series of shell-craters in which our men have to get what cover they
can, after chasing out the Germans, before digging and strengthening an
effective trench.
But it is the position that counts, and if we can hold it, as I am
now certain we shall, it puts the enemy at a great disadvantage, of
which our guns are already making a full and terrible use. The enemy’s
endeavours to counter-attack—he made two last night—have broken down
under our fire with great bloodshed, and now it is not in the least
likely that he will succeed in wresting back from us any of the high
ground.
The importance of the position is, of course, entirely one of
observation, apart from the tactical importance of having driven the
enemy on to ground beyond his first and second systems of trenches and
dug-outs, so that he can get no strong cover until he retires to a
considerable distance.
It gives us vantage points from which we can observe his movements down
the slope, rake him with rifle and machine-gun fire if he sends out
working parties, and turn the guns on to him with direct observation of
results.
One of the immediate effects of being on the Pozières ridge was seen
yesterday, when our artillery registered something like twenty-five
direct hits upon some of the enemy’s batteries. He had a great
concentration of guns.
Acting in connection with our aviators, who are always observing from
high places, our gunners are punishing the enemy in a very frightful
way, and the ground above Thiépval and Courcelette, into which I
looked for the first time at close range from the switch trench, and
Martinpuich, and the barren ground to the right of it, is swept by our
shell-fire.
A very realistic and tragic picture of what is happening down there
beyond the high ridge is given in a letter written on August 10 by a
German officer of the 133rd Infantry Regiment:
“The relief yesterday,” he wrote, “is incredible. The route
taken—Ligny—Warlencourt—Pys—Courcelette, on the way to the trenches
was very dangerous. During the first part the thunder of the guns was
very disagreeable, and the second part was very unsafe. Heavy shells
fell right and left of the road. Mounted troops, cars, field kitchens,
infantry in column of route, were all enveloped in an impenetrable
cloud of dust.”
“The last stage consisted of troops in single file crouching on
the slope beside the road, with shells bursting overhead. Close to
Courcelette a message arrived: ‘Enemy firing gas-shells, on with your
gas helmets.’ It appeared to be an error. From Courcelette to our
position in the line we relieved across the open. If the enemy had
only noticed that, what a target he would have had!”
“Our position was of course quite different to what we had been told.
Our company alone relieved a whole battalion. We had been told we were
to relieve a company of fifty men weakened by casualties. The men we
relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was, or if
any of our troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our supposed
position until 6 o’clock this evening.”
“To-night I am taking my platoon out to form a covering party. My men
and I are to lie in shell holes in part of an old demolished trench
of ours. The English are 400 metres away. The Windmill is over the
hill. The hundreds of dead bodies make the air terrible, and there are
flies in thousands. About 300 metres from us is a deserted artillery
position. We shall have to look to it to-night not to get taken
prisoners by the English. We have no dug-outs. We dig a hole in the
side of a shell hole and lie and get rheumatism. We get nothing to eat
or drink.... The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad. Many of
the men are knocked up. The company commander thinks we were breathing
gas yesterday, which slowly decomposes the blood, and this is an end of
one. What a variety of ways one can lose one’s life in this place!...
It is getting light. I must start on my way back to the front-line
trenches.”
From another man in the 3rd battalion of the 124th Regiment there is a
letter which pays a doleful tribute to our flying men.
“I am on sentry duty, and it is a very hard job, for I dare not
move. Overhead are the English airmen and in front of us the English
observers with telescopes, and as soon as they perceive anything, then
twenty-four ‘cigars’ arrive at once, and larger than one cares to
see—you understand what I mean. The country round me looks frightful.
Many dead bodies belonging to both sides lie around.”
These letters give the other side of the pictures which I have been
describing. They show what German life is like below the Pozières ridge.
We are drawing very close to Thiépval, and standing yesterday on the
high ground to the right of the Windmill by Pozières, within 500 yards
of Martinpuich, I could see how near our lines have been pushed to both
these places. Thiépval I have seen several times from the western side,
but yesterday I stood to the south-east of it looking straight across
the cemetery of Pozières to the long line of branchless trees and
broken roofs where the German garrison awaits its certain doom.
That doom crept a little nearer last evening when some of our English
troops left their trenches south of the Leipzig Redoubt, which
was already in our hands, and following in the wake of a terrific
bombardment on a short line of the enemy’s position took that section
quickly by assault. I saw the steady bombardment of the ground
hereabouts which was continuous throughout the afternoon, but, by bad
luck, having gone to another part of the line, did not see the attack
which followed.
It was a highly organised and grim bit of work, very quickly done
and with few casualties on our side. As soon as the guns had lifted,
after concentrated fire which tore up the ground and made an utter
chaos of the German line of trench, our men followed. They went over
in two waves, at as rapid a pace as possible over the tumbled ground.
Then they went through the broken strands of barbed wire, and by men
watching them from a little distance were seen to drop down into the
enemy’s trench.
After a little while—less than a minute—the result of the attack was
seen by a number of German soldiers coming out of the shell-craters
with their hands up. A little later a large group of soldiers ran out
and tried to escape. They ran as though the devil were behind them, but
there was a devilish fate in front of them, for they plunged straight
into a heavy fire from our guns, and disappeared.
In less than a quarter of an hour the fight was over and men came
plodding back along the way for “walking wounded,” and the Red Cross
flag could be seen over there in the light of the setting sun.
The enemy must have suffered heavily. Our guns caught them during a
relief, which means that there was a double garrison, resulting in a
double number of killed, wounded, and prisoners. Worse still for them,
it seems likely that on their way up to the lines many of them were
caught in the heavy barrage we had for some time been flinging across
their route.
Among the 200 prisoners taken there is an ex-waiter of the Savoy Hotel,
who says that he is thoroughly sick of the war, like most of his
comrades, and that Verdun, from which he has just come, is a heaven
compared to the battlefields of Picardy.
Some time after our assault German troops were observed to be massing
for a counter-attack behind the captured position, but these were
immediately dispersed by our artillery, and no attack took place
throughout last night.
The result of the operation is that we now hold a line straight above
the Leipzig salient and striking across to our trenches south of
Mouquet Farm, where the Australians made an attack yesterday to push
further forward towards Thiépval.
15
The successful advance south of the Leipzig Redoubt was due mainly to
the gallant work of some Territorial troops who attacked a maze of
German trenches on Friday evening last, carried them by assault, and
linked up with the redoubt itself, already in our hands immediately
below Thiépval, getting a closer grip at the throat of the garrison
there.
I have already told how the men captured the great dug-out and took
nearly 600 prisoners. They were men of the Royal Warwicks, who did that
great achievement with extraordinarily slight loss to themselves. One
of the most thrilling episodes of the attack was when they were held
up on the right by a German strong point, from which came a stream of
machine-gun fire. The men lay down in front of it, and held on until
our own Lewis guns could get to work. Four times a message came over
the telephone asking whether the “heavies” should shell the place, but
the colonel was afraid that his men would be hit, and refused the offer
each time. Then suddenly, when it seemed impossible to stop that deadly
squirt of bullets, the German machine-gun ceased fire and a white flag
fluttered up.
The colonel of the Warwicks expected to see twenty men come out of
that bomb-proof hiding-place. To his amazement there emerged six
officers, and—not 150 men (as I think I said in my last despatch) but
242 unwounded Germans and six “stretcher cases.” There were many acts
of great individual gallantry among the Warwicks, and all were splendid
under the fine leadership of their officers. One sergeant jumped on to
the parados of a German trench and kept a machine-gun team away from
their weapon until our bombing party could arrive, thereby saving the
lives of many Warwickshire lads and helping to secure victory.
Further along the trench a company officer, held up at a “bomb-stop” or
barricade, called for a rifle and fired repeatedly with a cool aim at
the German machine-gunners on the other side, with two men by him, who
kept refilling his magazine, and bombers behind him hurling grenades
over his shoulders.
16
Many of the Germans defended themselves stubbornly to the death. A
sentry standing outside one of the dug-outs saw our men approaching,
and, turning quickly, shouted down the word “England!” to his comrades
below. One of the Warwicks who was closest to him hurled his last bomb
at him, and then, seizing the man’s rifle, sprang on to the parapet
ready to shoot the enemy as they came up. They came up in a swarm,
with bombs, and there was a great conflict which ended only when the
last German was dead.
In one dug-out there was in the midst of all this horror a comic
episode, like that of a clown in tragedy. A curtain divided the
dug-out, and a Warwickshire man thrust his bayonet through it. Suddenly
the curtain was drawn on one side and a German soldier, yawning loudly
and rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of one hand, stood there, as
though to say “What’s up?” He had slept heavily through the bombardment
and attack, and now when he saw the English soldiers facing him,
believed he was dreaming.
So the Warwicks took 400 yards of trenches along a front of 600 yards
and thrust the wedge closer to Thiépval. Meanwhile, in the centre of
our line of attack, English and Scots and Australian troops had been
fighting for the German switch-line beyond Bazentin-le-Petit, the newly
dug trench which the enemy had made feverishly to defend the high ridge
above Pozières, but could not hold. They were Scottish troops who took
the trench opposite Martinpuich, so gaining at least part of the ground
for which we have striven since July 1.
17
It is not long ago, as the calendar counts time, though a lifetime
ago for many thousands of men who have fought along the road
to Martinpuich, since that village with a queer name seemed as
unattainable as any dream-city. No man of ours, except our flying
men, had ever seen it, for it lies just below the Pozières ridge, and
before the battle opened on July 1 the ridge itself was a high and
distant barrier defended all the way by great strongholds like Fricourt
and Mametz and Contalmaison, and by all those woods which could be
captured, as every soldier knew, only by desperate fighting.
Now, after the greatest battle in British history—a series of battles,
rather, in one great and continuous attack—we have gained that ridge
above Pozières and the Windmill, and, pushing up to this German
switch-line, look down the slopes beyond.
There, only 500 yards away across No Man’s Land, lies Martinpuich, as
I saw it myself to-day from our front-line trench, surprised that one
could see so close into its ruins. To my left as I stood out in the
open, above the trenches, was the windmill for which the Australians
have fought—the conical base of it being all that is left as a memorial
of the heroism that gained this ground, and behind was Pozières, the
desolate, shell-swept ruin which is linked also, for ever, with the
memory of those boys from the Overseas Dominion who gave a treasure of
life to take it.
The way to Martinpuich is truly “The Street of Adventure” for hundreds
of thousands of our men who have fought their way over the ground about
it since that first day of July which was the beginning of the great
adventure.
When I went up it to-day, further than I have ever been before, and
to our last post upon it, I passed all the places which will make
chapter-headings in any history of the war—the scenes of all the big
battles and of all the little desperate conflicts which have been
fought along this wing from ditch to ditch, in every tiny copse, in
every bit of broken woodland. It is a road of immortality. Alas!
also of great death—as one sees all along the way—past Fricourt and
Contalmaison, over ground dotted with new-made graves, where white
wooden crosses stick up above the mounds of earth, everywhere. Amidst
the torn tree-stumps, now very neat in all the upheaval of these fields
flung into chaos by gun-fire, now clustering thickly about piles of
broken brickwork which are still called by their old village-names are
crosses—crosses and graves.
Many of those graves are the size of one man’s bed, but others are
broad mounds into which many bodies have been laid, with taller
crosses, to the remembrance of all of them, such as that “To the memory
of the N.C.O.’s and men of the — Border Regiment who fell in action
at this spot on the 1st of July, 1916.” Many of them are to unknown
British soldiers who could not be identified, but whose names are on
the long roll-call of honour.
18
On the road to Martinpuich we passed up by Lonely Copse—just a few
“strafed” trees—and by Lozenge Wood and the Dingle and Birch Tree
Wood, and Peake Wood, and Acid Drop Copse. Do you remember the names?
Men fought ferociously to get these places, our artillery registered
on them, and I saw them in the first days of July under tempests of
shell-fire. Now they can be found only by a few charred sticks, a few
black gibbets, standing above heaps of ashes and the bones and dust of
men.
Contalmaison, the capital of the woodlands, is on higher ground, and is
still the target of German bombardments, as it was our target when I
saw it first. Most of its redbrick château was standing when I looked
into its windows one day from an artillery O. Pip and saw one of its
towers shot away by one of our 15-inch shells, as cleanly as one could
cut a slice out of a cake. Now all that is left of the château is a
broken wall or two, rose coloured except where the bricks are blackened
by fire, standing in the midst of great shell-craters and solid waves
of earth and ash-coloured tree-trunks all hurled about.
A devilish place is Contalmaison now, and when I walked through it
yesterday the foul horror of it reeked about me. In the night the
Germans had flung thousands of gas-shells into it, and the stench was
still prowling about, stealing out of crannies and shell-holes with
faint, sickly whiffs as though from rotten eggs. And the smell of
corruption came up from all the litter of battle lying there....
We went beyond Contalmaison, and were glad to leave it, for the enemy’s
shells were bursting over it, and round by Bazentin-le-Petit Wood,
thinned out by successive storms of shell-fire to the mere ghost of
a wood, with the light striking through its leprous-looking trunks,
where many unburied dead lie among the broken trenches. The ground rose
gradually past Contalmaison Villa, which stood far beyond the village
itself, as the country house of some French gentleman who will never
see it again except in dust and ashes, and here we were out in the
centre of the battleground, where our men are now fighting between the
windmill of Pozières and High Wood, on the farthest line of our advance.
The battle was going on, as it goes on all through the days and nights,
with never-ceasing gun-fire. The infernal tumult of it was all around
us, and death was everywhere for any man whose luck had run out. Lord
God in heaven! If a man had any kind of prayer in his soul, or any
special form of curse for those who made this war, his lips should
mutter it in a place like this.
19
It was into the famous switch trench which has been the goal of great
endeavour since July 14, when our troops broke the German second line,
that we went through other trenches after the long walk in the open,
and looked at last into Martinpuich, first below the high ridge. Merely
to see it was the supreme proof of the greatest achievement in arms
ever done by British soldiers. To get as far as this, to capture the
high ground where we now stood, behind earth and sandbags, looking down
into the valley beyond, our men have stormed many strongholds, fought
through all the ghastly woodlands from Fricourt and Bazentin and High
Wood, and many have fallen all along the road to Martinpuich.
The village itself is just like any of all those ruins which have been
smashed to bits in this poor France. There was no sign of human life
there among the broken buildings. But there was human life, though I
could not see it, in the 500 yards of No Man’s Land between our first
line and the village.
In the deep shell-craters here, as thick as holes in a sieve, there
are still some German soldiers living. They have no kind of trench,
for there is nothing but open ground before us for 1,000 yards, now
that we have taken the German switch-line, but in these holes they hide
themselves at night and snipe our men by day. They are fellows who have
been sent out to hold the ground as much as possible before they are
dead or captured, and their officers never expect to see them again.
When our guns barrage this stretch of barren land they can be seen
hopping from one shell-hole to another, and it is then the turn of our
snipers. They brought down thirty-five the first day, after taking the
switch-line, and about as many two days ago.
More valuable than a German prisoner—for what’s the value in this war
of one man’s life?—was the German machine-gun brought in a day or two
ago from the ground outside Martinpuich, where it lay half-buried,
but so undamaged that it is now used against the enemy with his own
cartridge belts. Other queer things have been brought back. Two days
after the capture of the switch-line our soldiers saw two men waving
out there in No Man’s Land, and getting their glasses on to them saw
that they were wounded Englishmen. A party of Scots crawled out and
brought them in, as during the same day they had carried back a number
of German wounded lying about in the shell-holes close to our own line.
The real wonder of our men is only to be seen in such places as this.
On these battlefields, under shell-fire, they were working as calmly as
though they were building sand castles on the English seaside. Behind
them lay many of their dead.
I could track my way by the blood that splashed the walls of the
trenches, to the place where an amateur medico patches up the bodies of
broken men in a hole in the ground.
20
The ground over which I walked with a young Scottish officer—who has no
emotion at all about such things because since he went first into Loos
he has lived cheek by jowl with death so that any fear he may have had
is killed by habit—was nothing but one great stretch of shell-craters.
There was not one yard of ground into which a shell had not fallen,
over thousands of yards. Some of them were small shells making small
craters, others were heavy shells which had made enormous pits, and
the rim of one crater met the rim of another, or mingled. And, as we
walked, the sky above our heads was filled with shells continuing this
work, flinging up the earth again into new hills and hollows.
From our own batteries far away behind us there came a steady
bombardment of the German ground just beyond us, and the shells passed
overhead with that indescribable sound which is half a scream and half
a sigh, enormous in the volume of its noise. But those sounds were
comforting compared with others, which were coming overhead. They were
coming from the enemy’s side with a savage overwhelming roar, which
ended in a rending explosion.
“Eight inch,” said the young Scot by my side. “Heavy stuff.”
It is surprising what effect an eight-inch shell can have in the way
of upheaval. But one’s sensation is not that of surprise when fifty
yards away, or less, a mass of field is suddenly lifted skyward and a
smoke-cloud as large as a cathedral stands there strangely solid in the
wind. The whole field of battle about us was vomiting up these things,
and it was damnable.
XXIII
THE GERMANS’ SIDE OF THE SOMME
1
AUGUST 9
I have not been across to the enemy’s side of the line (except when
it has been broken by our guns and men), and I have no intention of
following the example of a friend of mine who deliberately tried to
get across to them in search of information. But now and again it is
possible to get a mental glimpse of how the enemy lives and works and
thinks behind the barbed wire and the ditches and the machine-gun
redoubts which make up his defensive system.
I mean the enemy’s fighting men, and not all those people in Germany
who starve on false promises and grow sick with hope deferred, and
count up the number of their dead, and still say, with a resolute
pride, “At least—we cannot be beaten.”
From talks with prisoners, and explorations of German dug-outs, and
the reading of captured documents, and many days spent (before the
battles of the Somme) in our own trenches from which through a loophole
or a tuft of grass I have looked over to the German lines and seen,
not often, but several times, German soldiers moving about in working
parties, and German infantry marching down a hillside over 2,000 yards
away, I have been able to conjure up a fair answer to questions which
have often come into my head: “What are the fellows doing over the way?
What are they thinking about and talking about? What does it look like
behind their lines? And how do their methods and their moral differ
from our own?”
Since the beginning of our attack on July 1 I have gained some later
information about those things, and it seems to me interesting to put
down a few of the facts, so that people at home may know more about the
enemy than they seem to know.
2
There is no doubt at all that as a fighting man the German knows his
business thoroughly, and performs it with great skill, courage, and
discipline. He has had the advantage of us in an enormous reserve of
highly-trained officers and non-commissioned officers, and although
the advantage is rapidly disappearing, because after two years of war
we are getting large numbers of the same class of men and he is losing
and has lost a great mass of them by death and wounds, he still has, I
imagine, more than enough for his needs.
Now, and to the end of the war (for he is careful to keep his best
brains out of danger), he can call upon a great store of professional
and scientific knowledge to direct the machinery of this business of
destruction and defence, and to organise the lives of his machine-made
men.
In minute detail of organisation, and in a driving industry behind it,
the German High Command is masterly, and there is not a soldier in the
Kaiser’s armies who is not well-equipped (down to the “housewife” full
of pins and needles, cotton, buttons, and thread, which he carries in
his pouch) and well-fed, unless our guns do not permit his supplies to
come up.