Transcriber’s Notes:--
The spelling, punctuation and accentuation are as the
original, except for apparent typographical errors which have been
corrected. The hyphenation has been standardised.
Italic text has been marked _thus_.
THE BATTLES OF
THE SOMME
PHILIP GIBBS
THE BATTLES OF
THE SOMME
BY
PHILIP GIBBS
AUTHOR OF “THE SOUL OF THE WAR”
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
I. THE HISTORIC FIRST OF JULY 21
II. THE FIRST CHARGE 38
III. THE FIELD OF HONOUR 46
IV. THE DEATH-SONG OF THE GERMANS 57
V. THE ATTACK ON THE LEFT 65
VI. THE LONDON MEN AT GOMMECOURT 71
VII. THE MEN WHO FOUGHT AT FRICOURT 79
VIII. HOW THE PRUSSIANS FELL AT CONTALMAISON 87
IX. A CAMEO OF WAR 95
X. THE ASSAULT ON CONTALMAISON 100
XI. THE BATTLE OF THE WOODS 109
XII. THE FIGHT FOR OVILLERS 116
XIII. THROUGH THE GERMAN SECOND LINE 124
XIV. THE WOODS OF DEATH 142
XV. PRISONERS OF WAR 147
XVI. THE LAST STAND IN OVILLERS 151
XVII. THE SCOTS AT LONGUEVAL 154
XVIII. THE DEVIL’S WOOD 160
XIX. THE WORK OF THE GUNS 172
XX. THE FIGHTING ROUND WATERLOT FARM 178
XXI. THE PETER PANS OF WAR 182
XXII. THE HIGH GROUND AT POZIÈRES 188
XXIII. THE GERMANS’ SIDE OF THE SOMME 220
XXIV. THE ATTACK ON THIÉPVAL 227
XXV. THE LAST FIGHTS IN DEVIL’S WOOD 244
XXVI. THE AUSTRALIANS AT MOUQUET FARM 250
XXVII. THE CAPTURE OF GUILLEMONT 258
XXVIII. THE IRISH AT GINCHY 276
XXIX. THE COMING OF THE TANKS 284
XXX. FIGHTING BEYOND FLERS 300
XXXI. MONSTERS AND MEN 305
XXXII. LONDON PRIDE 318
XXXIII. THE SPLENDID NEW ZEALANDERS 324
XXXIV. THE CANADIANS AT COURCELETTE 331
XXXV. THE ABANDONMENT OF COMBLES 336
XXXVI. THE DOOM OF THIÉPVAL 345
XXXVII. NORTHWARD FROM THIÉPVAL 356
XXXVIII. THE WAY TO BAPAUME 366
XXXIX. THE GERMAN VERDICT OF THE SOMME BATTLES 371
INTRODUCTION
THE COMING OF THE NEW ARMIES
In this book I have put together the articles which I have written day
by day for more than three months, since that first day of July, 1916,
when hundreds of thousands of British troops rose out of the ditches
held against the enemy for nearly two years of trench warfare, advanced
over open country upon the most formidable system of defences ever
organised by great armies, and began a series of battles as fierce and
bloody as anything the old earth has seen on such a stretch of ground
since the beginning of human strife.
Before July 1 I had an idea of writing a book about all that I had
seen for nearly eighteen months, since I abandoned the hazardous game
of a free lance in the war-zones of France and Belgium (to me those
were the great and wonderful days) and became officially accredited
as a correspondent with the British armies in the field. I had seen a
good deal in the trenches and behind the lines—nearly all there was
to see—of stationary warfare from Ypres to the Somme, and enough to
understand with every nerve in my body not only the abomination of this
doom which put fine sensitive men into dirty mudholes and sinister
ruins, in exile from the comforts and beauty and decency of life, under
the continual menace of death or mutilation, but also the valour of
great numbers of simple souls who hated it all and yet endured it with
a queer gaiety, and laughed even while they cursed its beastliness,
and resigned themselves to its worst miseries like Christian martyrs
with a taste for beer and the pictures of the “vie parisienne.” I had
seen, and suffered from, the boredom of this stationary warfare—an
intolerable boredom it is, demoralising to men whose imaginations
demand something brighter and more varied than a glimpse through the
sandbags at the same old fringe of broken tree, the same old ruined
house, the same old line of chalky trenches, from which death may come
at any moment by rifle-grenade, sniper’s bullet, or whizz-bang—which
is not an exciting form of death giving men the thrill of dramatic
moments before they drop. Even in this danger there was no cure for
the deadening monotony after the first few days of new experience. It
was just another part of the dirty business, and, for men of nerves,
a nagging, apprehensive thought, varied by moments of cold, horrible
fear. Behind the lines, on supply columns, at railheads, in billets, in
squalid villages of Flanders and Picardy with their rows of miserable
estaminets and evil-smelling farmyards, Boredom, monstrous and
abominable, sat like a witch-hag on the shoulders of many men, divorced
from the interests of their old home life, from their women-folk, from
the reasonable normal routine of peaceful careers. Discipline and duty
had taken the place of personal ambitions and the joy of life, and
they are cold virtues, very comfortless. Artists, actors, barristers,
writers, sportsmen, and men who had found good fun in youth and the
wide world, or some corner of it, found themselves as officers on
supply columns, R.T.O.’s, D.A.D.O.S.’s, and in other administrative
jobs, condemned to a drudgery melancholy in its limitations and
apparently interminable. To many of them their area of activity was
confined between one squalid village and another, and the chance of
a stray shell or of an aeroplane bomb did not really brighten up the
scene.
They fought against this desolation of mind valiantly—and it wanted
valour—forced themselves to get absorbed in the minute details of their
work, sent for the old banjo from home, organised canteens, smoking
concerts, boxing matches, cultivated cheeriness as the first law of
daily life until it became a second nature, beneath which the first
nature only obtruded at night when they went back to sleep in their
billets and before sleeping cried out in a kind of agony, “How long
is this going on?—this Insanity, this waste of life, this unnatural,
damned existence!”
The fighting men had all the danger and, on the whole, were less dull
during the long period of stationary warfare. They too cultivated
cheerfulness as the first law of daily life, and it was a harder job,
yet they succeeded wonderfully in spite of the filthy trenches, the
rats and vermin, the ice-cold water in which they waded up to the front
line during the long months of a Flemish winter (beginning in October
and ending—perhaps—in April) the trench-feet which for a time—until
the rubbing-drill was adopted—drained the strength of many battalions,
and the enemy’s shell-fire and mining activities which took a daily
toll of life and limbs. Many of them found a gruesome humour in all
this, laughed at death as a low comedian, guffawed if they dodged its
knock-about tricks by the length of a traverse, and did not go very
sick if it laid out their best pal. “You know, sir, it doesn’t do to
take this war seriously.” So said a sergeant to me as we stood in a
trench beyond our knees in water. It was a great saying, and I saw the
philosophy which had kept men sane. Without laughter, somehow, anyhow,
by any old joke, we should have lost the war long ago. The only way
to avoid deadly depression was to keep smiling. And so for laughter’s
sake and to keep normal in abnormal ways of life there was a great
unconscious conspiracy of cheerfulness among officers and men, and the
most popular man in a platoon was the fellow who could twist a joke
out of a dead German, or the subaltern who could lead a patrol into
No Man’s Land with men chuckling over some whimsical word about his
widow, or the comic corporal who could play ragtime tunes on a comb
and tissue-paper. Behind the lines there were variety theatres in old
warehouses ventilated by shell-holes, packed by muddy men just out of
the trenches, who found it difficult to laugh for the first half-hour
and then roared with laughter at funny fellows dressed as Mrs.
Twankey, or Charlie Chaplin, or the red-nosed comic turn who satirised
“brass hats” and the Army Safety Corps and Kaiser Bill, and the effect
of a 17-inch shell in the neighbourhood of Private Spoofkins, V.C.
Discipline and hard work helped men to forget the voice that called
back to the days of individual liberty and peace. There was always
something to do up in the trenches, building up the parapets which in
the Salient slipped down after every rain-storm, wiring, revetting,
digging new communication-trenches (under the enemy’s machine-gun
fire), keeping German heads down by sniping every head that came
up, between the stand-to at dusk and dawn. After the relief in the
trenches—getting out was the risky job—there was not much rest in
the rest camps, what with parades, bombing schools, bayonet drill,
machine-gun courses, and practice at the rifle-range. “I’d rather be in
the blinkin’ trenches again,” groused the tired Tommy. “Oh, you’ll soon
be back again, my lad,” said the sergeant. “Yet another week of your
bright young life.”
It was the youngest men who were most cheerful—young officers
especially, just down from the Universities or the Public Schools. Life
was beginning for them, and even here in the dirty ditches they found
the thrill of life, the splendour of life, the beauty of life. They
found it splendid to command men, to win their trust, to “make good”
with them. The comradeship with fellow-officers, the responsibility
of their rank, the revelation of their own manhood and of their own
courage—they had been afraid of failing in pluck—and their professional
interest in their jobs as gunners or sappers or bombers, whatever they
might be, were great rewards for the dirt and the danger. I saw many
of these boys in places where death lay in wait for them, and they had
shining eyes and strode along cheerily, talking proudly of some little
“stunt” they had done with their men, and not worrying about the menace
overhead. It was all “topping” to them, until the strain began to
tell. The ideals of the Public Schools, the old traditional ideals of
British boyhood—“_Dulce et decorum est_...” “Play the game,” “_Floreat
Etona_,” or whatever the old school motto of chivalry and service might
be—inspired them and made a little white flame of enthusiasm in their
hearts at which their spirit warmed itself when the body was very cold
and everything comfortless. One by one many of them were soon picked
off by German snipers or laid out by German shells, but others came
out, and others, in an endless procession of splendid boyhood, still
“to play the game.” With them came new battalions of men, whistling and
singing along the roads of France.
I saw the first Territorial Divisions come out, and then the first of
the “Kitchener crowd,” and gradually, month after month, the building
up of the New Army. The Old Army, that little Regular army which fought
on the retreat from Mons to the Marne and then upon the Aisne, and then
had swung up into Flanders to bar the way to Calais—was gone for ever
and was no more than an heroic memory. In the first Battle of Ypres
and the second they had done all that human nature could do, and the
fields were strewn with their dead until only a pitiful remnant held
the lines of that salient against which the enemy had hurled himself in
massed attacks supported by tremendous artillery. Battalions had been
wiped out, divisions had been cut to pieces. A year ago a battalion
commander told me that he was one out of only 150 officers belonging
to the original Expeditionary Force still serving in the trenches—and
a year is a long time in such a war as this. I met men who had passed
unscathed through all of that, but there were not many of them. The
regiments remained, but they were filled up with new drafts. The old
traditions remained, fostered by the old soldiers here and there, and
by officers who know the value of tradition, but they were new men
and new armies who were beginning to crowd the roads of France and
to straighten the lines of defence. They were the lads who had been
called to the colours by the shouts of the street placards: “Your
King and Country need you,” “What did _you_ do, daddy, in the Great
War?” (I could not print the outrageous answers I have heard to that
little simple question!) and “What will your best girl say if you
don’t wear khaki?” They had been called by quieter and nobler voices
also, speaking to their hearts above the clicking of typewriters in
city offices and the whirr of machinery in great workshops and in the
silence of the fields where they followed the plough. It was an army
of amateurs hastily drilled, hastily trained, knowing very little
of the real business of war, but quick to learn and full of pluck.
They were led for the most part by temporary officers “for the period
of the war only,” with a few old “dug-outs” among them and some old
non-commissioned officers to stiffen them. The Germans jeered at
them—not the enemy in the trenches but the enemy in hostile newspaper
offices. “What can this rabble of amateurs do?” they asked. The answer
was kept waiting for a little while.
The New Armies were learning. They were bearing the hardships, the
cruelties, the brutalities of war, and had to suffer and “stick”
them. They were learning the craft of modern warfare in trenches,
mine-shafts, and saps, behind field-guns and “heavies,” and they had to
pay for their lessons by blood and agony. I went to see the New Armies
learning their lesson in frightful places. Always the worst place was
the Ypres Salient, where the enemy had the advantage of ground and
observation, so that he could shoot at our men from three points of the
compass and even hit them in the back. The names of all these places
in the Salient are a litany of death—Pilkem, Potije, Hooge, Zillebeke,
Vlamertinghe, Sanctuary Wood—and Hooge was the concentration-ground
of all that was devilish. Dead bodies were heaped there, buried and
unburied. Men dug into corruption when they tried to dig a trench. Men
sat on dead bodies when they peered through their periscopes. They ate
and slept with the stench of death in their nostrils. Below them were
the enemy’s mine-shafts; beyond them were our own mine-shafts. It was a
competition in blowing up the tumbled earth, and men fought like devils
with bombs and bayonets over mine-craters which had buried another
score or so of men. The story of Hooge was a serial carried on from
week to week, but the place was only one of our little schools of war
for bright young men.
Always the City of the Salient—the ghost-city of Ypres—stood as a
memorial of death, and of that dreadful day in April of 1915 when the
enemy first discharged his poison-gas, flung a storm of great shells
into the streets and strewed them and the fields around with dead men,
dead horses, and dead women. I had been first into Ypres in March,
when the beauty of its Cloth Hall and of all its churches and of its
quaint old houses was untouched. The Grande Place was full of cheerful
English soldiers chaffing the Flemish girls at their booths and stalls,
buying picture post cards and souvenirs in the shops, and strolling
into the Cloth Hall to stare at the painted frescoes and the richness
of its mediæval decorations. I had tea with a party of officers in
a bun-shop facing the Cathedral.... When I went into Ypres again, a
few weeks later, there was a great hole where the bun-shop had been
and only litters of stone and brickwork where the soldiers had bought
their picture post cards, and the Grande Place was a desert about the
tragic ruins of the great Cloth Hall and Cathedral, which were but
skeletons in stone with broken arches, broken pillars, broken walls
standing gaunt above great piles of masonry. The Horror had come, when
suddenly on the breath of the wind a poisonous cloud stole into the
city, and there was a wild stampede of people choking and gasping,
terror-stricken, black in the face with the struggle to breathe.
British soldiers and Indian soldiers joined the flight of the people of
Ypres in a wild turmoil through the streets. Many of them fell and died
on the way. A despatch-rider rode the other way, towards the poison
cloud. He had a message to carry to the lines beyond. The gas caught
him in the throat and he fell off his motor-cycle and lay dead, while
his machine went on until it crashed into a wall. Then the storm of
shells burst over the city, flinging down houses, tearing great holes
in them, and lighting great bonfires which blazed high, so that from a
distance Ypres was one flaming torch.... There were people who could
not get away, poor women and children who were caught in their cellars.
One woman lay ill and could not be moved. An officer of the R.A.M.C.
promised to get back to her if he could get an ambulance through the
fires and shells. Late in the evening he found her in a field two
miles away with a new-born baby by her side. A young French officer
stayed with a crowd of wounded all huddled in an underground drain-pipe
and tried to bandage them and keep them alive till other help came.
For four days they could not move out of the hole, so that it was
pestilential. Two little wounded girls lay there among the dead and
dying. One of them, with eyes strangely bright, talked continually in
a voice preternaturally clear, sharp and metallic, without intonation.
She was a Flemish child, but again and again she spoke three words of
French: “Moi, morte demain.... Moi, morte demain.” She died in the arms
of the young Frenchman. “I am astonished that I did not go mad,” says
the young Baron de Rosen, remembering these hours.
In the summer of 1915 I went into Ypres several times, and always the
sinister horror of the place put its spell upon me. I spent a night
there with a friend—a strange, fantastic night, when shells came
whirring overhead, falling with heavy crashes into the ruins. Beyond,
the line of the Salient was outlined by the white light of flares.
In abandoned dug-outs were wild cats who spat at me when I peered
in. A lonely sentry—poor boy!—had the jim-jams and saw ghosts about;
and truly Ypres should be full of ghosts if they walk o’ nights—the
ghosts of all the men who have been buried alive here under the fallen
masonry, and have been killed here by shells which have dug enormous
craters in the roadways. One day two German aeroplanes flung down
bombs as I stood in the Grande Place staring at its desolation. I was
amazed to know how quickly I found a hole under a wall which I had not
seen before.... Ypres was never a safe place, and in the minds of many
thousands of British soldiers who once passed through its ruins it is
etched as one of the ghastly pictures of war.
All through 1915 we had in France not an army of attack but an army
of defence. This was not properly realised by the people at home,
by our Allies, or by some of our generals. There were demands for
attack before we had enough men or enough guns or enough ammunition.
It was a tragedy that we had to make several attacks without a real
chance of success. Neuve Chapelle was one of them. Loos was another,
more formidable and brilliantly carried out as far as Hill 70 by the
15th (Scottish) Division and the 47th (London Territorial) Division,
supported on their left by the 9th (Scottish) Division and co-operating
with a strong French attack on the right along the Vimy Ridge, but
unable to inflict as much damage upon the enemy as we suffered in the
assault and the following days when the Guards attacked at Hulluch.
It was the first great bombardment of ours I had seen, though I had
seen many small ones since an attack on Wyghtschaete in March of
1915, and was the first time when we showed any real strength in
massed artillery, but we did not support the first assault with strong
reserves, tactical blunders were made, and the enemy was able to rally
after some hours of panic, when their gunners began to move away from
Lens and we had a great chance. The disappointment came very quickly
upon one’s first hopes, but to me the memory of Loos is the revelation
of the astounding courage of those men of the London, the Scottish,
and the Guards Divisions who proved the mettle of the New Armies (for
even most of the Guards were new men) and went into battle with a
high-spirited valour which could not have been surpassed by the old
Regulars. The Scots were played on by their pipers. The London men
played mouth-organs, dribbled a football—as every one knows—all the
way to Loos, and sang “Who’s Your Lady Friend?” amidst the crash of
shell-fire.
So now there were other classrooms in the school of war—the
Hohenzollern Redoubt, Hulluch, Loos, and other hot spots in
that broad, flat, barren, villainous plain pimpled by black
slag-heaps—Fosse 8 and Fosse 14 _bis_—which one approached through
miles of communication-trenches under the whirring of many shells.
I went to these places when the battle was on, and afterwards.
Quite a long way away from them there were spots where one hated to
linger, and through which one had to pass to get to the battlefields.
Noyelles-les-Vermelles was one of them, and I had some nasty hours
there when I went for afternoon tea with some officers and found the
enemy searching for that house with four-inch shells, which knocked
out three gunners in the back yard just as I arrived, and killed some
horses as I walked across the field between the bursting crumps—there
was a blue sky overhead and fleecy clouds and a golden sunshine—to a
hall door where a number of young men were expecting death—disliking
it exceedingly, but chatting about trivial things with occasional
laughter which did not ring quite true. Vermelles was another of them,
and I never went without foreboding into that village of ruins where
the French had fought like tigers from garden to garden and house to
house before the capture of the château—do you remember how they fought
on the ground floor with the Germans above and below them, until the
first-floor ceiling gave way and Germans came through and a young
French lieutenant swung a marble Venus round his head in the midst of
a withing mob of men clutching at each other’s throats? Shells made
smaller dust day by day of all these rubbish-heaps and bigger holes in
the standing walls. The smell of poison-gas reeked from the bricks and
the litter. Other smells lurked about like obscene spectres. At any
moment of the day or night death might come here, and did, without
warning.... Higher up one felt safer in the winding ditches leading
to the front lines. But it was the ostrich sense of safety. One had
only to mount a sandbag and glance over the side of the trench to see
how the enemy’s “crumps” were flinging up fountains of earth in all
directions. They came whining with their high gobbling notes overhead.
Dead bodies lay about. Up in the front trenches, by Hulluch and the
Hohenzollern, men lived always close to mine-shafts which might open
the earth beneath them at any moment and bury them or hurl them high.
There were bombing fights on the lips of the shell-craters. In some
places a few yards only separated British soldiers and German soldiers.
They fought with each other in saps. It was another Hooge.
I was only a looker-on and reporter of other men’s courage and
sacrifice—a miserable game, rather wearing to the nerves and spirit.
There were many places to visit along the front, and although they were
not places where it is agreeable to pass a few hours for amusement’s
sake, there was an immense interest in these peep-shows of war where
one saw the real thing and the spirit of it all and the ugliness, and
the simple heroism of the men there. “Plug Street” was the elementary
training school for many of the new divisions, with a touch of Arcadia
in its woods in spite of the snipers’ bullets which came “zip-zip”
through the branches and the brushwood fringes along the outer walks,
past which one had to creep warily lest watchful eyes should see one
and stop one dead. A fairly safe place “Plug Street” was supposed to
be, but men were killed there all right—each time I went I saw a dead
body carried down one of the glades—and at Hyde Park Corner, on the
edge of it, a colleague of mine was hit in the stomach by the nose of
a shell, and here I first heard the voice of “Percy,” a high-velocity
fellow who kills you before you know he is coming.
Then there was Kemmel and its neighbourhood for an afternoon’s
adventure any time one liked to be brave or felt inclined to look down
into the German trenches from Hill 65, which gave a very fine view of
them, up above Kemmel village, strafed into a miserable huddle of ruins
and damnably sinister about the deep shell-craters and the overthrown
crosses in a wrecked churchyard. I went there one day in a snowstorm,
and coming back out of its desolation—where plucky young men lived with
their guns and wondered now and then, at their mess-table in a broken
barn, whose number would be written up next—saw a man in full evening
dress without an overcoat and with a bowler-hat upon his head, walking
in a leisurely way through the snowflakes and past the churchyard with
its opened graves. A fantastic figure to meet on a battlefield, but not
madder than many things in this mad dream which is war.
Up in the trenches at Neuve Chapelle, beyond the ruins of Croix Barbée,
there were bits of open country across which one had to sprint between
one trench and another because of German machine-guns trained upon them
day and night. I ran across them on Christmas Day to wish good luck to
some country boys who were sitting in puddles below the fire-step and
chatting with grave irony about peace on earth, goodwill to men, and
the Christmas stockings—waders, really—which they had hung up outside
their dug-outs to see how the trick would work in war-time. It hadn’t
worked, and they groused against Santa Claus and laughed at this little
joke of theirs to hide the sentiment in their hearts.
Festubert and Givenchy, Armentières and Houplines, were other familiar
places which one approached through ruins before getting into the
ditches where the British Army was learning its lessons. Then as the
armies grew the British line was lengthened and we took over from the
French, from Hébuterne to Vaux-sur-Somme, and afterwards, in February,
when the Germans began their great attack upon Verdun, from the Vimy
Ridge to the south of Arras. There was plenty of room here for the
new Divisions who were coming out to learn, and plenty of practical
object-lessons in the abominable business of war. We learnt a lot
of French geography, and dozens of small villages unknown before to
history are now famous among British soldiers as places where they
lived under daily shell-fire, where they escaped death by the queerest
flukes, or where they were hit at last after a thousand escapes.
Sailly-au-Bois was a village on the way to Hébuterne. A charming little
place it must have been once, with quaint old cottages and a market
square. When I went there first the Germans disliked it, plugged shells
into most of the houses and into one where a number of Sussex gentlemen
were sitting down to lunch. It spoilt their meal for them and made
a new entrance through the dining-room wall. Beyond the village was
the road to Hébuterne. It led through open fields and past a belt of
trees less than a thousand yards away, where the Germans lay watching
behind their rifle-barrels. But the French had made a friendly little
arrangement. If an open car crawled down slowly the Germans did not
snipe. If it were a covered car, presumably a General’s, or went fast,
they had the right to shoot. Queer, though it seemed to work. But I
was always glad to get the length of that road and to find some cover
in the fortress-village of Hébuterne, with its deep dug-outs, proof
against the lighter kind of shells. The Germans had been here first
and had dug in with their usual industry. Then the French had turned
them out after ferocious fighting—there are many French graves there
in the Orchard and in the trenches, and a little altar still kept in
good order by British soldiers to Notre-Dame-des-Tranchées; they had
gone on digging and strengthening the place, and when our men took over
the ground they continued the fortifications, so that it was a model
of defensive work. But the Germans shelled it with method, and it was
safer below ground than above. In the Orchard young fruit of life fell
before it had ripened, and I did not like to linger there among the
apple-trees.
The taking over of Arras and its neighbourhood down from the Vimy Ridge
to Souchez, Ablain-St.-Nazaire, La Targette, Neuville-St.-Vaast—the
very names make me feel cold—liberated a complete French army for the
defence of Verdun, and it was our biggest service to France before the
battles of the Somme.
I went into Arras and saw the despoiled beauty of this old city of
Artois, silent and desolate, in its ruined gardens where white statues
lay in the rank grass, except when shells opened great craters in the
Grande Place or tore off a gable from one of the Spanish houses in the
Petite Place, or came crashing into the wreckage of the railway station
or knocked a few more stones out of the immense walls of the Cathedral
and the Bishop’s Palace, through which I wandered, gazing up long
vistas of white ruin. In the suburbs of St.-Laurent and St.-Nicholas
the enemy was very close across the garden walls, and in the Maison
Rouge one had to tip-toe and talk in whispers by chinks in the wall
(there was a rosewood piano in the front room), through which one could
look at the enemy’s sandbags a few yards away. Wrinkled old women and
wan-faced girls lived still in the deep cellars of the city, coming up
for a little sunlight when the air was quiet, and scuttling down again
at the scream of a shell. In the dusk small boys roamed the broken
streets, searched among the litter of stones for shrapnel-bullets for
games of marbles (I once played such a game in a night at Ypres), and
cocked a snook at German shells falling a street or two away. Our
soldiers became familiar with all these places, strode through them
with that curious matter-of-fact way of the British Tommy, who makes
himself at home in hell-on-earth as though it were the usual thing, and
in Souchez, Neuville-St.-Vaast, Ablain-St.-Nazaire, and on the ridge
of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette held the lines in spite of five-point-nines,
aerial torpedoes, every kind of high-explosive force which tried to
blast them out. For miles the ground was strewn with “duds”—so that one
had to pick one’s way lest one should kick a fuse—and with the litter
of men’s clothes and bodies.
The months passed. Spring came, and nightingales sang in the bushes of
old French châteaux and the woodpecker laughed in the forest glades;
the fields were strewn with flowers, and the beauty of France sang
a great song in one’s heart. The wheat grew tall and green. And all
this time the roads in the British war-zone were becoming more crowded
with the traffic of men and horses and guns and lorries—miles of
motor-lorries—as new Divisions came out, with belts and harness looking
very fresh, making their way slowly forward to the firing-lines to
learn their lesson like others who had gone before them. The billeting
areas widened, became congested districts from Boulogne to the Somme.
In Picardy and Artois there was khaki everywhere. In old market-places
of St.-Omer, Bailleul, Béthune, St.-Pol, Hesdin, Fruges, Doullens, our
Tommies jostled among the stalls and booths, among the old women and
girls and blue-coated “poilus,” making friends with them, learning
a wonderful lingua franca, settling down into the queer life, which
alternated between the trenches and the billets, as though it would
last for ever.
The human picture changed. New types of men arrived and some of the
old stagers departed. The Indian infantry also went, and the flat
fields behind Neuve Chapelle, where the canals cut straight between
the rushes, lost those grave, sad-eyed, handsome men who seemed like
fairy-book princes to the French peasants, whose language they had
learnt to speak with a courtesy, and with soft, simple manners which
won the friendship of these people. In the winter trenches the Indians
had shivered; in the dank mists across the flats they had wandered
dolefully. They had fought gallantly under officers who sacrificed
their own lives with noble devotion, but they hated modern shell-fire
and all the misery of trench-warfare in a wet, cold climate, and were,
I think, glad to go.
The Australians came, and for the first time we saw in France those
bronzed, hatchet-faced, handsome fellows who brought a new character of
splendid manhood into the medley of British types. The New Zealanders
followed, with Maoris among them. The Canadians were adding many new
battalions to their strength. The South African Scottish sent more
kilts swinging down the roads of war. There were Newfoundlanders, West
Indians from Barbados. All the Empire was sending her men. For what?
That was the question which we were all asking. How and when were these
men going to be used? The months were dragging on and there was no
great attack. There had been savage fighting on a small scale up in
the Salient at St.-Eloi and the Bluff. The Canadians lost ground under
a sudden storm of shell-fire which flattened out their trenches, and
retook it after bloody counter-attacks. The Vimy Ridge had seen heavy
and costly fighting which gained nothing. All along the line there
were raids into the enemy’s trenches, but it was Red Indian warfare
and not the big thing. France, after four months of desperate fighting
at Verdun, asked when the English were going to strike. And British
soldiers who had been in and out of the trenches, month after month,
seeing heavy losses mount up by the usual daily toll, with nothing to
show for them, began to despair a little. Was it going on for ever like
this? This existence was intolerable. To sit in a trench and be shelled
to death—what was the sense of it? At the mess-table there were men
who found the world all black, the war a monstrous horror, an outrage
to God and life. I had queer conversations with men in dug-outs, in
wooden huts under shell-fire, in French châteaux inhabited by British
officers, and heard the secrets of men’s souls, their protests against
the doom that had enchained them, their perplexities, their strivings
to find some spiritual meaning in the devilish appearance of things,
their revolt against the brutality and senselessness of war, their
ironic laughter at the bloody contrast between Christian teaching and
Christian practice, their blind gropings for some light in all the
darkness and damnation.
Then suddenly all changed. The “Big Push” was to come at last. Trench
warfare was to end, and all this great army of ours in France was to
get out of its ditches and out into the open and strike. Enormous hope
took the place of the doubts and dolefulness that had begun to possess
men of melancholy minds. It would be a chance of ending the business.
At least we had the strength to deliver a smashing, perhaps a decisive,
blow. All our two years of organisation and training and building
up would be put to the test, and the men were sure of themselves,
confident in the new power of our artillery, which was tremendous,
without a doubt in the spirit of attack which would inspire all our
battalions. They would fight with the will to win.
So we came to July 1, that day so great in hope, in achievement, and
in tragedy, and what happened then and for three and a half months
of fighting days is told in the articles now printed in this book. I
might have rewritten them, polished their style, put in new facts here
and there, and written a narrative of history with a more considered
judgment than was possible day by day. But I have thought it best to
let them stand as they were written at great speed, sometimes in utter
exhaustion of body and brain, but always with the emotion that comes
from the hot impress of new and tremendous sensations. They may hold
some qualities that would be lost if I wrote them with more coldness
and criticism of words and phrases. Even the repetition of incidents
and impressions has some value, for that is true of modern warfare—a
continual repetition of acts and sounds, sights and smells and emotions.
The method of attack has become a formula—the intense preliminary
bombardment almost annihilating the enemy’s front trenches (but not
all his dug-outs), the advance across No Man’s Land under the enemy’s
curtain-fire, the rush over the enemy’s broken parapets in the face
of machine-gun fire, the bombing-out of the dug-outs, the taking of
prisoners. One captured “village” destroyed utterly by shell-fire days
before the final attack upon its earthworks is exactly like another
in its rubbish-heaps of bricks and woodwork. The pictures repeat
themselves. Heroic acts—the knocking-out of a machine-gun, the bombing
down a section of trench, the rescue of wounded—repeat themselves also
through all the battles. In my chronicles these repetitions will be
found, and the effect of them on the reader’s mind should be the effect
in a faint, far-off way of the real truth.
Some people imagine, and some critics have written, that the war
correspondents with the armies in France have been “spoon-fed” with
documents and facts given to them by General Headquarters, from which
they write up their despatches. They recognise the same incident, told
in different style by different correspondents, and say, “Ah, that is
how it is done!” They are wrong. All that we get from the General Staff
are the brief bulletins of the various army corps, a line or two of
hard news about the capture or loss of this or that trench, such as
appears afterwards in the official communiqués. For all the details of
an action we have to rely upon our own efforts in the actual theatre of
operations day by day, seeing as much of the battle as it is possible
to see (sometimes one can see everything and sometimes nothing but
smoke and bursting shells), getting into the swirl and traffic of the
battlefields, talking to the walking wounded and prisoners, the men
going in and the men coming out, going to headquarters of brigades,
divisions, and corps for exact information as to the progress of the
battle from the generals and officers directing the operations, and
getting into touch as soon as possible with the battalions actually
engaged. All this is not as easy as it sounds. It is not done without
fatigue, and mental as well as physical strain. It takes one into
unpleasant places from which one is glad and lucky to get back. But
we have full facilities for seeing and knowing the truth of things,
and see more and know more of the whole battle-line than is possible
even to Divisional Generals and other officers in high command. For
we have a pass enabling us to go to any part of the front at any time
and get the facts and points of view from every class and rank, from
the trenches to G.H.Q. Because the correspondents sometimes tell the
same stories it is because we tell them to each other, not believing in
professional rivalry in a war of this greatness. Our only limitations
in truth-telling are those of our own vision, skill, and conscience
under the discipline of the military censorship. I have no personal
quarrel with that censorship—though all censorship is hateful. After
many alterations in method and principle it was exercised throughout
the battles of the Somme (and for months before that, when there
was no conspiracy of silence but only the lack of great events to
chronicle) with a really broad-minded policy of allowing the British
people to know the facts about their fighting men save those which
would give the enemy a chance of spoiling our plans or hurting us.
If there had been no censorship at all it would be impossible for an
honourable correspondent to tell some things within his knowledge—our
exact losses in a certain action, failures at this or that point of
the line, tactical blunders which might have been made here or there,
the disposition or movement of troops, the positions of batteries and
observation-posts.
These are things which the enemy must not know. So I do not think that
during the whole of the Somme fighting there was more than a line
or two taken out of one or the other of my despatches, and with the
exception of those words they are printed as they were written. They
tell the truth. There is not one word, I vow, of conscious falsehood
in them. But they do not tell all the truth. I have had to spare the
feelings of men and women who have sons and husbands still fighting in
France. I have not told all there is to tell about the agonies of this
war, nor given in full realism the horrors that are inevitable in such
fighting. It is perhaps better not to do so, here and now, although it
is a moral cowardice which makes many people shut their eyes to the
shambles, comforting their souls with fine phrases about the beauty of
sacrifice.
One thing hurt me badly in writing my accounts and hurts me still. For
military reasons I have not been permitted to give the names of all the
troops engaged from day to day, but only a few names allowed by our
Intelligence. The Germans were counting up our divisions, reckoning how
many men we had in reserve, how many were against them in the lines.
It was not for us to help them in this arithmetic. But it is hard on
the men and on their people. They do not get that immediate fame and
honour for their regiments which they have earned by the splendour of
their courage and achievements. It is not my fault, for I would give
all their names if I could, and tire out my wrist in praising them if
it could give them a little spark of pleasure and pride. But, after
all, each man who fought on the Somme shares the general honour which
belongs to all of them.
The correspondents with the armies in the field do not prophesy or
criticise or sit in judgment. That is not within our orders, and
belongs to the liberty of writing-men who sit at home with their maps
and the official bulletins and our despatches from the front. “There is
not one of these industrious men,” writes a critic of our work, “who
has had the experience to form a military judgment.” Well, that is as
may be, though we have had more experience of war than most men will
have, I think, for another fifty years. In our own mess we are critics
and prophets and judges, and I fancy we could give a point or two to
the experts at home, and, with luck, later on, may do so. Now in the
war-zone we are but chroniclers of the fighting day by day, trying to
get the facts as fully as possible and putting them down as clearly as
they appear out of the turmoil of battle. Even now in this Introduction
I shall attempt no summing up of the results achieved by these
battles of the Somme, except by saying that by enormous sacrifices,
by individual courage beyond the normal laws of human nature as I
thought I knew them once, by great efficiency in organisation and a
resolute purpose not checked or weakened by any obstacles, our troops
broke through positions which the enemy believed, and had a right to
believe, impregnable, carried by assault his first, second, and third
systems of trenches, drew in his reserves with many guns and men from
Verdun so that the French could counter-attack with brilliant success,
and inflicted upon the enemy heavy and irreparable loss which, as we
hope and believe, though with imperfect knowledge, he cannot afford
without weakening his line of defence on our own front and facing our
Allies. These hammer-strokes were not decisive in victory. I believe
that the German strength of resistance and attack is still great. I do
not see a quick ending of this most horrible massacre in the fields
of Europe. But it was only the weather which stopped for a time our
forward progress when at the end of October the rain-storms made all
the battlefield a swamp and obscured the observation which our men had
won by three months and a half of uphill fighting and desperate strife.
Even then in the mud they took many more prisoners in heavy fighting
up by the Stuff and Schwaben Redoubts which the enemy hated us to hold
because of their dominating ground to the north of Thiépval—and then
in the fog made that great, audacious attack on Beaumont-Hamel, which
captured one of the strongest positions against our own front with
over 6,000 prisoners. Of that last attack I saw nothing, being home on
sick-leave.
I must say a word or two about the Tanks. After the first great
surprise, the exaltation of spirits caused by these new motor-monsters,
there followed a disappointment in the public mind and even among our
soldiers. Some of the infantry, poor lads, hoped that at last the
enemy’s deadly machine-gun fire would be killed by these things and
that in future infantry attacks would be a walk-over behind the Tanks.
That was hoping too much. It would require thousands of Tanks to do
that and we had only a few. But I have the record of what each Tank did
in action up to the middle of October, and it leaves no room for doubt
that, balancing success with failure, these new machines of war have
justified their inventors a hundred-fold. They saved many casualties at
certain points of the line and helped to gain many important positions,
as at Thiépval and Flers, Courcelette and Martinpuich. If we had enough
of them—and it would be a big number—trench warfare would go for ever
and machine-gun redoubts would lose their terror.
The battles of the Somme—as we call this fighting, curiously, for
on our side it is not very near the Somme—are not yet finished. As
I write these words it is only a lull which seems to end them, and
does end at least the first phase with which I deal in the pages that
follow. They are pages written on the evenings of battle hastily and
sometimes feverishly, after days of intense experience and tiring
sensation. Yet there is in them and through them one passionate
purpose. It is to reveal to our people and the world the high valour,
the self-sacrificing discipline of soul, the supreme endurance of those
men of ours who fought and suffered great agonies and died, and if not
killed or wounded, came out to rest a little while and fight again, not
liking it, you understand—hating it like the hell it is—but doing their
duty, with a great and glorious devotion, according to the light that
is in them.
THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME
I
THE HISTORIC FIRST OF JULY
1
WITH THE BRITISH ARMIES IN THE FIELD, JULY 1, 1916
The attack which was launched to-day against the German lines on a
20-mile front began well. It is not yet a victory, for victory comes
at the end of a battle, and this is only a beginning. But our troops,
fighting with very splendid valour, have swept across the enemy’s front
trenches along a great part of the line of attack, and have captured
villages and strongholds which the Germans have long held against us.
They are fighting their way forward not easily but doggedly. Many
hundreds of the enemy are prisoners in our hands. His dead lie thick in
the track of our regiments.
And so, after the first day of battle, we may say: It is, on balance,
a good day for England and France. It is a day of promise in this war,
in which the blood of brave men is poured out upon the sodden fields of
Europe.
For nearly a week now we have been bombarding the enemy’s lines from
the Yser to the Somme. Those of us who have watched this bombardment
knew the meaning of it. We knew that it was the preparation for this
attack. All those raids of the week which I have recorded from day to
day were but leading to a greater raid when not hundreds of men but
hundreds of thousands would leave their trenches and go forward in a
great assault.
We had to keep the secret, to close our lips tight, to write vague
words lest the enemy should get a hint too soon, and the strain was
great upon us and the suspense an ordeal to the nerves, because as the
hours went by they drew nearer to the time when great masses of our
men, those splendid young men who have gone marching along the roads of
France, would be sent into the open, out of the ditches where they got
cover from the German fire.
This secret was foreshadowed by many signs. Travelling along the roads
we saw new guns arriving—heavy guns and field-guns, week after week. We
were building up a great weight of metal.
Passing them, men raised their eyebrows and smiled grimly.... A tide of
men flowed in from the ports of France—new men of new divisions. They
passed to some part of the front, disappeared for a while, were met
again in fields and billets, looking harder, having stories to tell of
trench life and raids.