THE NEW FIGHTING
_France, August 20th._
It is a month this morning since Australians plunged into the heart of
the most modern of battles. They had been in many sorts of battle
before; but they had never been in the brunt of the whole war where the
science and ingenuity of war had reached for the moment their highest
pitch. One month ago they plunged into the very brunt and apex of it.
And they are still fighting there.
People have spoken of this war as the war of trenches. But the latest
battles have reached a stage beyond that. The war of trenches is a
comfortable out-of-date phase, to be looked upon with regret and perhaps
even some longing. The war of to-day is a war of craters and potholes--a
war of crannies and nicks and crevices torn out of the earth yesterday,
and to be shattered into new shapes to-morrow. It may not seem easy to
believe, but we have seen the Germans under heavy bombardment leaving
the shelter of their trenches for safety in the open--jumping out and
running forward into shell holes--anywhere so long as they got away from
the cover which they had built for themselves. The trench which they
left is by next day non-existent--even the airmen looking down on it
from above in the mists of the grey dawn can scarcely tell where it was.
Then some community of ants sets to work and the line begins to show
again. Again it is obliterated, until a stage comes when the German
decides that it is not worth while digging it out. He has other lines,
and he turns his energy on to them.
The result of all this is that areas of ground in the hot corners of
battles like that of the Somme and Verdun, and especially disputed hill
summits such as the Mort Homme or this Pozières Ridge, become simply a
desert of shell craters.
A few days back, going to a portion of the line which had considerably
altered since I was there, I went by a trench which was marked on the
map. It was a good trench, but it did not seem to have been greatly used
of late, which was rather surprising. "You won't find it quite so good
all the way," said a friend who was coming down.
Presently, and quite suddenly, the trench shallowed. The sides which had
been clean cut were tumbled in. The fallen earth blocked the passage,
and the journey became a switchback over tumbled rubbish and into the
trench again. Someone had before been living in the trench, for there
were tools in it and bits of soldiers' gear. Here and there a shattered
rifle stuck out of the terra-cotta soil. The trench shallowed still
further. There had been little hastily scraped dug-outs in the sides of
it. They were more than three parts filled with earth; but in them,
every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the
debris. It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the
shell that killed him. It must have been an old German trench taken by
our men some weeks before. It can scarcely have been visited since, for
its garrison lay there just as the shells had buried them. Probably it
had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.
The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were
lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a
puzzle to say what was trench and what was not. Around one stretched a
desert of shell craters--hole bordering upon hole so that there was no
space at all between them. Each hole was circular like the ring of earth
at the mouth of an ants' nest several thousand times magnified, and they
stretched away like the waves of the sea. Far to the left was a bare,
brown hill-side. In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes
rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.
You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide
ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the
crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that
shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch
of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you
were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance.
But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. In one part
of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry
stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black,
shattered tree stumps. Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding
among the craters--clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement.
The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there
might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen
yards farther--a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable
there for a short interval. That was certainly the direction.
It was the parapet sure enough. There, waterlogged in earth, were the
remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench. A few yards on
was another similar barrier. They must have been the British and German
barricade built across that sap at the end of some fierce bomb fight,
already long-forgotten by the lapse of several weeks. What Victoria
Crosses, what Iron Crosses were won there, by deeds whose memory
deserved to last as long as the race endures, God only knows--one trusts
that the great scheme of things provides some record of such a
sacrifice.
Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way.
Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially--about
ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close--a black burst on the
brown hill--two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side--a
huge brick-red cloud over the skyline--an angry little high-explosive
whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it
goes on all day long in the area where our troops are.
[Illustration: THE WINDMILL OF POZIÈRES AND THE SHELL-SHATTERED GROUND
AROUND IT]
[Illustration: THE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCH]
One picked the likeliest line, and was ploughing along it, when a
bullet hissed not far away. It did not seem probable that there were
Germans in the landscape. One looked for another cause. Away to one
side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four
Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It
must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed.
So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole
trench, the enemy must still have been holding on. It was a case for
keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there
was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.
Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found
Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard.
In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world,
to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern
battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes
impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch
in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice,
here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position
with its wickerwork shell-covers around it--the whole looking like a
broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. An officer crawled out to
some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the
wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure
standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.
Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this
sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or
bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a
tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes. "Yes, we were put out there
to dig an outpost trench," he said. "The sergeant gave us a wrong
direction, I think. We took two days' rations and went out hundreds of
yards. No one came near us. There was firing on all sides, and we did
not know where we were. Our food was finished--we saw men working--we
did not know who they were--but they were English, and we were
captured."