to Paris!" the old battle-cry of leaders who had now come to
urge these men to the utmost of endurance and sacrifice by telling them
that if they did not hold against the relentless hammering of British
and French guns what had been done to French villages would be done to
their own.
Prisoners spoke of peace as having been promised as close at hand by
their officers. In July the date had been set as Sept. 1st. Later, it
was set as Nov. 1st. The German was as a swimmer trying to reach shore,
in this case peace, with the assurance of those who urged him on that a
few more strokes would bring him there. Thus have armies been urged on
for years.
Those fighting did not have, as had the prisoners, their eyes opened
to the vast preparations behind the British lines to carry on the
offensive. Mostly the prisoners were amiable, peculiarly unlike the
proud men taken in the early days of the war when confidence in their
"system" as infallible was at its height. Yet there were exceptions. I
saw an officer marching at the head of the survivors of his battalion
along the road from Montauban one day with his head up, a cigar stuck
in the corner of his mouth at an aggressive angle, his unshaven chin
and dusty clothes heightening his attitude of "You go to ----, you
English!"
The hatred of the British was a strengthening factor in the defense.
Should they, the Prussians, be beaten by New Army men? No! Die first!
said Prussian officers. The German staff might be as good as ever, but
among the mixed troops--the old and the young, the hollow-chested and
the square-shouldered, mouth-breathers with spectacles and bent fathers
of families, vigorous boys in their late 'teens with the down still
on their cheeks and hardened veterans survivors of many battles east
and west--they were reverting appreciably to natural human tendencies
despite the iron discipline.
It was Skobeloff, if I recollect rightly, who said that out of every
hundred men twenty were natural fighters, sixty were average men who
would fight under impulse or when well led, and twenty were timid;
and armies were organized on the basis of the sixty average to make
them into a whole of even efficiency in action. The German staff had
supplied supreme finesse to this end. They had an army that was a
machine; yet its units were flesh and blood and the pounding of shell
fire and the dogged fighting on the Ridge must have an effect.
It became apparent through those two months of piece-meal advance that
the sixty average men were not as good as they had been. The twenty
"funk-sticks," in army phrase, were given to yielding themselves if
they were without an officer, but the twenty natural fighters--well,
human psychology does not change. They were the type that made the
professional armies of other days, the brigands, too, and also those of
every class of society to whom patriotic duty had become an exaltation
approaching fanaticism. More fighting made them fight harder.