to the heels of the enemy, and there were moments yesterday when they
saw many pairs of heels.
6
The area of our attack extended on the left from the ground north of
Pozières to the line recently won to the north of Ginchy on the right,
and its purpose was, as I have said, to break through the third German
line below Courcelette, Martinpuich, and Lesboeuf, a distance of about
six miles. Time of attack was shortly after six o’clock yesterday
morning, and along all the line the troops were awaiting the moment to
rise, after our artillery had completed its first barrage.
On the left in front of Courcelette there was hard and unexpected
fighting. As we now know the enemy had prepared an attack against us,
and had massed troops in considerable force in his front and reserve
lines. He sent out advanced patrols and bombing parties, while our men
were waiting to go over, and immediately there was a fierce encounter.
One young brown-eyed fellow told me his own experience, and it was like
many others.
“The sergeant in my bay,” he said, “suddenly called out that he had
seen a signal light go up from another point of the trenches giving a
warning of attack. ‘We shall have the whole lot on us,’ he shouted.
‘Look out for yourselves, lads.’”
The enemy came over in a rush. Many fell before the rifle fire of our
men, but others managed to jump into portions of trench, and bombed
their way up several of the bays.
Machine-guns were turned on to them, and there were not many left
alive. But before the fight had ended a new one began, for our
jumping-off time had come, and the assaulting troops rose as one man,
and taking no notice of what had happened swept across their own
trenches and the Germans who were in them, and went straight across
country towards Courcelette.
They came up immediately against difficult ground and fierce
machine-gun fire. South-east of Courcelette, beyond the shell-craters
and bits of broken trench which the men had carried easily enough,
sweeping the Germans down before them, stood the ruins of a sugar
factory, which the enemy had made into a redoubt, with machine-gun
emplacements.
It was one of those deadly places which have cost so many lives among
our men in other parts of the battle ground now in our hands.
7
But we had a new engine of war to destroy the place. Over our own
trenches in the twilight of the dawn one of those motor-monsters had
lurched up, and now it came crawling forward to the rescue, cheered by
the assaulting troops, who called out words of encouragement to it and
laughed, so that some men were laughing even when bullets caught them
in the throat.
“Crême de Menthe” was the name of this particular creature, and it
waddled forward right over the old German trenches, and went forward
very steadily towards the sugar factory.
There was a second of silence from the enemy there. Then, suddenly,
their machine-gun fire burst out in nervous spasms and splashed the
sides of “Crême de Menthe.”
But the Tank did not mind. The bullets fell from its sides, harmlessly.
It advanced upon a broken wall, leaned up against it heavily until it
fell with a crash of bricks, and then rose on to the bricks and passed
over them, and walked straight into the midst of the factory ruins.
From its sides came flashes of fire and a hose of bullets, and then it
trampled around over machine emplacements, “having a grand time,” as
one of the men said with enthusiasm.
It crushed the machine-guns under its heavy ribs, and killed
machine-gun teams with a deadly fire. The infantry followed in and
took the place after this good help, and then advanced again round the
flanks of the monster.
In spite of the Tank, which did such grand work, the assault on
Courcelette was hard and costly. Again and again the men came under
machine-gun fire and rifle fire, for the Germans had dug new trenches,
called the Fabeckgraben and Zollerngraben, which had not been wiped out
by our artillery, and they fought with great courage and desperation.
Seventy men who advanced first on a part of these lines were swept
down. Seventy others who went forward to fill their places fell also to
a man. But their comrades were not disheartened, and at last carried
the position in a great wave of assault.
Then they went on to the village. It was like all these villages in
German hands, tunnelled with a nest of dug-outs, and a stronghold hard
to take. The British troops entered it from the eastern side, fought
yard by yard, stubbornly resolved to have it.
The Tank came along and ploughed about, searching for German
machine-guns, thrusting over bits of wall, nosing here and there, and
sitting on heaps of ruin while it fired down the streets. By 6.30 last
evening the village was taken.
The British took 400 prisoners, and when they were brought down to
Pozières last night they passed old Crême de Menthe, who was going
home, and held up their hands crying “Gott in Himmel!” and asked how
they could fight against such monstrous things.
The taking of Courcelette was a great achievement skilfully planned
and carried out with stern and high courage by splendid men, and one
monster.
8
On the right of these troops there was a great assault upon Martinpuich
and High Wood. Here, also, in High Wood, the Germans had been ready
for an attack, and, being forestalled in that, they made a strong
counter-attack which for a time had some success, driving our men back
to the southern edge of the wood.
Our troops had been heavily shelled beforehand, and they found the
enemy in much stronger force than they had expected in that wood of
bitter memory. But these men of ours—I have met many of them before a
year ago—fought very gamely.
Some among them were utterly without experience of the Somme kind of
fighting and wilted a little before its ferocity of fire, but the older
men, the “veterans” of a year’s service or more, cheered them up, kept
them steady, and led them on.
They counter-attacked the counter-attack and regained their old line,
and then to their great joy saw the Tanks advancing through High Wood
and on each side of it.
“It was like a fairy tale!” said a Cockney boy. “I can’t help laughing
every time I think of it.”
He laughed then, though he had a broken arm and was covered in blood.
“They broke down trees as if they were matchsticks, and went over
barricades like elephants. The Boches were thoroughly scared. They came
running out of shell-holes and trenches, shouting like mad things.”
“Some of them attacked the Tanks and tried to bomb them, but it wasn’t
a bit of good. O Crikey, it was a rare treat to see! The biggest joke
that ever was! They just stamped down the German dug-out as one might a
whops nest.”
On the left of High Wood was a very fine body of troops who had no
trenches to lie in but just lay out in shell-craters under a constant
fire of “whizz-bangs,” that is to say, field-guns firing at short
range, which was extremely hard to endure.
“It was cruel,” said one of these men, “but we went forward all right
when the time came over the bodies of comrades who were lying in pools
of blood, and afterwards the enemy had to pay.”
9
They were co-operating with some troops on their left, who went
straight for Martinpuich, that village into which I stared a week or
two ago after a long walk to our front line on the crest of the ridge
beyond Bazentin, looking at the Promised Land.
These men were superb and went across No Man’s Land for nearly 1000
yards in six minutes, racing. They made short work with the Germans who
tried to snipe them from the shell-craters, and only came to a check on
the outskirts of Martinpuich, where they were received with a blast of
machine-gun fire.
It was then the turn of the Tanks.
Before the dawn two of them had come up out of the darkness and
lumbered over our front line trenches looking towards the enemy as
though hungry for breakfast. Afterwards they came across No Man’s
Land like enormous toads with pains in their stomachs, and nosed at
Martinpuich before testing the strength of its broken barns and bricks.
The men cheered them wildly, waving their helmets and dancing round
them. One company needed cheering up, for they had lost two of their
officers the night before in a patrol adventure, and it was the
sergeants who led them over.
Twenty minutes afterwards the first waves were inside the first trench
of Martinpuich and in advance of them waddled a monster.
The men were held up for some time by the same machine-gun fire which
has killed so many of our men, but the monsters went on alone, and had
astounding adventures.
They went straight through the shells of broken barns and houses,
straddled on top of German dug-outs, and fired enfilading shots down
German trenches.
From one dug-out came a German colonel with a white, frightened face,
who held his hands very high in front of the Tank, shouting, “Kamerad!
Kamerad!”
“Well, come inside then,” said a voice in the body of the beast, and
a human hand came forth from a hole opening suddenly and grabbed the
German officer.
For the rest of the day the Tank led that unfortunate man about on the
strangest journey the world has ever seen.
Another Tank was confronted with one hundred Germans, who shouted
“Mercy! Mercy!” and at the head of this procession led them back as
prisoners to our lines. Yet another Tank went off to the right of
Martinpuich, and was so fresh and high-spirited that it went far into
the enemy’s lines, as though on the way to Berlin.
The men were not so fortunate as the monsters, not being proof against
machine-gun bullets. The enemy concentrated a very heavy fire upon
them, and many fell. One boy—a fine, stout-hearted lad who had a keen
and spirited look in spite of dreadful experience—told me a tale that
Edgar Allan Poe might have written if he had lived to see things worse
than anything in his morbid imaginings—one of our common tales.
A German crump killed a lance-corporal by his side and buried them both
completely.
“It was just my steel hat that kept the earth from my face,” said the
boy, “and gave me a little handful of air to breathe. It was in a wee
trench we had dug to get some cover. But now I was covered too much.”
“It seemed like an hour I was there, but perhaps no more than half that
time. I tried to shout, but could not. A man walked over my head, but
did not know I was there.”
“Presently they saw the lance-corporal’s leg sticking out, and started
to pull him. I got my hand out, and waggled it, and they started
digging for me. It was just time. The veins were starting out of my
head, and I was nearly gone.”
It was late in the evening before the whole of Martinpuich was taken
after fierce fighting, and it was the crowning triumph of a successful
day.
10
The troops on the left side of the line did amazingly well, and were
handled well. They took forty German officers and 1430 other ranks.
Against them was the 2nd Bavarian Corps, whom many of our men had met
before at Kemmel and the Hohenzollern and Ypres, glad now to pay off
old scores against them.
On the right of the troops at Martinpuich the attack was swinging up to
Flers across a wide stretch of difficult and perilous ground strongly
defended.
The enemy was flinging over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, and
many of our men fell, but the wounded shouted on the others, if they
were not too badly hit, and the others went forward grimly and steadily.
These soldiers of ours were superb in courage and stoic endurance, and
pressed forward steadily in broken waves. The first news of success
came through from an airman’s wireless, which said:
“A Tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army
cheering behind.”
It was an actual fact. One of the motor-monsters was there, enjoying
itself thoroughly, and keeping down the heads of the enemy.
It hung out a big piece of paper, on which were the words:
“GREAT HUN DEFEAT. SPECIAL!”
The aeroplane flew low over its carcass, machine-gunning the scared
Germans, who fled before the monstrous apparition. Later in the day
it seemed to have been in need of a rest before coming home, and two
humans got out of its inside and walked back to our lines.
But, by that time, Flers and many prisoners were in our hands, and our
troops had gone beyond to further fields.
11
On the extreme right of our line of attack the fighting was hardest and
fiercest of all, and is still very confused and uncertain to the north
of Ginchy and in the direction of Guedecourt. In this direction the
enemy fought with fine courage. Machine-gun fire swept our men from the
direction of Morval and Combles, and the shell-fire was frightful in
its violence.
Nevertheless, the first rush forward was magnificent on the part of the
troops. They were the Guards.
“Lots of our men dropped,” said one of them, “but we didn’t look round
or bother about anything or see anything of what was going on around
us. We had orders to push on, and we pushed.”
The enemy resisted stoutly along his first line. They kept up a severe
rifle fire and machine-gun fire until our men were right on them, and
then fought bayonet to bayonet.
Large numbers of them were killed, and the troops swept through to the
second line of trenches and took that.
A third wave passed through them to the third German trench, but before
they reached this goal the German soldiers came out with their hands up
and surrendered. Our men went on and on.
“The Boches ran like rabbits before us,” said several of them. They
went too far, these soldiers, in their eagerness. One of the colonels
stood up on a hillock blowing a hunting horn to fetch them back, but
they did not hear, and went on still further, unsupported by troops on
their right.
The officers waved on the men with their revolvers, and many fell
leading their companies. It was one of the greatest charges in history,
but drove out too far into the “blue” without sufficient co-operation,
with troops held up lower down by strong points and machine-guns. What
the situation is there to-night I do not yet know, except that our men
were fighting on the outskirts of Guedecourt.
12
I have no time to tell of all the great drama I have seen—the long
trails of the walking wounded, marvellously brave, wonderfully full of
spirits, the long columns of German prisoners tramping back from the
battlefields, dejected and miserable, and other great pictures of war
not yet to be written.
The German prisoners were utterly dismayed—bewildered beyond words.
Some of the officers tried to shrug it off as “a stroke of luck,” but
others admitted that we had surprised them by a great and brilliant
stroke.
One of them with whom I spoke was a young artillery officer who had
fought against us at Ypres in 1914, and afterwards against the Russians.
“The Somme is the worst of all for us,” he said. “It is fearful.”
Several German officers were appalling figures, in masks of horror,
their faces as black as negroes. They had been in a dug-out blown up by
one of our bombs, and it was full of Very lights, which flamed about
them, and burnt them black.
It was a black day for Germany, and the hardest blow that has been
struck at her heart and pride by British troops. For us the glory of
the day is in the splendour of our men.
XXX
FIGHTING BEYOND FLERS
1
SEPTEMBER 17
The enemy has made desperate attempts to organise counter-attacks
to thrust back our lines from the ground gained by us since Friday
morning. They have failed. We hold all the ground captured in the
general assault, and yesterday and to-day our troops have gone further
forward winning new and important positions.
Mouquet Farm, for which the Australians fought with a most stubborn
courage, entering the place several times with their patrols, was taken
last night by a swift and successful assault. Left of that, below
Thiépval, and to the east of that stronghold, attacks beginning last
Thursday on a fortified position known as the “Wunderwerk” (a curious
and villainous system of trenches and dug-outs) have been a brilliant
success, and have extended our gain by a mile of frontage along the
Danube trench.
We have a strong flank line securing Courcelette and have pushed out
beyond Martinpuich towards Eaucourt l’Abbaye, and beyond Flers towards
Guedecourt. The day has not been so sensational as Friday, but solid
progress has been made, and the enemy is kept nervous.
He has been hurrying up reserves from Le Sars and Miraumont and places
far back behind his lines. They were reported to be moving up yesterday
by motor transport, and our long-range guns “dealt with them,” to use
the grim phrase of one of our artillery officers.
The enemy’s losses are certainly very frightful. His dead lie solid
in certain parts of the battle front. There are fields of horror here
round High Wood and above Delville Wood, and not all the shells which I
saw slashing those rows of tree stumps to-day will give the enemy back
those men who are being buried by his high explosives.
The whole of the great stretch of battlefield along the high ridge to
Delville Wood and Ginchy is one great graveyard, and looking across it
to-day, as I stood among shell-craters and old German trenches and the
litter of a wide destruction, this great desolate horror was an evil
panorama which chilled one’s spirit.
The enemy was flinging over heavy crumps and black shrapnel, but his
shooting seemed to me wild and without definite targets. The reason
of it was clear. In taking the high ridge we have the observation
which was once his, and it is our artillery which now has the supreme
advantage.
2
The bombardment of September 15 was the most remarkable achievement
ever done by British artillery, and not surpassed I should say in any
army. Every detail of it was planned beforehand.
Every “heavy” had its special objective and its own time-table working
exactly with the infantry, concentrating upon the enemy’s trenches and
strong points, barraging his lines of communication, following the
tracks of those motor monsters whose amazing adventures I described in
my last despatch, and co-operating with the air service to reach out to
distant targets.
The field batteries were marvellously audacious in taking up new
positions, and the F.O.O.’s (the forward observing officers) were
gallant in getting up to the high ground as soon as our infantry had
taken it and registering their batteries from these new view-points.
I heard to-day the whole artillery scheme of one corps and the
scientific precision with which the enemy’s defences were destroyed
made me shiver as in the presence of a high intelligence distributing
death on a great scale, by means of minute calculations of time and
space, which, indeed, is exactly the truth.
The enemy’s artillery is still very strong, and it would be nonsense to
depreciate his prodigious gun-power. But some at least of his batteries
are in a perilous position now that we are able to observe them, and
from my own observation of his shell-fire to-day it seems to me that he
is shifting them further back.
He had not shifted them when our attack began on Friday morning last
(although our counter-battery work was making it extremely hot for
him), and it is remarkable that within two minutes of our attack he
concentrated a particularly fierce fire on High Wood, where our men
were advancing.
It is possible that his “sausage” balloons had observed the approach
of the Tanks, and had seen them behind our trenches, like ichthyosauri
waiting for their morning meal. But as I have previously hinted,
there is sound evidence for the belief that he had prepared a great
counter-attack along a wide front at the very time when our own was
launched.
This accounts for the great mass of men killed in his lines and for the
large number of prisoners who fell into our hands.
3
The capture of Mouquet Farm last night was made by a dash across a
short strip of No Man’s Land. The garrison there retreated into a
tunnelled dug-out, which had at least two entrances, and showed no
willingness to surrender, maintaining rifle fire from loop-holes after
they were surrounded.
The southern entrance to this underground stronghold was blown in by
high explosives, while men kept guard of the other entry, waiting for
any Germans who might come up to surrender.
This capture of Mouquet Farm (a stick or two above a heap of broken
brickwork, as I saw it some weeks ago) has made the position of
Thiépval still more closely gripped—the garrison there holds out
stubbornly in its tunnelled corridors—and helped forward the assault
upon the Danube Trench launched with absolute success.
This carried further the operation begun last Thursday, when our troops
made one of those brilliant assaults upon the intricate system of
earthworks to the south of Thiépval, which I watched a few weeks ago,
when the Wiltshires and the Gloucesters did so well.
On the left, running southwards down the ridge, is an extraordinary
V-shaped wedge with an open end. This position was not attacked, but
our men drove straight up to the left of it, upon the “Wonder-work,”
which was one of those nests of dug-outs upon which the Germans
lavished all their skill in digging and pummelling and strengthening
and furnishing in what soldiers call “the days of peace”—the old days
of ordinary trench-warfare.
It was no longer a “Wonder-work” when our men rushed upon it. A
whirlwind bombardment which had preceded them, and heavy shell-fire for
weeks past had broken the concrete emplacements and flung up the earth
with deep shell-pits, so that it was merely a part of the general chaos
existing on these battlefields.
Five German officers and 116 men were still alive there, and
surrendered instantly. “You were on us like the wind,” said one of
these officers afterwards. “We had no time to defend ourselves.” Other
men fled from neighbouring shell-craters, but ran straight into our
curtain fire and fell.
Our lads chased some of them as they ran, but halted this side of our
bursting shells, and came back “fearfully bucked,” to use their own
phrase, because they had put the enemy to flight and mastered him so
utterly.
4
Yesterday counter-attacks were attempted by the 5th Reserve Regiment of
Guards, but they were not carried through with resolution. The first
wave of men came a hundred yards or so towards our men, then hesitated,
flung their bombs, which fell ludicrously short, and ran back.
On the left they were bolder and brave, and a very long and stubborn
fight took place with bombs, ending in the complete victory of our men
after they had flung 1,500 hand-grenades.
North-east of Flers other counter-attacks were attempted yesterday, but
our troops who were advancing towards Guedecourt went right through
them and over them with irresistible spirit, checked only by concealed
machine-guns in a harvest field on their wing.
In Bouleaux Wood, to the north of Leuze Wood, there has been fierce
hand-to-hand fighting, and in the centre of it is an unfortunate
Tank—one of the few casualties among the armoured monsters—which lies
with its nose in the earth, forming a barricade between the opposing
bombers.
The general situation along our attacking front leaves the initiative
in our hands and reveals the temporary demoralisation of the enemy’s
troops and command.
One cannot say more than that. The enemy has had a hard blow, but he
has reserves of strength which are controlled by cool brains behind his
lines.
There is still much fighting to be done before Germany’s weakness
reaches the breaking point, but the losses we have inflicted upon her
during the last three days are so terrible that she cannot hide her
wounds.
XXXI
MONSTERS AND MEN
1
SEPTEMBER 18