belonging to famous old regiments—and they fought very grimly,
according to the spirit of their race, with their blood set on fire by
the music of the pipes that went with them. Before the light of dawn
came, and when our guns lifted forward, they rose from the ground just
north of Montauban and went forward across No Man’s Land towards the
German trenches. They had to make a distance of 1,200 yards over open
ground and came at once under heavy shell-fire and an enfilade fire
from machine-guns.
The enemy also used smoke bombs, and the ground was ploughed with high
explosives. A number of men fell, but the others went forward shouting
and reached the German line. In some parts the wire had not been cut
by our bombardment, but the Highlanders hurled themselves upon it and
beat their way. Machine-guns were pattering bullets upon their ranks,
but not for long. The men poured through and surged in waves into and
across the German trenches. Every man among them was a grenadier,
provided with bombs and with supplies coming up behind. It was with the
bomb, the most deadly weapon of this murderous war for close combat,
that the men fought their way through. The German soldiers defended
themselves with their own hand grenades when their machine-guns had
been knocked out in the first line trenches, but as they sprang out of
their dug-outs when the bombardment lifted and our men were upon them
they had but a poor chance of life unless they were quick to surrender.
I hear that these trenches in the second German line were not deeply
dug, and that the dug-outs themselves were hardly bomb-proof.
For once in a way the enemy had been lazy and over-confident, and he
paid now a bitter price for his pride in believing that the first
line was impregnable. I do not care to write about this part of the
fighting. It was bloody work, and would not be good to read. One
incident was told me by a kilted sergeant as he lay wounded. From one
of the dug-outs came a German officer. He had a wild light in his eyes,
and carried a great axe.
“I surrender,” he said, in good English.
And in broad Scotch the sergeant told him that if he had an idea of
surrendering it would be a good and wise thing to drop his chopper
first. But the German officer swung it high, and it came like a flash
past the sergeant’s head. Like a flash also a bayonet did its work.
8
While men were “cleaning up” the dug-outs in the first-line trenches
other men pressed on and stormed their way into Longueval village.
The great fires there which I had seen in the darkness had died down,
and there was only the glow and smoulder of them in the ruins. But
machine-guns were still chattering in their emplacements.
In one broken building there were six of them firing through holes in
the walls. It was a strong redoubt sweeping the ground, which had once
been a roadway and was now a shambles. Scottish soldiers rushed the
place and flung bombs into it until there was no more swish of bullets
but only the rising of smoke-clouds and black dust. Longueval was a
heap of charred bricks above ground, but there was still trouble below
ground, before it was firmly taken. There were many cellars in which
Germans fought like wolves at bay. And down in the darkness of these
places men fought savagely, seeing only the glint of each other’s eyes,
and feeling for each other’s throats, unless there were still bombs
handy to make a quicker ending. It was primitive warfare. The cave-men
fought like that, in such darkness, though not with bombs, which belong
to our age in this Christian era of grace and civilisation.
To the right of Longueval and south of the second German line lies the
Trones Wood, and as it was on the right flank of our attack it could
not be left in the enemy’s hands. We had held most of it once, a few
days ago, and for a few hours, but the enemy’s shell-fire had made
the place untenable. It was into that fire that some of our English
battalions advanced yesterday morning from Bernafay Wood. “They shelled
us like hell,” said a boy who came from a quiet place in Sussex before
he knew what hell is like.
There were machine-guns sweeping the southern end of the woods with
cross-fire, and with bursting shells overhead it was a place of black
horror in the night. But these English boys kept crawling on to gain
a yard or two before the next crash came, and then another yard or
two, and at last they came up to the German line, and flung themselves
suddenly upon German machine-gunners and German riflemen sheltered
behind earthworks and trunks of trees.... The wood was captured again,
and then a queer kind of miracle happened, and it seemed as if those
who had been dead had come to life again. For out of holes in the
ground, and from behind the fallen timbers of shelled trees, came
a number of English boys, dirty and wild-looking, who shouted out,
“Hullo, lads!” and “What cheer, matey?” or just shouted and laughed
with a sob in their throats and big tears down their grimy faces. They
were West Kents, who had first taken the Trones Wood and then had
been caught in a barrage of fire. With one officer 300 men had dug
themselves into the roots of trees on the eastern edge of the wood and
kept the Germans at bay with a machine-gun.
9
Meanwhile a number of battalions, mostly English, but with some
Scots—men who have done as well in this war since the early days of
it as any troops who have fought in France—were attacking the line
between Longueval and the two Bazentins. They, too, found the wire
uncut in places, but they went through in a tearing hurry, hating the
machine-gun fire and resolved to end it quickly. They stormed the
German trenches and fought down them with bombs and bayonets. German
soldiers came out of the dug-outs and begged for mercy. They came
holding out their watches, their pocket-books, their helmets, anything
that they thought would ransom their lives, and when they had been
taken prisoners they made no trouble about carrying back the English
wounded, but were glad to go. It was all in the darkness, except when
shell-bursts lit the ground, and some of our battalions lost their
sense of direction towards Bazentin Woods. Prisoners acted as guides to
their own lines. Five or six of them unwillingly led the way back. A
British officer of nineteen, a boy who had only been in France a month
or two, led one of the companies forward because his brother officers
had fallen.
“Come on, lads!” he shouted, “I’m only a kid, but I’ll show you the way
all right.”
They liked those words, “only a kid,” and laughed at them.
“He’s a plucked ’un, he is,” said one of the men who followed him. They
went after him into Bazentin Wood, and others followed on, into and
through a heavy barrage of fire.
So it was on the left, where other battalions were at work pressing
forward in waves to Contalmaison Villa and the ground beyond. The
second German line had fallen before our men, and they were over it and
away.
10
It was at about 6 o’clock in the evening that some British cavalry
came into action. They were the men whom I had seen on my way up to
the battlefield, a small detachment of the Dragoon Guards and also of
the Deccan Horse. They worked forward with our infantry on a stretch
of country between Bazentin Wood and Delville Wood, rising up to High
Wood (Foureaux Wood), and then rode out alone in reconnaissance, in
true cavalry formation, with the commander in the rear. Lord! Not one
in a thousand would have believed it possible to see this again. When
they passed, the infantry went a little mad, and cheered wildly and
joyously, as though these men were riding on a road of triumph.
So they rode on into open country, skirting Delville Wood. Presently a
machine-gun opened fire upon them. It was in a cornfield, with German
infantry, and the officer in command gave the word to his men to ride
through the enemy. The Dragoons put their lances down and rode straight
into the wheat. They killed several men and then turned and rode back,
and charged again, among scattered groups of German infantry. Some of
them prepared to withstand the charge with fixed bayonets. Others were
panic-stricken and ran forward crying “Pity! Pity!” and clung to the
saddles and stirrup leathers of the Dragoon Guards. Though on a small
scale, it was a cavalry action of the old style, the first on the
Western front since October of the first year of the war.
With thirty-two prisoners our men rode on slowly still reconnoitring
the open country on the skirt of Delville Wood, until they came again
under machine-gun fire and drew back. As they did so an aeroplane came
overhead, skimming very low, at no more than 300ft. above ground. The
cavalry turned in their saddles to stare at it for a moment or two,
believing that it was a hostile machine. But no bullets came their way,
and in another moment it stooped over the German infantry concealed in
the wheat and fired at them with a machine-gun. Four times it circled
and stooped and fired, creating another panic among the enemy, and then
it flew off, leaving the cavalry full of admiration for this daring
feat. They could ride no further, owing to the nature of the ground,
and that night they dug themselves in. German guns searched in vain for
them, and the cavalry to-night is full of pride, believing with amazing
optimism that their day may come again. [It was after all only a “fancy
stunt” as soldiers call it, and it seems certain now that the cavalry
is an obsolete arm of war on the Western front. The Tanks have taken
their place.]
The scene all through the afternoon behind the battle-lines and down
in little villages beyond the reach of guns will stay in my mind as
historic pictures. Numbers of wounded men—with a very high proportion
of lightly wounded among them—arrived at the casualty clearing stations
and, while they waited their turn for the doctors and nurses, lay about
the grass, fingering their souvenirs—watches, shell-fuses, helmets,
pocket-books, German letters, and all manner of trophies—and telling
their adventures in that wild battle of the night.
They seemed to have no sense of pain, and not one man groaned, in spite
of broken arms and head wounds and bayonet thrusts. Every dialect of
England and Scotland and Ireland could be heard among them. There were
men from many battalions, and as they lay there talking or smoking or
sleeping in the sunlight, other processions came down in straggling
columns, limping and holding on to comrades, hobbling with sticks,
peering through blood-stained rags, tired and worn and weak, but with a
spirit in them that was marvellous.
XIV
THE WOODS OF DEATH
1
JULY 17
We are again in the difficult hours that inevitably follow a successful
advance, when ground gained at the extreme limit of our progress has to
be defended against counter-attacks from close quarters, when men in
exposed positions have to suffer the savaging of the enemy’s artillery,
and when our own gunners have to work cautiously because isolated
patrols of men in khaki may be mistaken in bad light for grey-clad men
in the same neighbourhood. This period is the test of good generalship
and of good captains.
The weather was rather against us to-day. There was a thick haze over
the countryside, causing what naval men call “low visibility,” and
making artillery observation difficult. It was curious to stand on high
ground and see only the dim shadow-forms of places like Mametz Wood and
the other woodlands to its right and left, where invisible shells were
bursting.
Our shells were passing overhead, and I listened to their high
whistling, but could see nothing of their bursts, and for nearly an
hour an intense bombardment made a great thunder in the air behind the
thick veil of mist.
We were shelling High Wood, from which our men have had to retire for a
time owing to the enemy’s heavy barrage of high explosives, and we were
also pounding the enemy’s lines to the north of Bazentin-le-Grand and
Longueval, where he is very close to our men. Hostile batteries were
retaliating upon the woodlands which we have gained and held during
the past three days.
2
This woodland fighting has been as bad as anything in this war—most
frightful and bloody. Dead bodies lie strewn beneath the trees, and in
the shell-holes are wounded men who have crawled there to die. There is
hardly any cover in which men may get shelter from shell-fire.
The Germans had dug shallow trenches, but they were churned up by our
heavies, and it is difficult to dig in again because of the roots of
great trees, and the fallen timber, and the masses of twigs and foliage
which have been brought down by British and German guns. When our
troops went into Trones Wood under most damnable fire of 5·9’s they
grubbed about for some kind of cover without much success.
But some of them had the luck to strike upon three German dug-outs
which were exceptionally deep and good. Obviously they had been built
some time ago for officers who, before we threatened their second
line, may have thought Trones Wood a fine dwelling-place, and not too
dangerous if they went underground. They went down forty feet, and
panelled their rooms, and brought a piano down for musical evenings.
A young company commander found the piano and struck some chords upon
it at a time when there was louder music overhead—the scream of great
shells and the incessant crash of high explosives in the wood. Further
on, at the edge of the wood, our men found a machine-gun emplacement
built solidly of cement and proof against all shell splinters, and it
was from this place that so many of our men were shot down before the
enemy’s gunners could be bombed out.
3
One of the most extraordinary experiences of this woodland fighting
was that of an English boy who now lies in a field-hospital smiling
with very bright and sparkling eyes because the world seems to him like
Paradise after an infernal dwelling-place. He went with the first rush
of men into Mametz Wood, but was left behind in a dug-out when they
retired before a violent counter-attack.
Some German soldiers passed this hole where the boy lay crouched, and
flung a bomb down on the off-chance that an English soldier might be
there. It burst on the lower steps and wounded the lonely boy in the
dark corner.
He lay there a day listening to the crash of shells through the trees
overhead—English shell-fire—not daring to come out. Then in the night
he heard the voices of his own countrymen, and he shouted loudly.
But as the English soldiers passed they threw a bomb into the dug-out,
and the boy was wounded again. He lay there another day, and the
gun-fire began all over again, and lasted until the Germans came back.
Another German soldier saw the old hole and threw a bomb down, as a
safe thing to do, and the boy received his third wound.
He lay in the darkness one more day, not expecting to live, but still
alive, still eager to live and to see the light again. If only the
English would come again and rescue him!
He prayed for them to come. And when they came, capturing the wood
completely and finally, one of them, seeing the entrance to the dug-out
and thinking Germans might be hiding there, threw a bomb down—and the
boy was wounded for the fourth time. This time his cries were heard,
and the monotonous repetition of this ill-luck ended, and the victim of
it lies in a white bed with wonderful shining eyes.
4
The German prisoners have stories like this to tell, for they suffered
worst of all under the fury of our bombardment and the coming and
going of our troops in the woodland fighting. I spoke with one of them
to-day—one of a new batch of men, whose number I reckoned as 300, just
brought down from Bazentin-le-Grand.
He was a linguist, having been an accountant in the North German
Lloyd, and gave me a choice of conversation in French, Italian, Greek
or English. I chose my own tongue, but let him do the talking, and
standing there in a barbed wire entanglement, surrounded by hundreds of
young Germans, unshaven, dusty, haggard and war-worn, but still strong
and sturdy men, he described vividly the horrors of the woods up by the
two Bazentins where he and these comrades of his had lain under our
last bombardment.
They had but little cover except what they could scrape out beneath the
roots of trees. And the trees crashed upon them, smashing the limbs of
men, and shells burst and buried men in deep pits, and the wounded lay
groaning under great branches which pinned them to the ground or in the
open where other shells were bursting. From what I can make out some of
the men here retreated across the country between Bazentin and Delville
Woods, for they were the men who were captured by our cavalry.
“My comrades were afraid,” said this German sergeant. “They cried out
to me that the Indians would kill their prisoners, and that we should
die if we surrendered. But I said, ‘That is not true, comrades. It is
only a tale. Let us go forward very quietly with our hands up.’ So in
that way we went, and the Indian horsemen closed about us, and I spoke
to one of them, asking for mercy for our men, and he was very kind, and
a gentleman, and we surrendered to him safely.”
He was glad to be alive, this man who came from Wiesbaden. He showed
me the portrait of his wife and boy, and cried a little, saying
that the German people did not make the war, but had to fight for
their country when told to fight, like other men. All his people had
believed, he said, that the war would be over in August or September.
“Are they hungry?” I asked.
“They have enough to eat,” he said. “They are not starving.”
He waved his hand back to the woodlands, and remembered the terror of
the place from which he had just come.
“Over there it was worse than death.”
5
Over there on the one small village of Bazentin-le-Grand our heavy
howitzers flung an amazing quantity of shells on Friday morning. The
place was swept almost flat, and little was left of its church and
houses but reddish heaps of bricks and dust, and twisted iron, and the
litter of destruction. Yet there were many Germans living here when the
men of some famous regiments came through in the dawn with bayonets
and bombs, Yorkshiremen and some of the Scottish all mixed together,
as happens at such times. There was one great cellar underneath
Bazentin-le-Grand large enough to hold 1500 men, and here, crouching in
its archways and dark passages, were numbers of German soldiers.
They came to meet our men and surrendered to them. And here also lay
many wounded, in their blood, and unbandaged—just as they had crawled
down from the ground above where our shells were smashing everything.
If any man were to draw the picture of those things or to tell them
more nakedly than I have told them, because now is not the time, nor
this the place, no man or woman would dare to speak again of war’s
“glory,” or of “the splendour of war,” or any of those old lying
phrases which hide the dreadful truth.
XV
PRISONERS OF WAR
1
JULY 17
In spite of bad weather, which has hampered operations so that no great
advance has been possible, we have made some progress to-day in the
direction of Pozières.
Some of our troops stormed a double line of trenches from
Bazentin-le-Petit to the south-east of Pozières, a distance of 1500
yards, strewn from one end to the other with German dead and wounded.
High Wood, or the Bois de Foureaux, as it is properly called, is to a
great extent No Man’s Land, as lying over the crest of the hill our men
could be shelled by the direct observation of the enemy’s artillery,
over the heads of their own men in the lower edge of the wood.
Our line therefore has been drawn back from this salient and
straightened out from Longueval to the long trench by Pozières, which
is now approached on both sides.
Ovillers is ours, after a German post which had been bravely defended
surrendered with two officers and about 140 men early this morning.
There is no other news of importance to-day on the line of attack, but
it is good enough, and the general position of our force is improved.
2
What is the German point of view about our attack and the prospects of
the war?
That is the question I have always had in my head during the last
fortnight, when I have seen batches of prisoners being led down from
the battlefields, and the question I have put to some of them in bad
German or fair English.
It is difficult to get any clear answer, or an answer of any real
value. The men have just come out of dreadful places, many of them are
still dazed under the shock of shell-fire, some of them are proud and
sullen, others are ready to talk but ignorant of the battle-front in
which they have been and of the situation outside the dug-outs in which
they crouched.
Yet there is something to be learnt out of their very ignorance, and
by putting together answers from separate groups of men and individual
soldiers one does get a kind of hint of the general idea prevailing
among these German troops against us.
Quite a number of them have told me that they and their people were
sure that the war would be over in August or September. They have been
promised that but could not give any reason for belief except the
promise.
“Do you think you are winning?” I asked one man—of real intelligence.
“We thought so,” he answered.
“And now?”
He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
“The English are stronger than we believed.”
There seems to me no doubt that they were perfectly confident in the
strength of their lines. They did not believe that such defences as
those at Fricourt and Montauban could ever be broken.
The new power of our artillery has amazed them—they speak of it always
with terror—and the officers especially admit that they did not imagine
that “amateur gunners,” as they call our men, could achieve such
results.
For the courage of our infantry they have always had a great respect,
remembering the two battles of Ypres, but they count the strength of
armies by the strength of guns, and until recent days knew they had the
greater power.
The foundations of their belief are shaken, but only to the extent that
they admit the possibility of their army having to retire to a new line
of defence.
I have not found one man speak of defeat. They are still convinced that
the German army will never be beaten to the point of surrender. As the
German doctor whom I have previously quoted said to me a few days ago,
“You are strong and we are strong. Neither side can crush the other. If
the war goes on it will be the suicide of Europe.”
These German soldiers do not want it to go on. That idea in their heads
is clear enough. They are weary of war, and have a great craving for
peace. They want to see their wives and children again. One strain of
thought creeps out in their talk. It is the suggestion that they fight
not as free men desiring to fight, but as men compelled to fight by
higher powers, against whom they cannot rebel.
“It is our discipline,” said one of them to-day. “We cannot help
ourselves.”
I am told by one of the officers in charge of them that they talk of
another inevitable war between Germany and England in ten years from
now.
They have been taught to believe, he says, that we thrust this war upon
them, that all through we have been the aggressors, and that Germany
will seek her revenge.
3
Personally, I have not heard such words spoken, but rather from several
of these prisoners, a frank hatred of war as the cause of horrors and
suffering beyond the strength of man to bear. They talk as men under an
evil spell put upon them by unknown powers beyond their reach.
As I have said, all this does not amount to anything of real value
in trying to see into the spirit of the German people. They are the
opinions of prisoners, who have escaped from the worst terrors of war,
but are immediately cautious of any interrogation, and perhaps a little
tempted to say pleasing things to their captors. They cannot conceal
their ignorance, which is enormous, because all but victories have
been hidden from them until their own defeat, but they conceal their
knowledge.
I was interested, for instance, to hear them deny any great suffering
from hunger in their own country.
“Our people have enough to eat,” said several of them when I questioned
them. When I told them of the letters captured in their dug-outs, all
full of pitiful tales about lack of food, they stared at me with grave
eyes, and said again, stoutly:
“They have enough to eat. Bread enough, and meat enough.”
Their first desire upon coming from the battlefields is water, which
they get at once, and their next is permission to write home to their
people. All of them are anxious to be sent at once to England, where
they expect greater comforts than in the fields with barbed-wire
hedges, where they are kept on the way down until they can be entrained.