shell-craters, and looked to their rifles and bombs. There was not
much doubt as to what was coming. It came down the main road from
Guillemont—a large force of German soldiers with machine-guns.
At the same time, from the trench parallel with ours, the Germans
sprang on to their parapets and came over. The Scots were hardly
strong enough to resist these attacks supported by enfilade fire. They
were ordered to fall back, and the retirement was carried out without
disorder—to say “without panic” would be ridiculous to these men who
have fought a score of battles since they came to France—and it was
covered by the machine-gunners, who remained as a rearguard, sweeping
down the advanced parties of the enemy, so as to gain time for our men
to get back.
3
A second move from Waterlot Farm was made by the same Scots, supported
by other troops. The enemy suffered badly. A very strong force of
German bombers made a brave counter-attack on the Scots, but were
caught by rifle and machine-gun fire, and fell almost to a man.
“Practically wiped out” was the way in which an officer of the Scots
described it. During the afternoon a patrol of our snipers went out
on a hunting expedition and sighted a party of Germans carrying down
ammunition boxes. Not all of them reached their journey’s end, for the
Scottish snipers are good shots.
Some of the German soldiers were sick of the business, and had had too
much shell-fire. When dusk was creeping over the countryside a group of
them came out of a ruined farm—it had really been a farm in the old
days of peace—standing on the left of the main road to Guillemont.
They came holding up their hands as a sign of surrender, and some of
the Scots went out to bring them in. But the enemy in the trenches
beyond opened fire on their own countrymen, and some of our own were
killed and wounded.
When, later on, another party came out, they were not received in a
friendly spirit.... That night the Scottish stretcher-bearers went out
to bring in their wounded, and they found among them one man of theirs
who had been discovered by a German patrol, but left behind because
he gave them his water to drink. They thanked him, and said “Good
luck, and a safe return to your own lines!” but when they went away he
thought he had been left to die.
XXI
THE PETER PANS OF WAR
1
JULY 31
For two days now the sun has been blazing hot, and our fighting men
have been baked brown. It is not good fighting weather either for
guns or men. A queer haze is about the fields, as thick at times
as a November mist and yet thrilling with heat, so that artillery
observation is not good for anything like long-range shooting.
Mametz Wood, which is now well behind the lines, looms up vaguely, and,
beyond, Delville Wood is hardly visible except as a low-lying smudge on
the sky-line. Yet the sun is not shaded by the haze, and strikes down
glaringly upon the white roads and the trampled fields, upon transport
crawling forward in clouds of dust that rise like the smoke of fires
about them, and upon soldiers trudging along with their rifles slung
and their packs slipping, their iron helmets thrust forward over the
eyes and their faces powdered white as millers’.
It is hot and thirsty work and painful to the spirit and flesh of men,
even along roads that are not pebbled with shrapnel bullets. Men on
the march to-day were glad of frequent halts, and flung themselves
down on the waysides panting and sweating, moistening their dusty lips
with parched tongues and fumbling for their water-bottles. They were
lucky to have water, and knew their luck. It was worse for the men who
were fighting yesterday in the same heat wave up by Waterlot Farm and
further south by Maltzhorn Farm, not far from Guillemont.
Some of them drank their water too soon, and there was not a dog’s
chance of getting any more until nightfall. Thirst, as sharp as redhot
needles through the tongue, tortured some of these men of ours. And
yet they were lucky, too, and knew their luck. There were other men
suffering worse than they, the wounded lying in places beyond the quick
reach of stretcher-bearers. “It was fair awfu’ to hear them crying,”
said one of their comrades. “It was ‘Water! water! For Christ’s
sake—water!’ till their voices died away.”
As usual the stretcher-bearers were magnificent and came out under
heavy fire to get these men in until some of them fell wounded
themselves. And other men crawled down to where their comrades lay
and, in spite of their own thirst, gave the last dregs of their water
to these stricken men. There were many Sir Philip Sidneys there, not
knighted by any accolade except that of charity, and very rough fellows
in their way of speech, but pitiful.
There was one of them who lay wounded with some water still in the
bottle by his side. Next to him was a wounded German, groaning
feebly and saying “Wasser! Wasser!” The Yorkshire lad knew enough to
understand that word of German. He stretched out his flask and said,
“Hi, matey, tak’ a swig o’ that.” They were two men who had tried to
kill each other.
2
On one part of the battlefields recently were some of the Bantam
battalions, those little game-cocks for whom most of us out here have a
warm corner in our hearts, because they are the smallest fighting men
in the British army, and the sturdiest, pluckiest little men one can
meet on a long day’s march. They have been under fire in several parts
of the line, where it is not good for any men to be except for duty’s
sake.
It has generally been their fate to act in support of other
troops—troops whom it is an honour to support when they go into action,
because their regiments have won fame on all the battlefields of Europe
since the Napoleonic wars.
But it is always a dangerous honour to be in support. The attacking
troops have often an easier time than those who lie behind them with
scanty cover. It is here that the enemy’s barrage is likely to fall,
and there is not much fun in lying under shell-fire hour after hour,
perhaps for two days, without seeing the enemy or getting at him. The
ground becomes strewn with dead and wounded. It is then that to “hold
on” means the highest heroism.
The Bantams held on in hours like this, held on gamely and with
wonderful grit. They became great diggers, and because they are not
very high, a shallow trench was good enough for cover, and they
burrowed like ants. “They would as soon forget their rifles as their
shovels,” said one of their officers to-day. “There is no need to tell
them to dig. They get to work mighty quick, being old soldiers now who
have learnt by experience.”
They are old soldiers in cunning and knowledge, but there are young
lads among them. Old or young (and there are many middle-aged Bantams
who stand no higher than five feet in their socks), they are all the
Peter Pans of the British Army—the Boys-who-wouldn’t-grow-up, and, like
the heroic Peter Pan himself, who was surely the first of the Bantams,
they are eager for single combat with the greatest enemy of England,
Home and Beauty who may come along. They had their chance yesterday,
and brought back a number of enormous Bavarians as prisoners fairly
captured.
A certain Bantam, ex-boilermaker of Leeds (“the grandest city in the
world,” he says), and the King’s Jester of his battalion was enormously
amused by the incident. He said that each Bantam looked no higher
than the matchstick to the candle with each Bavarian. To all these
little men the German soldiers looked like giants, but like so many
Hop-o’-my-Thumbs they took charge of these Bavarian Blunderbores and
brought them back in triumph. They went searching for them in the ruins
of Longueval some days ago, and found some of them sniping from the
trees. They brought them down with a crash, and collected souvenirs.
This village was a dreadful place when some of the Bantams went into
it. Only a few ruins remained, and about these many soldiers of many
different regiments went prowling in search of Germans who were still
concealed in dug-outs and shell-craters, and who still defended the
outskirts of the village with machine-guns, which swept the streets.
There were Highlanders there, so “fey” after their fierce fighting
that they went about with their bayonets, prodding imaginary Germans,
and searching empty dug-outs as though the enemy were crowded there.
The ground was strewn with dead, and from ruined trenches and piles of
broken bricks there came the awful cries of wounded men.
3
There were many wounded—Germans as well as British—and one man tended
them with a heroic self-sacrifice which is described with reverence and
enthusiasm by many officers and men. It was a chaplain attached to the
South Africans who fought so desperately and so splendidly in “Devil’s
Wood.” This “padre” came up to a dressing station established in the
one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter and applied himself to
the wounded with a spiritual devotion that was utterly fearless.
In order to get water for them, and the means of making tea, he went
many times to a well which was a danger spot marked down by German
snipers, who shot our men, agonising with thirst, as though they were
tigers going down to drink. They are justified according to the laws of
war, but it was a cruel business. There was one German officer there,
in a shell-hole, not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy
to pick off any men who ventured to the well, and he was a dead shot.
But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the fine figure of
that chaplain, his disregard of all the bullets snapping about him,
the tireless, fearless way in which he crossed a street of death in
order to help the wounded, held back the trigger-finger of the German
officer, and he let him pass. He passed many times, untouched by
bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into its worst places, which
were pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he had made from the
well-water for men in agony because of their wounds and thirst.
They were officers of the Bantams who told me the story, though the
padre was not theirs, and their generous praise was fine to hear. It
was good also to hear the talk of these men who had just come out of
battle with the grime and dirt of war upon them, about the men they
love to command.
These young officers are keen, bright-eyed fellows, and in spite of
all they had been through—things not yet to be described—they bore but
little trace of their endurance. I sat with them under a tent propped
up by stretcher-poles, with one flap tied to an old cart, while the men
who had just marched down were lying in groups on the field, mostly
without shirts and socks, because of the heat and the long time since
they had changed their clothes.
Afterwards I went among the men—all these Peter Pans—who came from all
parts of Scotland and the North of England, so that their speech is
not easy to a man from the South. They were talking of German snipers
and German shells, of all that they had suffered and done, and the
boilermaker, their comic turn, was egged on to say outrageous things
which caused roars of laughter from the Bantam crowd. The language of
the boilermaker on the subject of Germans and the pleasures of war
would be quite unprintable, but the gist of it was full of virtue
and suited the philosophy of these five-foot Cœurs-de-Lion, who were
grinning round him.
It is the philosophy of our modern knights, who take more risks in one
day than their forebears in a lifetime, and find a grim and sinister
humour in the worst things of war.
XXII
THE HIGH GROUND AT POZIÈRES
1
AUGUST 5
Last evening, just as dusk was creeping over the battlefields, the
Australians, with English troops on their left, sprang over the
parapets of their lines at Pozières, advanced up five hundred yards of
rising ground, stormed through the trenches of the second German line,
and captured the crest of the ridge which looks down to Courcelette and
Martinpuich.
It was a great and tragic surprise to the enemy. They may have
believed, I think they did believe, that after the series of battles
in the July fighting, the spirit of the British offensive was broken,
and that our troops were too tired to make fresh assaults. The German
generals tried to put comfort into the hearts of their men by telling
them that the British guns and the British soldiers had done their
worst, and that the attack was at an end. The lull deceived them.
Because two or three days had passed without any infantry action after
thirty days of unceasing battle there may well have seemed to the enemy
a reasonable hope that we should content ourselves with digging in and
holding the ground gained. One thing, however, must have disheartened
the German troops and prevented any kind of nervous recuperation after
the appalling strain of the month’s shell-fire. The British guns, which
should have been worn out, and the British gunners supposed to be
exhausted, went on firing.
They went on all yesterday, as on the day before and more than a month
of yesterdays, with their long, steady bombardment, that bombardment
which is now rumbling with its sullen shocks of sound as I write, and
as it goes on night and day. Long-range guns were reaching out to
places far ahead the German lines. Courcelette was a ruin. Martinpuich
was falling to pieces. There is no safety for Germans anywhere and up
in the lines no safety except in the deepest dug-outs for officers and
lucky men.
2
As many men as could get into dug-outs to the north of Pozières were
down there yesterday, listening to the crashes of our heavy shells
which were smashing the trenches about them and screaming overhead on
more distant journeys.
The Australians and English troops, including men of Kent, Sussex, and
Surrey regiments, were waiting in their own trenches.
A crescent moon came up. The woods darkened. Shadows crept down from
Thiépval. Distant cornfields in the world beyond the war, so near as
miles are counted, so far away in peace, became bronzed and red, and
then all dark and vague in the evening mist. Above, the sky was still
blue, with stars very bright and glistening.
It was, I think, about 9 o’clock—as the clock goes now in France
and England—when the British troops left their trenches. They went
quietly without any great clamour across that 500 yards of ground,
dusky figures, the brown of their khaki no different from the colour
of the earth around them, through the gloom of coming night. The
Australians worked up to the right, the English to the left. Before
them was the German second line on a front of about 3,000 yards, and
part of that long line which was pierced and taken on July 14, between
Bazentin-le-Petit and Longueval, when the British troops went up in
waves and astounded the world by their achievement. It was no longer a
line of trenches.
It was a wavy line of hummocky and tumbled earth along innumerable
shell-craters such as I described at Montauban. Only the dug-outs, or
some of them, still remained in all this chaos, filled with living and
wounded and dead.
Out of the wreck of earth, as our men advanced, living men came out in
groups. They came forward through the dusky night with their hands held
up—pitiable shadows. Most of them were utterly nerve-broken—beaten and
broken men with no fight left in them, but only an animal fear, and
desire of life.
Their surrender was received, and the English and Australians put
guards about them and sent them back to our lines while they went on
to clear out the dug-outs of men who refused to come out, or could not
come out, and to deal with those who further back had still the courage
to defend themselves.
There was some bayonet fighting and bombing. From behind the German
lines in isolated redoubts machine-guns were at work spraying out
bullets. But our casualties were very few; all told, less, I imagine,
than in any action of importance during the Battle of the Somme. The
enemy’s losses were heavy. More than 400 prisoners have passed the
toll-bar, and others are being brought down. In dead he lost more than
that, and his wounded must number high figures. It was a blow which
must be grievous to him after all the hammer-strokes of the month, and
what is most significant is the troubled state of his soldiers, these
dazed and nerve-shattered men who surrendered. They had no pride left
in them.
These men were mostly of the 17th and 18th Reserve Division of the
9th Reserve Corps with miscellaneous drafts from various Ersatz or
reserve battalions, the scourings of the last class whom Germany
can, I suppose, put into the field. By that I do not mean they are
physically weak or undersized—there are very few German soldiers who
could be described like that—but they are not soldiers of the proud and
highly-trained kind who fought in earlier days of the war. They are men
with families and with a great yearning for peace, and no love of this
massacre which is ordained by their warlords.
During the night the troops behind them were rallied to make three
separate counter-attacks. They came on very bravely—there is
nothing the matter with German courage as a rule—but in a spirit of
self-sacrifice and stupidly. They walked into our barrage, and our
shells caught them and shattered them.
To-day up to the time I write there has been no further attack by
infantry, but the enemy’s guns have opened and maintained a very fierce
fire upon the positions gained by our troops.
The new part of the German second line now in our hands makes up with
the other part of his line captured on July 14 a distance of nearly
10,000 yards.
3
AUGUST 7
All last night, which was still and calm, as the weather goes, there
was a great hammering of guns, and this morning, when I went out in the
direction of Thiépval, the artillery on both sides was hard at work.
The enemy was dropping “heavy stuff” in the neighbourhood of Pozières,
with occasional shots at long range into fields about quiet villages
behind the lines which look utterly peaceful in the warm light of this
August sun gleaming upon their church spires and upon the thick foliage
of the trees around them.
It was in the midst of a tumult of guns and below the long resonant
journeying of great shells on their way to the enemy’s territory that I
sat to-day with some of the officers who have just chased the Germans
out of their trenches to the north of Pozières.
They were all men of Kent around me. The captain is a merry soul, who
laughs most heartily over his hairbreadth escapes and still more loudly
when he describes little exploits which would make most men shudder at
the mere remembrance.
The colonel of his battalion, who sat opposite, is of a different type,
quiet and thoughtful, but with a sense of humour also that lights his
eyes. And two places off was the M.O.—a doctor who loves his men and
would not leave this battalion of the Kents for any other in the Army
(he has patched up all their bodies after every scrap and did heroic
work for them the other night).
Before the fighting began the colonel took the jovial captain up
to the line “to view the Promised Land,” as he called it. And the
Promised Land looked very uninviting on this high ridge—above the
blackened ruins of Pozières—where the German second lines were guarded
by a tangle of barbed wire. It was also difficult to look at it very
long or very closely, because the enemy was “lathering” the field of
observation with every kind of “crump” and shell.
“When we popped over the parapet,” says the captain, “we advanced into
the middle of the Brock’s Benefit, and it was obvious that the blinking
Boche had got the wind up.”
That is to say the enemy was sending up distress signals to his guns,
and in the anticipation of an attack, was flinging coloured lights
over to our lines so as to illuminate any British infantry who might
be advancing. These lights were fired out of a special kind of pistol,
and when they fell flared up with vivid red and green fires. At the
same time the enemy’s machine-guns played upon any figures so revealed,
so that it was almost certain death to be in those flare lights. At
great risk several men sprang forward into the illumination and kicked
out the burning canisters. Then in the momentary darkness, the leading
companies advanced in waves towards the German trenches south of
Mouquet (or, as the soldiers call it, Moo-Cow) Farm.
4
The colonel of the battalion went very gallantly with his men, and as
he drew near to the enemy’s line saw two figures silhouetted like his
own men had been against the enemy’s lights. He called out to them,
thinking they might be his own men working forward on his right. But
he saw they were Germans when one man threw up his hands as a sign of
surrender, and the other dropped on to one knee to fire a rifle shot.
The colonel sprang forward, covering them with his revolvers, and took
both of them prisoner.
Without many casualties in spite of machine-gun fire, our men reached
the German trenches. Great heroism was shown by a young lieutenant and
a party of bombers who went first over No Man’s Land so quickly behind
our barrage that they risked death by our own shells and came against
the first defence. The officer and several of this first wave were
found lying wounded 400 yards further than the “jump-out” position,
and it was their quick advance which scared the enemy and helped to
demoralise him.
5
One of the prisoners taken later was a forward observing officer, a
Prussian giant well over six feet high and enormously stout, and he was
put in charge of a little Kentish man standing five foot one in his
socks. The German giant was very frightened at the machine-gun fire
of his own people, which was whipping over the ground, and he went
back crouching in a bear-like way, prodded from behind by the wee man
in khaki. This sight, illuminated by the flares, was seen by the men
left behind in our own trenches, and they stood up on their parapets
laughing and cheering wildly.
But there were other trenches ahead, and the men “hared” off to these,
and found them held by scared men. The Kentish men started bombing down
the trench “like mad,” and blocked it at each end in case of accidents,
while a young officer posted a machine-gun on the left of it.
The position, however, became quite obviously an untenable one, when
the Germans rallied and attacked in bombing parties from the farm.
Many of them were cut down by the young officer with his Lewis gun
and by the Kentish grenadiers, but they brought up machine-guns and
made the position “very hot.” A lance-corporal behaved very gallantly
in going back 700 yards under heavy fire to report the situation, and
volunteered to return with the message that the patrol could not be
supported and must fall back in small groups. This he did, and returned
again in safety with the other party, who brought with them three more
prisoners “as samples” (to use their own phrase), including the huge
officer whom I have described previously.
They have funny fellows among them—this British battalion—and
the amount of comedy they extract from all this grim business is
astounding. There is one of their number who was once a member of Fred
Karno’s troupe, and has not lost his old instincts for a knock-about
turn. When he took a prisoner he caught him by the hand and danced a
“pas de quatre” with him.
“Offizier?” asked the astounded man.
“Oui, oui,” said the comic turn, “and you—prisonnier—savez?”
So much for the men of Kent, though I should like to tell more if
I had the time to-night about their medical officer who tended all
the wounded men of two companies and thirty wounded Germans in a
subterranean dressing station (there was no comedy there), and more
about their very fine and fearless colonel, and about the cheerful
captain, whose adventures since the war began would fill a book as
strange as the Memoirs of Marbot.
To-day other men were fighting in the same place, and I must tell at
some later time the fine work of the Surrey and Sussex men.
6
AUGUST 11