dead, shot by the man who had beckoned to him, who with his comrade
disappeared immediately into some hole which could not be found.
A day or two later a working party digging in the neighbourhood broke
through to a deep tunnel. Instead of searching it there and then they
filled it up again. Our men found themselves being sniped from other
holes in the ground. It came into the heads of our officers that
beneath the ground, even behind our lines, were nests of Germans who
might turn upon them at any moment, or blow them up by a charge of
guncotton.
Orders were given to draw back a little from Mouquet Farm, and the guns
were turned on it again, flinging high explosives and shrapnel over
the place, as in the old days. Then some of our men were sent forward
to clear the trenches, if they could find them. They came back without
success. So the place remained one of our “mystery corners” until
yesterday, when the attack was to begin on Thiépval, from the trenches
south, and swinging left from Mouquet. It was dangerous, but it was
decided to carry out the attack without worrying about the underground
inhabitants.
The attack on Thiépval began, and instantly our men on the right had
advanced beyond the farm to the Zollern trench parties of grey-coats
came out of the tunnels of Mouquet and began firing machine-guns into
the backs of the British soldiers.
By good luck there was a young British officer not far away who kept
his head on his shoulders, and had a quick way of dealing with a
situation of this kind. He was in charge of a working party, but he saw
his chance of a “scrap.” “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Never mind your
shovels.” His men threw down their tools and followed him.
I don’t know how many there were of them, but only thirteen came back.
They did not come back ingloriously. They brought with them one German
officer and fifty-five men as prisoners, and there were no living men
left at six o’clock last night in the tunnels of Mouquet.
It was only a small episode in the rear of the assault on Thiépval, but
extraordinary, and not without importance, on the right wing of our
advance, for men do not like to go forward with machine-gun fire from
behind. It shows the way in which the ground all about here has been
used for subterranean fighting.
3
So it was in Thiépval. Above ground there was nothing to see to-day,
and for a long time, but the black and broken tree-trunks with their
lopped branches high above Thiépval Wood, which is just as utterly
destroyed—those bare poles, and to the left a mass of reddish brickwork
which was once Thiépval chateau, and, standing solitary, a queer-shaped
monster, looking like a sleeping megatherium, which I recognised as an
old Tank on the war-path.
No men could have remained alive above ground yesterday when our guns
hurled upon it a stream of heavy shells which burst all over the site
of the village with violent upheavals of earth and vast clouds of curly
black smoke filled with death.
The German garrison kept below, in a long series of vaults and tunnels
which they had strengthened and linked up, and dug deeper, in a way
that would have surprised the old French farmers who used to keep
their wine and stores down there centuries ago. They had made many
exits, so that they could pop up with rifles and machine-guns at many
spots between the four corners of the village, and they were ready for
another British attack.
I know these things because I have been talking with the German
survivors of the garrison. They were nearly all men of the 180th
Regiment, and they have held Thiépval for two years.
“In the old days,” said one of them this morning—he talked very frankly
to me in excellent French—“the place was quiet and happy. We had no
great comfort below ground, no fancy furniture or fine decorations (our
beds were just wooden planks raised above the ground); but we worked
hard to fortify the vaults. We pierced many new tunnels. We made this
underground world perfectly safe, and we were proud of it.”
It belonged so much to the 180th Regiment that instead of being
relieved in the ordinary way like other troops, and sent off to
different parts of the front, they were given the honour of defending
Thiépval since the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The regiment
arranged its own reliefs company by company, Bapaume being their rest
camp. The men I met to-day had been actually in Thiépval only seven
days, without relief, and had guessed that it would be their turn to
defend the place against a great English assault. They had pledged
themselves to defend it to the death.
Before telling the narrative of our attack and the adventures of
our own men I think it is interesting to give this glimpse of the
defenders, of their life underground. When I talked with them this
morning they had just been captured. I was struck by the superior
bearing and intelligence of them all.
They were certainly the best type of Germans I have seen on this
front—Württembergers all, and handsome fellows, who had kept their
spirit—one of the last groups of men who fought against us in the early
days, and survivors of the first-line troops of the German army who
have fallen like autumn leaves upon the battlefields of Europe, in the
endless massacre of this war.
They are weary of the war, like all their troops. They laughed when
I asked “Will England win?” and would not pretend that Germany is
still victorious. They had heard of the downfall of the two Zeppelins
in England, “Kaput,” as they called it, and had all the news that is
given to German people by the newspapers which they had every day—even
yesterday!—in their underground dwelling-place at Thiépval. But they
were not dupes of false news.
“Do you believe the British Fleet is destroyed?” I asked, testing them.
“The English Fleet is too great to be destroyed,” they said. “We did
not believe all those stories. But we gave you a good fight at sea.”
They gave us a good fight on land, and underground, this garrison of
Thiépval, and with a few exceptions they fought honourably, so that our
men have no grudge against them now that they are prisoners of war.
4
Our attack began yesterday at half-past twelve after a great
bombardment that had been continuous for twenty-four hours, rising to
infernal heights of shell-fire. Our men leapt out of their trenches to
the south of the trees, just north of the “Wunderwerk,” and advanced
in waves up to the trench by the row of apple trees, the right wing
swinging round, as I have said, from Mouquet.
It was on the left that the men had the hardest time. One battalion
leading the assault had to advance directly upon the château, that
heap of red rubbish, and from cellars beneath it came waves of savage
machine-gun fire. They were also raked by an enfilade fire of
machine-guns from the left top corner of the ground where the village
once stood.
Our men were astounded.
“I didn’t believe it possible,” said one of them, “that any living
soul could be there after all that shell-fire. But blessed as soon
as it switched off if the Germans didn’t come up like rabbits out of
bunnyholes and fire most hellishly.”
For a long time it was impossible to get near the château or take a
trench dug in front of it. It was a château once belonging to a German.
French gossip said that he had tunnelled it for such a defence as that
of yesterday, which is a fantastic tale, but its cellars stood now, and
were a strong place from which one party of the garrison poured out a
stream of lead.
“Where are the old Tanks?” shouted our men, and stared back to catch a
glimpse of them.
It is splendid to see the smiles spreading over our men’s faces every
time they talk of the Tank. Whatever their sufferings have been they
cheer up and laugh in a comical way at this thought, for the Tank is
a wonderfully fine tonic to the spirits of our men and an outrageous
comedy thrusting a blunt nose into the grim business of this fighting.
A Tank had been coming along slowly in a lumbering way, crawling over
the interminable succession of shell-craters, lurching over and down
into and out of old German trenches, nosing heavily into soft earth,
and grunting up again, and sitting poised on broken parapets as though
quite winded by this exercise, and then waddling forward in the wake
of the infantry. Then it faced the ruins of the château, and stared at
them very steadily for quite a long time, as though wondering whether
it should eat them or crush them. Our men were hiding behind ridges of
shell-craters, keeping low from the swish of machine-gun bullets, and
imploring the Tank to “get on with it.”
Then it moved forward, in a monstrous way, not swerving much to the
left or right, but heaving itself on jerkily, like a dragon with
indigestion, but very fierce. Fire leapt from its nostrils. The German
machine-guns splashed its sides with bullets, which ricocheted off. Not
all those bullets kept it back. It got on top of the enemy’s trench,
trudged down the length of it, laying its sandbags flat and sweeping it
with fire.
The German machine-guns were silent, and when our men followed the
Tank, shouting and cheering, they found a few German gunners standing
with their hands up as a sign of surrender to the monster who had come
upon them.
“We couldn’t have faced the château without the help of the old Tank,”
said several men. “It didn’t care a damn for machine-guns. It did them
in properly.”
Unfortunately the great grasshopper got into trouble with some part of
its mysterious anatomy, and had to rest before crawling home to its
lair, so that the rest of the fighting in Thiépval was without this
powerful support, and our infantry faced many other machine-guns alone.
5
I suppose only Ovillers can rank with Thiépval for long and close
fighting. Our men had to tackle an underground foe, who fired at them
out of holes and crevices while they remained hidden.
They had to burrow for them, dive down into dark-entries, fight in
tunnels, get their hands about the throats of men who suddenly sprang
up to them out of the earth.
“I went down into some of those deep dug-outs,” said one boy, “but
ran back again every time I saw Germans there. Some of them wanted to
surrender, but how did I know if they wouldn’t have killed me? And
other chaps were coming along with bombs. As likely as not I should
have been done in by our own lads. It was very difficult to know how to
handle ’em, and up above we were being raked by rifles and machine-guns
something frightful.”
Many of the deep dug-outs were blown in at the entrances, so that the
men were forced to come up the other side. Our men smoked them out,
and dug holes for them to tease them out. It was like rat-hunting,
but dangerous rats, life-size, and often desperate. They surrendered
in hundreds when our men were all round them and right down in their
tunnels.
I cannot tell the number of the German garrison. Nine hundred and
ninety-eight unwounded men and forty wounded were brought down safely
as prisoners, but others were killed on the way by their own barrage,
and many fought until they died, so that some of the dug-outs are
filled with dead and many lie above in the shell-craters. In one case a
party of sixteen prisoners behaved treacherously.
They turned on the escort of two English soldiers taking them down,
wounded them, and tried to go back to fight. They had no mercy from
other English soldiers who came up at this moment. All through the
night and early this morning the last remnant of the garrison held out
in the north-west corner of Thiépval, until they were swept into the
net by a separate and gallant assault of South Country troops.
Later in the morning the enemy attempted a counter-attack after a
tremendous barrage which I watched falling along the ridge and below in
Thiépval Wood. Very-lights rose through all this smoke, and I saw our
men signalling for the help of our guns.
The help came quickly, and a new storm of white and black smoke-clouds
rent by little flashes of flame burst beyond the village on to the
German positions in and beyond the cemetery.
It was queer that this seemed to silence the enemy’s guns, for after
this Thiépval was quiet for a time, and our men came poking about in
the open as though looking for souvenirs, and dug new holes down into
the tunnels.
They seemed to be teasing out more prisoners, because I saw trails
of smoke rising from those holes in the earth, and one black volume
gushed out of a cavern mouth made through the heap of red rubbish which
was once the château.
6
I have no space or time to deal with many events on other parts of
the line, but everywhere the enemy is harassed, and his troops do not
seem able yet to rally up to strong counter-attacks. In many parts
of the line patrols find it difficult to locate the enemy, and No
Man’s Land is widening out. His guns were active to-day along all the
line, shelling Combles now and then, and Morval heavily, but even his
gun-power seems to be weakening here and there, and it is likely that
he is shifting some of his batteries.
One of the most remarkable Tank adventures was in the direction of
Gueudecourt where our troops were held up yesterday in the usual way,
that is to say by the raking fire of machine-guns. They made two
attacks, but could not get beyond that screen of bullets.
Then a Tank strolled along, rolled over the trench, with fire flashing
from its flanks, and delivered it into the hands of the infantry with
nearly 400 prisoners, who waved white flags above the parapet. That was
not all. The Tank, exhilarated by this success, went lolloping along
the way in search of new adventures. It went quite alone, and only
stopped for minor repairs when it was surrounded by a horde of German
soldiers. These men closed upon it, with great pluck, for it was firing
in a most deadly way, and tried to kill it.
They flung bombs at it, clambered on to its back, and tried to smash it
with the butt-ends of rifles, jabbed it with bayonets, fired revolvers
and rifles at it, and made a wild pandemonium about it.
Then our infantry arrived, attracted by the tumult of this scene, and
drove the enemy back. But the Tank had done deadly work, and between
200 and 300 killed and wounded Germans lay about its ungainly carcass.
For a little while it seemed that the Tank also was out of action, but
after a little attention and a good deal of grinding and grunting, it
heaved itself up and waddled away.
These things sound incredible.... They are true. And though I write
them in fantastic style because that is really the nature of the thing,
it must not be forgotten that these Tanks are terrible engines of war,
doing most grim work, and that the men inside are taking high risks
with astonishing courage.
They are of the same breed as those flying men of ours who to-day and
yesterday flew in flocks over and beyond Thiépval “ridiculously low
down,” as one of our officers observed, swooping down like hawks over
German batteries so that they did not dare to fire. All our soldiers
are fighting with a spirit beyond the normal laws of human nature. They
are fighting for a quick finish—if that may be had by courage—to this
most infamous and vile war.
XXXVII
NORTHWARD FROM THIÉPVAL
1
SEPTEMBER 28
The weather is still in our favour—and soldiers watch the weather like
seamen in frail craft, knowing that two days of heavy rain, or less
than that, may make a month’s difference in the progress of attack, and
that when mist gathers over the hills airmen cannot see to report to
the guns, and guns cannot shoot on certain targets, and enemy troops
may come creeping up to a counter-attack.
One of his battalions was spotted by our airmen to-day, and our
artillery found the range quickly and scattered them. It puts them
into the same villainous plight as our men have had to endure under
the brow of the Messines and Wyghtschaete ridges and other high ground
from which the enemy could see the slightest movement of our troops and
would snipe even a solitary wagon with shell-fire.
The tables are turned down here by the Somme and the Ancre. The German
soldiers will know now the devilish torture of living always under
hostile observation, and under great guns. They are already beginning
to find it intolerable, not “sticking” it as our men “stuck” it in the
salient, when we had hardly any guns to answer back.
A further gain of ground was made yesterday on the high ridge where
Thiépval stood when our men captured a strong line of trenches known as
the Stuff Redoubt, and again to-day when they advanced northwards from
the black trees of Thiépval to the Schwaben Redoubt, which is on the
edge of the plateau.
This attack at mid-day to-day was similar to other operations which
I have described on this part of the front before. A large number of
batteries concentrated intense, violent fire upon the position beyond
the last blighted trees on the ridge and on the upheaved lines of soil,
of white chalk and brown earth, which marked the enemy’s next defensive
system.
Our heavy shells tore up the ground, opening great chasms and raising
hell fires, until all the blue of the sky was hidden behind heavy
spreading smoke, gushing up in round, dense masses which mingled and
thickened the overhanging pall.
Then our guns lengthened their range, and our infantry trudged across
through this fog and under the wild scream of shells flung beyond
them, and fought their way down into the enemy’s ditches. Later, after
signals of distress, the German gunners barraged the line of the
Schwaben Redoubt, which seemed to prove the successful advance of our
men, and ranged their heavies on to Thiépval itself as we did until the
day before yesterday, when it changed hands.
The industry of the men who lived there first—that 180th regiment which
has held Thiépval for two years—is now of use to our own soldiers, who
can find ample and shell-proof cover in those underground rooms, one of
them, at least, large enough to hold three companies of men.
I am not certain at this hour whether we hold the whole of the Schwaben
Redoubt, but if not all, the rest will be taken quickly, and the whole
of the high plateau will be ours from Thiépval to Ginchy old telegraph.
Meanwhile on the right we hold a firm straight line, down from
Gueudecourt to Combles, and it forms a solid flank.
2
SEPTEMBER 30
It is here beyond Thiépval that the slaughter of men is greatest just
now—the scene of the shambles changes quickly these days—and here that
the enemy is sacrificing many more lives in the vain hope of driving
our men back from the underground fortress and its surrounding redoubts.
Desperate German counter-attacks were made last night and this morning
on the Schwaben Redoubt, just north of Thiépval, and on the Hessian
Redoubt, further east, where the German troops hold out in a wedge made
by a sunken road from Grandcourt.
I have not often heard such a menace in the sound of gun-fire as when
I went to an artillery O.P. in this direction this morning. There
was something in the atmosphere as well as in the intensity of the
bombardment which made the shell-bursts—they were German crumps—thunder
out in a queer, hollow, reverberating way.
The enemy had concentrated a heavy weight of metal on to our lines here
(so recently his own), and I watched these high explosives vomiting up
from the Thiépval ridge, just below the Schwaben Redoubt, with a great
hope that our men holding out there might have found good cover in old
German dug-outs.
That is one advantage gained in capturing these strongholds. The
enemy’s industry through two years of trench warfare may be turned
to our own good and safety. In Thiépval itself many of the elaborate
underground chambers have now been found, though when our men first won
the place, after all their hard hand-to-hand fighting with the garrison
they could not get to cover at once.
A major belonging to one of the battalions who came up first behind the
assaulting troops—New Army men who fought like the old Regulars, though
many of them were quite new to this fortress fighting—tells me that the
entry into Thiépval was the most devilish experience he has had, though
he has been through other frightful “shows.”
A dug-out next to a hole in which he had made his temporary
headquarters was blown up with sixteen men, and when he moved on beyond
the château—a fine name for the only rubbish heap which marked the site
of a town—he found the headquarters of the leading battalion “sitting
on red bricks” in the midst of dead men.
By that time his colonel and adjutant had been badly wounded, and the
major arrived with only three runners, surprised to see the C.O. of
the other battalion standing up on the brick heap waving his stick and
rallying his men.
It is not really surprising. I met that officer to-day, and I saw the
ice-cold fervour of the man, the quiet determination of his character,
utterly scornful of any kind of danger. Men would follow such a man
into furnace fires—and did.
The enemy was six hours before he began to get his barrage fixed
(before then he was not quite sure of his own soldiers’ whereabouts)
and it was colossal when it came. Many of our men lay about wounded. It
was difficult to get them into safety.
The medical officer of one of the battalions lost his stretcher-bearers
and went up alone to do what he could, dodging great shells, binding up
the wounds of men.
For a time a Tank gave valuable cover. It had heaved itself across a
trench, enfilading it each side with deadly fire. Underneath its body
there was good shelter, and the M.O. worked here for a while with a
heap of wounded.
The fighting on the north-east of Thiépval is in a land of
shell-craters. Most of the trenches are just linked shell-craters, into
which men burrow as soon as they have rushed the ground, getting a
little cover in their depths from the barrage which searches them out.
The Hessian trench has changed hands several times within the last
forty-eight hours, after savage bomb-fights and bayonet work. Forty
Germans have been brought in from one bit of ground, but it is not
country in which prisoners are gathered in great numbers. It is
difficult to know one’s own whereabouts.
There are single combats over the rim of a shell-hole. Men knock up
against each other in the dark, and peer into each other’s faces to
know if it is friend or foe. If friend they drop into a shell-hole
together; if foe, fight till one is dead.
3
Queer things happen in shell-crater land, as when a Canadian officer
brought up the rum ration for his men, and found himself in a ditch
with a number of German wounded. They were lying in a row, in a tragic
state.
What was the officer to do? He was puzzled, but decided to give the rum
to these poor suffering devils, who were grateful for it.
In the Hessian trench or in a twist of the crater-land about it, two
German officers and twenty-two men came down across the holes. They
were met by a private soldier, who was surprised to see them. He
emptied his revolver at them, shooting one of them.
Then he picked up a German rifle and fired that and killed another.
A second time he stopped and grasped a German rifle at his feet, and
killed a third man. The others ran. Our man ran after them.
It was a chase along a dirty ditch which had once been a trench, and
the hunter was a dead shot, with abandoned rifles, all along the way.
At the end of the hunt there was only one German unwounded, and he was
brought back as a prisoner.
It sounds like a lie—preposterous in the numbers given. But the German
prisoner tells the same tale, and other men watched the hunt at
different stages—this fearful man-hunt down a bloody ditch.
4
Things happen like that in this present fighting. Worse than that in
human anguish, and better than that in courage. Out in crater-land were
found three Australians in a hole.
One of them was unwounded, the other two rotting with wounds. They
had been there for nine days. The unwounded man had stayed with his
“pals” all that time, day after day, night after night, hoping for
rescue. This part of crater-land was swept with machine-gun fire—ours
or the enemy’s, how could these men tell who had lost all sense of
direction?—but at night the unwounded Australian crawled out of his
hole and rummaged among dead bodies for rations and water-bottles,
which he took back to his friends and shared with them.