THE BRITISH--FRICOURT AND LA BOISELLE
_France, July 3rd._
Yesterday three of us walked out from near the town of Albert to a
hill-side within a few hundred yards of Fricourt. And there all day,
lying amongst the poppies and cornflowers, we watched the fight of the
hour--the struggle around Fricourt Wood and the attack on the village of
La Boiselle.
To call these places villages conveys the idea of recognisable streets
and houses. I suppose they were villages once, as pretty as the other
villages of France; each with its red roofs showing out against its
dark, overshadowing woodland. They are no more villages now than a
dust-heap. Each is a tumbled heap of broken bricks, like the remains of
a Chinese den after it has been pulled down by order of the local
council. Through this heap runs a network of German trenches, here and
there breaking through some still recognisable fragment of a wall.
It was by the sight of two or three English soldiers clambering up one
of these jagged fragments and peering into whatever lay beyond it, that
we knew, as we came in sight of Fricourt, that the village had already
been taken. A string of men was winding past the end of the dust-heap
into the dark wood behind it, where they became lost to view. Somewhere
in the heart of the wood was the _knock-knock_ of an occasional rifle.
So the fight had gone on thither.
In front of us was a long gentle hill-slope, gridironed with trenches
which broke out above the green grass like the wandering burrow of a
mole. The last visible trench was in redder soil and ran along the crest
of the hill. It passed through or near to several small woods and clumps
of trees--the edges of them torn to shreds with shell-fire. They stood
up against the skyline. In one of them, clearly visible, was a roadside
crucifix.
Our men possessed the whole of that slope right into the trench at the
top. We could see occasional figures strolling about the old German
trenches--probably from posts established here or there behind the line
of battle. All day long odd men wandered up or down some part of the
hill-side--a guard with a German prisoner coming down, a messenger or
stretcher-bearers going up. Now and then one could even see heads, with
our flat steel helmets on them, showing out from the red trench against
the skyline. So the fighting could not be severe at the moment on the
crest of the hill.
Yet we were clearly not holding the whole of that skyline trench. On its
southern or right-hand shoulder the hill ran into Fricourt Wood, which
covered all that end of it. At the lower end of the wood, standing out
against it, was the dusty yellow ruin which once was Fricourt. Behind
that shoulder of the hill was a valley, of which we could see the gentle
green slopes stretching away to Mametz and Montauban, both taken the day
before, in the first half-day's fighting. The green slopes must have
been covered with the relics of that attack. But the kindly grass, the
uncut growth of two years, hid them; and the valley, except for a few
thin white trench lines, might have been any other smiling summer
landscape.
When the wave of our attack swept through that country the Germans in
Fricourt village and wood still held on. Another promontory was left
jutting out into the wave of our attack in a similar village on our
left--La Boiselle, where the main road for Bapaume runs straight out
from our lines through the German front. We could see this heap of
yellow-brown ruins sticking up beyond the left shoulder of the opposite
hill much as Fricourt did on its right. There was a valley between, but
it could only be guessed. Boiselle, too, had the remains of a small wood
rising behind it. The bark hung from its ragged stumps as the rigging
droops from the broken masts of a wreck.
We were looking another way, watching our troops trying to creep up to
the extreme right-hand end of the red trench on the top of the hill. We
could see them on the centre of the crest; but here, where the trench
ran into the upper end of Fricourt Wood, there was apparently a check.
Men were lined up at this point, not in the trench, but lying down on
the surface a little on our side of it. From beyond that corner of the
wood there broke out occasionally a chatter of machine-gun fire.
Evidently the Germans still hung on there. The bursts of machine-gun
must have been against small rushes of our men across the open. I
believe that one British unit was attacking round this left-hand corner
of the wood while another was attacking around its right. The drive
through the wood was going forward at the same time. Clearly they were
having some effect; for out of the wood there suddenly appeared a number
of figures. Someone thought they were our men coming back, until it was
noticed that they were unarmed, and held their hands up. They were a
party of the enemy who had surrendered, and for the next quarter of an
hour we watched them being marched slowly down the hill-side opposite.
Our advance here seemed to be held up by some cause we could not see.
German 5.9 shell were falling just on our side of Fricourt village, and
in a line from there up the valley behind our attack. It was not a
really heavy barrage--big black shell-bursts at intervals on the ground,
helped by fairly constant white puffs of shrapnel in the air above them.
Just then our attention was attracted in quite another direction: La
Boiselle.
It had been fairly obvious for some time that La Boiselle was about to
be attacked. While the rest of the landscape before us was only treated
to an occasional shell-burst, heavy explosions had been taking place in
this clump of ruins. Huge roan-coloured bouquets of brickdust and ashes
leaped from time to time into the air and slowly dissolved into a tawny
mist which floated slowly beyond the scarred edge of the hill. It must
have been a big howitzer shell, or perhaps a very large trench mortar
bomb, which was making them. Gradually most of our artillery in the
background to the left of us seemed to be converging upon this village.
Suddenly, at a little before 4 p.m., there lashed on to the place the
shrapnel from three or four batteries of British field guns. They seemed
to be fired as fast as they could be served. Shell after shell laid whip
strokes across the dry earth as swiftly as a man could ply a lash. One
knew perfectly well that our infantry must now be advancing for the
attack, and that this hailstorm was to make the garrison, if any were
left, keep its heads down. But the shoulder of the hill prevented us
from seeing where the infantry was going to issue.
In the turmoil which covered that corner we scarcely noticed that the
nature of the shelling had suddenly changed. Our shell-bursts had gone
much farther up the hill--one realised that; and heavy black clouds were
spurting into the air below Boiselle, just behind the hill's shoulder.
The _crash, crash, crash, crash_ of four heavy shells, one following
another almost as quickly as you would read the words, focused all
one's attention on that point. The fire on it was growing. The Germans
were shooting down a valley, almost a funnel, invisible to us. But we
could see that the fire was increasing every minute; 4.2's were joining
in, and field guns; the lighter guns firing shrapnel, the heavier guns
high explosive. The black smoke of German high explosive streamed up the
valley like a thundercloud. La Boiselle was entirely hidden by it.
There could be no doubt now where our infantry was to attack. That
cauldron was the barrier of shell fire which the German artillery was
throwing in front of them.
It seemed no living thing could face it. Our fire had lengthened at
about 4 o'clock. The German barrage began almost immediately after.
Minute after minute passed without a sign of any troops of ours. Our
spirits fell. "It is one of these fearful attacks on small objectives,"
one thought, "where the enemy knows exactly where you must come out, and
is able to converge an impenetrable artillery fire on that one small
point. If you attack on a wide front, your artillery is bound to leave
some of the enemy's machine-guns unharmed. And when you have to mop up
the small points that are left, and attack on a small front, he gets
you with his artillery--you get it one way or the other." One took it
for granted that the head of this attack had been turned.
Suddenly, out of the mist, came the sound of a few rifle shots. Then
bursts of a machine-gun. It could only be the Germans firing on
advancing British infantry.
And presently they came out, running just beyond the shoulder of that
hill. We could only see their heads at first, tucked down into it as a
man bends when he hurries into a hailstorm. Presently the track on which
they were advancing--I don't know whether it was originally a road or a
trench, but it is a sort of chalky sandhill now[2]--brought them for a
moment rather to our side of the hill into partial shelter. Each section
that reached the place crouched down there for a moment. Spurts of
shrapnel lashed past them whirling the white dust. Black rolling clouds
sprang into existence on the earth beside them. Every minute one
expected to see one of them obliterate the whole party. But, at the end
of a minute or so, someone would pick himself up and run on--and the
remainder would follow.
[2] What we thought was a road or sandhill I afterwards found to be the
upturned edge of one of the two giant mine craters, south of La
Boiselle.
Not all of them. Some there were who did not stir with the rest. Other
figures came running up, heads down into it, often standing out black
against white bursts of chalk dust. I saw one gallant fellow racing up
quite alone, never stopping, running as a man runs a flat race. But
there were an increasing number who never moved. And, though we watched
them for an hour, they were still there motionless at the end of it.
For thirty minutes batches continued to come up. We could see them
building up a line a little farther up the hill, where another bank gave
cover. Then movement stopped and our heavy shell-bursts in La Boiselle
began again. The whole affair was being repeated a step farther forward.
The last we saw was the men leaping over the bank and down into the
space between them and the village.
This morning we went to the same view point. The firing had gone well
beyond Fricourt Wood. They were German shells which were now falling on
the smoking site of La Boiselle.
On the white bank there still lay twelve dark figures.