and of all the great sum of human misery which has been heaped up in
this war. Fortunately, in our treatment of prisoners we teach our
enemies a lesson in chivalry, for it is not, I think, in our race or
history, with rare exceptions, to kick men when they are down.
XVI
THE LAST STAND IN OVILLERS
1
JULY 18
In all the fighting during the past fortnight the struggle for Ovillers
stands out separately as a siege in which both attack and defence were
of a most dogged and desperate kind.
The surrender of the remnants of its garrison last night ends an
episode which will not be forgotten in history. These men were of the
3rd Prussian Guard, and our Commander-in-Chief, in his day’s despatch,
has paid a tribute to their bravery which is echoed by officers and men
who fought against them. It is a tribute to our own troops also, who
by no less courage broke down a stubborn resistance and captured the
garrison.
I have already described the earlier phases of the siege; the first
attack on July 1, when our men broke through the outer network of
trenches and advanced through sheets of machine-gun fire, suffering
heavy casualties, the seizure of separated bits of broken trench-work
by little bodies of gallant men fighting, independently, gaining ground
by a yard or two at a time and attacking machine-gun posts and bombing
posts by hand-to-hand fights; the underground struggle in great vaulted
cellars beneath the ruined town; the surprise attack at night when a
number of fresh troops sprang upon the defences to the western side of
the town, and then, linking up with the men in the captured trenches
and ruins, cut the place in half, took many prisoners, and isolated
the enemy still holding out in the northern half of the position.
Many different battalions had taken a share in the fighting, all
had suffered, and then given way to new men who knew the nature of
this business, but set grimly to work to carry on the slow process
of digging out the enemy from his last strongholds. It was almost
literally a work of digging out.
2
The town of Ovillers does not exist. It was annihilated by the
bombardments and made a rubbish heap of bricks and dust. When our
men were separated from the enemy by only a yard or two or by only a
barricade or two the artillery on both sides ceased fire upon Ovillers,
lest the gunners should kill their own men.
They barraged intensely round about. Our shells fell incessantly upon
the enemy’s communication trenches to the north and east so that the
beleaguered garrison should not get supplies or reinforcements.
We made a wall of death about them. But though no shells now burst over
the ground where many dead lay strewn, there was artillery of a lighter
kind, not less deadly. It was the artillery of machine-guns and bombs.
The Prussian Guard made full use of the vaulted cellars and of the
ruined houses.
They had made a series of small keeps, which they defended almost
entirely by machine-gun fire. As soon as we advanced the machine-guns
were set to work, and played their hose of bullets across the ground
which our men had to cover. One by one, by getting round about them,
by working zig-zag ways through cellars and ruins, by sudden rushes of
bombing parties, led by young officers of daring spirit, we knocked out
these machine-gun emplacements and the gunners who served them, until,
yesterday, there was only the last remnant of the garrison left in
Ovillers.
These men of the 3rd Prussian Guard had long been in a hopeless
position. They were starving because all supplies had been cut off by
our never-ceasing barrage, and they had no water supply, so that they
suffered all the torture of great thirst.
Human nature could make no longer resistance, and, at last, the
officers raised a signal of surrender, and came over with nearly 140
men, who held their hands up.
The fighting had been savage. At close grips in the broken earthworks
and deep cellars there had been no sentiment, but British soldiers and
Germans had flung themselves upon each other with bombs and any kind of
weapon.
But now, when all was ended, the last of the German garrison were
received with the honours of war, and none of our soldiers denies them
the respect due to great courage.
“They stuck it splendidly,” was the verdict of one of them to-day,
and though there is no love lost between our army and the enemy’s,
it is good at least that we should have none of that silly contempt
for the foe which is sometimes expressed by people—never by British
soldiers—who unconsciously discredit the valour of our men by
underestimating the courage and tenacity of those who fight us.
XVII
THE SCOTS AT LONGUEVAL
1
JULY 20
The present stage of our advance is causing us very hard fighting for
important positions on high ground which must be gained and held before
new progress over open country is possible. The enemy is gathering up
his reserves and flinging them against us to check the onward movement
at all costs, and it seems to me that he has brought up new batteries
of heavy guns, because his artillery fire is increasing.
His prisoners reveal the grave anxiety that reigns behind the German
lines, where there is no attempt to minimise the greatness of our
menace. The enemy is undoubtedly straining every nerve to organise a
new and formidable resistance.
To-day, however, he has lost many men and valuable ground, not only in
fighting with British troops, but with the French, who at Maurepas and
other positions on our right have made a successful advance.
In the early hours of this morning, after a long bombardment which
made the night very dreadful with noise, and the sky vivid with the
light of bursting shells—such a night as I described at length a day
or two ago—an attack was made by our troops on the high ground between
Delville Wood and High Wood and to the west of these positions.
The enemy was in great strength, and maintained a strong defence, but
he suffered severely, and was forced to retreat in disorder upon some
parts of his line.
2
A good deal of the fighting fell to south-country boys who once
followed the plough and still have the English sky in their eyes. But
not far from them were some of the “Harry Lauder lads,” who used to man
the battlements of Edinburgh Castle when Rouge Dragon knocked at the
gate and asked admittance for the King.
They had a bad night—“the worst a man could dream of,” said one of
them, who had known other bad nights of war. They lay under the
cross-fire of great shells, British and German. Field batteries were
pumping out shells in a great hurry before breakfast time, but these
were as nothing compared with the work of the heavies.
We were firing “Grandmothers” and “Aunties,” those 15-inch and
12-inch shells which go roaring through the air and explode with
vast earth-shaking crashes. And the enemy was replying with his
coal-scuttles.
“They were the real Jack Johnsons,” said a Devonshire lad who had a
piece of one of them in his right shoulder. “These brutes have not been
seen, I’m told, since Ypres, except in ones or twos. But they came over
as thick and fast as hand-grenades. You know the kind of hole they
make? ’Tis forty feet across and deep enough to bury a whole platoon.”
“The din fairly made me quake,” said a tall lad with the straw-coloured
hair one sees on market days in Ipswich, and he shivered a little at
the remembrance of the night, though the sun was warm upon him then.
But they did not suffer much from all this gun-fire as they manned
their trenches in the darkness. The shells passed over them, and few
were hurt. The attack was made before the dawn up the rising slope of
ground towards high roads which used to go across from the Bois de
Foureaux, or High Wood, as we call it, to Delville Wood.
Now there are no roads, for our bombardment had torn up the earth into
a series of deep craters. The Germans had a line of dug-outs here,
built in great haste since the first of July, but well built.
As soon as our men were upon them, the German soldiers, who had been
hiding below ground, came up like rabbits when the ferrets are at work.
Most of them ran away, as hard as they could, stumbling and falling
over the broken ground.
“They ran so hard,” said one of our men, “that I couldn’t catch up with
’em. It was a queer kind of race, us chasing ’em, and they running. The
only Germans I came up with were dead ’uns.”
But some of the Germans did not run. They came forward through the
half-darkness of this dawn with their hands raised. One Cornish boy I
knew took five prisoners, who crowded round him crying “Kamerad!” so
that he felt like the old woman in the shoe.
Up to that point our casualties were very slight, but later on, up the
higher ground, the enemy’s machine-gun fire swept across the grass and
the brown, bare earth of the old trenches, and above the high rims of
the shell craters. But our men swept on.
Other troops were working round High Wood on the left, and in the
centre men were advancing into the wood itself, and forcing forward
over the fallen trees and branches and the bodies of German dead. The
enemy’s shells crashed above them, but these regiments of ours were
determined to get on and to hold on, and during the day they have
organised strong points, and captured the western side and all the
southern part of this position.
3
The situation at Longueval and Delville Wood, on the north-east of that
village, has been very full of trouble for our men ever since these
places were taken by some of our Highland regiments on July 14. The
enemy made repeated counter-attacks from the upper end of the village,
where he still held some machine-gun emplacements, and kept a way
open through his trenches here on the north so that he could send up
supports and supplies.
From the north also he concentrated heavy artillery fire on the
southern part of Delville Wood, which was held by some of our South
African troops, and maintained a violent barrage.
Nevertheless the Highlanders have held on for nearly a week with a
dogged endurance that has frustrated all the efforts of the enemy to
get back on to their old ground. The gallantry of these men who wear
the tartans of the old Scottish clans would seem wonderful if it were
not habitual with them.
Their first dash for Longueval was one of the finest exploits of the
war. They were led forward by their pipers, who went with them not only
towards the German lines but across them and into the thick of the
battle.
It was to the tune of “The Campbells are Coming” that one regiment went
forward and that music, which I heard last up the slopes of Stirling
Castle, was heard with terror, beyond a doubt, by the German soldiers.
Then the pipes screamed out the Charge, the most awful music to be
heard by men who have the Highlanders against them, and with fixed
bayonets and hand-grenades they stormed the German trenches.
Here there are many concealed machine-gun emplacements, and dug-outs so
strong that no shell could smash them. Some of them were great vaults
and concreted chambers of great depth, where many Germans could find
cover. But the Highlanders went down into them with great recklessness,
two or three men flinging themselves into the vaults where enemies were
packed. They were scornful of all such dangers.
I am told by one of their colonels that in bombing down the
communication trenches they threw all caution to the wind, and while
some of the men went along the trenches others ran along on top under
heavy fire, cheering their comrades on, and then leaping down upon the
enemy.
The Germans defended themselves with most stubborn courage, and
even now, or at least as late as last night, they still serve some
machine-guns at one point, from which it has been found difficult to
dislodge them. They are down in a concrete emplacement, from which they
can send out a continual spatter of bullets down the ruined way of what
once was a street.
The Highlanders dug trenches across the village, and had what they
call in soldiers’ language, “a hell of a time,” which is a true way of
putting it. The enemy barraged the village with progressive lines of
heavy shells, yard by yard, but by the best of luck his lines stopped
short of where some ranks of Highlanders were lying down in fours,
using frightful words to keep their spirits up. There were hours of
bad luck, too, and one was when some of the transport men and horses
were knocked out by getting into a barrage. Casualties were heavy among
other officers and men, but the Highlanders held on with a wonderful
spirit.
4
It is a spirit which I saluted to-day with reverence when I met these
men marching out of the fire-zone. They came marching across broken
fields, where old wire still lies tangled and old trenches cut up the
ground, and the noise of the guns was about them.
Some of our heavy batteries were firing with terrific shocks of sound,
which made mule-teams plunge and tremble, and struck sharply across the
thunder of masses of guns firing along the whole line of battle. There
was a thick summer haze about, and on the ridges the black vapours of
shell-bursts, and all the air was heavy with smoke. It was out of this
that the Highlanders came marching. They brought their music with
them, and the pipes of war were playing a Scottish love-song:
I lo’e nae laddie but ane,
An’ he lo’es nae lassie but me.
Their kilts were caked with mud and stained with blood and filth, but
the men were beautiful, marching briskly, with a fine pride in their
eyes. Officers and men of other regiments watched them pass and saluted
them, as men who had fought with heroic courage, so that the dirtiest
of them there and the humblest of these Jocks was a fine gentleman and
worthy of knighthood.
Many of them wore German helmets and grinned beneath them. One brawny
young Scot had the cap of a German staff officer cocked over his ear.
One machine-gun section brought down two German machines besides their
own. They were very tired, but they held their heads up, and the pipers
who had been with them blew out their bags bravely, though hard up for
wind.
And the Scottish love-song rang out across the fields. Whatever its
words, it was, I think, a love-song for the dear dead they had left
behind them.
XVIII
THE DEVIL’S WOOD
1
JULY 21
Delville Wood, to the right of Longueval, is a name marked on the
war-maps, but some of our soldiers, who take liberties with all French
place-names, giving a familiar and homely sound to words beyond the
trick of their tongues, call this “The Devil’s Wood.”
It is a reasonable name for it. It is a devilish place, which has been
a death-trap to both the German and British troops who have held it in
turns, or parts of it. It is here, and in High Wood to the north-west
of it, that the fighting continues hotly. Last night and to-day the
northern end was under the fire of our guns, the southern end under
German fire, and somewhere about the centre the opposing infantry is
entrenched as far as it is possible to dig in such a place.
The German soldiers have the advantage in defence. They have placed
their machine-guns behind barricades of great tree-trunks, hidden their
sharpshooters up in the foliage of trees still standing above all the
litter of branches smashed down by shrapnel and high explosives, and
send a patter of bullets across to our men, who have dug holes for
themselves below the tough roots.
There is no need for either side to do any wood-chopping for the
building of their barricades. Great numbers of trees have fallen, cut
clean in half by heavy shells, and lie across each other in the tangle
of brushwood. Branches have been lopped off or torn off, and are piled
up as though for a bonfire. The broken trunks stick up in a ghastly
way, stripped of their bark, and enormous roots to which the earth
still clings have been torn out of the ground as though by a hurricane,
and stretch their tentacles out above deep pits.
The wood is strewn with dead, and wounded men are so caught in the
jungle of fallen branches that they can hardly crawl through it. Even
the unwounded have to crawl on their way forward to fight, over, or
underneath, the great trunks which lie across the tracks.
The gallant South Africans who were here could not dig quickly enough
to get cover from the shells which the enemy’s guns pumped into the
wood as soon as our men had gained it, and found it very hard to dig at
all, but now, I hope, our troops are more secure from shell-fire and
the enemy is suffering severely from our bombardment. His machine-guns
chatter through the day and night from one or two strong emplacements,
and our men, lying behind their own stockades, effectively reply. In
the twilight of “The Devil’s Wood” the struggle goes on, but gradually
we are enclosing the place and the Germans in it are not there for long.
2
JULY 27
At about ten o’clock this morning our troops again took Delville
Wood—all but a narrow strip on the north—and perhaps it is the last
time that it will be necessary to send men to the assault of this evil
position which has earned the nickname of “Devil’s Wood” from soldiers
who have been through it and out of it.
As one of our officers said to me this morning, “I wish to goodness we
could wipe the place off the map, or burn it off. A good forest fire
there would cleanse the ground of this filthy wreckage of trees which
has been a death-trap to so many good fellows.”
It is a queer thing that so many trees are still standing, and that it
still looks like a wood as I saw it the other day when the enemy was
barraging this side of it. In spite of all the trees that have been cut
down by shells the foliage still looks dense at a distance and hides
all the horror underneath.
To-day many more trees have been slashed off and hurled upon other
fallen trunks. If the wood had been drier the forest fire would have
blazed. I am told that our concentration of guns for this morning’s
bombardment secured the most intense series of barrages upon one
position since the battle of Picardy began twenty-seven days ago; twice
as heavy as any similar artillery attack.
The bombardment began this early morning, and took line after line
from south to north above the ground held by our men, in progressive
blocks of fire. Our batteries over an area of several miles, from the
long-range heavies to the 18-pounders far forward, flung every size of
shell into this “Devil’s Wood,” and filled it with high explosives and
shrapnel so that one great volume of smoke rose from it and covered it
in a dense black pall.
It seems impossible that any Germans there could still be left alive,
but it is too soon yet to know whether our men found any of them
crouching in holes or lying under the shelter of great trunks and
roots. Perhaps a few German soldiers may come out from this place of
death having escaped by what seems like a miracle, except that every
day men do escape in the strangest way from shells which burst above
them and under them and around them.
But there will not be many who may tell the tale of this morning’s
bombardment of the wood, for the enemy has not had time to make an
elaborate system of dug-outs here, deep enough to protect them from
6-inch or 8-inch shells, but had no more cover than our own men who
held the wood when it was the turn of the enemy’s artillery.
3
I was talking to some of these men this morning, and they all had the
same tale to tell. “Devil’s Wood,” said one of them—a shock-headed
Peter in shorts, who had not lost his sense of humour, though a good
deal of blood, up there—“this Delville Wood, as it is called politely
by fellows who don’t know the look of it or the smell of it, is easily
the worst place on earth, as far as I can guess.”
“It’s just crowded with corpses, and to stay there is to join that
company. The only cover one can get is to crawl under a log and hope
for the best, or crawl into a shell-hole and expect the worst—which
generally arrives. I had the devil’s own luck—a puncture of the left
leg—so I can’t walk back there.”
He was amazed to have come out so easily, and because he still had
life, and could see the sun shining through the flap of a tent, he
was in high spirits, like all our men who have had the luck to get a
“cushie wound,” which in this war is the best of luck to men in such
places as “Devil’s Wood.”
The other men were eloquent about the German snipers who were hidden
in the foliage of trees with rifles and machine-guns and waited very
patiently until any of our men began to crawl through the tree trunks.
That game is finished. Our bombardment this morning must have swept
away all such men with whatever weapon they had.
Devil’s Wood has become more crowded with dead, and it is over these
bodies that our men stumbled this morning when they went forward slowly
and cautiously behind the great barrage of our guns which cleared the
way for them. They advanced in waves, halting while another barrage
was maintained for half an hour or more ahead. They had to cross
Princes-street, which was a sunken road made into something like a
trench by the South Africans, and afterwards by Scots from home,
striking across the glades from west to east, and then they pushed
northwards.
I have no details of the fighting, which is still in progress, but it
is probable that the attack has succeeded without many casualties.
It is in holding the ground that the worst time comes to the men who
capture it.
4
Meanwhile another attack has been made this morning, advancing
eastwards to Delville Wood from Longueval, which is partly in and
partly out of the wood, with the object of clearing out the enemy from
the northern part of the village and joining up with the men advancing
into the wood from the south, as I have just described.
Here, again, not much more of the fighting is known, but we know the
difficulties of the position, and it is not surprising that the hardest
fighting has been happening here. The history of the fight that has
gone on in this corner of ground since July 14 is one of the most
wonderful things, for sheer stubborn courage, that has been done in all
this great battle.
The Scottish troops who first took Longueval, as I have described
in a previous despatch, held part of the village in spite of heavy
counter-attacks and incessant bombardments while the South Africans
were in the adjoining wood of devilish fame.
The home-grown Scots had a trench—a poor thing, but still called a
trench—running from east to west at the south end of the village, and
two parallel roads going out of this trench northwards through the
ruins of the village.
There were barricades up these two roads held by the Scots with
machine-guns, and on the other side of the barricade, the roads were No
Man’s Land leading to the enemy, who were, and still remain, in bits of
copse and ruined gardens and old orchards, with their own machine-guns
protected by strong emplacements.
The Scots had a severe time, under almost continuous fire, and lost
heavily. At night they were attacked from the orchard land by parties
of German bombers, who advanced with desperate courage although swept
back again and again by rifles and machine-guns and hand-grenades.
Meanwhile the South Africans were being shelled to death in Delville
Wood close by, and, as I have already told, the poor remnants of them
were withdrawn.
The troops in Longueval were replaced by others, who succeeded in
clearing the enemy out of part of the orchard and capturing some of
his machine-guns, but not enough to “clean up” this position, which
was still very dangerous. It was another battalion of Scottish troops,
together with English boys of the New Army, who captured Waterlot
Farm, running down south-eastwards from Delville Wood, and made two or
three very gallant attempts to get as far as Guillemont, and on July
22 another part of Longueval was taken a third time by these fine men,
whose general has trained them to attack and to go on attacking.
5
Delville Wood proved the stumbling block again. One young officer
who was wounded here yesterday told me that he could get no kind of
cover where he lay with his men at the edge of Delville Wood and on
the outskirts of Longueval. All night long there was the swish of
machine-gun bullets above him, varied with shrapnel and bits of high
explosive.
He has only been out in France a fortnight, and two days ago came
straight to the “Devil’s Wood,” into the heart of Inferno.