journalist’s prose but in heroic verse. Poor Ireland will weep tears
over it, for many of her sons have fallen, but there will be pride also
in the heart of the Irish people, because these men of Munster, Dublin,
and Connaught, and of all parts of the west and the south, have done
such splendid things in courage and endurance, adding a very noble
episode to the history of the Celtic race.
When they came out of the battle this morning they were weary and
spent, and they had left many good comrades behind them, but the spirit
of the war sustained them, and they came marching steadily with their
heads held high. It was one of the most moving things I have ever seen
in this war.
A great painter would have found here a subject to thrill his soul,
that long trail of Irish regiments, horribly reduced by their losses,
and with but few officers to lead them, coming across a stretch of
barren country strewn with the wreckage of two years’ bombardment, and
crowded with the turmoil of the present fighting.
Behind them arose the black curtain of smoke across the battlefields
through which there came the enormous noise of the unending gun-fire,
and around them were some of our own batteries hard at work with great
hammer-strokes as their shells went on their way to the enemy’s lines,
but ahead of them walked one Irish piper playing them home to the
harvest-fields of peace with a lament for those who will never come
back.
2
A brigadier came riding over the fields to meet them. It was the first
time he had seen them together since the early dawn of to-day, when
they were still fighting beyond the ruins of Ginchy, which they had won
by a great assault.
He stood, a solitary figure by the side of the track down which his men
came, and there was a great tenderness in the eyes of this brigadier as
he watched them pass, and called out to them words of thanks, and words
of good cheer, and turned to me now and then to say how splendid they
had been.
“Eyes right!” shouted the officers or sergeants who were leading their
companies, and the general said, “Carry on, there,” and “Well done—you
did gloriously.” “Bravo, Dublins!... You did well, damned well,
Munsters, my lads!”
The men’s eyes brightened at the sight of him; and they squared up, and
grinned under German caps and German helmets.
“Hullo, Greene!” called out the brigadier to a very tall fellow
tramping in the outside file. “Glad to see you’re all right. And a big
target, too!”
The music of the Irish pipes went calling down to the valley, and I
watched the men out of sight with something stirring at my heart.
Earlier in the morning, before they had formed up, I had been among
them and had heard many stories of great adventure and of great
courage, told sometimes with an Irish humour that finds a whimsicality
even in the most awful moments, and sometimes with the sadness of men
who mourn for their friends, but wonderfully untouched by the fearful
strain of it all and with a grim joy in their victory.
Some of them had been in Gallipoli, and one sergeant of the Munsters
told me that the taking of Ginchy was the “hottest” thing he had seen
since the landing on August 21 at Suvla Bay. There were two men in his
regiment who had fought all through from Mons, and had escaped from
the hell of the Dardanelles, but had fallen now, at last, on the way
up from Guillemont. He and other men of the old Regulars spoke of the
regiments of the New Army who had fought with them to-day.
“They were just great. The Irish Rifles went through like a whirlwind.
There was no stopping them. When the Germans ran you couldn’t see them
for dust.”
2
The story of the Irish Brigades does not begin at Ginchy. It begins
last Sunday, a week ago, at Guillemont, when one brigade, as I have
already described in an earlier despatch, went through the northern
part of that village in one fierce assault which would not be checked.
After that (as well as before) they lay under heavy shell-fire, without
sleep and without hot food or much water, until the new attack, when
they were on the right of the assault.
The brigade on the left, which had the greatest triumph yesterday, was
lying out in connected shell-craters (the old kind of trench, neatly
revetted, with strong traverses and cosy dug-outs, does not exist in
this part of the battle-line). For five days they held on stubbornly
under ceaseless shell-fire. When the hour of “zero” came for the attack
they were not broken in spirit, as weaker men would have been after all
this trial, but eager to get out and get on—“to get some of their own
back.”
The Germans in Ginchy would have had more terror in their hearts if
they had known the character of the men who were about to storm their
stronghold. They would have prayed to God to save them from the Irish.
As it was, these German soldiers were not feeling safe. They were new
men just sent up to the line, and conscious of a frightful menace about
them. They belonged to the 185th Division, the 19th Bavarian Division,
and the machine-gun company of the 88th Division. They crouched down
in a network of dug-outs and tunnels under the ruins of the village
expecting attack, and determined, as we know now, to sell their lives
dearly. They were brave men.
3
The attack began yesterday afternoon shortly before five o’clock after
a heavy bombardment. The Irish sprang up and went forward cheering.
They shouted “Go on, Munsters!” “Go on, Dublins!” and old Celtic cries.
“Now then, Irish Rifles!” Our shell-fire crept up in front of them.
They went from the south in four waves in open order, with about 50
yards between each wave, and on the left the troops reached their first
halting place in the village, right across the first German trenches
and dug-outs, in eight minutes after starting time—a distance of 600
yards, which is a wonderful record.
On the right the Irish were checked by three machine-guns well placed
for very deadly work and sweeping the ground with waves of bullets.
Many poor fellows dropped. Others fell deliberately with their faces
to the earth so that the bullets might skim above their prone bodies.
At the same time the Irish officers and men were being sniped by
German marksmen who had crept out into shell-craters. It was a serious
situation here unless the machine-guns could be “killed.”
A brilliant little piece of tactics was done by the troops on the
left of the right wing, who swung round and attacked the machine-gun
position from the west and north, in an encircling movement so that
the German teams had to run out of the loop with their weapons to some
broken trenches 300 yards away, where they again fired until knocked
out by some trench mortars attached to one of the Irish battalions.
This enabled the right wing to advance and join the left, and they then
advanced together through the village, with the Irish Rifles remaining
to hold the captured ground, and the Dublins charging ahead.
In the centre of the village among all the dug-outs and tunnels was
the ruin of an old farm in which the enemy had another machine-gun
which they served with bursts of fire. Again our trench mortar men
saved the situation. They came on with the infantry, and ranged their
little engines on to the farm, aiming with such skill that the hostile
machine-gun was put out of action by a short storm of high explosives.
The men were still suffering from snipers and ordinary riflemen hidden
in all kinds of places in the northern half of the village, where there
were concreted and tunnelled chambers with loop-holes level with the
ground, through which they shot. The Irish were reckless of all this
and swept over the place fiercely, searching out their enemies. In
shell-craters and bits of upheaved earth and down in the dug-outs there
was hand-to-hand fighting of the grimmest kind. The Bavarians struggled
savagely, using bombs and rifles, and fighting even with the bayonet
until they were killed with the same weapon.
It was all very quick. Within ten minutes of reaching the line half-way
through the village the leading Dublins had got to the northern end of
it and sent out advanced parties 200 yards beyond. But there was one
menace, which might have led to disaster but for quick wit and fighting
genius.
The Irish had expected that their left flank would be supported by
other troops attacking between Ginchy and Delville Wood, but owing to
the difficulty of the ground in that neighbourhood and the rapidity
of the Irish advance this had not been possible, and the victors of
Ginchy found themselves with an exposed flank to the north-west of the
village. A young sapper officer from Dublin realised the situation,
and taking command of a body of men dug a defensive flank and
established strong posts as a protection against a counter-attack. The
situation on the extreme right was for some time equally perilous, as
the troops engaged in an enterprise on that side had not yet made good
their ground, and the splendid achievement of the Irish Brigade, from
a military point of view, is their success—quite astoundingly good—of
taking a hostile front of 900 yards to the depth of nearly a mile with
no supporting troops on either flank.
4
From a non-military, untechnical, human point of view the greatness
of the capture of Ginchy is just in the valour of those Irish boys
who were not cowed by that sight of death very close to them and all
about them, and who went straight on to the winning-posts like Irish
racehorses. The men who were ordered to stay in the village almost wept
with rage because they could not join in the next assault.
“We would have gone on into the blue,” said one of them, “except for
all this confounded diplomacy.” Diplomacy is a fine word for the simple
law of safeguarding the captured ground; but you see the spirit which
used it. It was the same spirit which caused the temporary desertion
of three Irish servants on the Brigade Staff. One of them left a
note yesterday morning on his master’s table: “As I could not be at
Guillemont I am going to Ginchy. I hope to be back again, so please
excuse.”
Fine and wonderful men! There was a Sinn Feiner among them, with all
the passion of his political creed and “a splendid soldier,” said one
of his officers, who is an Englishman. Nationalists and Catholics,
Irish to the bone, with every tradition of their race in their blood
and spirit, they fought yesterday and in the dawn of to-day without any
thought of grievance or any memory of hatred, except against the enemy
whom they call “jerry,” instead of Fritz.
In fair fight they were relentless, but they were kind to their
prisoners. It is queer how hatred and kindness alternate in these
men. One man told me the strangest tale with absolute truth, I am
sure, because of his fine, steady eyes. He captured a big Saxon in a
shell-hole the night before the attack. The man was wounded in the leg
and back, but held a revolver, and was not too ill to fight. But he had
no fight left in him when the Irishman jumped down to him.
“Are you going to kill me?” he asked, in good English.
“Sure, no,” said the Irishman. “But just put away that pistol, won’t
you?” Then the Irish sergeant undid his own field dressing and bound up
the man’s leg and back (it was all under the loud whistling of shells),
and said, “Now get along with you back to your own lines, for faith I
don’t mean any harm to you.”
So away went the German into Ginchy, and afterwards, no doubt, wished
he hadn’t.
A tall Irishman, describing the great charge to me, said: “The small,
little men went over with the greatest pluck, sir, so that it was a
real pleasure to see. And the Jerry boys ran that fast the dust was in
their throats, it was.”
“How did you get that Boche cap?” one man asked another. “Did you kill
your man?”
“Did I kill him?... I brought down fourteen prisoners all by myself, I
did, and if you don’t believe it, here’s my receipt for the same.”
He held out a slip of paper, and there sure enough was the officer’s
receipt for the fourteen men.
One German climbed up a tree during the attack. He had a white cap-band
and a white ribbon on his shoulder, and seemed to be signalling.
“Now, come down, Jerry,” shouted five Irishmen in a chorus. “If you
don’t come down we’ll shoot you, we will.”
The man would not come down.
“And sure we shot him,” was the end of the story.
The honours of the day are with the Irish, and these gallant men
hope—they spoke about it, pleadingly—that their losses will be filled
up by Irishmen, so that the spirit of their regiments may be kept.
XXIX
THE COMING OF THE TANKS
1
SEPTEMBER 16
Another day of great remembrance has been given to our history by
British troops, September the Fifteenth, that will not quickly pass out
of the memory of our people, for on that day, which was yesterday, our
soldiers broke through the enemy’s third line of defence and went out
into open country, and gave staggering blows to that German war-machine
which for two years, all but two months, seemed unbreakably strong
against us.
It was a day of good success, yesterday. It was no longer a promise of
future victory, dependent upon all the flukes and chances of war, with
their awful hazards, but, for one day at least, not looking further,
the real thing.
Our men had the taste of victory, and it was like a strong drug to
their hearts, so that they laughed even while blood was streaming down
their faces, and said: “It’s wonderful!” when they came limping off
the battlefields with wounds on fire, and said: “We made ’em run like
rabbits!” when they lay on stretchers and could not move without a
groan.
And it was wonderful indeed. For this day of victory came after two
and a half months of continued and most bloody fighting. This new
British Army of ours had not had an easy walk through after its time of
preparation and training in the dirty ditches of the old trench warfare.
The task that was set to our soldiers yesterday would have been
formidable on the first day of a great offensive. Coming after two
and a half months, it was startling in its boldness, and showed that
our generals had supreme confidence in the men, in their own powers of
organisation, and in the luck of battle that comes to those who have
worked for it. The enemy believed that our offensive had petered out.
There is much evidence for that.
They did not believe it possible that an army of our size and strength
could carry on the attack at the same fierce pace. They cherished the
hope that our divisions were broken and spent, that our stores of
ammunition were giving out, and that our men were overtired.
They still had faith in their own gun-power, the defensive strength
of a thousand guns against the British front, and it was a reasonable
faith. They had been digging furiously on dark nights to strengthen the
third line of defence—the famous Flers line, which was, they thought,
to be the boundary of our advancing tide, and though they were anxious,
and were counting up frightful losses on the Somme, they did not expect
this last disaster to them.
Yesterday I saw their prisoners coming off the battlefields in droves,
and to-day hundreds of them in the barbed-wire cages behind the lines.
They were dazed men, filled with gloom, and tortured by a great
bewilderment.
“It is your victory,” said one of their officers, speaking to me in
French. “It is our defeat. I cannot understand.”
“Germany is _kaput_,” said one of their non-commissioned officers. He
meant that Germany is down—“in the soup,” as our soldiers would say. It
was an exaggeration, for Germany has still a lot of fight left in her,
but it was the belief of her beaten soldiers yesterday.
Our men were exalted—excited by the smell of victory, exaggerating also
our own gains gloriously in the belief that the “last great smash had
been made, and that the end of this foul and filthy war is at hand.”
They “went over” at dawn yesterday filled with the spirit of victory,
and it was half the battle won.
2
Many of them went over, too, in the greatest good-humour, laughing as
they ran. Like children whose fancy has been inflamed by some new toy,
they were enormously cheered by a new weapon which was to be tried with
them for the first time—“the heavily armoured car” mentioned already in
the official bulletin.
That description is a dull one compared with all the rich and rare
qualities which belong to these extraordinary vehicles. The secret of
them was kept for months jealously and nobly. It was only a few days
ago that it was whispered to me.
“Like prehistoric monsters. You know, the old Ichthyosaurus,” said the
officer.
I told him he was pulling my leg.
“But it’s a fact, man!”
He breathed hard, and laughed in a queer way at some enormous
comicality.
“They eat up houses and put the refuse under their bellies. Walk right
over ’em!”
I knew this man was a truthful and simple soul, and yet could not
believe.
“They knock down trees like matchsticks,” he said, staring at me with
shining eyes. “They go clean through a wood!”
“And anything else?” I asked, enjoying what I thought was a new sense
of humour.
“Everything else,” he said earnestly. “They take ditches like
kangaroos. They simply love shell-craters! Laugh at ’em!”
It appeared, also, that they were proof against rifle bullets,
machine-gun bullets, bombs, shell-splinters. Just shrugged their
shoulders and passed on. Nothing but a direct hit from a fair-sized
shell could do them any harm.
“But what’s the name of these mythical monsters?” I asked, not
believing a word of it.
He said “Hush!”
Other people said “Hush!... Hush!” when the subject was alluded to in a
remote way. And since then I have heard that one name for them is the
“Hush-hush.” But their real name is Tanks.
For they are real, and I have seen them, and walked round them, and got
inside their bodies, and looked at their mysterious organs, and watched
their monstrous movements.
3
I came across a herd of them in a field, and, like the countryman
who first saw a giraffe, said “Hell!... I don’t believe it.” Then I
sat down on the grass and laughed until the tears came into my eyes.
(In war one has a funny sense of humour.) For they were monstrously
comical, like toads of vast size emerging from the primeval slime in
the twilight of the world’s dawn.
The skipper of one of them introduced me to them.
“I felt awfully bucked,” said the young officer (who is about five feet
high), “when my beauty ate up her first house. But I was sorry for the
house, which was quite a good one.”
“And how about trees?” I asked.
“They simply love trees,” he answered.
When our soldiers first saw these strange creatures lolloping along
the roads and over old battlefields, taking trenches on the way, they
shouted and cheered wildly, and laughed for a day afterwards. And
yesterday the troops got out of their trenches laughing and shouting
and cheering again because the Tanks had gone on ahead, and were
scaring the Germans dreadfully, while they moved over the enemy’s
trenches and poured out fire on every side. As I shall write later,
these motor monsters had strange adventures and did very good work,
justifying their amazing existence.
4
For several days before the great blow was to be made, and while there
was heavy fighting in progress at most parts of the line—the capture of
Guillemont by English and Irish troops, the splendid rush of the Irish
through Ginchy—there was a steady forward movement and concentration of
all the men and machinery to strike at the Flers line.
Villages beyond the zone of fire where battalions had been resting and
where there was the busy life of soldiers in their billeting areas
suddenly became emptied of all this human interest.
The men had passed on—higher up the roads, and higher up where there
was a struggling tide of all the traffic of war, with supply columns,
mule-trains, guns, limber, ambulances, and troops from all parts of the
Empire, surging, swirling, struggling slowly forward through narrow
village streets, up long winding roads, across trampled and barren
fields, through the ruins of villages destroyed a year or more ago,
and out into the country of evil menace which is criss-crossed by old
trenches and pitted with old shell-craters and strewn with the refuse
of battles two months back in history.
Here a great army with all its material of war—incredibly vast and
crowded—lay waiting for the hour when it should be hurled to the great
hammer-stroke.
They were masses of men who were there the night before the battle
hidden in the darkness of the earth, not revealed even by the white
moonlight except in huddled crowds and camps, but as I passed them
again a few hours before the dawn I thought of the individual and not
of the mass, all the separate hopes and pulse-beats of these men who
were going to do a big thing if luck should favour us.
And out of the darkness I thought I heard the sound of laughter rising
at the thought of the monstrous “hush-hush.” Before the dawn the moon
was high and clear in a sky that had hardly any clouds. It shone down
upon the fields and roads so that the plaster walls of French cottages
were very white under the black roofs, and rows of tents were like
little hillocks of snow in the harvest-fields.
As I looked up a shooting star flashed across the sky, and I thought
of the old legend of a passing life, and wondered why to-night all the
stars were not falling.
Presently dawn came, and some low-lying clouds were touched with a warm
glow which deepened and spread until they were all crimson. It was a
red dawn.
“The promise of victory like the sun of Austerlitz,” said an officer.
Before six o’clock, summer-time, all our guns were firing steadily, and
all the sky, very pale and shimmering in the first twilight of the day,
was filled with the flashes of guns and shell-bursts. Heavy howitzers
were eating up shells.
5
I went to the right of the line, hoping to see the infantry attack
to the left of Leuze Wood, as I had watched the battle here a week
or two ago, and here one of the motor monsters was coming across the
ground. But as the sun rose higher it drew the moisture out of all
these shell-craters and trenches, and a dense white mist blotted out
the ridge for an hour or more. French troops who join our line here
came across country. British soldiers were moving forward on the left,
silently, with the mist about them.
Overhead shells went rushing—heavy shells that travelled with the noise
of trains. Forward batteries were firing rapidly and increasingly, and
then sharp staccato knocking was clear above the heavy crashes of giant
crumps, compared by a whimsical mind in this war with “an immortal
plumber laying down his tools.”
Machine-gun fire rapped out in fierce spasms, and the German “Archies”
were throwing up shells which burst all about the planes of our
airmen, who came like a flock of birds over the battlefields, flying
low above the mists.
They did wonderful things yesterday, those British air-pilots, risking
their lives audaciously in single combats with hostile airmen, in
encounters against great odds, in bombing enemy headquarters and
railway stations and kite balloons, and troops, and registering or
observing all day long for our artillery. They were out to destroy the
enemy’s last means of observation, and they began the success of the
battle by gaining the absolute mastery of the air.
Thirteen German aeroplanes (since reported by Sir Douglas Haig to be
fifteen) were brought down, and their flying men dared not come across
our lines to risk more losses.
On our side it was fighting “all in.” There was nothing of a killing
character within our reach and knowledge which we did not use, and we
turned the enemy’s own worst weapons against himself.
Every material of war made by the home workers in our factories by
months of toil was called in.
The men went in with the resolve to break through the enemy’s third
line without counting the cost, to smash down any opposition they might
meet, and to go forward and far until they could get the enemy on the
run.
A body of Scots went up to the battle-lines to the tune of “Stop your
tickling, Jock,” but there was a grim meaning in the music, and it was
no love-song.
English soldiers had been practising bayonet exercise harder than
usual, and with a personal interest beyond the discipline. “It’s time
to finish old Fritz,” was the shout of one soldier to another. “We want
to go home for Christmas!”