hummocky ridges. It was only later that I heard that these men had been
fighting heavily down near the two trees known as the Poodles, and that
they had captured a number of German prisoners, who came towards them
with uplifted hands. The prisoners were being brought down in small
batches, whom I met on the road.
3
Up at La Boisselle the shelling was still intense, but our troops had
already surrounded part of the position, and after a concentration by
our guns advanced and captured it. A number of Germans were there in
their dug-outs, the remnant of a battalion which had suffered frightful
things under our gun-fire. Some of the officers, it seems, from what
the prisoners told me, went away to Bush Tree Copse, Contalmaison,
saying that they were going to bring up reserves. But they did not come
back.
The other men—about 250 of them—stayed in the dug-outs, without food
and water, while our shells made a fury above them and smashed up the
ground. They had a German doctor there, a giant of a man with a great
heart, who had put his first-aid dressing-station in the second-line
trench and attended to the wounds of the men until our bombardment
intensified so that no man could live there.
He took the wounded down to a dug-out—those who had not been carried
back—and stayed there expecting death. But then, as he told me, to-day
at about eleven o’clock this morning the shells ceased to scream and
roar above-ground, and after a sudden silence he heard the noise of
British troops. He went up to the entrance of his dug-out and said to
some English soldiers who came up with fixed bayonets, “My friends, I
surrender.” Afterwards he helped to tend our own wounded, and did very
good work for us under the fire of his own guns, which had now turned
upon this position.
There was another German to-day at La Boisselle, but his work was not
that of helping wounded men. It was one of those machine-gunners who
kept up a fire of dropping bullets upon our troops when we first made
an assault upon this position. And to-day he was there still in his
emplacement doing very deadly work, and though he was wounded in nine
places when we found him he was still working his terrible little gun.
Our men took him prisoner, and, in the English way, bore no grudge
against him, but sang his praises. Many other machine-guns were
captured, and round one of them all the team was laid out dead by one
of our shells.
4
At about 11.30 in the morning I walked down into Fricourt, which was
captured yesterday afternoon. It was a strange walk, not pleasant,
but full of a terrible interest. Fighting was still going on on the
high ground above, a few hundred yards away, and while I had been
watching the scene of war from a field near by I had seen heavy shells,
certainly five-point-nines, falling near the village and raising clouds
of black and greenish smoke, and they were falling into Mametz some
distance to the right.
Fricourt was not an inviting place, but other men had been there at a
worse time. And the interest of it called to one to get into this bit
of ruined ground with its broken brickwork which for more than a year
we have stared at across barbed wire and through holes in the ground
as an evil place beyond our knowledge, as a place from which death
came to our men from trench-mortars and machine-guns, separated from
us by lines of trenches full of snipers who waited and watched for any
of our heads to appear, even for a second, above the parapet, and by
No Man’s Land into which some of our brave boys went out at night at
great peril, hiding in shell-holes, and avoiding the mine-fields of the
Bois Français and other ground honeycombed below by German galleries
which, night after night—do you remember the line in the official
communiqué?—flung up the soil and formed another crater and buried some
more of our men. “There was mining activity near Fricourt.” Well, there
will be no more of it there.
I went across the fields—Lord God! that would have meant death a
week or two ago, before the enemy was busy with other things close
by—and came down to our old system of trenches. Here were the little
wooden bridges across which our men made their advance, and litters of
sandbags no more to be used for the parapets here, and the abandoned
properties of men who had left these old familiar places—the old
rat-holes, the bays in the trenches where they stood on guard at night,
the dug-outs where they had pinned up photographs—upon the morning of
the great adventure, which was yesterday.
Here was a redoubt from which I had first looked across to the Crucifix
and the communication-trench up which the men used to come at night.
Now all abandoned, for the men had gone forward.
The flowers were growing richly in No Man’s Land, red and yellow and
blue, except where the earth was white and barren above the mine-fields
of the famous Tambour, and brown and barren in the Bois Français, where
never a tree now grows.
We walked across No Man’s Land in the full sunlight of this July day,
and though shells were rushing overhead, those from our batteries
seemed low enough to cut off the heads of the flowers, and mine. They
were mostly our shells.
Lightly wounded men, just hit up there beyond the wood, walked along
unaided, or helped by a comrade. One of them, a boy of 18 or so, with
blue eyes under his steel helmet, stopped me and showed me a bloody
bandage round his hand, and said with an excited laugh:
“They got me all right. I was serving my Lewis when a bullet caught me
smack. Now I’m off. And I’ve had 18 months of it.”
He went away grinning at his luck, because the bullet might have chosen
another place.
Some German prisoners followed him. Two of them were carrying a
stretcher on which an English soldier lay with his eyes shut. A wounded
German behind turned and smiled at me—a strong, meaningful smile. He
was glad to be wounded and out of it.
Other Germans came down under guard, and little groups of English
soldiers and Red Cross men. I struck across the field again to the old
German lines of trenches, and saw the full and frightful horror of war.
The German trenches were smashed at some places, by our artillery
fire, into shapelessness. Green sandbags were flung about, timbers from
the trench sides had been broken and tossed about like matchsticks.
I stumbled from one shell-crater to another, over bits of indescribable
things, and the litter of men’s tunics and pouches and haversacks,
and dug-outs. Rifles lay about, and the ground was strewn with
hand-grenades, and here and there was a great unexploded shell which
had nosed into the soil. There were many German dead lying there in
Fricourt, and some of our own poor men. The Germans were lying thick in
one part of the trenches.
They had been tall, fine men in their life. One of them lying with many
wounds upon him was quite a giant. Another poor man lay on his back
with his face turned up to the blue sky and his hands raised up above
his body as though in prayer....
But I turned my head away from these sights, as most people hide these
things from their imagination, too cowardly to face the reality of war.
I followed an officer down into a German dug-out until he halted
half-way down its steps and spoke a word of surprise.
“There’s a candle still burning!”
It gave one an uncanny feeling to see that lighted candle in the deep
subterranean room, where yesterday German officers were living, unless
dead before yesterday.
It could not have been burning all that time. For a moment we thought
an enemy might still be hiding there, and it was not improbable, as two
of them had been found in Fricourt, only a few hours before. But in all
likelihood it had been lit by an English soldier after the capture of
the place.
The dug-out was littered with German books and papers. I picked up one
of them, and saw that it was “Advice on Sport.” Here was sad sport for
Germans. There was a tragic spirit in that little room, and we went out
quickly. I peered into other German dug-outs, and saw how splendidly
built they were, so deep and so strongly timbered that not even our
bombardment had utterly destroyed them. They are great workers, these
Germans, and wonderful soldiers.
Everywhere there lay about great numbers of steel helmets, some of them
with vizors, and well designed, so that they come down to the nape of
the neck and protect all the head. Some of our soldiers were bringing
them back as souvenirs. One man had ten dangling about him, like the
tin pots on a travelling tinker.
In the wood beyond the Crucifix our machine-guns were firing fiercely,
and the noise was like that of a great flame, beyond the village.
Fricourt itself is just a heap of frightful ruin, with the remains of
houses which the enemy had used as machine-gun emplacements. Every
yard of it was littered with the débris of war’s aftermath. Before
our final attack yesterday many of the German troops filtered out in
retreat, leaving some of their wounded behind, and one poor puppy—a fox
terrier—which is now the trophy of one of our battalions.
But a number of men—about 150, I should say—could not get away owing to
the intensity of our first bombardment, and when our men stormed the
place yesterday afternoon they came up out of their dug-outs with their
hands up for mercy. I saw them all to-day, and spoke with some of them.
They belonged to the 109th, 110th and 111th regiments of the 14th
Reserve Corps, and were mostly from Baden. It would be absurd to talk
of these fellows as being undersized or underfed men. They were tall,
strong, stout men, in the prime of life. Only a few were wounded,
and lay about in a dazed way. The others answered me cheerfully, and
expressed their joy at having escaped from our gun-fire, which they
described as “schrecklich”—terrible. They had had no food or drink
since yesterday morning until their English guards gave it to them.
I spoke also with a little group of officers. They were young men of
an aristocratic type, and spoke very frankly and politely. They, too,
acknowledged the new power of our artillery and the courage of our
men, which was not new to them. It was here that I had a talk with the
German medical officer whom I had seen walking down between two guards
close to Fricourt. After describing his own experiences during the
bombardment this morning he laughed in a sad way.
“This war!” he said. “We go on killing each other to no purpose. Europe
is being bled to death, and will be impoverished for long years. It
is a war against religion, and against civilisation, and I see no end
to it. Germany is strong and England is strong and France is strong.
It is impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end
to come?” Because of his services to our own men he was given special
privileges and an English soldier had brought down all his personal
belongings. A little apart from all his fellow officers stood a German
lieutenant-colonel who was charged with having killed two of our
officers by bombing them after his surrender. A tall, gloomy, truculent
man of the worst Prussian type, he stood awaiting an inquiry, and I
could only hope that he was not guilty of such a crime.
From personal observation I know nothing of what has happened elsewhere
in the line to-day, but I have heard a story of an attack on the
Gommecourt salient which shows that this action was one of the most
tragic and heroic things in British history. The enemy had concentrated
a great mass of guns here in the belief that our main attack was to be
directed against this part of the front. The existence of this belief
has been proved by German orders which have come into our hands.
As soon as our men left their trenches after the bombardment yesterday
the enemy barraged our front and support trenches with a most infernal
fire. Our men advanced through this barrage absolutely as though on
parade, and in spite of heavy losses made their way over 500 yards of
No Man’s Land to the enemy’s front line.
The German soldiers also behaved with great courage, and carried their
machine-guns right through our barrage until they faced our men in the
open and swept them with fire so that large numbers fell.
The attack did not succeed in this part of the line. But it drew on
the enemy’s reserves, and great honour is due to the valour of those
men of ours, who fought as heroes in one of the most glorious acts of
self-sacrifice ever made by British troops.
IV
THE DEATH-SONG OF THE GERMANS
Morning bright; morning bright—
Light that leads me to the grave—
Soon shall dawn with summons brazen
Call me to my death to hasten—
I and many a comrade brave.
“Morgenroth” (Dr. Blackie’s translation).
“Morgenroth!” the haunting death-song of the forlorn hopes of
the German armies, is the song which was sung so often in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and is being sung again to-day.
The words were written by Wilhelm Hauff, a patriotic German writer of
the first half of the nineteenth century.
1
JULY 4
No sensational progress has been made by us since I wrote my last
despatch, yesterday, but our guns are in a good position to follow up
our advance, and the battle is developing, I believe, according to
the original plan which anticipated slow and steady fighting from one
German position to another. That is being done, and another point was
gained to-day by the capture of Bernafay Wood to the north-east of
Montauban, from which I have just come back after seeing the shelling
of this wood, from close range.
It is behind the lines on the outskirts of the battlefields that one
sees most of the activity of war, as I saw it to-day again when I went
up to this captured ground of Montauban. Up there where fighting was
in progress not many men were visible. Until the advance, after the
work of our guns, and the short, sharp rush from open ground under the
enemy’s shrapnel, our men are hidden and the only movement to be seen
is that of the shells bursting and tossing up the earth.
But on the way up, now that the war is no longer stationary, there is a
great turmoil of men and mules and guns and wagons and again and again
to-day I wished that I could put on to paper sketches rather than words
to describe these scenes. For here all along the way were historic
pictures of the campaign full of life and colour.
Great camps had been assembled in the dips and hollows of the hills
with painted tents between the lines and great masses of horses and
wagons and gun-limbers crowded together, with thousands of men busy as
ants. Transport columns came down or went up the hilly roads driven
by tired men who drooped in their seats or saddles after three days
of battle, in which they have had but little sleep. One of them was
asleep to-day. He had fallen backwards in his wagon still holding the
reins, and while he slept his horses jogged on steadily following the
leaders of the column. On the roadside and among the wild flowers
of uncultivated fields batches of infantry, who had been marching
all night, had flung themselves down and slept also while they had a
half-hour’s chance, with their arms outstretched, with their rifles and
packs for their pillows.
Other men were moving up towards the fighting lines, marching with a
steady tramp along the chalky roads, which plastered them with white
dust from steel helmet downwards, and put a white mask upon their
faces, except where the sweat came down in gullies. Artillerymen were
leading up reserve horses, who put their ears back for a moment, as
though to switch off flies when heavy guns blared forth close to them
and shells of at least 8in. calibre went howling overhead to the
enemy’s lines.
At wayside corners were field dressing stations flying the Red Cross
flag, and surrounded by little parks of ambulances, where stretcher
men were busy. And every now and then, at a cross-road or a by-path,
a wooden notice-board directed the way in red letters and the words
“Walking wounded.”
This was the Via Dolorosa of men who could hobble away from the
battlefield up there and get back on their legs to save transport more
badly needed by stricken comrades.
Closer to the lines there was a scene which would make one weep if
one had the weakness of tears after two years of war. Our dead were
being buried in a newly-made cemetery, and some of their comrades were
standing by the open graves and sorting out the crosses—the little
wooden crosses which grow in such a harvest across these fields of
France.
They were white above the brown earth, and put into neat rows, and
labelled with strips of tin bearing the names of those who now have
peace.
French troops were mingled among our own men. A working party of them
came along shouldering picks and shovels. They were Territorials, past
the fighting age, but tall, sturdy, hardened men, with a likeness to
their young sons who, with less weight, but with the same hard bronzed
look, are fighting the new battles of the war.
It was the sound of French guns away to the south which was making most
commotion in the air to-day. Big fighting was going on there, as though
the French were making a further advance, and the rafale of their field
guns was incessant, and like the roll of many drums.
2
As I went over the battlefield of Montauban the enemy’s shells and our
own were falling over Bernafay Wood, where each side held part of the
ground. A little to my left Mametz was being pounded heavily by the
German gunners, and they were flinging shrapnel and “crumps” into the
ragged fringe of trees, just in front of me, which marks the place
where the village of Montauban once stood. They were also barraging
a line of trench just below the trees, and keeping a steady flow of
five-point-nines into one end of the wood to the right of Montauban,
for which our men are now fighting.
Other shells came with an irregular choice of place over the
battlefield, and there were moments when those clouds of black shrapnel
overhead suggested an immediate dive into the nearest dug-out.
I passed across our old line of trenches from which on Saturday
morning our men went out cheering to that great attack which carried
them to the furthest point gained that day, in spite of heavy
losses. The trenches now were filled with litter collected from the
battlefield—stacks of rifles and kit, piles of hand-grenades, no longer
needed by those who owned them.
This old system of trenches, in which French troops lived for many
months of war before they handed them over to our men, was like a
ruined and deserted town left hurriedly because of plague, and in great
disorder. Letters were lying about, and bully beef tins, and cartridge
clips. Our men had gone forward and these old trenches are abandoned.
It is beyond the power of words to give a picture of the German
trenches over this battlefield of Montauban, where we now hold the
line through the wood beyond. Before Saturday last it was a wide and
far-reaching network of trenches, with many communication ways and
strong traverses, and redoubts—so that one would shiver at their
strength to see them marked on a map. No mass of infantry, however
great, would have dared to assault such a position with bombs and
rifles.
It was a great underground fortress, which any body of men could have
held against any others for all time apart from the destructive power
of heavy artillery. But now!... Why now it was the most frightful
convulsion of earth that the eyes of man could see.
The bombardment by our guns had tossed all these earthworks into vast
rubbish-heaps. We had made this ground one vast series of shell
craters, so deep and so broad that it was like a field of extinct
volcanoes.
The ground rose and fell in enormous waves of brown earth, so that
standing above one crater I saw before me these solid billows with 30
feet slopes stretching away like a sea frozen after a great storm.
We had hurled thousands of shells from our heaviest howitzers and
long-range guns into this stretch of field.
3
I saw here and touched here the awful result of that great gun-fire
which I had watched from the centre of our batteries on the morning
of July 1. That bombardment had annihilated the German position. Even
many of the dug-outs, going 30 feet deep below the earth and strongly
timbered and cemented, had been choked with masses of earth so that
many dead bodies lay buried there. But some had been left in spite of
the upheaval of earth around them, and into some of these I crept down,
impelled by the strong grim spell of those little dark rooms below
where German soldiers lived only a few days ago.
They seemed haunted by the spirits of the men who had made their homes
here and had carried into these holes the pride of their souls, and
any poetry they had in their hearts, and their hopes and terrors, and
memories of love and life in the good world of peace. I could not
resist going down to such places, though to do so gave me gooseflesh.
I had to go warily, for on the stairways were unexploded bombs of the
“hair-brush” style. A stumble or a kick might send one to eternity by
high explosive force, and it was difficult not to stumble, for the
steps were broken or falling into a landslide.
Down inside the little square rooms were filled with the relics of
German officers and men. The deal tables were strewn with papers, on
the wooden bedsteads lay blue-grey overcoats. Wine bottles, photograph
albums, furry haversacks, boots, belts, kit of every kind had all been
tumbled together by British soldiers who had come here after the first
rush to the enemy’s trenches and searched for men in hiding.
There were men in hiding now, though harmless. In one of the dug-outs
where I groped my way down it was pitch dark. I stumbled against
something, and fumbled for my matches. When I struck a light I saw in a
corner of the room a German.
He lay curled up, with his head on his arm, as though asleep. I did
not stay to look at his face, but went up quickly. And yet I went down
others and lingered in one where no corpse lay because of the tragic
spirit that dwelt there and put its spell on me. I picked up some
letters.
They were all written to “dear brother Wilhelm,” from sisters and
brothers, sending him their loving greetings, praying that his health
was good, promising to send him gifts of food, and yearning for his
homecoming. “Since your last letter and card,” said one of them, “we
have heard nothing more from you.”
“Every time the postman comes we hope for a little note from you....
Dear Wilhelm, in order to be patient with your fate you must thank God
because you have found fortune in misfortune.”
Poor, pitiful letters! I was ashamed to read them because it seemed
like prying into another man’s secrets, though he was dead.
There was a little book I picked up. It is a book of soldiers’ songs,
full of old German sentiment, about “the little mother” and the old
house at home and the pretty girl who kissed her soldier boy before he
went off to the war. And here is the sad old “Morgenlied,” which has
been sung along many roads of France.
“Red morning sun! Red morning sun! Do you light me to an early death?
Soon will the trumpets sound, and I must leave this life, and many a
comrade with me.”
“I scarcely thought my joy would end like this. Yesterday I rode a
proud steed; to-day I am shot through the chest; to-morrow I shall be
in the cold grave, O red morning sun!”
On the front page of this book, which I found to-day at Montauban,
there is an Army Order from Prince von Rupprecht of Bavaria to the
soldiers of the Sixth Army.
“We have the fortune,” it says, “to have the English on our front,
the troops of those people whose envy for years has made them work
to surround us with a ring of enemies in order to crush us. It is to
them that we owe this bloody and most horrible war.... Here is the
antagonist who stands most in the way of the restoration of peace.
Forwards!”
It seemed to me that the preface by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria spoilt
the sentiment in the German folksongs, which were full of love rather
than of hate.
4
I stood again above ground, in the shell craters. Other shells were
coming over my head with their indescribable whooping, and the black
shrapnel was still bursting about the fields, and the Germans were
dropping five-point-nines along a line a hundred yards away.
“Be careful about those dug-outs,” said an officer. “Some of them have
charged mines inside, and there may be Germans still hiding in them.”