with the yellow shell sulphur, tasted as good as a bottle of beer.
To-day we got something to eat. It was impossible before to bring food
up into the front line under the violent curtain fire of the enemy.”
One other out of hundreds tells all in a few words:
“We came into the front line ten days ago. During those ten days I have
suffered more than any time during the last two years. The dug-outs are
damaged in places, and the trenches are completely destroyed.”
We do not gloat over the sufferings of our enemy, though we must make
them suffer, and go on suffering, that they may yield. It is the curse
of war, the black horror which not even the heights of human courage
may redeem, nor all the splendour of youth eager for self-sacrifice.
I have seen things to-day before which one’s soul swoons, and which,
God willing, my pen shall write, so that men shall remember the meaning
of war.
But now, when these things are inevitable, we must look only to our
progress towards the end, and to-day we have made good progress.
Yesterday I wrote of the position we attacked on July 1 as a great
German fortress with a chain of strongholds linked by underground works.
In ten days, by the wonderful gallantry of our men and the great power
of our guns we have smashed several of those forts—as strong as any
on the Western front, and defended stubbornly by masses of guns and
troops—and have stormed our way in so deeply that the enemy is now
forced to fall back upon his next line of defence.
The cost has been great, but the enemy’s losses and the present
position in which he finds himself prove the success of our main attack.
For the first time since the beginning of the war the initiative has
passed to us, and the German Headquarters Staff is hard pushed for
reserves.
XI
THE BATTLE OF THE WOODS
1
JULY 12
For several days now I have been giving a chronicle of hard fighting
at several important points on the way to the second German line, with
such scenes as one eye-witness may describe in a great battle in which
many different bodies of troops are engaged upon a wide front.
The fortunes of war have varied from day to day, almost from hour to
hour, so that positions taken one evening have been lost in the morning
and again captured by the afternoon. Writing as events are happening,
one’s narrative becomes as confused as the confusion of the battlefield
itself, where troops know nothing, or very little, of what is doing
to their right and left, until some general scheme of operations is
completed.
By the capture of Contalmaison and ground to each side of it a general
scheme of progress has been achieved, and, although fighting does not
cease about these points, it is now possible to give a clearer idea of
the battle as it has developed up to the present moment.
I think it may very well be called the Battle of the Woods, for the
chief characteristic of it has been the determined effort of our troops
to take and hold a number of copses and small forests between the first
and second German lines.
On the left of Contalmaison is Bailiff Wood, north-eastwards of the
Horseshoe Redoubt. If we could get that and keep it Contalmaison itself
could be enfiladed and attacked from the west as well as from the
south. Away to the right of Contalmaison is Mametz Wood, even more
important, both in size and position with Bernafay Wood still further
eastwards and Trones Wood on the right again. Other small woods or
copses to the south of Contalmaison were strong fighting points, from
Shelter Wood to Round Wood and Birch Wood at the top of the Sunken Road
and Peak Wood to the left of the Quadrangle Trench.
Some of these places are but a few shell-slashed trees serving as
landmarks, but Bailiff Wood, Mametz Wood, Bernafay Wood, and Trones
Wood are still dense thickets under heavy foliage hiding the enemy’s
troops and our own, but giving no protection from shell-fire.
It is for these woodlands on high ground that our men have been
fighting with the greatest gallantry and most stubborn endurance,
suffering more than light losses, meeting heavy counter-attacks,
gaining ground, losing it, retaking it, and thrusting forward again,
with a really unconquerable spirit, because they know that these woods
are the way to the second bastion of the German stronghold.
It would be good to say something about the different battalions who
have been fighting the Battle of the Woods, and it is hard not to give
some honour to them now, by name. But there are reasons against it—the
enemy wants to know their names for other reasons—and we must wait
until some weeks have passed. They are men from nearly all our English
counties—from Northumberland, Durham, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, from
the Midlands, the Home Counties, and the “West Countrie.” Welshmen were
there, and Irish, and Highlanders and Lowlanders. It was a British
battle, but the greater share of it fell to England alone, and it
was English lads from the North, and English lads from old county
towns like Worcester and Northampton, York and Bedford, Guildford and
Arundel, Norwich, and old London Town itself, who fought on the way to
Contalmaison and took this stronghold of the woodlands.
I passed some of them on the roads to-day. They were the men who
captured Contalmaison the day before yesterday, and they were marching
with such a steady swing that it was hard to think they had been
through such fighting and fatigues, and that they had left behind them
many good fellows who will never come back along the road.
They were bringing back trophies of victory. On their wagons, beside
their own steel hats, were German helmets. Some of the enemy’s
machine-guns were passing back with them, and although the men were
tired, they held their heads high and there was a fine pride in their
eyes. An officer who watched them pass called out the names of their
regiments and said, “Well done!” and one of their own officers waved
his hand and called back, “Cheery-O!” It was the greeting of gallant
fighting men.
2
But before the taking of Contalmaison the day before yesterday there
were other men who had done their best to take it, and did take it for
a while, in spite of bad luck and every kind of hardship.
Their attack depended a good deal upon the progress made by other
troops who were fighting for Bailiff Wood on the left, and by troops
who were attacking up to the line of Pearl Alley on the right.
Neither of these attempts was successful at the time, and the men who
had been ordered to take Contalmaison were not in a happy position.
The weather had been foul, and it was this which on July 7 and 8 made
all attacks difficult. When the troops of the attacking columns tried
to get forward the ground was bogged, their rifles and bombs and
machine-guns were covered with muddy slime, and they stumbled through
water-logged trenches. Apart from this the way was perilous and tragic.
The main trench leading up to Contalmaison was the Sunken Road which
goes up between Round Wood and Birch Wood, and this was being heavily
barraged by the enemy’s guns sweeping down the valley from Pozières.
Further up and slanting right to Pearl Alley was a shallow trench.
Dead bodies lay there in the mud, and soon it was choked with wounded
men. How could any one pass? How was it possible to bring up bombs and
ammunition and machine-guns and all the stores which must follow an
attack? That was not done, but our men, fellows who know the chimes
of Worcester Cathedral, struggled forward over open ground and made a
dash for Contalmaison, enfiladed by machine-gun fire from Bailiff Wood
and Mametz Wood, which were not yet in our hands. Round the western
side of Contalmaison was a shallow trench in which the enemy also kept
his machine-guns, but when the remnants of the attacking force rushed
forward these were withdrawn into the village, from which the German
gunners swept the ground.
It seems to me quite an astonishing feat of arms that our men, in such
small numbers and in such adverse conditions, should have penetrated a
good way into the village. And it is wonderfully to their credit that
they should have taken eighty prisoners at such a time.
They found themselves “up in the air,” as soldiers say, and they were
being badly hurt by machine-gun fire. It was a bad position, and after
rummaging through some German dug-outs and taking their prisoners they
fell back to a strong point to the south of the village, which they
held for two or three days, establishing a machine-gun post which did
valuable service in the next attack.
They did not succeed in holding Contalmaison, and in war, which is a
hard thing, it is only success that counts. But I see nothing to blame
in the adventure of those companies who got through at great hazard.
Luck was against them, and against their other battalions. Luck, and
the weather.
3
In the meantime great fighting was in progress for the woods around.
A very splendid body of men, among them true descendants of Sir Hugh
Evans and other brave men across the Marches, had fought their way up
on July 5 to Birch Tree Copse and Shelter Alley, to Quadrangle Trench
on the 6th, then to Caterpillar Wood and Marlborough Wood, and they had
placed, with a cunning that belongs to the genius of war, a machine-gun
which covered an exit from Mametz Wood, where the enemy was still in
force.
At 3 o’clock on Monday afternoon last our troops advanced to the
capture of the wood—a wood whose bloom was brightened by the frightful
flash of shells, whose tree trunks were broken and splintered and
slashed by sharp axes hurtling through the leaves, and about whose
gnarled roots, in shell-holes and burrows, German soldiers crouched
with their bombs and machine-guns. A wood of terror. Yet not dismaying
to those men of ours who went into its twilight. Our own guns were
shelling it with a progressive barrage.
Our men were to pass forward in short, sharp rushes behind the barrage,
but some of them in their eagerness went too fast, and too far, and
went through the very barrage itself until a signal warned a gunner
officer sitting in an O.P. behind, so that he suddenly seized a
telephone and whispered some words into it, and made the guns “lift”
again.
Waves of bullets were streaming like water through the trees from
German machine-guns. Many of our men fell, and the others, checked
awhile, lay down in any holes they could find or dig. All through the
night shells broke over them, and through the glades there came always
that horrible chatter of machine-guns.
It was a night to which men think back through a lifetime with a
wonderment that it brought any dawn for them. But when dawn came their
spirit was unbroken and they made a new attack, and went forward with
bombs and bayonets to the encounter of other men not less brave. Not
less brave, in truth and in fairness to them. There was a fierce fight
before the last of them surrendered, so that Mametz Wood was ours, for
a while, at least.
4
Meanwhile to the left of Contalmaison—our left—other men had worked
their way up into Bailiff Wood and had established posts there. It
was still impossible to attack Contalmaison from the south, and, as
it happened, perhaps a lucky thing because the enemy had expected an
attack from the south and had most of his machine-guns facing that way
when our troops advanced upon him from the west.
They advanced after a series of artillery barrages from a great number
of batteries working in most perfect harmony with the plan of the
infantry attack.
At 4.50 the infantry went forward to their first stage in four waves
and in extended order. They had to cover about 1,100 yards of open
ground, and they travelled light, without their packs, fighting troops,
searching parties for house-fighting, and consolidating troops.
“They went across magnificently,” said their General, and in spite of
the enemy’s shells and machine-guns penetrated the town. They worked
across in time to the successive barrage which preceded them, and at 7
o’clock they had the whole of Contalmaison. The enemy defended himself
bravely, and there was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, in which 200
Germans were killed, refusing to surrender. Many prisoners were taken
in the dug-outs.
So at last the stronghold of the Woods was ours, and there is good hope
that we shall keep it.
One other wood in this stretch of woodlands is still not ours. It is
the Wood of Trones, where also there has been desperate fighting by
the men who captured Bernafay Wood and Caterpillar Wood and the ground
about Montauban, shelled and shelled again by the enemy, who hates to
have us there.
We have taken it several times, but the evening’s shell-fire forced us
from part of it. When they come, our shell-fire slashes them to death.
So much of it is No Man’s Land, and a devilish place.
But we hold a great stretch of ground after the Battle of the Woods.
XII
THE FIGHT FOR OVILLERS
1
JULY 13
At Ovillers there has been fierce fighting to-day which has gained for
us several important bits of trench and ground, linking up with other
separate points already won, so that this German stronghold is closely
besieged.
The enemy to-day was bombarding our positions round Contalmaison and
Mametz Wood with a most formidable barrage, and as I watched this from
a vantage point looking across a wide stretch of the battlefields
it seemed to me that the Germans might be preparing a strong
counter-attack along that line.
Nearer to Thiépval it was strangely quiet after the great fighting a
week and more ago.
The village of Thiépval itself was deadly quiet in the German lines of
brown, bombarded earth, beyond our whiter trenches. What was once a
wood there, about red-roofed barns and houses and an old church tower,
is now only a number of charred stumps sticking up from the brick dust
and ruin of these buildings.
Behind Thiépval, captured and lost by our soldiers after heroic
fighting and great sacrifice on July 1, could be seen the places which
the enemy is holding in his second line of defence, the next line of
village fortresses.
They were marked by the tall chimney of Courcelette, the woods of
Grandcourt, and the church spire of Irles. And there, standing high and
clear above the ridge, was one landmark which has been famous before
in the war and will be again before the war is ended. It was the
clock-tower of Bapaume, and if the sun had been shining on it we could
have read the time of day.
On the ridge above Thiépval were little moving figures.
“Germans,” said a sergeant with one eye to his glass.
There was a lot of them, crawling about like ants, but none of our
shells fell among them. All guns were busy on other work further to the
right, where the smoke of great shells rose like smouldering fires over
all the ground from Ovillers to Montauban.
2
The fighting for Ovillers has been hard, bloody, and close. Many of our
men have died to gain a yard or two of earthwork. There have been great
adventures in the capturing of some bits of broken brick or the working
round a ditch below the remnants of a wall.
Under a steady drive of machine-gun bullets sweeping all the ground,
men of ours from Cheshire and another English county in the north have
crept forward at night with a few hand-grenades and flung themselves
against the enemy’s bombing-posts and barricades and fought fiercely to
smash down the sandbags or brickwork and get a few more yards of clear
ground.
They have sapped their way underground and blown up the roofs of vaults
where Germans lay in hiding with machine-guns. They have fought in
small parties, gaining isolated points in the southern part of the
village, and holding on to them under heavy fire until only a few men
remained alive, still holding on.
There have been fights to the death between a handful of English or
Irish soldiers and a dozen or more Germans, meeting each other in the
darkness of deep cellars quarried out from the chalk subsoil, and
German gunners peering out of slits in concrete emplacements below
ground and firing bursts of bullets down the roadway have found
themselves suddenly in the grasp of men covered with white clay rising
out of holes in the earth, with no weapons but their picks.
Ovillers is a place of abominable ruin.
“Do you know Neuville St. Vaast?” asked an officer this morning, and
when I nodded (because I had a near call there), he said, “Ovillers
beats it hollow, for sheer annihilation.”
There is nothing left of it except dust. There is not a wall standing
two feet high, or a bit of a wall. The guns have swept it flat.
But underground there are still great cellars quarried out by
inhabitants who have long fled, and in these the Germans are holding
out against our attacks and our bombardments.
Heavy shells have opened up some of them, and filled them with dead and
wounded, but many still stand strong, and out of them come the enemy’s
machine-guns and bombers to make counter-attacks against the ditches
and débris from which our men are working forward. The ground is pitted
with enormous shell holes, in which men lie buried. Ovillers is perhaps
more ghastly than any ruined ground along the front.
3
It was at 8 o’clock on the morning of July 7 that the south-eastern
part of the village was taken by assault. The North-Country men
advanced from a line to the north of La Boiselle after a great
bombardment, and went over open ground to the labyrinth of trenches
which defend the village. These had been smashed into a tumult of
earth and sandbags, but, as usual, some of the German machine-gunners
had been untouched in their dug-outs, and they came up to serve their
machines as soon as our barrage lifted.
Other Germans defended themselves with bombs. There was savage
fighting between the broken traverses, in shell craters, and in
ditches. Many of our men fell, but others came up and pushed further
forward. One officer and a man or two ran straight towards a German
machine-gun which was doing deadly work, and knocked it out with a
well-aimed bomb. But higher up on this maze of broken trenches was a
German redoubt, from which machine-gun fire came in streams.
Some Irish soldiers tried to storm the place but suffered heavy
casualties in front of the redoubt. It was decided to fall back a
little, and reform the line for the night, and all through the night
the men worked to build up barricades to cut off the enemy from the
southern end of the village.
That end was being “cleaned out” of Germans, who were routed out of
cellars. Many of them were glad to surrender and grateful for the life
they had expected to lose.
“We took bags of ’em,” said an officer in charge of this work.
Next day the men worked their way forward above ground and below
ground. Some crept out of a ditch and worked up to a bombing post made
by others on the left of the village.
Another body of troops made a sudden forward movement and, taking
the enemy by surprise, marched round the left and took up a line
right across the south-west end of Ovillers without loss. That was a
great gain which enabled our men to link up from separate points. The
fighting to-day has been a further process of fitting up this jigsaw
puzzle of isolated groups who have been burrowing into the German
stronghold.
4
A great adventure, or what the officers call a fine “stunt,” was
carried out by some Lancashire men on the right of the village. They
were told to send out a patrol overland in the direction of Pozières.
I think, to the young officers in charge, it must have seemed rather
like a pleasant suggestion to go and discover the North Pole or the
Magnetic North. However, the idea appealed to them; they would see some
new country, and there was quite a chance of individual fighting, which
is so much better than being killed in a ditch by shell-fire.
With them went a young machine-gun officer, who is justly proud of
having gone out with sixteen machine-guns and, as you shall hear, of
coming back with twenty.
I know that he is pleased with himself, as he ought to be, because he
had a laughing light in his eyes when I gave him a lift in a car on
the way back to a good dinner, and, having escaped without a scratch
(and four extra guns) it is no wonder that he thought this adventure “a
topping bit of work.”
It was gallant work, and as far as the first day went, without loss.
The little company of men struck north-eastwards up an old bit of
communication trench, and part of the way in the open, in the twilight
and the darkness that followed. They were going steadily into German
territory, to the high ground which slopes down from Pozières.
There were lots of Germans about—thousands of them not enormously far
away—but they did not expect a visit like this, and were not watchful
of this piece of ground.
After working forward for something like a mile they came to a redoubt
inhabited by German bombers.
What happened then is not very clear to me, and was certainly not very
clear to the Germans. But this place was passed successfully, and it
was further on that my machine-gun friend (the fellow with the sparkle
in his eyes) increased his number of guns.
This part of his adventure is also somewhat confused, as most fighting
is. He tells me that he “pinched” the guns. Also that he made “a bag of
’em.” Anyhow, he captured them, and has brought them back, which is a
very good proof that they were taken.
So far all went well. The night was spent in consolidating this
extraordinary position right in the heart of German territory, and
all next day our men stayed there. They had a wonderful view of the
country below them, saw many things worth noting for future use, and
sent bursts of machine-gun fire at the enemy’s infantry moving down to
attack our troops.
But it was too good to last. The enemy became aware that they were
being hit from a position where none of our troops could possibly be,
according to the logic of things.
They could hardly believe their eyes, I imagine, when they saw these
illogical young gentlemen making themselves at home in this extremely
advanced post.
There must have been some frightful words used by German officers
before they ordered an infantry attack to clear these Englishmen out.
The infantry came down a trench from Pozières, but as they came they
were met by a stream of machine-gun fire directed by the young officer
who had “pinched” four more guns than he had taken out.
They suffered heavy casualties, and the attack broke down. But then the
enemy put his guns to work, as he always does when his infantry fails,
and what had been a great adventure, with a sporting chance, became a
deadly business, with all the odds against our men.
The enemy’s shell-fire was concentrated heavily upon this one bit of
trench away out in the open, and the ground was ploughed up with high
explosives. The machine-guns were taken back, but the British held on
until at last only an officer and six men were left.
Those who came back unwounded numbered in the end only one officer
and one man—with the exception of a sergeant who stayed behind with a
wounded Irishman. He would not leave his comrade, and for thirty-six
hours stayed out in his exposed position, with heavy shells falling on
every side of him.
The Irishman was delirious, and making such a noise that his friend
knocked him on the head to keep him quiet. Every time a shell burst
near him he shouted out, “You’ve missed me again, Fritz.”
But the sergeant himself kept his wits. He is a Lancashire man and with
all the dogged pluck of Lancashire.
When the bombardment quieted down he brought back his friend, and then
went out to No Man’s Land to search for another one.
5
But let us not forget that our men have not the monopoly of courage in
this war. We have against us a brave enemy, and again and again during
this battle our officers and men have paid a tribute to the stubborn
fighting qualities of the German soldiers.
“For goodness sake,” said one officer, “get rid of that strange idea in
the minds of many people at home that we are fighting old men and boys
and cripples.”
“All the Germans we have met and captured have been big, hefty fellows,
well fed until our bombardment stopped their food and with plenty of
pluck in them.”
“The courage of their machine-gunners especially, is—worse luck for
us—quite splendid.”
As far as food goes the watchword of the German people is “soldiers
first.”
That they are suffering themselves seems certain from the letters found
in great numbers in their captured dug-out. It seems to me incredible
that these should be fictitious.