" ... _a violent counter-attack was delivered but was successfully
repulsed at every point with heavy losses to the enemy_."--EXTRACT FROM
OFFICIAL DESPATCH.
There appears to be some doubt as to who rightly claims to have been
the first to notice and report signs of the massing of heavy forces of
Germans for the counter-attack on our positions. The infantry say that
a scouting patrol fumbling about in the darkness in front of the
forward fire trench heard suspicious sounds--little clickings of
equipment and accouterments, stealthy rustlings, distant tramping--and
reported on their return to the trench. An artillery observing officer
is said to have seen flitting shadows of figures in the gray light of
the dawn mists, and, later, an odd glimpse of cautious movement amongst
the trees of a wood some little distance behind the German lines, and
an unbroken passing of gray-covered heads behind a portion of a
communication trench parapet. He also reported, and he may have been
responsible for the dozen or so of shrapnel that were flung tentatively
into and over the wood. An airman droning high over the lines, with
fleecy white puffs of shrapnel smoke breaking about him, also saw and
reported clearly "large force of Germans massing Map Square So-and-so."
But whoever was responsible for the first report matters little. The
great point is that the movement was detected in good time, apparently
before the preparations for attack were complete, so that the final
arraying and disposal of the force for the launching of the attack was
hampered and checked, and made perforce under a demoralizing artillery
fire.
What the results might have been if the full weight of the massed
attack could have been prepared without detection and flung on our
lines without warning is hard to say; but there is every chance that
our first line at least might have been broken into and swamped by the
sheer weight of numbers. That, clearly, is what the Germans had
intended, and from the number of men employed it is evident that they
meant to push to the full any chance our breaking line gave them to
reoccupy and hold fast a considerable portion of the ground they had
lost. It is said that three to four full divisions were used. If that
is correct, it is certain that the German army was minus three to four
effective divisions when the attack withdrew, that a good half of the
men in them would never fight again. The attack lost its first great
advantage in losing the element of surprise. The bulk of the troops
would have been moved into position in the hours of darkness. That
wood, in all probability, was filled with men by night. The only
daylight movement attempted would have been the cautious filling of the
trenches, the pouring in of the long gray-coated lines along the
communication trenches, all keeping well down and under cover. Under
the elaborate system of deep trenches, fire-, and support-,
communication- and approach-trenches running back for miles to emerge
only behind houses or hill or wood, it is surprising how large a mass
of men can be pushed into the forward trenches without any disclosure
of movement to the enemy. Scores of thousands of men may be packed away
waiting motionless for the word, more thousands may be pouring slowly
up the communication ways, and still more thousands standing ready a
mile or two behind the lines; and yet to any eye looking from the
enemy's side the country is empty and still, and bare of life as a
swept barn. Even the all-seeing airmen can be cheated, and see nothing
but the usual quiet countryside, the tangled crisscross of trenches,
looking from above like so many wriggling lines of thin white braid
with a black cord-center, the neat dolls' toy-houses and streets of the
villages, the straight, broad ribbon of the Route Nationale, all still
and lifeless, except for an odd cart or two on the high road, a few
dotted figures in the village streets. Below the flying-men the packed
thousands are crouched still to earth. At the sound of the engine's
drone, at sight of the wheeling shape, square miles of country stiffen
to immobility, men scurry under cover of wall or bush, the long, moving
lines in the trenches halt and sink down and hang their heads (next to
movement the light dots of upturned, staring faces are the quickest and
surest betrayal of the earth-men to the air-men), the open roads are
emptied of men into the ditches and under the trees. For civilized man,
in his latest art of war, has gone back to be taught one more simple
lesson by the beasts of the field and birds of the air; the armed hosts
are hushed and stilled by the passing air-machine, exactly as the
finches and field-mice of hedgerow and ditch and field are frozen to
stillness by the shadow of a hovering hawk, the beat of its passing
wing.
But this time some movement in the trenches, some delay in halting a
regiment, some neglect to keep men under cover, some transport too
suspiciously close-spaced on the roads, betrayed the movement. His
suspicions aroused, the airman would have risked the anti-aircraft guns
and dropped a few hundred feet and narrowly searched each hillside and
wood for the telltale gray against the green. Then the wireless would
commence to talk, or the 'plane swoop round and drive headlong for home
to report.
And then, picture the bustle at the different headquarters, the stir
amongst the signalers, the frantic pipings of the telephone "buzzers,"
the sharp calls. "Take a message. Ready? Brigade H.Q. to O.C.
Such-and-such Battery," or "to O.C. So-and-So Regiment"; imagine the
furtive scurry in the trenches to man the parapets, and prepare bombs,
and lay out more ammunition; the rush at the batteries, the quick
consulting of squared maps, the bellowed string of orders in a jargon
of angles of sight, correctors, ranges, figures and measures of degrees
and yards, the first scramble about the guns dropping to the smooth
work of ordered movement, the peering gun muzzles jerking and twitching
to their ordained angles, the click and slam of the closing
breech-blocks, the tense stillness as each gun reports "Ready!" and
waits the word to fire.
And all the while imagine the Germans out there, creeping through the
trees, crowding along the trenches, sifting out and settling down into
the old favorite formation, making all ready for one more desperate
trial of it, stacking the cards for yet another deep gambling plunge on
the great German game--the massed attack in solid lines at close
interval. The plan no doubt was the same old plan--a quick and
overwhelming torrent of shell fire, a sudden hurricane of high
explosive on the forward trench, and then, before the supports could be
hurried up and brought in any weight through the reeking, shaking
inferno of the shell-smitten communication trenches, the surge forward
of line upon line, wave upon wave, of close-locked infantry.
But the density of mass, the solid breadth, the depth, bulk, and weight
of men so irresistible at close-quarter work, is an invitation to utter
destruction if it is caught by the guns before it can move. And so this
time it was caught. Given their target, given the word "Go," the guns
wasted no moment. The first battery ready burst a quick couple of
ranging shots over the wood. A spray of torn leaves whirling from the
tree tops, the toss of a broken branch, showed the range correct; and
before the first rounds' solid white cotton-wooly balls of smoke had
thinned and disappeared, puff-puff-puff the shrapnel commenced to burst
in clouds over the wood. That was the beginning. Gun after gun, battery
after battery, picked up the range and poured shells over and into the
wood, went searching every hollow and hole, rending and destroying
trench and dug-out, parapet and parados. The trenches, clean white
streaks and zig-zags of chalk on a green slope, made perfect targets on
which the guns made perfect shooting; the wood was a mark that no gun
could miss, and surely no gun missed. What the scene in that wood must
have been is beyond imagining and beyond telling. It was quickly
shrouded in a pall of drifting smoke, and dimly through this the
observing officers directing the fire of their guns could see clouds of
leaves and twigs whirling and leaping under the lashing shrapnel, could
see branches and smashed tree-trunks and great clods of earth and stone
flying upward and outward from the blast of the lyddite shells. The
wood was slashed to ribbons, rent and riddled to tatters, deluged from
above with tearing blizzards of shrapnel bullets, scorched and riven
with high-explosive shells. In the trenches our men cowered at first,
listening in awe to the rushing whirlwinds of the shells' passage over
their heads, the roar of the cannonade behind them, the crash and boom
of the bursting shells in front, the shriek and whirr of flying
splinters, the splintering crash of the shattering trees.
The German artillery strove to pick up the plan of the attack, to beat
down the torrent of our batteries' fire, to smash in the forward
trenches, shake the defense, open the way for the massed attack. But
the contest was too unequal, the devastation amongst the crowded mass
of German infantry too awful to be allowed to continue. Plainly the
attack, ready or not ready, had to be launched at speed, or perish
where it stood.
And so it was that our New Armies had a glimpse of what the old
"Contemptible Little Army" has seen and faced so often, the huge gray
bulk looming through the drifting smoke, the packed mass of the old
German infantry attack. There were some of these "Old Contemptibles,"
as they proudly style themselves now, who said when it was all over,
and they had time to think of anything but loading and firing a red-hot
rifle, that this attack did not compare favorably with the German
attacks of the Mons-Marne days, that it lacked something of the
steadiness, the rolling majesty of power, the swinging stride of the
old attacks; that it did not come so far or so fast, that beaten back
it took longer to rally and come again, that coming again it was easier
than ever to bring to a stand. But against that these "Old
Contemptibles" admit that they never in the old days fought under such
favorable conditions, that here in this fight they were in better
constructed and deeper trenches, that they were far better provided
with machine-guns, and, above all, that they had never, never, never
had such a magnificent backing from our guns, such a tremendous stream
of shells helping to smash the attack.
And smashed, hopelessly and horribly smashed, the attack assuredly was.
The woods in and behind which the German hordes were massed lay from
three to four hundred yards from the muzzles of our rifles. Imagine it,
you men who were not there, you men of the New Armies still training at
home, you riflemen practicing and striving to work up the number of
aimed rounds fired in "the mad minute," you machine-gunners riddling
holes in a target or a row of posts. Imagine it, oh you Artillery,
imagine the target lavishly displayed in solid blocks in the open, with
a good four hundred yards of ground to go under your streaming
gun-muzzles. The gunners who were there that day will tell you how they
used that target, will tell you how they stretched themselves to the
call for "gun-fire" (which is an order for each gun to act
independently, to fire and keep on firing as fast as it can be served),
how the guns grew hotter and hotter, till the paint bubbled and
blistered and flaked off them in patches, till the breech burned the
incautious hand laid on it, till spurts of oil had to be sluiced into
the breech from a can between rounds and sizzled and boiled like fat in
a frying-pan as it fell on the hot steel, how the whole gun smoked and
reeked with heated oil, and how the gun-detachments were half-deaf for
days after.
It was such a target as gunners in their fondest dreams dare hardly
hope for; and such a target as war may never see again, for surely the
fate of such massed attacks will be a warning to all infantry
commanders for all time.
The guns took their toll, and where death from above missed, death from
the level came in an unbroken torrent of bullets sleeting across the
open from rifles and machine-guns. On our trenches shells were still
bursting, maxim and rifle bullets were still pelting from somewhere in
half enfilade at long range. But our men had no time to pay heed to
these. They hitched themselves well up on the parapet to get the fuller
view of their mark; their officers for the most part had no need to
bother about directing or controlling the fire--what need, indeed, to
direct with such a target bulking big before the sights? What need to
control when the only speed limit was a man's capacity to aim and fire?
So the officers, for the most part, took rifle themselves and helped
pelt lead into the slaughter-pit.
There are few, if any, who can give details of how or when the attack
perished. A thick haze of smoke from the bursting shells blurred the
picture. To the eyes of the defenders there was only a picture of that
smoke-fog, with a gray wall of men looming through it, moving, walking,
running towards them, falling and rolling, and looming up again and
coming on, melting away into tangled heaps that disappeared again
behind advancing men, who in turn became more falling and fallen piles.
It was like watching those chariot races in a theater where the horses
gallop on a stage revolving under their feet, and for all their fury of
motion always remain in the same place. So it was with the German
line--it was pressing furiously forward, but always appeared to remain
stationary or to advance so slowly that it gave no impression of
advancing, but merely of growing bigger. Once, or perhaps twice, the
advancing line disappeared altogether, melted away behind the drifting
smoke, leaving only the mass of dark blotches sprawled on the grass. At
these times the fire died away along a part of our front, and the men
paused to gulp a drink from a water-bottle, to look round and tilt
their caps back and wipe the sweat from their brows, to gasp joyful
remarks to one another about "gettin' a bit of our own back," and "this
pays for the ninth o' May," and then listen to the full, deep roar of
rifle-fire that rolled out from further down the line, and try to peer
through the shifting smoke to see how "the lot next door" was faring.
But these respites were short. A call and a crackle of fire at their
elbows brought them back to business, to the grim business of
purposeful and methodical killing, of wiping out that moving wall that
was coming steadily at them again through the smoke and flame of the
bursting shells. The great bulk of the line came no nearer than a
hundred yards from our line; part pressed in another twenty or thirty
yards, and odd bunches of the dead were found still closer. But none
came to grips--none, indeed, were found within forty yards of our
rifles' wall of fire. A scattered remnant of the attackers ran back,
some whole and some hurt, thousands crawled away wounded, to reach the
safe shelter of their support trenches, some to be struck down by the
shells that still kept pounding down upon the death-swept field. The
counter-attack was smashed--hopelessly and horribly smashed.