understand something of the truth when I cannot understand myself,
but can only guess and grope at the qualities which make them do the
things they do? Take our last great day of battle—September 15—there
were troops of many different types engaged in its fighting—Canadians,
New Zealanders, Scots, Irish, and English of many counties. One would
expect to find differences among these men, to find some harder than
others, or softer than others, battalions here and there who flinched
before the storm of steel and those frightful shells which open great
chasms in the earth. But on Friday the courage of all those men was of
one quality, and a man would be a liar who said that one set of men
were less brave than another.
2
To-day I went among the London men, and afterwards among some
Highlanders, who have a special place in my heart. In blood, in
upbringing, in physique, in temperament one could not find two bodies
of men more unlike, yet they have been alike in splendid endurance
under merciless fire last Friday and onwards. “I cannot understand how
my boys stuck it out during the worst hours they had,” said a colonel
of one of the City of London battalions. “They just had to sit in
shell-craters under heavy crumps. Many men would not have gone through
with it. But the London boys just stayed there, gamely. They are
wonderful.”
The colonel himself was wonderful—this old Territorial soldier, nearly
sixty years of age, with a white moustache and grizzled eyebrows that
did not hide the bright and almost boyish light in his eyes. He used
to be a dyspeptic and a “bundle of nerves,” so he told me, and did not
think he could last three months of war. But now, at the beginning of
the third year of war he led his battalion into action, went under
some of the fiercest fire along the whole battle-line with them, and
lay side by side with his “boys,” as he calls them, in a shell-hole
which became filled with water by violent rain-storms. For three days
and nights he lay there while the enemy was trying to shell our men to
death by his monstrous five-point-nines.
There were London men with him and all around him in the same kind of
holes—for there were no trenches here—and though even the sergeants
were shaking with a kind of ague, not with cold, but after the nervous
strain of enduring the incessant shock of high explosives, they
“carried on,”—O splendid phrase!—and not a fellow played the coward,
though all were very much afraid, as all men are in these frightful
hours.
They had been born and bred in London. They had worn black coats and
“toppers” in the City—all the officers among them—and the men had
been in warehouses and offices and shops down Thames-side and away to
Whitehall. They had played the gentle game of dominoes in luncheon
hours over a glass of milk and a Bath bun. They had grown nasturtiums
in suburban gardens, and their biggest adventure in life had been
the summer manœuvres of the dear old “Terriers.” And now—they fought
through German trenches and lay in shell-holes, and every nerve in
their brains and bodies was ravaged by the tumult of shell-fire about
them and by the wounded who lay with them. But these Londoners who
fight on their nerves were no less staunch than men like the Scots and
the North Country lads, who, as far as I can see, have no nerves at all.
3
There were some strange individual adventures in the midst of the
general experience of rushing two lines of German trenches through a
violent barrage and getting forward to open country, where they dug
themselves in. Among ten machine-guns which they captured on their way
up there was one handled by a German gunner who awaited his chance to
sweep the ranks of the London lads. But he did not get it. An officer
of the London regiment who was carrying a rifle “spotted” the man
quickly and killed him with a straight shot before he had fired more
than a few bullets. That rifle-shot saved the lives of many of our men.
In the second German trench there was a sharp fight, and one single
combat between one of our officers—who happens to be a South
African—and a great lusty German who was a much bigger man than ours.
It was a bayonet duel as two mediæval knights might have fought in the
old days with heavy swords.
Our officer was already wounded twice. He had a bullet through the
shoulder, and a damaged jaw. But five times he pierced his enemy with
the bayonet. It should have been enough, but the great German still
fought. Both bayonets were dropped and the two men closed and wrestled
with each other, trying to get a grip of the throat. The German
wrestler, bloody as he was, seemed to keep all his brute strength,
but he was laid out by a bullet in the neck from a sergeant of the
Londoners who came to the rescue of the officer. Afterwards this
easy-going gentleman—from South Africa—chatted with his colonel over
the body of his man as quietly and calmly as though he were in his
smoking-room at home, and paid no attention whatever to his wounds,
refusing to go down to the doctor, but going forward again with his men.
Some of the men went too far in their eagerness, away into the “blue.”
No word came back from them. No signal. Later one man trudged back,
bringing two prisoners. “Where are the others?” he was asked. He
pointed far away, and said “Over there.” He is the only man who has
come back from that place of mystery.
4
Some of the London battalions did not suffer so heavily as might have
been expected, from the hard task they had, and the wonderful way in
which they fought. What loss they suffered was the price of extreme
valour. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava has been put into
song as one of the great heroic tales of history. Will any one make a
song of the London men who fought forward through a hurricane of fire?
The stretcher-bearers of the London Territorials did their work nobly,
and among them as a volunteer was one German who deserves a word of
praise, by men with a sporting spirit, fair to their enemy. He had
first been taken prisoner by an officer of ours, who was then hit by a
piece of shell or a rifle bullet. He fell, and could not rise again,
but his prisoner, who was an officer, too, picked him up and carried
him across the battlefield to our dressing station, and then stood by
for an escort to take him away.
The General commanding these London men spoke of them to-day with
a thrill in his voice. He had been with them, and had reconnoitred
their ground, and had seen their way of fighting. When I spoke to him
he had been without sleep and rest for two days and nights. “No men
could have done better,” he said. “No general could wish to command
braver men or better men. Their discipline is splendid. There is never
any crime among them. They behave always as gentlemen should behave,
and they fight with fine hearts. These London boys of mine had one of
the hardest tasks on Friday, and they carried it through with a most
gallant spirit.”
5
Another day I must write of the Highlanders whom I met to-day—those
Gay Gordons of whom I have written several times when I have found
them in other parts of the battle-line. Some of them waved hands to
me to-day and shouted cheerfully across a track of mud, and, seeing
the faces under their bonnets, I was enormously glad to find these old
friends of mine alive and well after many days of fighting. Squarer,
tougher, harder men than the Londoners, they fought in their own style,
gloriously, with all their comrades in kilts or trews who swept across
the German lines, and then held their captured ground under infernal
fire. One story they told me of the things they have seen is a grim
little picture which is etched in my brain.
Two of them went down into a German dug-out and started back when they
saw a man seated there at table. The table was laid for a meal, but the
food was uneaten. It was a dead German officer who sat before them, as
though asleep. The top of the dug-out had been knocked in by one of our
shells, and something had fallen and killed him as he was beginning
breakfast. The Gordons went into other dug-outs and found other dead
bodies, but it was this sitting man that they remember most.
XXXIII
THE SPLENDID NEW ZEALANDERS
1
SEPTEMBER 23
It was inevitable that after the great battle of September 15 our line
should have ragged edges and run up or down into small salients. This
was due to the greater progress made by different bodies of troops; and
to the way in which isolated groups of Germans held on very stubbornly
to these stretches of ground not in the general line of our advance.
During the past forty-eight hours a good deal has been done to clear
out these pockets, or wedges, and to straighten out the line from
Courcelette eastwards.
This morning our troops did a useful bit of work in such a place
between Courcelette and Martinpuich, knocking out a strong post and
taking some prisoners, with whom were two officers. Elsewhere strong
posts thrust out by us beyond the main trenches have been linked up,
so that the line now runs in a reasonably even way from the north of
Courcelette across the Bapaume Road, above Martinpuich, and so on to
the north of Flers.
This linking-up and clearing-up work now done to a great extent, puts
us in a stronger position of defence, to hold what we have gained,
against any attempts made by the enemy in counter-attack.
He has made many attempts since September 15 to drive our troops out of
the high ground, which is vital to his means of observation, and the
failure of them has cost him a great price in life.
2
Among the most desperate thrusts, pressed with stubborn bravery by
bodies of German soldiers, collected hastily and flung with but
little plan or preliminary organisation against our lines, were those
directed upon the New Zealanders, who repelled them after hard and long
conflicts fought out for the most part with naked steel.
In all the fighting since July i there has not been anything more
fierce or more bloody than these hand-to-hand struggles on the left of
Flers, and the New Zealanders have gained a greater name for themselves
(it was already a great name since Gallipoli) as soldiers who hate
to give up what they have gained, who will hold on to ground with a
grim obstinacy against heavy odds, and if they are ordered to retreat
because of the military situation round them come back again with a
stern resolve to “get the goods.”
That is not only my reading of the men, and I do not pretend to know
them well, but is the summing-up of an officer, not from their own
country, who has seen them fight during these last few days, and who
spoke of them with a thrill of admiration in his voice, after watching
the stoicism with which they endured great shell-fire, the spirit with
which they attacked after great fatigues and hardships, and the rally
of men, discouraged for a while by their loss of officers, which swept
the Germans back into panic-stricken flight.
This struggle covers a week’s fighting since September 15, when at dawn
the New Zealanders advanced in waves to a series of positions which
would bring them up to the left of Flers if they had the luck to get as
far. On their right were the troops whose capture of Flers village I
have already described, and on their left other troops attacking High
Wood and the ground north of it.
The men of New Zealand went forward with hardly a check, to the German
switch trench 500 yards from the starting line. They were men of
Auckland, Canterbury, Otago, and Wellington, and they put their trust
in the bayonet and desired to get close to their enemy.
They had their desire. In the switch trench the Germans defended
themselves to the last gasp, and, as far as I can make out, only four
of them were left alive after that frightful encounter. It was a fight
to the death on both sides, and the New Zealanders did not cross that
ditch at full strength.
On the way up they lost under shrapnel and machine-gun fire. On the
other side of the ditch their lines were thinner. But they were on
the other side, and the ditch behind them was a grave upon which they
turned their backs to get across the next stretch of ground to trenches
800 yards ahead.
The New Zealand Rifles covered this ground quickly, moving in open
order, but keeping in touch with each other by fine discipline and an
esprit de corps which is better than discipline.
3
That next system of trench work, two lines heavily wired and deeply
dug, part of the famous Flers line, was a great obstacle. Our gun-fire,
grand as it had been, had not laid all the wire low nor destroyed the
trenches. A swish of machine-gun bullets showed that the enemy was
alive and savage.
An infantry assault on such a line had to be paid for, sometimes by a
great number of dead and wounded. But it was the day of the Tanks. Two
of them had tried to keep pace with the New Zealand attack, but had
lagged behind like short-winded creatures suffering from stitch—and no
wonder, looking at the shell-craters and pits across which they had to
bring their long bodies, crawling in and crawling out, with their tails
above their heads and their heads above their tails.
But they arrived in time to attack the Flers line, and in a very
deliberate and stolid way they sidled along the barbed wire, smashing
it into the earth, before poking their big snouts over the German
parapets, hauling themselves up, and firing from both flanks upon
German machine-gun teams.
With this noteworthy help, which saved time and trouble and life, the
New Zealanders took the double trenches of the Flers line, and again
pushed on, another 700 yards, across a sunken road with steep banks and
very deep dug-outs, where the enemy did not stay to meet them until
they had established themselves on a line running westwards from the
top of Flers village, now in the hands of our English lads.
One of the Tanks followed them, getting down the steep bank with its
nose to earth, and lumbering up the other side like a huge elephant
(without a trunk).
A German battery 1,500 yards away searched for it with shell-fire, but
did not get within hitting distance of its armoured skin. Eventually it
was the German battery that was knocked out by our guns.
However, this was a side-show, and the Tanks must not take all the
glory away from the infantry, who had not armoured skins, alas, and who
were facing murderous fire elsewhere.
4
They had been ordered to swing left to make a flanking front up the
edge of a valley running north-west of Flers, right away beyond the
village, and this they did most gallantly, although at the time they
stuck out like a thin wedge into German territory, because at that
time they had no support on their left (our English fellows, as I have
described in an earlier despatch, had been having a fearful time in and
beyond High Wood), and on the right the other English troops were busy
with the capture of Flers.
It was clearly and undeniably a hazardous position for the New
Zealanders all alone out there, and they were ordered to fall back to
the line going straight westwards from the top of Flers village, which
they helped to hold, on the night of the 15th to 16th.
From that day onwards the enemy made repeated counter-attacks.
Sometimes they were in feeble strength, shattered quickly, but they
grew in intensity and numbers as the days passed, while the New
Zealanders were still in a rather precarious position, “a rocky
position,” says one of their officers, owing to the weakness of their
left flank.
Right down on that flank Germans were still holding out in
shell-craters with a way open behind them, so that supports might come
down to drive a wedge between the New Zealanders and the English troops
north of High Wood.
This was attempted by something like a brigade of Germans, who advanced
in six or seven waves upon the English soldiers—who were outnumbered by
more than two to one—in a steady, determined way. They were met out in
the open with the bayonet. It was the old way of fighting men meeting
men, staring into each other’s eyes, trusting to their own strength and
skill with sharp steel, and not to engines of war with high explosives
or quick-firing guns.
If men fight it is the best way though not pleasant and agreeable
for ladies to watch from silken canopies, as in the old days of the
tourney, when gentlemen hacked at each other with axes, just for fun. A
New Zealand officer watched it from a little distance, and his breath
came quick when he described it to me. The German ranks were broken and
a remnant fled.
But it was not so long or so bloody a fight as what the New Zealanders
themselves had to encounter three days ago.
The enemy struck a blow against the New Zealand troops, at the joining
point between those men and their comrades on the left, who had come up
to the west of Flers.
The New Zealanders—who were Canterbury men—were beaten back twice,
and twice regained the ground. All through the night of September 20
until the dawn of the 21st, there was violent bomb-fighting and bayonet
fighting.
There was no straight line of men British on one side, German on the
other. It was a confused mass, isolated bodies of men struggling
around shell-craters and bits of trench, single figures fighting twos
and threes, groups joining to form lines which surged backwards and
forwards and a night horrible with the crash of bombs and the cries of
the dying.
5
One New Zealand officer, a very splendid heroic man, was the life and
soul of this defence and counter-attack.
There were moments when some of his men were disheartened because their
line had fallen back, and the number of their wounded lay too thick
about them. He put new fire into them by the flame of his own spirit.
He led them forward again, rallying the gloomy ones, so careless of his
own life, so eager for the honour of New Zealand that they followed him
under a kind of spell, because of the magic in him.
They thrust back the enemy, put him to flight down the valley, remained
masters of the ground when the dawn brightened into the full light of
day, revealing the carnage that had been hidden in the night.
It was not the end of the fighting here. In the afternoon the enemy
came again, in strong numbers—sent forward by their high command, men
at the end of far telephones, desperate to retake the ground, and
ordering new assaults which were sentences of death to German soldiers
not at the end of far telephones but very near to British bayonets.
They came on thickly, these doomed men, shoulder to shoulder, and it
was again the captain of the Canterburys who led his men against them
in a great bayonet charge, right across the open.
It was bayonet against bayonet, for the Germans stood to receive the
charge, though with blanched faces. For the New Zealanders came upon
them at the trot and then sprang forward with bayonets as quick as
knitting needles....
The Germans cried out in terror. Down the hillside, beyond, those who
could escape ran, and fell as they ran. It was a rout and the end of
the counter-attack.
The New Zealanders were now sure of themselves. They knew that with the
bayonet they can meet the Germans as their masters. So scornful are
they of their bayonet fighting that they have it in their hearts to
pity them and say “Poor devils!”
To my mind, and to others, the finest heroism was shown by the New
Zealand stretcher-bearers. They did not charge with the bayonet. All
their duty was to go out across open country in cool blood to pick up
men lying there in blood that was not cool unless they had lain there
too long.
They had to go through salvoes of five-point-nines, which tore up the
ground about them, and buried them, and mangled many of them. And they
went quite steadily and quietly, not once or twice, but hour after
hour, until more than sixty of them had fallen, and hour after hour
they carried out their work of rescue quite careless of themselves.
“I am not a sentimentalist,” said a New Zealand officer to-day, as he
looked at me with grave eyes, remembering those scenes, “but the work
of those men seemed to me very noble and good.”
In New Zealand and in the quiet farmsteads there, those words will be
read gladly, I think.
And if any words of mine could give a little extra share of honour to
these Colonial boys, who have come so far overseas to fight by the side
of English soldiers, I should be glad and proud too, having a heart
very full of admiration for the valour of these men, who have fought in
these great battles as well as any troops who shared the day with them.
XXXIV
THE CANADIANS AT COURCELETTE
1
SEPTEMBER 21
In a scrappy way I have told something about the way the Canadians
fought for Courcelette. It is worth more than that as an historic
narrative. From first to last, beginning with the dawn of Friday,
September 15, and going on now, beyond the village, against German
counter-attacks, these men from the West have shown themselves very
gallant, and hard and quick in fighting qualities.
There was a body of French Canadians among them, dark-eyed fellows, of
the same type as the French people among whom they found themselves by
the odd chance of fate, like some of the French Chasseurs Alpins who
have been fighting on our right, lithe-bodied men, with muscles like
whipcord, full of individual character, and an old tradition of warfare
behind them, war against nature and wild animals, away from town life.
The enemy was not sure what men he had against him down below
Courcelette. I think it was to get this knowledge that he sent out
a number of his bombers just before the Canadian attack was to be
launched. I have already told about the sergeant who saw them coming,
and about the boy by his side who was buried alive by a shell, and
lived to tell me the tale with a strange smile in his brown eyes,
as he leaned on a crooked stick, some old tree stump he had picked
up to support him when he was weak from loss of blood. He was one
of the French Canadian boys. The German bombers came out of the
darkness suddenly, and pounced upon a bit of trench, flinging their
hand-grenades, and trying to grab some of our men as prisoners. It
was just like one of the old raids, better done by the Canadians
themselves. They had a short innings, and not a man went back. A
Canadian machine-gunner rushed up to his “Lewis,” and killed those who
came over our parapets. One officer with twelve bombers accounted for
the others.
But it was awkward happening just at the hour when the grand attack
was waiting for the word “Go.” It might have disorganised the plan at
the outset. The Canadians did not let it make any kind of difference
to them. At the exact moment all the waves of men rose, swept over
the dead bodies of the raiders, and in a great tide rolled over No
Man’s Land. Three Tanks went with them, slower than the infantry,
but climbing steadily over the trenches and the shell craters, and
prowling around for the places from which there came a spitting fire of
machine-guns. They found some of them in the Sugar Factory, and I have
told how they sat down there, crumpling the emplacements under their
heavy ribs, and pouring out a deadly fire.
2
The Canadian infantry had a difficult operation. The ground from
the high ridge of Pozières sloped down before them to the edge of
the village of Courcelette, where they had been ordered to halt
and consolidate while reserve battalions—the French Canadians on
the right—came up behind to “mop-up” the captured ground. A German
trench ran at an angle from their objective, and as they advanced the
Canadians had to take this _en passant_, as chess-players would say,
the flank capturing the trench at the same rate of progress as the
centre and right went forward.
It was done. Through machine-gun fire and an inferno of shrapnel
and high explosives the Canadians stormed their way down the slope,
shouting and cheering as they went, led by officers who urged them on,
before falling, some of them, mortally wounded. In the trenches the
German soldiers fought stubbornly, flinging their bombs and maintaining
a rapid rifle fire until the Canadians were right upon them with the
bayonet. At the sight of sharp steel they fought no more, but flung up
their hands.
The Canadians had a long way to go to the outskirts of Courcelette,
right across open country, and as they went the German crumps fell
among them, tossing up great masses—as large as village churches—of
smoke and earth filled with flying shell-splinters.