concerts, religious services, and beer-parties behind the lines, so
that they shall be kept cheerful until they die, and the news of the
world, as we all know, is specially edited for them with that point of
view in mind.
But the German High Command is careful of the lives of its men until
the day comes when they have to be flung ruthlessly forward, in wave
after wave, against the guns of the Allies.
Again and again I have described the spaciousness and the depth
and comfort of the German dug-outs. That is part of the system of
life-saving, and the divisional commanders set their men to work and
keep them at work in a way which our men would call slave-driving.
I have described those at Montauban and Fricourt as I saw them
immediately after their capture, and after the bombardment which
crumpled up all the trenches about them, but left them, for the most
part, solid and untouched.
3
At Ovillers they are even more elaborate, some of them having six
or eight rooms communicating with each other, and two separate
storeys—rooms as large as fifteen feet by thirty feet, furnished with
spring beds, carpets, washing arrangements with water laid on, electric
light, tapestries to keep out the draughts, and other luxuries. One of
the dug-outs at Ovillers has nine entrances, with beds for 110 men,
thirty feet below the surface, and with a cook-house containing three
big boilers.
But it is not only in the trenches and in places like Ovillers that
the Germans dig so industriously. Far behind their lines, wherever our
long-range guns can reach them, they have these elaborate subterranean
shelters, deeper and stronger than most of ours, and with much greater
accommodation. It means incessant work in addition to all the work
which keeps our own soldiers busy night and day.
But it is work that saves life, and the Germans do not begrudge it, and
have no special pride in taking risks. That is good generalship and
good soldiering. But it does not save them. Some of our officers are
apt to imagine—I confess it was in my own imagination for a time—that
the German was so snug in these burrows of his that our bombardments
in normal times without infantry attacks to follow, did not cause him
many casualties.
The truth is that continuous artillery fire, such as ours has been, is
frightfully destructive of human life, and that no amount of digging
will safeguard it. Transports must move along the roads. Men must go up
communication trenches. Working parties must come out into the open.
During all the month that our artillery has been increasing its weight
of metal and the number of rounds fired, the Germans, therefore, have
been suffering great losses, and the strain upon the nerves and moral
of the men has been severe.
This is certain not only from the statements of German soldiers brought
into our lines, but from new instructions issued as late as July 16,
which refer to the treatment of the great numbers of wounded, and the
terrible conditions of the present fighting. Significant sentences
reveal the truth of things behind the German lines, and again the
organising minds which try to better them, as far as possible:
“As the circumstances of the present fighting do not as a rule permit
of a dressing station being established near the fighting troops, the
wounded must at any rate be taken to places which are easy to find,
easy to describe, and easy to recognise.”
“Companies must inform battalions, and battalions regiments, where the
wounded are to be found, and how many there are to remove.”
“They can as a rule only be moved at night. The stretcher-bearers who
come to fetch them generally waste a good deal of time in searching for
the wounded, and sometimes do not find them if they are not assisted by
the unit which has been engaged.”
“The nights are short for carrying out these large evacuations.”
“I have already reminded units that troops which are relieved should
carry their wounded with them.” That reveals a tragic picture of
the enemy’s losses. It is emphasised again that many of the wounded
are not found, and suggestions are made that pieces of canvas dipped
in luminous paint might be used to indicate the whereabouts of the
wounded, or white canvas cut into the form of a cross.
The German mind is busy with the problem of its dead also. The enemy
goes to great risk and trouble to remove the dead from the fields
because the living men who follow are disheartened and terrified by the
sight of so many corpses on their way.
Search parties are sent out under shell-fire to collect them, even
though many of the searchers may join the dead, and the bodies are put
into mortuary chambers like one found by us the other day at Pozières.
It was filled with dead bodies waiting to be taken away on a light
railway which runs up to the place, but the enemy’s artillery fired
upon this mortuary and set it on fire, as though they were more jealous
of their dead than of the living who were our prisoners.
4
I have said that they keep their best brains out of danger. This is
true, even when the brains are second-best. It is very seldom that any
officer over the rank of a captain is found in the front-line trenches,
and officers of higher rank remain well in the background. Lately,
during our attack, orders have been given that officers and N.C.O.’s
commanding companies and platoons should visit their trenches at night
“so that the men may see or hear their commanders.” It is all very
naive, and reveals that curious lack of humour which characterises the
German war-lord.
“The men,” say these instructions, “should be instructed as to the
whereabouts of their commanding officer, and know where to go if they
feel that they require inspiring with courage. To stimulate courage and
to foster the feeling of confidence and the spirit of resistance these
should be the first duties of an officer in the front line, at all
events in the present circumstances. Courage rather than tactful theory
is the essence of a true leader.”
To give their men courage, in hours when these German soldiers, who
are brave men, might well give way to terror, the German chemists have
manufactured tabloids which drug them with a kind of frenzy. There is
no doubt of this, which sometimes I have doubted, because many of these
drugs were found by a friend of mine—the medical officer of the Kentish
men who helped to take the trenches north of Pozières a few days ago.
They contained ether and opium in sufficient quantity to intoxicate
the strongest man. In the German opinion it is good stuff before a
counter-attack.
German organisation is remarkably good. It does not neglect the
spiritual or the physical side of their soldiers. It provides them with
song-books and prayer-books as well as with food and drink.
It has never revealed a shortage of shells. Its gunners are full of
science and wonderfully quick to get on to their targets when the
infantry calls for help by sending up signals of distress.
In all the mechanics of war and in the fine art of keeping up the pride
of men the German war lords and high officers show real genius. But
they cannot bring dead men to life nor hide the agonies of all their
wounded, nor blink the fact that British troops have broken their
second line, and hammered them with terrific blows and reached out far
with long-range guns to destroy them behind their lines.
They live in many ruins as bad as Ypres—French ruins, alas!—and I know
that, on the eve of our great attack, all instructions were prepared
for a general retreat, with every detail ready in case our troops
should break through on a wide front.
That is a confusion of deep apprehension. It shows that they are
envisaging defeat and preparing for it—wisely enough—in case of need.
It is a state of mind not expressed in an Order of the Day issued
by the German Emperor a few days ago and found on a German officer
captured to the north of Pozières:
“To the leaders of the troops of the First Army,” says the Kaiser,
“I express from the bottom of my heart my deep appreciation and my
Imperial gratitude for the splendid achievement in warding off the
Anglo-French mass attacks of the 30th of July. They have accomplished
with German faithfulness what I and their country expected from them.”
“God help them further.”
(Signed) “Wilhelm I.R.”
Since then the ground to the north of Pozières has been captured, and
to-day there has been fierce fighting and further progress made by
British troops towards Guillemont. God has not helped them it seems.
Behind the German lines, in spite of the Kaiser’s gratitude for the
courage of his troops—a courage which we must not belittle, for it
is great—men are thinking gloomily and wondering when all the agony
of this great war, which holds no victory for Germany, will have an
ending, after all their blood and all their tears.
XXIV
THE ATTACK ON THIÉPVAL
1
AUGUST 25
The doom of Thiépval is near at hand. By a series of small, sharp
attacks, in short rushes, after enormous shell-fire, our troops have
forged their way across a tangled web of trenches and redoubts until
now they are just below the row of apple trees which still show a
broken stump or two below the southern end of the village. They have
bitten off the nose of the Leipzig salient, and yesterday I saw them
take the Hindenburg trench and its strong point, which is almost the
last of the defensive works barring our way to the south entrance of
the village fortress.
On the west our trenches have been dug for some time through Thiépval
Wood, within four hundred yards of this place, and on the east they
have been pushed forward to the left of Mouquet Farm; so that we have
thrown a lasso, as it were, around the stronghold on the hill, from
which its garrison has only one way of escape—by way of the Crucifix,
northwards, where our guns will get them. That garrison is in a
death-trap. The German soldiers in Thiépval must be praying for the end
to come.
As I stood watching the place yesterday, from a trench only a few
hundred yards away, it seemed to me astounding and terrible that men
should still be living there. I could see nothing of the village for
there is next to nothing left of it—nothing at all but heaps of rubbish
which were once the roofs and walls of houses. But on the sky-line
at the top of a ridge which slopes up from the Leipzig salient there
still stand a hundred trees or so, which are all that is left of
Thiépval. They stood black and gaunt against the blue sky, without a
leaf on their broken branches, and all charred. The brown hummocks of
the German trench-lines encircled them, with narrow strips of grass,
vividly green, between these earthworks and below, falling away to our
own lines, a turmoil of upheaved soil where a maze of trenches had been
made shapeless by incessant shell-fire.
All through the afternoon, as all through the morning, and the mornings
and afternoons of many yesterdays, our guns were firing in a steady,
leisurely way, one shell every minute or two, at the ground marked out
by the black tree-stumps. They were mostly the shells of our “heavies”
firing from long range, so that for several seconds one could hear
the long voyage of each shell, listen to the last fierce rush of it
over our heads, and then see, before the roar of the explosion, a vast
volume of smoke and earth vomit up from the place between the trees, or
just below, the line of trees where the enemy’s trenches lay.
A friend of mine, sitting on some sandbags with his steel helmet just
below the tops of some tall thistles which gave friendly cover in our
fore-ground above the parapet, said “Beautiful!” every time there was
a specially big cloud-burst. He is such a hater of war that his soul
follows each shell of ours with a kind of exultation so that it shall
help to end it quickly. But I kept thinking of the fellows below there,
under that shell-fire.
It was only previous knowledge, explorations in German dug-outs, talks
with men who have come living out of such bombardments, that made me
still believe that there were men alive in Thiépval, and that before we
take the place they may fight desperately and keep machine-guns going
to the last. There was not a human soul to be seen, and the earth was
being flung up in masses; but underground a garrison of German soldiers
was sitting in deep cellars, trying to turn deaf ears to the crashes
above them, trying to hide the terror in their souls, a terror invading
all their courage icily, and looking into the little mirrors of long
periscopes which showed them the vision of things above ground, and the
stillness of the British trenches, from which at any minute there might
come waves of men on a new attack.
2
With a few others in the trench where I stood I knew that our men
were to make another bound yesterday afternoon, though not the exact
time of it. For nearly two hours I watched the bombardment, steady
and continuous, but not an intense fire from all available batteries,
and every few minutes I looked at my wrist-watch and wondered “Will
it begin now?” Down below me was the hummocky track of our front-line
trenches, in which the attacking parties had assembled. Only now and
again could I see any movement there.
In our own trench some signallers were carrying down a new wire,
whistling as they worked. A forward observing officer was watching the
shell-bursts through a telescope resting on the parapet and giving
messages to a telephone operator who sat hunched at the bottom of the
trench with his instrument. A couple of young officers came along
jauntily, swearing because “these silly asses”—whoever they might
be—“never tell you where they are.” An artillery officer came along for
a chat, and remarked that it was a fine day for a football match.
3
It was a day when the beauty of France is like a song in one’s heart, a
day of fleecy clouds in the blue sky, of golden sunlight flooding broad
fields behind the battle lines, where the wheatsheaves are stacked in
neat lines by old men and women, who do their sons’ work, and of deep,
cool shadows under the wavy foliage of the woodlands.
Behind us was a ruined village, and German shells were falling into
the corner of a wood not far away to our left, but the panorama of
the French countryside beyond the edge of the battlefield was full of
peace. Above our heads some British aeroplanes came flying, and the hum
of their engines was like big bees buzzing. They flew straight over the
German lines, and presently the sky about them was dotted with white
puffs of shrapnel, and above the noise of the guns there was the high
“ping!” of the German “Archies,” as each shell reached up to those
soaring wings, but failed to bring them down.
Another officer came along the trench and said “Good afternoon! The
show begins in ten minutes.”
The “show” is the name soldiers give to a battle.
By my watch it was longer than ten minutes before the “show” began. The
leisurely bombardment continued in the same way. Now and again a German
“crump” replied, like an elaborate German guttural. Then suddenly,
as though at the tap of a baton, a great orchestra of death crashed
out. It is absurd to describe it. No words have been made for a modern
bombardment of this intensity. One can only give a feeble, inaccurate
notion of what one big shell sounds like.
When hundreds of heavy guns are firing upon one small line of ground
and shells of the greatest size are rushing through the sky in flocks,
and bursting in masses, all description is futile. I can only say that
the whole sky was resonant with waves of noise that were long-drawn,
like the deep notes of violins, gigantic and terrible in their power of
sound, and that each vibration ended at last in a thunderous crash. Or
again it seemed as though the stars had fallen out of the sky and were
rushing down to Thiépval.
The violence of this bombardment was as frightful as anything I have
seen in this war in the way of destructive gun-power. The shells tore
up the German trenches and built up a great wall of smoke along the
crest of the ridge, and smashed through the trees of Thiépval, until
for minutes together that place was only to be known by tall pillars
of black, and white, and brown smoke, which swayed about as though in a
great wind, and toppled down upon each other, and rose again.
4
A voice at my elbow, speaking breathlessly, said: “Look! They’re
away.... Oh, splendid fellows!”
Out of our front line trenches scrambled long lines of men. They stood
for a moment on the top of the parapet, waited for a second or two
until all the men had got up into their alignment, and then started
forward, steadily and in wonderful order. Some of the officers turned
round, as though to see that all their men were there. I saw one of
them raise his stick, and point towards the ridge. Then he ran ahead
of his men. They were on low ground—lowest on the right, in front of
the parapet where I stood, but sloping up a little on the left by the
Leipzig redoubt. Beyond them the ground rose steadily to the ridge on
which Thiépval stands. Our men had a big climb to make, and a long way
to go over open country, for four or five hundred yards is the very
devil of a way to go when it is swept with shell fire.
The enemy was not long in flinging a barrage in the way of our men. A
rocket went up from his lines as a signal to his guns, and perhaps half
a minute after our men had sprang over the parapet his shells began to
fall. But they were too late to do any damage there. Our men were out
and away. Some message seemed to reach the enemy and tell him this. He
raised his barrage on to ground nearer to his own lines, and his heavy
crumps fell rapidly, bursting all over No Man’s Land. Now and again
they seemed to fall right into the middle of a bunch of our men, in a
way frightful to see, but when the smoke cleared the group was still
going forward. On the right of the line one great shell burst with an
enormous crash, and this time there was no doubt that it had caught
some of our men. I saw them fall in a heap.... Perhaps they had flung
themselves down to avoid the shell splinters. Perhaps not one of them
had been touched. It is extraordinary how men can avoid death like that.
Nothing checked the advance of the long lines of figures going through
the smoke; not all the German barrage, which was now very fierce. The
men had to cross one of those narrow strips of grass land between the
earthworks before they came to the first line of German trenches, and
they showed up black and distinct against this green belt whenever the
smoke of the shells bursting above them drifted away.
They were not in close formation. They went forward after the first few
moments of advance, in small parties, widely scattered, but keeping
the same direction. Sometimes the parties themselves broke up and
separated into individual figures, jumping over shell-craters, running
first to left or right as the shriek of an enemy shell warned them
of approaching death. I saw then how easy it is to lose all sense of
direction in an attack like this, and the reason why men sometimes go
so hopelessly astray. But yesterday it was quite marvellous how quickly
the men recovered their line when they had drifted away in the blinding
smoke, and how the groups kept in touch with each other, and how
separate figures, running to catch up, succeeded in joining the groups.
5
We watched the single figures, following the fortunes of each man
across the fire-swept slope, hoping with all our souls that he would
get through and on. Then he would pick himself up when he fell face
forward.
For a little while the men were swallowed up in smoke. I could see
nothing of them, and I had a horrible feeling this time none of us
would ever see them again. For they had walked straight into the
infernal fires, and all behind them and all in front the shells were
bursting and flinging up the earth and raising enormous, fantastic
clouds.
It seemed an hour before I saw them again. I suppose it was only five
or six minutes. The wind drifted the smoke away from the Thiépval
ridge, and there, clear and distinct to the naked eye, were the lines
of our men swarming up. Some of them were already on the highest
ground, standing, single figures, black against the sky. They stood
there a second or two, then jumped down and disappeared. They were in
the German trenches, close to Thiépval.
“Magnificent!” said a French officer who was standing close to me. “By
God! your men are fine!”
They were wonderful. The German barrages did not stop them. They went
through and on as though proof against shells. Some men did not go on,
and fell on the side of the slope, but it seemed to me there were not
many of them.
In the centre of the German trenches was a strong point or redoubt,
with machine-guns. It was one of those deadly places that have often
checked one of our attacks, and cost many brave lives. But I could
see that our men were all round it. One single figure was an heroic
silhouette against the blue of the sky. He was bombing the redoubt,
and as he flung his bombs the attitude of the man was full of grace
like a Greek disc-thrower. A German shell burst close to him and he was
engulfed in its upheaval, but whether he was killed or not I could not
tell. I did not see him again.
6
Up the slope went the other men, following the first wave, and
single fellows hurrying after them. In a little while they had all
disappeared. They were in the enemy’s trenches, beyond all doubt.
New sounds of an explosive kind came through all the fury of gun-fire,
which had slackened in intensity, but was still slashing the air. It
was a kind of hard knocking in separate strokes, and I knew it was
bomb-fire. Our men were at work in and about the German dug-outs, and
there were Germans there who were not surrendering without a fight.
One fight took place on the top of the parapet. A man came up and
stood on the sky-line—whether an English soldier or a German it was
impossible to see. I think a German, for a second after another man
came up as though chasing him, and the first man turned upon him. They
both had revolvers and fired, and disappeared. Other men were running
along the parapets of the German trenches. They were ours, and they
were flinging bombs as they ran. Then a curtain of smoke was wafted in
front of them again, and they were hidden.
From our own trenches another wave of men appeared. I think it wanted
more courage of them even than of the first line of assaulting troops
to go out over that open ground. They had to face the German barrage
and to pass over a way where many of their comrades were lying. But
they went on steadily and rapidly, just as the others had gone,
splitting up into groups, running in short rushes, disappearing in the
smoke of shell-bursts, falling into shell-craters, scrambling up, and
on again....
Another wave came still later, making their way to that ridge where
their comrades were fighting in the enemy’s trenches. They, too,
disappeared into those ditches.
Only in the ground near to me could I see any sign of life now. Here
some of our wounded were walking back, and the stretcher-bearers were
at work. I watched a little procession coming very slowly to our
trenches with their stretchers lifted high. It was a perilous way of
escape for wounded when the enemy was flinging shells all over the
ground and there was no safety zone. Somewhere on our right a shell
had struck a bomb-store or an ammunition dump and a volume of smoke,
reddish-brown, rose and spread into the shape of a gigantic query
mark. Other fires were burning in what had been No Man’s Land, and out
of an explosion in the enemy’s trenches there was flung up a black
vomit in which were human beings, or fragments of them. Over the ridge
by Thiépval the enemy’s barrage was continuous on the far side of the
slope between our trenches on the west and the ground just gained, and
the top of the smoke-clouds drifted above the sky-line as though from a
row of factory chimneys.
7
Suddenly out of all this curtain of smoke came a crowd of figures,
leaping and running. They were Germans trying to get to our trenches,
not in a counter-attack, but to give themselves up as prisoners, and
to get some cover from their own shell-fire. Terror was in their
attitudes, in their wild stampede and desperate leaps over the broken
ground where the shells of their own guns were bursting. One great
German crump crashed close to them, and I think it must have killed
some of them.