after our attack had started, they were brought to Cambrai, and while
the officers were sent on by motor-car they marched a long distance
through unknown country to the front. They do not know the names of the
villages through which they passed, their officers had no maps, and
they had an ominous feeling that they were going to their doom. But the
strength of our artillery, and its deadly accuracy of aim, surprised
them.
They did not know the English had such gunners. Still more were they
surprised by the dash of our infantry when they heard that they had
against them “men of the ‘New Army.’” “We thought they were Guards,”
said these Prussian prisoners, who belonged chiefly to the Lehr,
Grenadiers and Fusiliers—all Guards’ Divisions—the 70th Jaeger and the
110th, 114th and 190th regiments of the line. Some of them I spoke to
were Poles from Silesia—“ich kann nur ein wenig Deutsch sprechen” (I
can only speak a little German), said one of them. Yet they were tall,
hefty men of good physique and well-fed. Some of them were middle-aged
fellows, and fathers of families, corresponding to the French
Territorials. They spoke of their wives and children, and their tired,
dazed eyes (for they were just down from the field of fire) lighted up
at the thought of going home again after the war.
“God send a quick ending to the war!” said one of them, and he spoke
the words as a prayer with his hands upraised.
I sat in a little dug-out, bomb-proof, perhaps, but not sound-proof,
because the noise of guns was appallingly close and loud while some of
the men were being brought in to be examined by a bright-eyed officer,
who spoke their dialects as well as their language, and had an easy way
with him so that they were not frightened.
They answered frankly, in a manly way, and were grateful for our
treatment of them. A queer scene inside these walls of sandbags,
lighted by German candles, filled with all sorts of litter from German
pockets—great clasp-knives, leaden spoons, cartridge clips, compasses,
watches, pencils. One of the investigating officers was the son of a
famous musician, and seemed to find an intense interest in his job,
though new batches of prisoners keep arriving through day and night, so
that his meals and his sleep are interrupted.
But with his brother officers he is accumulating a store of
information, and sees all the drama of the war, and all its misery for
the enemy, between these sandbags, and in the dim candlelight which
flickers upon the worn faces of German soldiers taken an hour before up
there where the shells are falling.
IX
A CAMEO OF WAR
1
JULY 9
Slowly, but quite steadily, we are drawing our lines closer about the
enemy’s strong places along the whole extent of our attacking front
in order that one by one he must abandon them. Last night our troops
captured new trenches about Ovillers-la-Boiselle, so that the pressure
upon that place is tighter, and during the past eighteen hours we have
established ourselves in the Bois des Trones, and its neighbourhood to
the east of Montauban.
The meaning of our attacking methods and of the hard fighting at
different points may not be clear to people who do not realise the
position which our men have to storm. It has often been said that
the enemy’s lines, which stretch from the sea to the Vosges, are one
great fortress, and this is true, but it is more essentially and even
technically true of the line through which we broke on the first day of
July.
The great German salient which curves round from Gommecourt to Fricourt
is like a chain of mediæval fortresses connected by earthworks and
tunnels. The fortresses, or strong places as we now call them, are the
ruined villages—stronger in defence than any old tower because they are
filled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, and other deadly engines—of
Gommecourt, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiépval, Ovillers-la-Boiselle and Fricourt.
In spite of the superb courage of those British battalions which flung
themselves against those strongholds on the left side of the German
salient they did not fall, but breaches were made in their defences
which are now being widened and deepened. On the southern side, where
the attack succeeded, La Boiselle and Fricourt and further eastwards
Mametz and Montauban, are ours, and the attack is pushing further in
to turn the strong places on the left from within the fortress walls,
as it were, while they are being weakened by assaults from without,
gradually putting the strangle-grip upon them. If we have luck and
keep striking deeper into the salient, as we have done during the past
twenty-four hours at Contalmaison and Ovillers, it would seem to me as
if the strong places on the left must either be evacuated by the enemy
or surrounded and taken, with their imprisoned troops, by us.
I saw the scene of this struggle for the enemy’s strongholds to-day
almost as if I were looking into the mirror of the Lady of Shalott.
It seemed like that, strangely unreal, as though in an image—and yet
terribly real and vivid—because I came upon it suddenly, by accident,
arranged for me by a gap in a hedge and by two trees on each side of
the gap, like the frame of a picture.
I had been up to the lines in search of an officer whose headquarters
is in dug-outs below the crest of a hill. Beyond this crest and another
one beyond that the fires of hate were burning all right. I could tell
that by the smoke clouds which came black, and white, and green, into
the fleecy sky of this July day in France, and by the noise of the guns
all about me. But I did not trouble to climb to the crest. There were
interesting things to see below and fine men whom I wanted to meet
again before they go nearer to those fires.
I passed two friends on the roadway riding in the centre of a long
column of troops, and when I waved my hands to them and shouted “Good
luck!” they turned in their saddles and waved back and smiled in a
way that one remembers through a lifetime. I did not trouble to climb
the crest because there were some captured German guns below it worth
seeing as the first fruits of victory.
They were being fastened to our own gun-carriages and taken off to the
place where such trophies go, cheered by French townsfolk on the way.
Queer, beastly things were some of these captured engines. There were
long wooden barrels hooped with steel, and with a touch-hole to fire
the charge for a “plum-pudding” bomb large enough to blow up ten yards
of trench—as primitive as the engines of war used in the fifteenth
century.
It was on the way back that I came upon the gap in the hedge. I passed
camps of men and horses, masses of guns and long lines of dug-outs
in chalk banks, where soldiers sat in the entries on this Sunday
afternoon, smoking their pipes with an air of profound peace in spite
of the noise of shell-fire; and large bodies of splendid troops,
English and Scottish, tramping up the roads, all powdered with white
dust, or lying under the shadows of wayside trees, sleeping on their
backs with the sun full on their bronzed, sweat-begrimed faces. It was
the madding crowd of war, with a tangle of traffic on the roads, and
kicking mules making beasts of themselves at the sight of a motor-car,
and artillery wagons with creaking axles plunging through it all under
the daring guidance of red-faced boys with short whips.
Turning off the road, away from all this turmoil, and presently,
through the gap in the hedge, I saw, quite unexpectedly, the scene of
war across the fields in front of me, all gold with that weed which is
ruining so many harvest fields of France. It was Mametz Wood. I knew
at once the queer shape of it with a great bite out of its western
side. In spite of all our shell fire it is still thick with foliage,
upon which the sunlight lay, casting a great black shadow underneath.
Just below it was Peak Wood, a row of broken trees by a sunken road,
and a triangle trench, for which our men fought desperately, so that
it changed hands three times before they won it finally, on Friday
afternoon.
To the left of Mametz Wood and on a line with it was Contalmaison, and
on the left of that Bailiff Wood, which we captured and lost again the
day before yesterday, and then further left Ovillers-la-Boiselle, and
completing the crescent, La Boiselle itself.
2
Between the gap in the hedge I saw again one of the world’s great
battlefields, and every detail of it was so clearly and sharply defined
in the sunlight that it was like a Pre-Raphaelite picture painted
in vivid colours. I could count the shell-holes in the roofs of
Contalmaison village, and the château there, standing to the right of
a little wood, was brought so closely forward by a stereoscopic effect
that I could look into the blackness of its broken windows.
Down below me were our trenches, and I saw our men in them. Some of
them were outside the trenches, strolling about in the open, in little
groups, or walking about on a lone track, as though taking a quiet
half-hour on this Sunday afternoon.
And yet they were in the centre of the battlefield, and over their
heads came an incessant flight of shells, our shells which I could
see falling in the German lines, and in the fields about them German
shells, bursting with dull crashes and with clouds of black and
greenish smoke. All the power of destruction was at work, but because
of the utter calm and beauty of the sky and the golden light over all
the scene it seemed to me, standing on the edge of it, less deadly,
like a dream of war.
It was no dream. Three of our shells followed each other in a group and
burst with one explosion against the left-hand tower of Contalmaison
château, smashing off a turret as though it were a card-castle.
Our shells were flinging up fountains of black earth and smoke in the
German lines beyond—at Pozières. All round the battlefield there were
the black clouds of shell fire breaking and rising and spreading over
Bailiff Wood, at Ovillers, and between the broken tree trunks of La
Boiselle. Men were being killed as usual, là-bas. But our shells were
doing most of the damage.
An extraordinary thing happened as I looked across the château of
Contalmaison. The earth seemed suddenly to open in the enemy’s lines
and let forth the smoke of its inner fires. It gushed out in great
round, dense masses, and rose to a vast height, spreading like the
foliage of some gigantic tree. It was not a mine.
The explosion from a mine flings up a black mass with jagged edges
like a piece of black-cardboard cut into teeth. But this was a regular
uprising of curly black clouds of great volume, getting denser, and
coming continuously. I watched it for twenty minutes or more, and
could not make out its meaning, but guessed that we had blown up an
ammunition store.
Two great explosions which came quite a few seconds after the first
vomit of smoke suggested this. So I went away from the picture through
the gap in the trees. Down in the valley where I passed the enemy’s
shells were coming rather near. A heavy crump burst on a knoll close
by, and some officers and men were watching with that curious smile men
have at times when they know their lives depend upon a freak of chance.
It is an ironical smile, and rather grim.
X
THE ASSAULT ON CONTALMAISON
1
JULY 9
I had an idea that there would be “something doing” to-day at
Contalmaison, and I went over the fields towards it, past some of our
batteries, past columns of troops marching with their bands along the
roads which powder them with white blinding dust, past great camps
and ammunition columns, and litters of empty shell cases remaining
over from the great bombardment, and past bodies of soldiers stretched
out upon the grass and sleeping in the warm sunlight close behind
the fighting lines, until I came to a little crest looking down to
Contalmaison village, and the woods about it.
Mametz Wood was very quiet this afternoon. As neither side could see
exactly the position of its troops underneath the heavy foliage—our
men, who were fighting last night, hold a line about half-way
through—the gunners were chary of shelling it severely. Now and
again a burst of shrapnel smoke puffed against the dark background
of the trees, and the shell slashed through the branches, but that
was not often, and the wood seemed very peaceful. Looking at it one’s
imagination found it difficult to realise that perhaps there were men
there who had dug themselves into the earth beneath the spreading
roots, and that British and German patrols were feeling their way,
perhaps, from one tree to another, through the glades, until they came
into touch and exchanged some rifle shots before falling back to their
own line. I could only guess at that, and could see nothing but the
tight foliage, yellow in the sun and black in the shadows.
There were plenty of shells falling elsewhere, and it seemed to me
that the enemy had brought up new batteries to strengthen his defence.
His shell-fire was certainly more intense, and wider-spreading, than
during the past few days round here. He was bombarding our positions
from La Boiselle to Montauban very fiercely. The poor broken wood of La
Boiselle, which our men captured after desperate fighting, was being
searched by his black shrapnel, and every now and then by one of his
“universals,” which broke with a vivid cloud of greenish fumes, very
prolonged in density, and forming fantastic shapes as it dissolved. One
such cloud, metallic in the brilliance of its green, was like a winged
woman with a Medusa face.
High explosives were falling into Montauban village, raising volumes of
rose-coloured clouds, beautiful in the sunlight. I think it must have
been the dust of red bricks flung up from ruined houses.
2
At half-past three in the afternoon the enemy put a very heavy barrage
in a straight line below Contalmaison. One by one the shells burst,
and so quickly down the line and back again that they formed a wall of
black smoke with only a few gaps.
“It is so nice to get a little fresh air!” said a young gunner officer
who was next to me, reporting for his battery, which speaks from afar
with a very gruff voice. “During the first few days of the ‘show’ I
lived indoors”—he pointed to the dark entry of a dug-out—“but now I’m
getting sunburnt again. The men enjoy this open fighting. Look at ’em!”
There were men moving about the battlefield utterly regardless of the
trenches—the old German trenches, marked by billows of brown earth
(brown because of our gun-fire which ploughed it up), and more regular
lines of white earthworks, which were our own parapets before the
advance. A long column of them was winding very slowly round towards
Contalmaison.
“Looks as if they were going up to support an attack,” said an officer
close to me.
Other groups of khaki-coloured men were moving over the ground which
one sees southward from the tall chimney of Pozières village which we
were bombarding heavily.
I thought back to the Ypres salient for a moment. Men do not move
about so freely there! Or between Loos and Hulluch, where over the
wide barren stretch of desolation no human being is ever seen, or, if
seen, killed. But—“it is nice to get a little fresh air” after the
imprisonment in the trenches, and this open warfare is enormously
better. It is better even to die in the open, with the wind upon one’s
face, standing among the poppies, underneath the blue sky, which to-day
was glorious with white snow-mountains piled high with dazzling peaks
in its sea of blue and sunlight.
And so our men are touched with a kind of spiritual joy to be fighting
above ground again instead of crouching in ditches—though personally I
like a handy hole at times.
In the very centre of the battlefield for which some of our men fought
and died a day or two ago, one tall fellow was signalling to somebody
about something. Now and then a German shell fell dangerously close
to his position sending up a fountain of earth and smoke, but he kept
talking with his dot-and-dash to a far and invisible friend. It seemed
an interesting monologue, as though he had important things to tell. It
seemed to be addressed to the ruins of Contalmaison. There were moments
when its old French château, set in a little wood, was lit up by a
splash of golden light as the white clouds drifted by, so that I could
almost count its bricks, and could see how the shells which I watched
yesterday had opened its roofs. But the left hand tower was knocked
off this morning by a direct hit from that same battery whose fire was
being observed by the young gunner officer with whom I sat to-day.
It is a wonder the shell did not smash the whole château to a pitiful
ruin, but it took the tower _en passant_ as chess players say.
At four o’clock our guns concentrated upon Contalmaison, Acid Drop
Copse—the poor little straggly wood to the right of Mametz—and the
German trenches defending the Contalmaison ridge. Smoke belched over
the battlefield, and the song of the shells was loud and high. It was
under those shells falling beyond them and through the smoke that a
body of our men moved forward to the assault upon the village.
3
JULY 10
The village of Contalmaison is ours again. Whether we ever held it
before, by more than handfuls of men, who went in and went out,
is doubtful. Certainly some men succeeded in getting there from
Caterpillar Wood and Acid Drop Copse, because I met them afterwards
with wounds in their bodies, but it is difficult to know what happened.
One can only guess that Germans came up from their dug-outs after our
men had penetrated the outskirts and made use of the darkness with
their machine-guns and bombs.
What happened last night is clear enough. I have already described in
a previous dispatch how we concentrated our fire upon the positions in
front of the village and then shelled the village itself with terrific
intensity.
I saw the beginning of this bombardment, and watched our men going up
to support the attack which was to follow. It was begun when fresh
troops who had been brought up to help the tired men who had been
fighting in this part of the line under heavy shell-fire for several
days advanced under the cover of our guns to the left and right of the
village.
It was already hemmed in on both sides, for other British troops were
in firm possession of Bailiff Wood to the left, and during the evening,
by a series of bombing attacks, Mametz Wood to the right had been
almost cleared of Germans, who are now only in the outer fringe of it.
The enemy in Contalmaison knew that their position was hopeless. When
our guns lifted they heard the cheers of our infantry on both sides of
the village, and many of them—at least many of those who were still
alive and unwounded—streamed out of the village in disorderly retreat,
only to be caught behind by our extended barrages between Contalmaison,
Pozières and Bazentin-le-Petit, so that their rout became a shambles.
Our men were quickly into the village, and having learnt a lesson by
the experience of other troops at other places made a thorough search
of machine-gun emplacements and dug-outs, so that there should be no
further trouble with this wasps’ nest.
4
The men left in Contalmaison were in a dreadful state, having suffered
to the very limit of human endurance, and beyond. They were surprised
to find themselves living enough to be taken prisoners.
One of these men with whom I talked this morning told me a tragic tale.
He spoke a little English, having been a cabinet-maker in the Tottenham
Court Road some years ago before he went back to Württemberg, where,
when the war began, he was, as he said, taken and put in a uniform and
told to fight, though it was not his trade, poor devil.
With other men of the 122nd (Bavarian) Regiment he went into
Contalmaison five days ago. Soon the rations they had brought with them
were finished, and owing to our ceaseless gun-fire it was impossible
to get fresh supplies. They suffered great agonies of thirst, and the
numbers of their dead and wounded increased steadily.
“There was a hole in the ground,” said this German cabinet-maker,
whose head was bound with a bloody bandage and who was dazed and
troubled when I talked with him. “It was a dark hole which held twenty
men, all lying in a heap together, and that was the only dug-out for my
company, so that there was not room for more than a few.”
“It was necessary to take turns in this shelter, while outside the
English shells were coming and bursting everywhere. Two or three men
were dragged out to make room for two or three others.”
“Then those who went outside were killed or wounded. Some of them had
their heads blown off, and some of them had both legs torn off, and
some of them their arms.”
“But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went
outside knew that it was their turn to die, very likely. At last most
of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so
that we lay in blood.”
“There was only one doctor there, an ‘unteroffizier’”—he pointed to a
man who lay asleep on the ground, face downwards—“and he bandaged some
of us till he had no more bandages.”
“Then, last night, we knew the end was coming. Your guns began to fire
all together—the dreadful ‘trommelfeuer,’ as we call it—and the shells
burst and smashed up the earth about us.”
“We stayed down in the hole waiting for the end. Then we heard your
soldiers shouting. Presently two of them came down into our hole. They
were two boys and they had their pockets full of bombs.”
“They had bombs in their hands also, and they seemed to wonder whether
they would kill us. But we were all wounded, nearly all, and we cried
‘Kameraden!’... And now we are prisoners—and I am thirsty.”
Other prisoners told me that the effect of our fire was terrible in
Contalmaison, and that at least half of their men holding it were
killed or wounded, so that when our soldiers entered last night they
walked over the bodies of the dead.
These men who had escaped were in a pitiful condition. They lay on the
ground utterly exhausted most of them, and—that was strange—with their
faces to the earth. Perhaps it was to blot out the vision of things
seen.
I shall remember the cabinet-maker of the Tottenham Court Road. In
spite of the clay which caked his face and clothes and the bloody rag
round his head he was a handsome bearded fellow with blue eyes which
once or twice lighted up with a tragic smile, as when I asked him when
he thought the war would end.
“In 1915,” he said, “when I was wounded at Ypres, I thought the war
would end in a few months. And a little while ago I thought so again!”
Then he muttered something to himself, but loudly enough for me to hear
the words—“Surely we cannot go on much longer?”
I left these men, and further down the road saw many more prisoners.
There were nearly three hundred of them marching down a side track,
between some ripening corn, under mounted escort, their grey-blue
uniforms hardly visible until I was closer to them against the
background of the wheat.
Most of them were young, healthy-looking men, who walked briskly, and
it was only a few behind who limped as they walked, and looked broken
and beaten men.
5
It was a good day for us in prisoners, for about 500 have come down
from Contalmaison, Mametz Wood and the Trones Wood as living proofs of
our advance in all those places.
All the prisoners speak of the terror of our artillery fire, and
documents captured in their dug-outs tell the same tale in words which
reveal the full horror of bombardment.
“We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote a German
soldier on the day before our great attack. “Nothing comes to us;
no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches, it
is terrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days since this
bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot
to pieces.”
“Our thirst is terrible,” wrote another man. “We hunt for water, and
drink it out of shell-holes.”
Many of the men speak of the torture of thirst which they suffered
during our bombardment.
“Every one of us in these five days has become years older. We hardly
know ourselves. Bechtel said that, in these five days, he lost 10 lbs.
Hunger and thirst have also contributed their share to that. Hunger
would be easily borne, but the thirst makes one almost mad.”