it, though not so long-drawn. But it is the enemy who suffers most out
there.
Many times men left to hold a line against us do not get their reliefs,
for the reliefs cannot get up through our curtain-fire or will not come.
So the others, starving and wounded, crawl back, leaving a trail
of dead on the way, and for a time, here and there, the enemy has
disappeared before us, so that when our patrols push out they can find
no living man.
Then, after a while, the reliefs come up, dodging our shell-fire,
leaving another trail of dead and wounded, and then dropping into
shell-holes inhabited by corpses.
It is the way of the war, about which the orators have much to say, not
knowing quite the meaning of it. Herr Bethmann-Hollweg has not seen his
men in crater-land.
5
OCTOBER 4
A little romance clings to old buildings, even the remnant of a wall
or two, so that a place like Eaucourt l’Abbaye—the ruin of a French
monastery—seems of greater importance than a heap of earth and a
network of ditches like the Schwaben or Hessian redoubts. It is of
no more importance (I suppose less, except as another stepping-stone
on the way to Bapaume), but it is the scene of fighting which has a
special interest because of those old bricks built up centuries ago by
French monks to enclose a place of prayer and peaceful work.
On Monday last, when the fighting began, two monsters came crawling
up to the ditches which had been dug by the fighting men outside the
monastery walls. They breathed out smoke and fire. Their sides opened
with stabs of flame, and they killed the men in the ditches by rolling
on them and crushing them, and hurling invisible bolts at them.
The ghosts of the monks, if any were there, would have seen that modern
warfare has brought back the mediæval dragon-myth, and made it real,
and more terrible than superstition. They were the Tanks who came.
One could write all this fantastically and make a queer tale of it. The
truth is fantastic, but one must write it soberly, because they were
British boys who have given their lives or a little of their blood to
get these bits of wall called Eaucourt l’Abbaye, with its vaults and
cellars. To them it was not like an old fairy-tale, but was just one of
those grim bits of fighting, damnably dangerous and ugly and cheerless,
which belong to the Battle of the Somme.
The first part I have already told, two days ago, how our men, in their
attack on the double line of trenches outside the monastery, were
checked by barbed wire and machine-guns, and two Tanks came to the
rescue. One of them, after doing useful work, came to a stop, and the
skipper came out and, after doing most gallant service, was wounded.
Three of the crew put him into a shell-crater and would not leave
him. A day later he was wounded again by a bomb, which—amazing as it
seems—did not burst, but injured him badly in the ribs, so that he had
to endure great suffering out there in the crater.
Our infantry passed over the trenches and through the monastery ruins
and dug a new ditch on the north side for defence and cover. Heavy rain
came and drenched them and swamped the ditch. They were cold and wet
and hungry.
For a time it was impossible to get food up to them. The ground behind
was a quagmire for miles. The carriers became bogged. That little body
of men to the north of the abbey were dangerously isolated, and might
have starved but for the help of troops on their right who discovered
their needs and sent food.
That was on Monday night. To the best of their belief the enemy was in
force all round them. They could see flares going up, at Warlencourt,
and from a primeval burial ground, about forty feet high, called the
Butte de Warlencourt, just north of them, and they could hear the snap
of rifle bullets from close shell-craters and the rat-tat-tat of a
machine-gun from a millhouse 300 yards away, north-west.
From what our men learnt yesterday, there was an hour or two at least
when they had only a few Germans in the close neighbourhood of the
Abbey.
The enemy’s troops were expecting their relief. When they found that
the reliefs did not come up they cursed the war and the weather—they
were as wet and hungry as our men—and decided to go back without
further waiting. Only a few snipers and machine-gunners stayed.
Such things have happened before in the enemy’s lines as I have already
described. It was given away this time by a body of twenty men with an
officer and non-commissioned officer, who came down past the millhouse
and took cover under a bank close to the abbey buildings.
They were seen by our men, who crept out towards them with a
machine-gun, and then shouted “Hands up!” Twenty men held up their
hands. The officer and the “unteroffizier” did not surrender, but ran
hard back and made their escape, unless two of our bullets reached them.
The twenty men told their tale. They belonged to the battalion who had
been sent up to relieve the troops holding the outskirts of the Abbey.
They had found no one to receive them or to explain the lie of the
land. They had not the slightest notion of the amount of ground held
by the English here.
Other bodies of the relieving troops were just as ignorant. Some of
them blundered against trenches held by our men on the right of the
Abbey, and were dealt with by them.
Meanwhile a telephone message had been sent to our artillery, which
flung out a barrage and caught more of the relief coming down from
Warlencourt.
In spite of their horrible mess, the men who got through the barrage
were bold fellows and attacked the abbey and the trenches south of it.
They had a new supply of bombs and used them freely. Our men were sadly
at a disadvantage. Bombs were very scarce.
A dump had exploded by accident, sending their store to blazes. They
had to fight with what they carried on their bodies, and it was not
enough. For a time they had to submit to the fortune of war, and while
still holding the north side of the abbey and ground to the east and
south-east, could not keep the enemy from bombing his way into a part
of the ruins and into the southern ditch which had been captured with
the help of the Tanks.
So the situation remained last evening and night. New and heavy
rain-storms increased the ugly discomforts of our men.
They were clinging on to water-logged holes. They were wet to the skin,
covered in slimy mud, and cold and weary. The wounded among them were
in a tragic plight.
The dead seemed to have all the luck.... But the fighting spirit did
not desert them. New bombs arrived, and that heartened them. Some of
their comrades came fighting up from the south.
Early in the morning there were roars of explosion as the bombs crashed
into the south ditch and then burst among the abbey ruins. It was then
that there was hot fighting underground as well as above ground. Our
men “cleaned up” Eaucourt l’Abbaye.
It is a technical phrase which has a very grim meaning. There are no
Germans there now in the abbey vaults, except the bodies of their dead.
In those great arched cellars, where old spiders have spun their webs,
and where old monks once came blinking down with horn lanterns to fetch
the abbot’s wine, or to count their stores, English soldiers, covered
with mud, but drier now, sit rubbing up their rifles and binding up
their wounded and talking of the fight that is over.
XXXVIII
THE WAY TO BAPAUME
1
OCTOBER 7
Our troops have taken advantage of fine weather after heavy rains to
make a new attack this afternoon upon a German front of 12,000 yards,
and have captured a number of important positions, including the
fortified village of Le Sars, to the north-west of Eaucourt l’Abbaye.
For several days past the pressure of our attack had to be slackened
on account of the bad state of the ground and the rain-storms, which
prevented artillery and aerial observation.
It was bad luck upon our men, as it increased the difficulties for
getting up the supplies essential to the success of a new move forward,
and made the battlefields one vast bog, in which guns and men and
wagons and mules were clogged with slime and mud.
Yesterday the sky cleared, and the men who had taken Eaucourt l’Abbaye
by such a gallant struggle pushed out and seized the millhouse to the
west of those ruins from which the enemy had been maintaining heavy
machine-gun fire.
It is to those who know what mud and rain mean to an army in the field
an astonishing and audacious thing to attack in such numbers to-day,
abruptly and without waiting for more favourable conditions of ground.
At this hour, when heavy fighting continues along the whole line from
Le Sars eastwards towards Le Transloy, it is impossible to write more
than a few details of the progress that has been made already.
The taking of Le Sars itself is the gain of another fortress defending
the way to Bapaume, the main road to that town running through the
village, which was in a natural position of defence protected by a deep
cutting on the right, by a double line of trenches to the south and by
machine-gun emplacements with a wide field of fire.
It was from that position that our troops were heavily enfiladed in
their first assaults upon the Abbey ruins, and the enemy had determined
to defend it desperately, as it holds a position of great strategic
importance to our future drive against them.
Well, they have lost it. Before the red dusk this evening our airmen,
who were hovering over the place high above the shell-fire, signalled
back that our infantry were well into the town and sending back batches
of prisoners.
It was a rapid assault. Within an hour our men had fought their way
across the tangle of trenches and shell-craters just below the village,
and had gained their chief objectives, which included the deep cutting
striking into the village from the right.
The only way of escape for the Germans was westwards through a belt
of scarred and blackened tree-stumps. I do not know yet whether they
had been dislodged from that primeval burial-place called the Butte de
Warlencourt, which rises about fifty feet to the north of Le Sars on
the right of the Bapaume Road.
The ground beyond has the village of Le Barque on the right of the road
and four sunken cross-roads called the Cut-Throat on the west of a deep
ravine, just above the village of Warlencourt-Eaucourt. It is here that
the enemy will be under our barrage and the enemy’s troops must rally
there if they can for any counter-attack.
East of Le Sars and north of Flers and Lesbœufs British battalions have
made solid progress, driving back the enemy out of trenches hurriedly
scraped up during recent weeks, but not so richly provided with
dug-outs as his earlier lines, so that when our guns concentrated their
fire on them the only escape from great slaughter was to hold them
thinly with the main reliance on machine-guns for defence.
Our right wing has advanced about a kilometre from Lesbœufs towards Le
Transloy, where it has linked up with the French battalions pressing
forward to Sailly-Saillisel, with their usual dashing spirit of attack.
It seems that the day has been in our favour all along the line of this
sweeping movement. We shall know more and may tell more in a few hours.
2
OCTOBER 8
The men who took Le Sars are still holding it, and only the short facts
of their case come back from them through the mist and across the
waterpools. Last night and this morning it has been raining again, in a
drizzling way, and all the shell-craters are ponds.
It would be possible to swim in some of them, those scooped out by the
biggest shells and linked up with others. It is not easy to get runners
back across country like that, and the Germans find it harder and are
drowned in many of those pits, because of our artillery fire pouring
“stuff” over them.
Yet, curiously, it is from the Germans that one learns most of the
frightful drama which went on yesterday afternoon in Le Sars village.
They are prisoners, 300 of them, with five officers who were sent back
to safety, while our men stayed on and fought on.
Those from the village—it’s just the name that stands—belong to
the 321st and 322nd “Ersatz,” or Reserve Regiment. They had been
reinforced, strengthening the garrison and expecting an attack, by some
uncanny means, at the exact minute.
They were stout fellows—our officers pay them this tribute—and they
had been ordered to fight to the last man rather than surrender this
fortress, which is one of the gates barring the long road to Bapaume.
They trained their machine-guns and trench mortars on our front
trenches, kept their rifles dry by wrapping them in rags, and sent out
volunteers and victims to lie in the shell-pits waist-high in water to
snipe our men as they came over.
They knew that they had a poor chance really to keep Le Sars, and their
best hope of life or death was to put up a hard fight. Our guns had
already smashed the houses and barns to rubbish heaps like those of
Martinpuich and Courcelette—even a little more, judging from what our
airmen saw—and our nine-point-twos, eight inches, and other monster
guns were making a worse hell of the place.
The men of the German 361st and 362nd regiment of reserves lay low in
their dug-outs and tucked their heads down in new trenches, finely
built in a hurry.
What happened first was that our barrage lifted and long waves of brown
soldiers sprang over their parapets facing up from ground close south
of Le Sars and on the German left from the edge of Eaucourt l’Abbaye
and the millhouse beyond.
Their first goal on our right was one of those beastly quadrilateral
redoubts called the Tangle (there is another behind our new line at
Eaucourt), and after that the road from Martinpuich, north-eastwards,
and then forward to the Butte de Warlencourt—that old high tumulus in
which the bones of some prehistoric man lay until we flung them up to
the surface of our modern civilisation.
3
The Tangle was the first check and a bad one. Machine-guns swept the
field with bullets so that men lay on their faces in the mud, not
bothering, you may guess, about appearances. They were just scarecrows
and mud-larks, wallowing in slime but finding an inch or two of luck
in it. Another muddy thing came on the way to the Tangle, more like a
primeval river hog than in the early days of its debut, because of the
mountains of slush churned up by its flanks.
The Tank turned its snout towards the Tangle and struggled over the
choppy ground—wave upon wave of craters with high rims, until it
reached a bit of the deep cutting which makes a hole in the side of Le
Sars.
This sunken road, or old quarry track, was filled with German soldiers
alive and dead. The living ones flung bombs at the Tank, fired rifle
volleys and tried to stab it from beneath as it straggled across the
ditch and stayed across it firing venomously from each flank. After
that, something having happened to its internal organs, it committed
hari-kari. But it seems to have been useful before going up in a blaze
of glory.
The German prisoners who faced our men in the outskirts of Le Sars,
and then further back in the sunken road, and in the hiding places
below ground, say there was grim and bitter fighting there, and pay
a soldier’s tribute to the men who captured them. “They fought us
fiercely, and beat us. We could not stand up against them.” Our men saw
red, even in the mist, and in the hand-to-hand fighting they had the
Germans by the throat.
XXXIX
THE GERMAN VERDICT OF THE SOMME BATTLES
1
OCTOBER 3
There has come into our hands, by the fortune of war, a long and
critical report by General Sixt von Armin, commanding the fourth German
Corps against the British front in the Battle of the Somme during July.
It is an important historical document. The German general has written
it as a great soldier writes on his own subject, without passion or
prejudice, in a cold scientific spirit, analysing the qualities of his
enemy as well as the enemy’s weaknesses, and exposing the errors and
failures of his own organisation, leadership, and troops with the same
impartial candour.
It is well done, minutely technical, full of military knowledge and
common sense. But in setting all these things down, in this analysis
of German organisation, tactics, material, and moral, during the first
month of our great offensive, General von Armin has confessed to the
utter failure of his war-machine.
In almost every paragraph, dealing with every department of his corps
in fighting organisation, there is this confession of breakdown and an
acknowledgment of British superiority.
No general of ours writing of our own troops or of our own artillery,
or air service, could claim greater supremacy than is granted to us by
this German army-corps-commander in his comparison between our power
and his own. To our soldiers this document is worth a thousand times
its weight in gold as a moral tonic, for everything they hoped had been
attained in this battle of the Somme—the ever increasing strain upon
German organisation, the effect of our artillery fire, the mastery of
our flying corps, the demoralisation of the enemy’s command, is here
admitted as the bitter fruit of experience. It is the fruit of one
month’s experience.
Since then there have been more months, and not all the lessons set
down in this document have been of help to the enemy, but the cup of
bitterness has been filled and refilled.
2
The Report begins with a tribute to our British infantry, which, says
General von Armin, “has undoubtedly learnt much since the autumn
offensive” (of 1915).
“It shows great dash in attack, a factor to which immense confidence in
its overwhelming artillery greatly contributes. The Englishman also has
his physique and training in his favour.”
“The English infantry showed great tenacity in defence. This was
especially noticeable in the case of small parties, which when once
established with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or group of
houses were very difficult to drive out.”
Again and again General von Armin reveals the new and overwhelming
power of our artillery.
“Particularly noticeable was the high percentage of medium and heavy
guns with the artillery, which, apart from this, was numerically far
superior to ours. The ammunition has apparently improved considerably.”
“All our tactically-important positions were methodically bombarded
by the English artillery, as well as all known infantry and battery
positions.”
“Extremely heavy fire was continuously directed on the villages
situated immediately behind the firing line as well as on all natural
cover afforded by the ground. Registration and fire control were
assisted by well organised aerial observation. At night the villages
also were frequently bombed by aeroplanes.”
The terrifying destructive power of our artillery is revealed not only
by these definite statements, but in advice under separate headings.
Thus, in the instructions to officers selecting infantry positions:
“Narrow trenches with steep sides again proved very disadvantageous,
and caused considerably more casualties (men being buried) than
shallower trenches with a wide top.... A cover trench roughly parallel
with the front fire trench is not sound. Such trenches are destroyed
by the enemy’s fire at the same time and exactly the same way as the
actual fire trenches.”
Heavy casualties were also experienced during July by the German
artillery, as the following note shows:
“The English custom of shelling villages heavily led to the adoption
of the principle that batteries should never be sited in the villages
themselves.... The employment of steep slopes for battery positions
must also be discarded for similar reasons.”
A melancholy picture is drawn of the German battle headquarters, also
brought under fire by our far-reaching artillery, and in such a zone of
fire that German staff officers get killed on their way up or cannot
find their whereabouts, or having found the building scuttle down into
overcrowded hiding-places, panic-stricken by our bombardments. Owing to
choosing unsuitable sites for battle headquarters there were “frequent
interruptions in personal and telephone traffic by artillery fire, and
overcrowding in the few available cellars in the villages.”
That rush for cellars already thronged must hurt the pride and dignity
of the German staff. They are recommended to have many sign-boards
put up to direct them to battle headquarters, and to avoid “lengthy
searches which caused many casualties.”
3
The enemy’s own artillery was much hampered during the July battles by
the steady intensity of our fire.
“It was found very difficult,” says General von Armin, “to form a
continuous barrage, without gaps, in front of our own lines, owing to
the occasional uncertainty as to the position of our front line, which
was continually changing during the fighting, the frequent changing of
batteries, the re-grouping of the artillery, which was often necessary,
the bad conditions for observation, the permanent interruption of the
telephone communications, and the practically continuous heavy fire
which was maintained behind our front line.”
The General describes in detail the enormous difficulties experienced
by his officers in bringing up reserves quickly for counter-attacks,
owing to the severity of our barrage, the breakdown of telephonic
communications, the killing of the runners, and the time taken for
transmission of orders from the front line.
The troops have to “advance slowly across country, with which they are
generally unacquainted, and under heavy fire.”
He confesses to the utter failure of the counter-attacks made against
us during July without method and without weight. His words are:
“If counter-attacks, which, on account of the situation, ought to be
methodically prepared, are hurried, they cost much blood, and cause the
troops to lose their trust in their leaders if they fail, which nearly
always happens in such a case.”
4
With regard to the air service General von Armin acknowledges in strong
language the supremacy of the British and the failure of their own:
“The means for providing the artillery with aerial observation has
proved to be insufficient.... The numerical superiority of the
enemy’s airmen and the fact that their machines were better were made
disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the
enemy’s artillery fire and in bomb-dropping.”
“The number of our battle-planes was also too small. The enemy’s airmen
were often able to fire successfully on our troops with machine-guns by
descending to a height of a few hundred metres.”
“The German anti-aircraft gun sections could not continue firing at
this height without exposing their own troops to serious danger from
fragments of shell...”
“A further lesson to be learnt from this surprisingly bold procedure on
the part of the English airmen is that the infantry make too little use
of their rifles as a means of driving off aircraft.”
5
The Army Corps commander responsible for the organisation and direction
of the troops who fought against us in July finds failure and shortage
in almost every department of war material at his disposal.
The supply of artillery ammunition of all kinds during the first days
of the battle did not equal the expenditure. Reserve supplies were only
available in very small quantities.
There were “repeated requests from all arms for an increased supply of
entrenching tools.”
“The original supply of maps was insufficient, not only as regards
quantity, but also as regards detail.”
The supply of horses and vehicles to the troops “has reached the
utmost limits owing, on the one hand, to the permanent reduction in
the establishment of horses, and on the other hand to the permanent
increase in fighting material and articles of equipment.”
“The existing telephone system proved totally inadequate in
consequence of the development which the fighting took.”
“The existing organisation in the light signalling service does not
meet requirements.”
The supply of light pistols for signalling “is too small.”
The establishment of motor cycles proved insufficient for the heavy
fighting. This deficiency was “painfully evident.”