POZIÈRES
_France, July 26th._
I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come
out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of
British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that
they were proud to fight by the side of them.
Conditions alter in a battle like this from day to day. But at the time
when the British attack upon the second German line in Longueval and
Bazentin ended, the farther village of Pozières was left as the hub of
the battle for the time being. This point is the summit of the hill on
which the German second line ran. And, probably for that reason, the new
line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their
third line--so as to have a line still barring our way when we had
broken through their second line--branched off near Pozières to meet the
third line near Flers. The map of the situation at this stage of the
battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary
that Pozières should next be captured.
There were several days' interval between the failure of the first
attack on Pozières and the night on which the Australians were put at
it. The Germans probably had little chance of improving their position
in the meanwhile, for the village was kept under a slow bombardment with
heavy shells and shrapnel which made movement there dangerous. Our
troops could see occasional parties of Germans hurrying through the
tattered wood and powdered, tumbled foundations. The garrison lost men
steadily, and on about the night of Thursday or Friday, July 20th or
21st, the Second Guard Reserve Division, which had been mainly
responsible for holding this part of the line, was relieved; and a fresh
division, from the lines in front of Ypres, was put in. The new troops
brought in several days' rations with them, and never lacked food or
water. It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men
noticed wandering through the village in daytime.
During the afternoon of Saturday our bombardment of Pozières became
heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this shell-swept
country by the trees around them. It is not that they originally stood
in a woodland; but when the village is a mere heap of foundations
powdered white the only relic of it left standing erect, if you except a
battered wall or two, is the shredded trunks and stumps of trees which
once made the gardens or orchards or hedges behind the houses. Our
troops had three obstacles before them--first a shallow, hastily dug
trench in the open in front of the trees around the village; then
certain trenches running generally through the trees and hedges and
behind a trench railway; thirdly, such lines as existed in the village
itself. The village is strung out along a stretch of the Albert-Bapaume
road up which the battle has advanced from the first. Just beyond the
village, near what remains of the Pozières Mill on the very top of the
hill, is the German second line still (at time of writing) in possession
of the Germans. Another line crossing the road in front of the village
was then in their hands.
On Saturday afternoon our heavy shells were tearing at regular intervals
into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up
branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A
German letter was found next day dated "In Hell's Trenches." It added:
"It is not really a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with
shells--not the slightest cover and no protection. We have lost 50 men
in two days, and life is unendurable." White puffs of shrapnel from
field guns were lathering the place persistently, so that when the
German trenches were broken down it was difficult to repair them or move
in them.
Our men in their trenches were cleaning rifles, packing away spare kit,
yarning there much as they yarned of old over the stockyard fence or the
gate of the horse paddock.
That night, shortly after dark, there broke out the most fearful
bombardment I have ever seen. As one walked towards the battlefield, the
weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out almost all the
time against one continuous band of flickering light along the eastern
skyline. Most of it was far away to the east of our part of the
battlefield--in some French or British sector on the far right. There
must have been fierce fire upon Pozières, too, for the Germans were
replying to it, hailing the roads with shrapnel and trying to fill the
hollows with gas shell. They must have suspected an attack upon this
part of their line as well, and were trying to hamper the reserves from
moving into position.
About midnight our field artillery lashed down its shrapnel upon the
German front line in the open before the village. A few minutes later
this fire lifted and the Australian attack was launched.
The Germans had opened in one part with a machine-gun before that final
burst of shrapnel, and they opened again immediately after. But there
would have been no possibility of stopping that charge with a fire
twenty times as heavy. The difficulty was not to get the men forward,
but to hold them. With a complicated night attack to be carried through
it was necessary to keep the men well in hand.
The first trench was a wretchedly shallow affair in places. Most of the
Germans in it were dead--some of them had been lying there for days. The
artillery in the meantime had lifted on to the German trenches farther
back. Later they lifted to a farther position yet. The Australian
infantry dashed at once from the first position captured, across the
intervening space over the tramway and into the trees.
It was here that the first real difficulty arose along parts of the
line. Some sections found in front of them the trench which they were
looking for--an excellent deep trench which had survived the
bombardment. Other sections found no recognisable trench at all, but a
maze of shell craters and tumbled rubbish, or a simple ditch reduced to
white powder. Parties went on through the trees into the village,
searching for the position, and pushed so close to the fringe of their
own shell fire that some were wounded by it. However, where they found
no trench they started to dig one as best they could. Shortly after the
bombardment shifted a little farther, and a third attack came through
and swept, in most parts, right up to the position which the troops had
been ordered to take up.
As daylight gradually spread over that bleached surface Australians
could occasionally be seen walking about in the trees and through the
part of the village they had been ordered to take. The position was
being rapidly "consolidated." German snipers in the north-east of the
village and across the main road could see them, too. A patrol was sent
across the main road to find a sniper. It bombed some dug-outs which it
found there, and from one of them appeared a white flag, which was waved
vigorously. Sixteen prisoners came out, including a regimental doctor.
There were several other dug-outs in this part and various scraps of
old trenches, probably the site of an old battery. The Germans, now that
they had been driven from their main lines, were naturally fighting from
the various scraps of isolated fortification which exist behind all
positions. During the afternoon two patrols were sent to clear out other
snipers from these half-hidden lurking places. But the garrison was
sufficiently organised to summon up some sort of reserve, and the
patrols had to come back after a short, sharp fight more or less in the
open.
After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village.
By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole
village was secure against sudden attack.
An official report would read: "The same progress continued on Tuesday
night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozières was consolidated."
That is to say--in the heart of the village itself there was little more
actual hand-to-hand fighting. All that happened there was that, from the
time when the first day broke and found the Pozières position
practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after
hour--day and night--with increasing intensity as the days went on, he
rained heavy shell into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield
for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing
in on a line south of the road--eight heavy shells at a time, minute
after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would
place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and
landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through
a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear
shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with
black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy
pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black
clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men
worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon
as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it
battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and
again.
What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would
go through a summer shower--too proud to bend their heads, many of them,
because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have
seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk
about as if I liked it--what else can you do when your own men teach
you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.
On Tuesday morning the shelling of the day before rose to a crescendo,
and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few
of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly
wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozières
windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage
of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill.
The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling
over, as quickly as they might, from one shell crater to another, grey
backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our
infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat
back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and
ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozières was pounded
more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to
onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an
ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and
black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm. Then
Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our
artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the
attack.
During all this time, in spite of the shelling, the troops were slowly
working forwards through Pozières; not backwards. Every day saw fresh
ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had
no more than two or three hours' sleep since Saturday--some of them none
at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.
The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the
hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches
before-mentioned--the second-line German trench behind Pozières and the
similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day--it
would almost deserve a book to itself.