of 170 men of the Royal West Kents and Queens[23] held out all night,
completely surrounded, until relieved the next morning. Delville Wood
(Plate 55) was captured the next day. The fighting in these woods
has left nothing of them but churned-up ground and a few bare stems,
although the rank undergrowth makes some of them appear quite green
from a distance. Combles (Plate 56) was not taken until the 26th of
September, when the British and French entered the town simultaneously
(from the north and the south respectively), and captured a company
which had not been able to get clear away in time. The little town is
not so entirely wrecked as many other places, but the house which is
shown under reconstruction in the photograph is perhaps one of the
least damaged.
[23] Haig's Despatches, p. 29.
Thiepval and the redoubts on the Thiepval plateau were not finally
secured until November. The Germans had said beforehand that we "would
bite granite" in trying to take them. We did bite granite, but our
teeth proved the harder.
Along the Albert-Bapaume road the villages of Pozières and Courcelette
have disappeared altogether. Sometimes a big iron gate, or half a gate,
or a stone gatepost, shows where an entrance once existed to some
more or less pretentious mansion, but the building itself has gone
entirely, and its site is grown over with rank herbage, which hides
every indication even of where the house once stood. The whole Thiepval
plateau is now a wilderness of weedy vegetation, and the weeds seem to
have swallowed up the redoubts altogether, as well as Thiepval itself.
The defences on the Upper Ancre still barred the way to Bapaume along
the road by Le Sars and the Butte de Warlencourt (Plate 57).[24] The
Butte was the centre of the German position, as strongly protected by
trenches and wire as even the Thiepval plateau itself. Fierce attacks
in October and November, 1916, failed to secure it, and the chalky
hillock was only finally taken in February, 1917. It now carries five
crosses erected in memory of the units which fought there.
[24] This view is taken looking eastwards towards Bapaume, with the
Butte on the south side of the road.
The mud, our chief enemy, made active operations impossible for a time.
It was an even worse enemy than the Germans. General Haig says[25] that
the trenches were channels of deep mud and the roads almost impassable,
making all problems of supply most serious. General Maurice calls
it, later on, a "morass of stinking mud." We were, in fact, at that
time--and at other times as well--fighting the elements as well as the
Germans. On the 17th of March, 1917, however (after the Warlencourt
Ridge had been carried), Bapaume itself, which had been systematically
destroyed by the Germans before they evacuated it, was at last entered.
[25] Despatches, p. 47.
Bapaume in 1919 was, like Albert, being rapidly reinhabited, and the
new buildings (perhaps due to their being closer to the main road) were
more in evidence than in most other places.
The villages north of Bapaume on the Arras road (Behagnies, Ervillers,
and others) are, like those nearer the Somme, practically wiped out.
But here, also, peasants and small shopkeepers were returning "home,"
and sheltering themselves as best they could in some sort of hutments.
On the 17th of March, 1917, also, the Germans having just commenced
their great retirement, Mont St. Quentin was taken, and the next day
Péronne itself. Plate 58 shows the dry bed of the Nord Canal where
the road crosses it just at the rise on the back (north) of Mont St.
Quentin. Plate 59 shows the ruin of the Church of St. Jean at Péronne.
The little town itself, originally of about 5,000 inhabitants, was
in parts systematically burnt and destroyed by mines by the Germans
before they evacuated it in 1917, and further damaged by Franco-British
shell-fire in 1918. On the spot I was told that the great church had
been among the buildings deliberately burnt by the Germans; in any
case it is now, like the rest of the town, a mere ruin. The outrages
perpetrated by the Germans in their masterly retreat in 1917 extended
across the whole area of the retirement (see Plate 119), and have been
sufficiently described, so far as it has been possible in any decent
paper to describe them. But the burnt and shattered houses were not the
matters, bad as they were, which caused the intense feeling of loathing
in addition to anger among the French, when they were at last able to
return to their desecrated homes.
For a year after March, 1917, the Somme area ceased to be fought
over, as the German retirement in 1917 had removed them far to the
east. A year later the tables were turned, when on the 21st of March
Ludendorff's great attack, cleverly directed against our weakest spot,
began to drive us back from St. Quentin towards Amiens, and succeeded
so rapidly that on the 23rd the Germans were at Péronne and on the 25th
near Estrées, three miles east of the Somme on the Amiens road. On the
25th our Allies, on our right, had been compelled to fall back as far
as Noyon. At this critical moment there was got together surely the
most remarkable auxiliary force that a British General has ever had
under his command. General Haig says:
"As the result of a conference on the 25th of March, a mixed force,
including details, stragglers, schools personnel, tunnelling
companies, army troops companies, field survey companies, and
Canadian and American Engineers, had been got together and organised
by General Grant, the Chief Engineer to the Fifth Army."[26]
[26] Haig's Despatches, p. 205.
The line on which this "mixed force" was placed passed through Warfusée
(Plate 60). Some of the men collected were Engineer civilians with no
previous training, and no knowledge of rifle-shooting. I have been told
that they were pronounced most plucky, "but somewhat dangerous"! In
the result, however, they did yeoman service in helping to hold back
the onslaught until the distant reserves could arrive and until the
attackers had eventually exhausted themselves.
On the next day came the historic conference at Doullens, which
resulted in the appointment of General Foch in supreme control of the
united forces (p. 3). But General Haig found it necessary to withdraw
his troops still farther, and the German advance was finally checked
only at Warfusée-Ablancourt, some ruins of which appear in Plate 60.
The enemy never succeeded in reaching the crest of the high ground from
which he could so completely have commanded Amiens (p. 38), although
he was able to hold Villers Bretonneux, after a new attack on the 24th
of April, for a few hours, after which he was turned out by the Anzacs
and never got back. It was in this attack that British tanks met German
tanks and beat them.
It was not until the 8th of August, 1918, after Foch had carried on
his successful attacks on the Marne Salient for three weeks, that the
great counter-attack on the Somme was fully started, although before
that day there had been some important gains. Especially had a notable
combination of Australians, Americans, and Tanks had a great success on
the 4th of July, after a heavy barrage, in capturing Hamel, a village
on the Somme just north of Warfusée. Both the Australians and the Tank
Corps have given picturesque accounts of this fighting, with a somewhat
amusing preference, in each case, for the service with which the
writer is connected. It was here that the Australians are credited with
having pronounced their new colleagues from across the Atlantic to be
"good lads, but too rough"!
Most elaborate (and successful) precautions[27] had been taken to make
sure that the attack of the 8th of August (Ludendorff's "black day")
should be a surprise. In spite of all these precautions, some anxiety
may have been felt by those who knew that a sergeant, who was well
acquainted with everything that was on foot, had been taken prisoner
by the Germans a few days before. Oddly enough, the minutes of the
cross-examination of this N.C.O. were afterwards captured, and it was
found that, like a plucky Englishman, he had given nothing whatever
away.[28]
[27] See Haig's Despatches, p. 259.
[28] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, vol. vi., p. 30.
Villers Bretonneux had been throughout in our possession, but only
its ruins were standing, the one "hotel" which I found there in 1919
being a tarpaulin-covered shed (Plate 61) calling itself the "Hôtel des
Trois Moineaux," and bearing a cryptic message from "Toto" which I am
unable to explain. The first day's advance swept far beyond Warfusée,
just south of which the village of Marcelcave was captured by a tank
whose Lieutenant demanded--and obtained--a receipt from the Australians
before he would hand over his spoils to them. Abreast of Foucaucourt
(Plate 52) and between it and the Somme lies Chuignes, where the
Australian advance captured a 380-mm. gun on an elaborate emplacement,
which had been put in position, but I believe too late to be used,
for the purpose of a long-range bombardment of Amiens. The gun was
dismantled before we reached it, and lies on the ground shorn of some
10 feet of its muzzle end, which had been cut off by its captors to
send home as a "souvenir."
The Chipilly spur (Plate 62), north of Warfusée on the north side of
the river, caused some heavy fighting, but was taken by the Londoners
on the second day of the advance, with the help of two companies of
Americans who are said to have lost touch with their own division and
to have been quite ready to lend a hand in any fighting that was going
on. The photograph gives some idea of the river itself at a place where
it is navigable over a great breadth. Cappy (Plate 63) is a little
farther upstream, where the river has divided itself into various
channels, the particular one seen being the navigable canal, the rest
of the river spreading over a quarter of a mile of marsh land to the
north bank.
The land beside the Amiens-Péronne road becomes more and more ruined
as one goes eastwards. Plate 51 shows something of what the actual
road looks like, but no picture can indicate the state of the land
itself, the country that was once fertile fields and farms. On my last
visit (early in 1920) it was pleasant, but pathetic, to see that many
peasants had somehow been able to find out which strip had been theirs
before the war, and had built themselves hutments--they could hardly
be called houses--in which they could at any rate live beside the land
which they loved and which they are trying once more to cultivate.
Towards Villers Carbonnel the countryside shows itself as more and
more destroyed. Plate 64 (an officially taken photograph) indicates
the appearance of that village immediately after we passed through it
in 1918 and before the clearing-up work had commenced. A little later
the broken woodwork would be collected for firing and the bricks from
the fallen walls (if enough were left) would be trimmed and stacked
ready for use again in making such dwellings as will anyhow make it
possible for the peasants to get back again. In France they do not wait
for trade union permissions, or "skilled" labour, or the sanitary (and
other) regulations of County Councils, but go straight ahead and build.
It seems certainly the best way of getting houses.
General Haig tells us how in March, 1917, when we were trying to keep
up with the retreating Germans along this road, the part of it between
Villers Carbonnel and the Somme at Brie was almost knee-deep in mud,
so that it took the troops sixteen hours to cover the last four and a
half miles. The difficulty of this crossing can be well understood
by everyone who has seen the breadth and character of the flat marshy
ground which, over a great part of the distance from Amiens, represents
the bottom of the Somme valley. Some indication of the difficulty of
troops crossing the river can be gathered from Plate 65, which is taken
from below Cléry, close to the point at which the Australians crossed
the river on the 31st of August, 1918, and made the magnificent attack
on Mont St. Quentin, which resulted in the capture of Péronne the next
day, and earned such warm praise from the Commander-in-Chief.[29]
[29] Haig's Despatches, p. 270.
The Château of Brie (Plate 66) lies on the Somme only half a mile
south of the crossing of the main road from Amiens to St. Quentin,
and therefore some four miles south of the great bend of the river
at Péronne. On the 27th of September, 1918, it was the scene of a
wonderful dress rehearsal for the crossing of the Hindenburg Line at
the St. Quentin Canal two days later (see p. 58). Rafts, collapsible
boats and life-lines, and some of the 3,000 life-belts which had been
hurried up from the coast, were all tested, to make sure that there
should be neither hesitation nor failure in their use in the attack on
the "absolutely impregnable" section. And, as everyone knows, there
_was_ neither hesitation nor failure; the St. Quentin Canal was carried
by the Terriers on the appointed day, and with this success, and the
crossing of the "Kriemhilde" Line by the Americans in the middle of
October, the last standing places for the retreating German armies
vanished.
On the road east of the Somme from Brie to Péronne one saw a curious
phenomenon which I seldom saw elsewhere, and cannot explain. In
some way the trees in the felled avenue had been able to reassert
their life, and for a considerable distance the road was lined in an
unsightly fashion with what looked like gigantic bushes growing out of
the stumps of the once tall and beautiful trees.
I have said nothing in this section as to Amiens itself; it had serious
enough troubles, although it was never in the fighting zone, having
been evacuated by the Germans after only ten days' occupation in
September, 1914. That time, however, was sufficient for a requisition
of half a million francs to be enforced, and for a number of civilians
to be deported.
Some parts of the city, including the railway-station, were seriously
damaged by bombing and by heavy shells, and the city suffered much from
April to June in 1918. The civilian inhabitants left it early in April.
Several shells hit the cathedral, and houses within a few yards of it
are entirely wrecked, but happily very little damage was done to the
structure itself, from which the stained glass had been safely removed.
[Illustration: _PLATE LI._
THE SOMME ROAD.
_A stretch, close to Villers Carbonnel, of the main road from Amiens
towards Brie and Péronne, which lies on the high country above the
Somme. What was once the avenue of trees is even here not so entirely
destroyed as in many other places._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LII._
FOUCAUCOURT.
_The remains of a church beside the Somme road._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LIII._
MAMETZ.
_The village of Mametz has practically disappeared; the immediate
foreground covers what had once been cottages; the cottages on the
other side have equally disappeared. (The cross is a war memorial.)_]
[Illustration: _PLATE LIV._
TRONES WOOD.
_Shell-holes, chalk trenches and bare trunks are all that remain of
the wood, the trunks much more numerous than in the Ypres Salient._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LV._
DELVILLE WOOD.
_There is here less than in Trones Wood of chalky holes, everything
is thickly covered with rank weeds, but along the roadsides even the
stumps of the trees disappear after a short distance._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LVI._
COMBLES.
_Remembering the amount of fighting which went on round Combles before
the French and the British entered the village simultaneously from
opposite sides, there are possibly more buildings left than might
have been expected. They are mostly, however, even more damaged than
the one which is here being examined by its owner with a view to
rebuilding._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LVII._
THE BAPAUME ROAD.
_The road from Albert to Bapaume by Le Sars. The chalky mound on the
right is the Butte de Warlencourt, the end of the Warlencourt Ridges,
which was the scene of some notably plucky fighting in November,
1916._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LVIII._
MONT ST. QUENTIN.
_A bridge, not entirely destroyed by the Germans, over the dry bed of
the Canal du Nord, where its course circles round the rising ground
known as Mont St. Quentin, which formed so important a defence for
Péronne on the north._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LIX._
PÉRONNE.
_The Church of St. Jean at Péronne, according to people on the spot,
was deliberately destroyed by the Germans before they were compelled
finally to evacuate the town._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LX._
WARFUSÉE (LAMOTTE).
_This little village church, on the Somme road, was just at the
cross-roads leading to Hamel in one direction and Marcelcave in the
other, both villages having some special interest both for Australians
and Americans and for the Tank Corps, in the advance of August, 1918._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXI._
VILLERS BRETONNEUX.
_The village had a notable history as the vantage-point over Amiens
which was the special objective of the Germans in March and April,
1918, but which they only succeeded once in holding for twenty-four
hours. The Hotel of the Three Sparrows was the only one which I found
in 1919._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXII._
THE CHIPILLY SPUR.
_A little salient of rising ground on the north of the Somme, filling
up a bend in the river, taken by the Londoners after very hard
fighting in August, 1918, with the friendly aid of a few Americans
who are said to have lost their bearings, but were ready for a fight
wherever they found themselves._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXIII._
CAPPY.
_One of the many destroyed villages along the Somme. The water here is
only the canalised branch of the river, the rest of the stream spreads
itself out to the north on the flat valley bottom._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXIV._
VILLERS CARBONNEL.
_An official photograph of the village just after we had passed it
and before the débris was tidied up. The aspect of solidity about the
cottages is much more apparent than real. In 1919 scarcely anything
was visible which could be called a building._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXV._
CLÉRY.
_Cléry lies a little north of Péronne and below the great bend of the
Somme. The photograph gives some idea of the difficulties which we had
to encounter in getting an army across the river at Brie, and which
the Australians had to meet, close to Cléry, in the memorable crossing
on the 31st of August, 1918, after which they were able the next day
to take Mont St. Quentin and enter Péronne._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXVI._
THE CHÂTEAU OF BRIE.
_At Brie the road from Amiens crosses the Somme, continuing on to the
east for St. Quentin, and turning north to Péronne._
_It was here that the trials were made--on the Somme--in September,
1918, of the various appliances used two days later in the audacious
crossing of the deep water forming a part of the Hindenburg Line at
the St. Quentin Canal, which proved so splendidly successful._]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXVII._
ON THE AMIENS-ALBERT ROAD.
_At a little village (Lahoussoye), beyond Pont Noyelles on the road to
Albert, stands, or stood, this dilapidated barn, carrying the scrawl
written by some cheerful "Tommy"--"Pessimists shot on sight."_]
[Illustration: _PLATE LXVIII._
ALBERT ON EVACUATION.
_An official photograph of one of the main entries to the town just
after we had regained it in August, 1918. This photograph, and also
Plate LXIX, may well be compared with Plates LXXIX and LXXXVIII, as
showing the original naked devastation by contrast with the state of
places after the sappers had been at work, and the inhabitants had
begun to return._]
VIII.--ALBERT AND THE ANCRE
(PLATES 67 TO 73.)
Half a dozen miles from Amiens on the road to Albert one crosses the
valley of a little stream at Pont Noyelles--an untouched valley,
beautiful with tall trees and green meadows like a bit of Middlesex.
The road climbs the combe on the eastern bank, and a little farther on
crosses the narrow space "that just divides the desert from the sown."
Onwards on the high ground from this point all greenness and beauty
have disappeared, every tree has gone, and at one bound is reached the
"desert" which covers thousands of square miles to east and north and
south. Close to the point of change it was cheering to come across the
inscription (Plate 67), doubtless scrawled by some plucky "Tommy" in
the bad spring days of 1918, "Pessimists shot on sight." One hopes that
the cheerful artist got through safely; it was just his spirit that
gave the army that final victory which they believed in as strongly in
our worst hours as at any other time.
The French had compelled the Germans to leave Albert in December, 1914,
and it remained in the hands of the Allies until the German advance in
1918, when it was captured on the 27th of March. It was finally retaken
by us on the 22nd of August. The little industrial town, originally
containing some 7,000 inhabitants, was severely shelled during years
by the Germans, and then for four months by ourselves, and reduced
absolutely to ruins. Plate 68 is one of those officially taken, and
gives a vivid idea of the condition of one of the principal streets of
approach just after we had retaken it.
In April of 1919 (Plate 69)[30] it remained a ruin, and even a year
later it could hardly be otherwise described. (I believe that Plates
68 and 69 correspond to nearly the same places.) But motoring through
it some nine months after the Armistice, while it was still to all
appearance very much in the condition indicated by the photographs, we
were practically held up about 10 o'clock in the forenoon by a stream
of some hundreds of people, carrying bags and all sorts of receptacles,
making their way towards the railway-station. They must no doubt have
found, somewhere, shelter enough to live and sleep in in cellars or
otherwise, in spite of the destruction, and were on their way to Amiens
to lay in supplies.
[30] From a negative taken by Mr. Basil Mott.
It was on the tower of the pilgrimage Church of Notre Dame de Brebières
that there stood for so long a statue of the Madonna in a position
which appeared to defy gravity, and which provoked the prophecy that
its fall would indicate the end of the war. The prophecy was not
exactly fulfilled, but the great heap of rubbish in front of the church
(Plate 70) is all that was left of the tower after our shelling of the
town in 1918.
The road northwards from Albert to Miraumont (Plate 71) runs in the
broad marshy valley of the River Ancre. The valley was originally
thickly wooded, but was in 1918 covered with fallen tree-trunks, and
Plate 72, which was taken close to Aveluy, gives some idea of its
appearance. The ground on each side of the valley rises somewhat
steeply for some 300 feet. The high ground on the east of the valley
is that on which Thiepval and the German redoubts lay. On the west,
farther north, lie Beaucourt, Beaumont-Hamel, and Miraumont, all of
which were repeatedly the scenes of very heavy fighting. Beaucourt and
Beaumont-Hamel were taken only at the very end of the 1916 campaign, in
a short spell of possible weather.[31] Haig describes the defences here
as of special and enormous strength.
[31] Haig's Despatches, p. 50.
At Beaumont-Hamel there was literally hand-to-hand fighting of the most
severe kind. Mr. O'Neill describes the action graphically:
"On many occasions sandwiches of Scots and Germans wrestled and strove
in the constricted space.... Bodies of men were prisoners and captors
many times over before the struggle approached a decision.... In the
midst of the fighting vast stores were tapped, and the men began to
smoke as they went about their business. Some of them found time to
change their underclothing when a large supply of spare shirts was
found."[32]
[32] O'Neill, "History of the War," p. 664.
And these men were not even the "Contemptibles," but only "mercenaries"
who had been civilians till a year or so before! Truly the German
preconceived notions as to the British must have suffered rude shocks.
Plate 73 (again from an official photograph) was taken after the 1918
fighting, which covered episodes as noteworthy as those of four years
earlier. The photograph is taken from a point near the "cross-roads" at
Beaumont-Hamel, looking across the Ancre valley to the northern (lower)
end of the Thiepval Ridge, and beyond it to the higher ground on which
Bapaume stands.