PART I

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FROM BAPAUME TO

PASSCHENDAELE

FROM BAPAUME TO

PASSCHENDAELE

1917

BY

PHILIP GIBBS

AUTHOR OF

"THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME," "THE SOUL

OF THE WAR," ETC.

_WITH MAPS_

TORONTO

WILLIAM BRIGGS

1918

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE COMPLETE PRESS

WEST NORWOOD ENGLAND

CONTENTS

CHAP Page

INTRODUCTION 1

PART I

RETREAT FROM THE SOMME

I. A NEW YEAR OF WAR 23

II. AN ATTACK NEAR LE TRANSLOY 28

III. THE ABANDONMENT OF GRANDCOURT 31

IV. THE GORDONS IN THE BUTTE DE WARLENCOURT 33

V. THE BATTLE OF BOOM RAVINE 36

VI. THE ENEMY WITHDRAWS 38

VII. OUR ENTRY INTO GOMMECOURT 39

VIII. WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW 44

IX. THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME 49

X. THE RESCUE OF PERONNE 55

PART II

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY

I. THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND 60

II. THE LETTER OF THE LAW 63

III. THE ABANDONED COUNTRY 66

IV. THE CURE OF VOYENNES 70

V. THE CHATEAU OF LIANCOURT 73

VI. THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT 77

VII. THE AGONY OF WAR 79

VIII. CAVALRY IN ACTION 83

PART III

THE BATTLE OF ARRAS

I. ARRAS AND THE VIMY RIDGE 87

II. LONDONERS THROUGH THE GERMAN LINES 96

III. THE STRUGGLE ROUND MONCHY 99

IV. THE OTHER SIDE OF VIMY 108

V. THE WAY TO LENS 113

VI. THE SLAUGHTER AT LAGNICOURT 124

VII. THE TERRORS OF THE SCARPE 125

VIII. THE BACKGROUND OF BATTLE 133

IX. HOW THE SCOTS TOOK GUEMAPPE 137

X. THE OPPY LINE 139

XI. THE BATTLE OF MAY 3 142

XII. FIELDS OF GOLD 148

PART IV

THE BATTLE OF MESSINES

I. WYTSCHAETE AND MESSINES 152

II. THE SPIRIT OF VICTORY 159

III. AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE 164

IV. THE EFFECT OF THE BLOW 172

V. LOOKING BACKWARD 176

VI. THE AUSTRALIANS AT MESSINES 180

VII. A BATTLE IN A THUNDER-STORM 183

VIII. THE TRAGEDY AT LOMBARTZYDE 186

IX. THE STRUGGLE FOR HELL WOOD 190

PART V

THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS

AND THE CANADIANS AT LENS

I. BREAKING THE SALIENT 195

II. FROM PILKEM RIDGE TO HOLLEBEKE 201

III. THE BEGINNING OF THE RAINS 206

IV. PILL-BOXES AND MACHINE-GUNS 211

V. THE SONG OF THE COCKCHAFERS 221

VI. WOODS OF ILL-FAME 226

VII. THE BATTLE OF LANGEMARCK 230

VIII. CAPTURE OF HILL SEVENTY 234

IX. LONDONERS IN GLENCORSE WOOD 242

X. SOMERSETS AT LANGEMARCK 246

XI. THE IRISH IN THE SWAMPS 251

XII. THE WAY THROUGH GLENCORSE WOOD 255

XIII. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS 261

XIV. THE AGONY OF ARMENTIERES 269

XV. THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD 274

XVI. THE WAY TO PASSCHENDAELE 294

XVII. THE BATTLE OF POLYGON WOOD 298

XVIII. ABRAHAM HEIGHTS AND BEYOND 308

XIX. SCENES OF BATTLE 321

XX. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 329

XXI. THE ASSAULTS ON PASSCHENDAELE 339

XXII. ROUND POELCAPPELLE 343

XXIII. THE CANADIANS COME NORTH 356

XXIV. LONDON MEN AND ARTISTS 372

XXV. THE CAPTURE OF PASSCHENDAELE 376

FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE

INTRODUCTION

1917.... I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that

date as one of the world's black years flinging its shadow forward to

the future until gradually new generations escape from its dark spell.

To us now, only a few months away from that year, above all to those of

us who have seen something of the fighting which crowded every month of

it except the last, the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a

river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great

carnage of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western Front,

which matters most to us because of all our youth there. It was a year

of monstrous and desperate conflict. Looking back upon it, remembering

all its days of attack and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded

with troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our armies

moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners by hundreds and

thousands, the long trails of the wounded, the activity, the traffic,

the roar and welter and fury of the year, one has a curious physical

sensation of breathlessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so

many memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individuals, their

personal adventures, their deaths or escape from death, are swallowed up

in this wild drama of battle so that at times it seems impersonal and

inhuman like some cosmic struggle in which man is but an atom of the

world's convulsion. To me, and perhaps to others like me, who look on at

all this from the outside edge of it, going into its fire and fury at

times only to look again, closer, into the heart of it, staring at its

scenes not as men who belong to them but as witnesses to give evidence

at the bar of history--for if we are not that we are nothing--and to

chronicle the things that have happened on those fields, this sense of

impersonal forces is strong. We see all this in the mass. We see its

movement as a tide watched from the bank and not from the point of view

of a swimmer breasting each wave or going down in it. Regimental

officers and men know more of the ground in which they live for a while

before they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope where

machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or a line of concrete

blockhouses heaped up with timber and sand-bags on one of the ridges.

They know with a particular intimacy the smallest landmarks there--the

forked branch among some riven trees that are called a "wood," a dead

body that lies outside their wire, the muzzle of a broken gun that pokes

out of the slime, a hummock of earth that is a German strong point. They

know the stench of these places. They know the filth of them, in their

dug-outs and in their trenches, in their senses and in their souls. I

and a few others have a view less intimate, and on a wider scale. We go

to see how our men live in these places, but do not stay with them. We

go from one battle to another as doctors from one case to another,

feeling the pulse of it, watching its symptoms, diagnosing the prospects

of life or death, recording its history, as observers and not as the

patients of war, though we take a few of its risks, and its tragedy

darkens our spirit sometimes, and the sight of all this struggle of men,

the thought of all this slaughter and sacrifice of youth, becomes at

times intolerable and agonizing. This broad view of war is almost as

wearing to the spirit, though without the physical strain, as the closer

view which soldiers have. The wounded man who comes down to the

dressing-station after his fight sees only the men around him at the

time, and it is a personal adventure of pain limited to his own

suffering, and relieved by the joy of his escape. But we see the many

wounded who stream down month after month from the battlefields--for

three and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing back,

so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed and stricken

men--and there is something staggering in the actual sight of the

vastness and the unceasing drift of this wreckage of war. So we have

seen the fighting in the year 1917 in the whole sweep of its bloody

pageant; and the rapidity with which one battle followed another after

an April day in Arras, the continued fury of gun-fire and infantry

assaults, and the long heroic effort of our men to smash the enemy's

strength before the year should end, left us, as chroniclers of this

twelve months' strife, overwhelmed by the number of its historic

episodes and by its human sacrifice.

The year began with the German retreat from the Somme battlefields. It

was a withdrawal for strategical reasons--the shortening of the enemy's

line and the saving of his man-power--but also a retreat because it was

forced upon the enemy by the greatness of his losses in the Somme

fighting. He would not have left the Bapaume Ridge and all his elaborate

defences down to Peronne and Roye unless we had so smashed his divisions

by incessant gun-fire and infantry assaults that he was bound to

economize his power for adventures elsewhere. On the ground from which

he drew back, more hurriedly than he desired because we followed quickly

on his heels to Bapaume, he left some of his dead. Many of his dead.

Below Loupart Wood I saw hundreds of them, strewn about their broken

batteries, and lying in heaps of obscene flesh in the wild chaos of

earth which had been their trenches. On one plot of earth a few hundred

yards in length there were 800 dead, and over all this battlefield one

had to pick one's way to avoid treading on the bits and bodies of men.

From the mud, arms stretched out like those of men who had been drowned

in bogs. Boots and legs were uncovered in the muck-heaps, and faces with

eyeless sockets on which flies settled, clay-coloured faces with broken

jaws, or without noses or scalps, stared up at the sky or lay half

buried in the mud. I fell once and clutched a bit of earth and found

that I had grasped a German hand. It belonged to a body in field-grey

stuck into the side of a bank on the edge of all this filthy

shambles.... In the retreat the enemy laid waste the country behind him.

I have described in this book the completeness of that destruction and

its uncanny effect upon our senses as we travelled over the old No Man's

Land through hedges of barbed wire and across the enemy's trenches into

his abandoned strongholds like Gommecourt and Serre, and then into open

country where German troops had lived beyond our gun-fire in French

villages still inhabited by civilians. It was like wandering through a

plague-stricken land abandoned after some fiendish orgy, of men drunk

with the spirit of destruction. Every cottage in villages for miles

around had been gutted by explosion. Every church in those villages had

been blown up. The orchards had been cut down and some of the graves

ransacked for their lead. There had been no mercy for historic little

towns like Bapaume and Peronne, and in Bapaume the one building that

stood when we entered--the square tower of the Town Hall--was hurled up

a week later when a slow fuse burnt to its end, and only a hole in the

ground shows where it had been. The enemy left these slow-working fuses

in many places, and "booby-traps" to blow a man to bits or blind him for

life if he touched a harmless-looking stick or opened the lid of a box,

or stumbled over an old boot. One of the dirty tricks of war.

We followed the enemy quickly to Bapaume northwards towards Queant, but

with only small patrols farther east, where he retired in easy stages

with rear-guards of machine-gunners to his Hindenburg line behind St.

Quentin. The absence of large numbers of British soldiers in this

abandoned country scared one. Supposing the enemy were to come back in

force? It was difficult to know his whereabouts. We were afraid of

running our cars into his outposts. "Can you tell me where our front

line is," asked a friend of mine to a sergeant leaning against a ruined

wall and chatting to a private who stood next to him. The sergeant

removed his cigarette from his mouth and with just the glint of a smile

in his eyes said, "Well, sir, I am the front line." It was almost like

that for a week or two. I went down roads where there was no sign of a

trench or a patrol and knew that the enemy was very close. One felt

lonely. Sir Douglas Haig did not waste his men in a futile pursuit of

the enemy. He wanted them elsewhere, and decided that the Germans would

not return over the roads they had destroyed by mine-craters to the

villages they had laid waste. He was concentrating masses of men round

Arras for the battles which had been planned in the autumn of '16.

The Commander-in-Chief has explained in one of his dispatches how the

general plan of campaign for the spring offensive was modified because

of the German retreat which relieved us of another battle of the Ancre.

It was readjusted also, as he has written, in order to meet the wishes

of the French Command, so that the attack on the Messines Ridge, to be

followed by operations against the Flanders ridges towards the coast,

had to be made secondary to the actions around Arras and the Scarpe.

They were intended to hold a number of German divisions while the French

undertook their own great offensive in the Champagne under the supreme

command of General Nivelle. In the Arras battles our troops were to do

the "team work" for the French, and if the combined operations did not

produce decisive results the British Armies might then be transferred to

Flanders, according to the original plan. It was a handicap to our own

strategical ideas, and was certain to weaken our divisions without

increasing our prestige before they could be sent to Flanders for the

most important assaults on our length of front. In loyalty to our Allies

it was decided to subordinate our own plan to theirs, and this agreement

was carried out utterly. By bad luck the Italians were not ready to

strike at the same time, and the Russian revolution had already begun to

relieve the enemy of his Eastern menace, so that the Anglo-French

offensive did not have the prospect of decisive victory which might have

come if the German armies had been pressed on all fronts.

Our regimental officers and men knew nothing of all this high strategy,

nothing of the international difficulties which confronted our High

Command. They knew only that they had to attack strong and difficult

positions and that the immediate success depended upon their own

leadership and the courage and training of their men. They were sure of

that and hoped for a victory which would break the German spirit. They

devoted themselves to the technical details of their work, and only in

subconscious thought pondered over the powers that lie behind the

preparations of battle and decide the fate of fighting men. The scenes

in Arras and on the roads that lead to Arras are not to be forgotten by

men who lived through them. Below ground as well as above ground

thousands of soldiers worked night and day for weeks before the hour of

attack. Above ground they were getting many guns into position, making

roads, laying cables, building huts and camps, hurrying up vast stores

of material. Below ground they were boring tunnels and making them

habitable for many battalions, with ventilation shafts and electric

light. All the city of Arras has an underground system of vaults and

passages dug out in the time of the Spanish Netherlands when the houses

of the citizens were built of stone quarried from the ground on which

they stood. These subterranean passages were deepened and lengthened

until they went a mile or more beyond Arras to the edge of the German

front lines. The old vaults where the merchants kept their stores were

propped up and cleaned out, and in this underground world thousands of

our men lived for several days before the battle waiting for "zero" hour

on April 9, when they would come up into the light and see the

shell-fire which was now exploding above them, unloosing boulders of

chalky rock about them and shaking the bowels of the earth. The enemy

knew of our preparations and of this life in Arras, and during the week

before the battle he flung many shells into the city, smashing houses

already stricken, "strafing" the station and the barracks, the squares

and courtyards, and the roads that led in and out. During the progress

of the battle I went many times into the broken heart of Arras while the

bodies of men and horses lay about where transport columns had gone

galloping by under fire and while the shrill whine of high velocities

was followed by the crash of shells among the ruins. In the town and

below it there were always crowds of men during the weeks of fighting

outside. I went through the tunnels when long columns of soldiers in

single file moved slowly forward to another day's battle in the fields

beyond, and when another column came back, wounded and bloody after

their morning's fight.

The wounded and the unwounded passed each other in these dimly lighted

corridors. Their steel hats clinked together. Their bodies touched.

Wafts of stale air laden with a sickly stench came out of the vaults.

Faint whiffs of poison-gas filtered through the soil above and made men

vomit. For the most time the men were silent as they passed each other,

but now and then a wounded man would say, "Oh, Christ!" or "Mind my arm,

mate," and an unwounded man would pass some remark to the man ahead. In

vaults dug into the sides of the passages were groups of tunnellers and

other men half screened by blanket curtains. Their rifles were propped

against the quarried rocks. They sat on ammunition boxes and played

cards to the light of candles stuck in bottles, which made their shadows

flicker fantastically on the walls. They took no interest in the

procession beyond their blankets--the walking wounded and the troops

going up. Some of them slept on the stone floors with their heads

covered by their overcoats and made pillows of their gas-masks. Under

some old houses of Arras were women and children--about 700 of

them--among our soldiers. They were the people who had lived underground

since the beginning of the war and would not leave. Only four of them

went away when they were told of the coming battle and its dangers. "We

will stay," they said with a certain pride because they had seen so much

war. A few women were wounded and one or two killed. Later, after the

first day's battle, in spite of some high velocities from long-range

guns, the streets and squares were filled with soldiers, and Arras was

tumultuous with the movement of men and horses and mules and wagons. The

streets seethed with Scottish soldiers muddy as they came straight out

of battle, bloody as they walked in wounded. Many battalions of Jocks

came into the squares, and their pipers came to play to them. I watched

the Gordons' pipers march up and down in stately ritual, and their

colonel, who stood next to me, looked at them with a proud light in his

eyes as the tune of "Highland Laddie" swelled up to the gables and

filled the open frontages of the gutted houses. Snowflakes fell lightly

on the steel hats of the Scots in the square, and mud was splashed to

the khaki aprons over their kilts--no browner than their hard lean

faces--as a battery rumbled across the cobbled place and the drivers

turned in their saddles to grin at the fine swagger of the pipers and

the triumph of the big drumsticks. An old woman danced a jig to the

pipes, holding her skirt above her skinny legs. She tripped up to a

group of Scottish officers and spoke quick shrill words to them. "What

does the old witch say," asked a laughing Gordon. She had something

particular to say. In 1870 she had heard the pipes in Arras. They were

played by prisoners from South Germany, and as a young girl she had

danced to them.... There was a casualty clearing-station in Arras, in a

deep high vault like the crypt of a cathedral. The way into it was down

a long tunnelled passage, and during the battle thousands of men came

here to have their wounds dressed. They formed up in queues waiting

their turn and moved slowly down the tunnelled way, weary, silent,

patient. Outside lay some of the bad cases until the stretcher-bearers

carried them down, and others sat on the side of the road or lay at full

length there, dog-weary after their long walk from the battlefields.

Blind boys were led forward by their comrades, and men with all their

heads and faces swathed about. They were not out of danger even yet, for

the enemy hated to leave Arras as a health resort, but it was sanctuary

for men who had been in hell fire up by Monchy.

The first day of the Arras battle was our victory. We struck the enemy a

heavy blow, and the capture of the Vimy Ridge by the Canadians and the

Highland Division was as wonderful as the great thrust by English and

Scottish battalions along the valley of the Scarpe across the

Arras-Cambrai road. By April 14 we had captured 13,000 prisoners and

over 200 guns. But it was hard fighting after the first few hours of the

9th, and the operations that followed on both sides of the Scarpe were

costly to us. The London men of the 56th Division, and the old county

troops of the 3rd and 12th and 37th, and the Scots of the 15th suffered

in heroic fighting against strong and fresh reserves of the enemy who

were massed rapidly to check them and made fierce, repeated

counter-attacks against the village of Roeux and its chemical works,

north of the Scarpe, and against Monchy-le-Preux and Guemappe, south of

the river. Again and again these counter-attacks were beaten back with

most bloody losses to the enemy, but our own men suffered each time

until they were weary beyond words. I saw the cavalry ride forward

towards Monchy, where they came under great fire, and I saw the body of

their General carried back to Tilloy. It was a day of tragic memory.

At this time, as Sir Douglas Haig has recorded, the battle of Arras

might have ended. But the French offensive was about to begin, and it

was important that the full pressure of the British attacks should be

maintained in order to assist our Allies. A renewal of the assault was

therefore ordered, and after a week's postponement to gather together

new supplies, to change the divisions, and complete the artillery

dispositions, fighting was resumed on a big scale on April 23. It was on

a front of about nine miles, from Croisilles to Gavrelle. Important

ground was taken west of Cherisy and east of Monchy, where our troops

seized Infantry Hill, but the violent counter-attacks of the enemy in

great strength prevented the gain of all our objectives on that day, and

once more put our troops to a severe ordeal. Roeux and Gavrelle on the

north of the Scarpe, Guemappe on the south, were the focal points of

this struggle and the scene of the bitterest fighting in and out of the

villages. On April 23 and 24 the enemy made eight separate

counter-attacks against Gavrelle, and each was shattered by our

artillery and machine-gun fire. On April 28 there was another great day

of battle when the Canadians had fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the

village of Arleux, and English troops made progress towards Oppy over

Greenland Hill and beyond Monchy. Gavrelle was attacked seven times more

by the enemy, who fell again in large numbers. The night attack of May 3

was unlucky in many of its episodes because some of our men lost their

way in the darkness and had the enemy behind them as well as in front of

them, and suffered under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. It was

"team work" for the French, and many of our sons fell that day not

knowing that their blood was the price of loyalty to our Allies and part

payment of the debt we owe to France for all her valour in this war. On

May 3 the battle front was extended on a line of sixteen miles, and

while the 3rd and 1st Armies attacked from Fontaine-lez-Croisilles to

Fresnoy, the 5th Army stormed the Hindenburg line near Bullecourt. The

Australians carried a stretch of this Hindenburg line. Cherisy fell into

the hands of East county battalions, Roeux was entered again by

English troops, and in Fresnoy, north of Oppy, the Canadians fought

masses of Germans assembled for counter-attack and swept them out of the

village. Heavy counter-attacks developed later, so that our men had to

fall back from Cherisy and Roeux--Fresnoy was abandoned later--but the

rest of the ground was held. During this month's fighting twenty-three

German divisions had been withdrawn exhausted from the line, and we had

captured 19,500 prisoners, 257 guns including 98 heavies, 464

machine-guns, 227 trench mortars, and a great quantity of war material.

We advanced our line five miles on a front of over twenty miles,

including the Vimy Ridge, which had always menaced our positions. Above

all, we had drawn upon the enemy's strength so that the French armies

were relieved of that amount of resistance to their offensive against

the Chemin des Dames. That was the idea behind it all, and it succeeded,

though the cost was not light. The battle of Arras petered out into

small engagements and nagging fighting when on June 7 the battle of

Messines began.

It was a model battle, and the whole operation was astonishing in the

thoroughness of its preparations through every detail of organization,

in the training of its method of attack, in generalship and staff work,

and in its Intelligence department. The 2nd Army had long held this

part of the Ypres salient, and knew the enemy's country as well as its

own. The observers on Kemmel Hill, which looked across to Wytschaete

Ridge, had watched every movement in the enemy's lines, and every sign

of new defensive work. Aeroplane photographs, stacks of them, revealed

many secrets of the enemy's life on this high ground which gave him

observation of all our roads and villages in the flat country between

Dickebusch and Ypres. A relief map on a big scale was built up in a

field behind our lines, and the assault troops and their officers walked

round it and studied in miniature the woods and slopes, strong points

and trenches, which they would have to attack. For eighteen months past

Australian and Canadian miners had been at work below ground boring deep

under the enemy's positions and laying charges for the explosion of

twenty-four mines. All that time the enemy, aware of his danger, had

been counter-mining, and at Hill 60 there was constant underground

fighting for more than ten months when men met each other in the

converging galleries and fought in their darkness. As Sir Douglas Haig

has written, at the time of our offensive the enemy was known to be

driving a gallery which would have broken into the tunnel leading into

the Hill 60 mines. By careful listening it was judged that if our attack

took place on the date arranged, the enemy's gallery would just fail to

reach us. So he was allowed to proceed. Eight thousand yards of gallery

had been bored, and there were nineteen mines ready charged with over a

million pounds of explosives. I saw those nineteen mines go up. The

earth rocked with a great shudder, and the sky was filled with flame. It

was the signal of our bombardment to break out in a deafening tumult of

guns after a quietude in which I heard only the snarl of enemy

gas-shells and the shunting and whistling of our railway engines down

below there in the darkness as though this battlefield were Clapham

Junction. Round about the salient a network of railways had been built

with great speed under the very eyes of the enemy, and though he had

shelled our tracks and engines he could never stop the work of those

engineers who laboured with fine courage and industry so that the guns

might not lack for shells nor the men for supplies on the day of attack.

The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a fine victory for us,

breaking the evil spell of the Ypres salient in which our men had sat

down so long under direct observation of the enemy on that ridge above

them. Kemmel Hill, which had been under fire in our lines for three

years, became a health resort for Australian boys whose turn to fight

had not yet come, and they sat on top of the old observation-post where

men had hidden below ground to watch through a slit in the earth,

staring through field-glasses at the sweep of fire from Oostaverne to

Pilkem, and eating sweets, and putting wild flowers in their slouch

hats. Dickebusch lost its horror. The road to Vierstraat was no longer

bracketed by German shells, and there was no further need of camouflage

screens along other roads where notice-boards said: _Drive slowly--dust

draws fire_. On the morning of battle after the capture of the ridge an

Irish brigadier sat outside his dug-out on a kitchen chair before a deal

table, where his maps were spread. "It's good to take the fresh air," he

said. "Yesterday I had to keep below ground." All that made a difference

on the right of the salient, but Ypres was still "a hot shop," as the

men say, and the roads out of Ypres--the Lille road and the Menin

road--were as abominable as ever, and worse than ever when at the end of

July the battles of Flanders began.

The Wytschaete-Messines Ridge is the eastern spur of that long range of

"abrupt isolated hills," to use the words of Sir Douglas Haig, which

divides the valleys of the Lys and the Yser, and links up with the

ridges stretching north-eastwards to the Ypres-Menin road, and then

northwards to Passchendaele and Staden. One of the objects of our

campaign in 1917 was to gain the high ground to Passchendaele and

beyond. A mere glance at a relief map is enough to show the formidable

nature of the positions held by the enemy on those slopes which

dominated our low ground. When one went across the Yser Canal along the

Menin road, or towards the Pilkem Ridge, those slopes seemed like a wall

of cliffs barring the way of our armies, however strongly our tide of

men might dash against them. The plan to take them by assault needed

enormous courage and high faith in the mind of any man who bore the

burden of command, and his faith and courage depended utterly on the

valour of the men who were to carry out his plan against those frowning

hills. The men did not fail our High Command, and for three and a half

months those troops of ours fought with a heroic resolution never

surpassed by any soldiers in the world, and hardly equalled, perhaps,

in all the history of war, against terrible gun-fire and innumerable

machine-guns, in storms and swamps, in bodily misery because of the mud

and wet, in mental suffering because of the long strain on their nerve

and strength, with severe casualties because of the enemy's fierce

resistance, but with such passionate and self-sacrificing courage that

the greatest obstacles were overcome, and the enemy was beaten back from

one line of defence to another with large captures of prisoners and guns

until, in the middle of November, the crest of Passchendaele was gained.

Before the first day of the battle the 5th Army, with the 1st French

Army on its left, below the flooded ground of St.-Jansbeek, crossed the

Yser Canal and seized 3000 yards of the enemy's trench system. During

that night the pioneer battalion of the Guards, working under fierce

fire, built seventeen bridges across the canal for the passage of our

troops on the day of assault. On that day, July 31, at 3.50 in the

morning, battle was engaged on a front of fifteen miles from Boesinghe

to the River Lys, where the 2nd Army was making a holding attack on our

right wing. The German front-line system of defence was taken

everywhere. Our troops captured the Pilkem Ridge on the left,

Velorenhoek, the Frezenberg Redoubt, the Pommern Redoubt, and St.-Julien

north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, and were fighting forward against

fierce resistance on both sides of the Ypres-Menin road. They stormed

through Sanctuary Wood and captured Stirling Castle, Hooge, and the

Bellewaerde Ridge, and by the end of the day had gained the crest of

Westhoek Ridge. On the 2nd Army front the New-Zealanders carried the

village of La Basseville after close fighting, which lasted fifty

minutes, and English troops on their left captured Hollebeke and

difficult ground north of the Ypres-Comines Canal. Over 6000 prisoners,

including 133 officers, surrendered to us that day.

It was in the afternoon of the first day that the luck of the weather

was decided against us and there began those heavy rain-storms which

drenched the battlefields in August and made them dreadful for men and

beasts. All this part of Flanders is intersected by small streams or

"beeks" filtering through the valleys between the ridges, and our

artillery-fire had already caused them to form ponds and swamps by

destroying their channels so that they slopped over the low-lying

ground. The rains enlarged this area of flood, and so saturated the

clayey soil that it became a vast bog with deep overbrimming pits where

thousands of shell-craters had pierced the earth. Tracks made of wooden

slabs fastened together were the only roads by which men and pack-mules

could cross this quagmire, and each of these ways became taped out by

the enemy's artillery, and very perilous. They were slippery under moist

mud, and men and mules fell into the bogs on either side, and sometimes

drowned in them. At night in the darkness and the storms it was hard to

find the tracks and difficult to keep to them, and long columns of

troops staggered and stumbled forward with mud up to their knees if they

lost direction, and mud up to their necks if they fell into the

shell-holes. It was over such ground as this, in such intolerable

conditions, that our men fought and won their way across the chain of

ridges which led to Passchendaele. I saw some of the haunting scenes of

this struggle and went over the ground across the Pilkem Ridge, and

along the Ypres-Menin road to Westhoek Ridge, and up past Hooge to the

bogs of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and beyond the Yser Canal to

St.-Jean and Wieltje, where every day for months our gunners went on

firing, and every day the enemy "answered back" with scattered and

destructive fire, searching for our batteries and for the bodies of our

men. The broken skeleton of Ypres was always in the foreground or the

background of this scene of war, and every day it changed in different

atmospheric phases and different hours of light so that it was never the

same in its tragic beauty. Sometimes it was filled with gloom and

shadows, and the tattered masonry of the Cloth Hall, lopped off at the

top, stood black as granite above its desolate boulder-strewn square.

Sometimes when storm-clouds were blown wildly across the sky and the

sunlight struck through them, Ypres would be all white and glamorous,

like a ghost city in a vision of the world's end. At times there was a

warm glow upon its rain-washed walls, and they shone like burnished

metal. Or they were wrapped about with a thick mist stabbed through by

flashes of red fire from heavy guns, revealing in a moment's glare the

sharp edges of the fallen stonework, the red ruins of the prison and

asylum, the huddle of shell-pierced roofs, and that broken tower which

stands as a memorial of what once was the splendour of Ypres. A

military policeman standing outside the city gave an order to all going

in: "Gasmasks and steel hats to be worn," and at that moment when one

fumbled at the string of one's gas-bag and fastened the strap of a steel

hat beneath one's chin, the menace of war crept close and the evil of it

touched one's senses. It was very evil beyond the Lille gate and the

Menin gate, where new shell-holes mingled with old ones, and men walked

along the way of death. The spirit of that evil lurked about the banks

of the Yser Canal with its long fringe of blasted trees, white and

livid, with a leprous look when the sunlight touched their stumps. The

water of the canal was but a foul slime stained with gobs of colour. The

wreckage of bridges and barges lay in it. In its banks were unexploded

shells and deep gashes where the bursts had torn the earth down, and

innumerable craters. The Yser Canal holds in a ghostly way the horror of

this war. Yet it is worse beyond. Out through the Menin gate the view of

the salient widens, and every yard of the way is bleeding with the

memory of British soldiers who walked and fought and died here since the

autumn of '14. How many of them we can hardly guess or know. The white

crosses of their graves are scattered about the shell-churned fields and

the rubbish-heaps of brick, though many were never buried, and many were

taken back by stretcher-bearers who risked their lives to bring in these

bodies. There is no house where the White Chateau used to be. There is

no grange by the Moated Grange where men crept out at night, crawling on

their stomachs when the flares went up. Hundreds of thousands of men

have gone up to Hell-fire Corner, some of them with a cold sweat in the

palms of their hands and brave faces and an act of sacrifice in their

hearts. It was the way to Hooge. It was a corner of the hell that was

here always under German guns and German eyes from the ridge beyond.

They had high ground all around us, as the country goes up from

Observatory Ridge and Sanctuary Wood and Bellewaerde to the Westhoek

Ridge and the high plateau of Polygon Wood. No men of ours could move in

the daylight without being seen. The Menin road was always under fire.

Every bit of broken barn, every dug-out and trench, was a mark for the

enemy's artillery. During the Flanders fighting all this ground was

still in the danger zone, though the enemy lost much of his direct

observation after our first advance. But he was still trying to find the

old places and hurled over big shells in a wild scattered way. They

flung up black fountains of earth with frightful violence. Everywhere

there were shell-holes so deep that a cart and horse would find room in

them. One looked into these gulfs with beastly sensations--with a kind

of animal fear at the thought of what would happen to a man if he stood

in the way of such an explosion. There was a sense of old black brooding

evil about all this country, and worst of all in remembrance were the

mine-craters of Hooge. I stared into those pits all piled with stinking

sand-bags on which fungus grew, and thought of friends of mine who once

lived here, with the enemy a few yards away from them, with mines and

saps creeping close to them before another upheaval of the earth, with

corpses and bits of bodies rotting half buried where they sat, always

wet, always lousy, in continual danger of death. The mines went up and

men fought for new craters over new dead. The sand-bags silted down

after rain, and machine-gun bullets swept through the gaps, and men sank

deeper into this filth and corruption. The place is abandoned now, but

the foulness of it stayed, with a lake of slime in which bodies floated,

and the same old stench rose from its caverns and craters. Bellewaerde

Lake, to the north of Hooge, is not what it used to be when gentlemen of

Ypres came out here to shoot wild-fowl or walk through Chateau Wood

around the White Chateau of Hooge with a dog and a gun. There are still

stumps of trees, shot and mangled by three years of fire, but no more

wood than that, and the lake is a cesspool into which the corruption of

death has flowed. Its water is stained with patches of red and yellow

and green slime, and shapeless things float in it. Beyond is the open

ground which goes up to Westhoek Ridge above Nonne Boschen and Glencorse

Wood, for which our men fought on the first day of battle and afterwards

in many weeks of desperate struggle. The Australians took possession of

this country for a time and had to stay and hold it after the excitement

of advance. They came winding along the tracks in single file through

this newly captured ground, carrying their lengths of duck-board and

ammunition boxes with just a grim glance towards places where shells

burst with monstrous whoofs. "A hot spot," said one of these boys,

crouching with his mates in a bit of battered trench outside a German

pill-box surrounded by dead bodies. Our guns were firing from many

batteries, and flights of shells rushed through the air from the heavies

a long way back and from the field-guns forward. It was the field-guns

which hurt one's ears most with their sharp hammer-strokes. Now and

again a little procession passed to which all other men gave way. It was

a stretcher-party carrying a wounded man shoulder high. There is

something noble and stately about these bearers, and when I see them I

always think of Greek heroes carried back on their shields. There was a

vapour of poison gas about these fields, not strong enough to kill, but

making one's eyes and skin smart. The Australians did not seem to notice

it. Perhaps the stench of dead horses overwhelmed their nostrils. It was

strong and foul. The carcasses of these poor beasts lay about as they

had been hit by shrapnel or shell splinters, and down one track came a

living horse less lucky than these, bleeding badly from its wounds and

ambling slowly with drooping head and glazed eyes. Worse smells than of

dead horse crept up from the battered trenches and dug-outs, where

Glencorse Wood goes down to Inverness Copse. It was the dreadful odour

of dead men. It rose in gusts and waves and eddies over all this ground,

for the battlefield was strewn with dead. I saw many German bodies in

the fields of the Somme, and on the way out from Arras, and on the Vimy

Ridge, but never in such groups as lay about the pill-boxes and the

shell-craters of the salient. Everywhere they lay half buried in the

turmoil of earth, or stark above ground without any cover to hide them.

They lay with their heads flung back into water-filled craters or with

their legs dangling in deep pools. They were blown into shapeless masses

of raw flesh by our artillery. Heads and legs and arms all coated in

clay lay without bodies far from where the men of whom they had been

part were killed. God knows what agonies were suffered before death by

men shut up in those German blockhouses, like Fitzclarence Farm, and

Herenthage Chateau, and Clapham Junction, which I passed on the way up.

Some of the garrisons had not stayed in the blockhouses until our troops

had reached them. Perhaps the concussion of our drum-fire was worse

inside those concrete walls than outside. Perhaps the men had rushed out

hoping to surrender before our troops were on them, or with despairing

courage had brought their machine-guns into the open to kill our first

waves before their own death. Whatever their motive had been, many of

these men had come out, and they lay in heaps, mangled by shell-fire

that came across the fields to them in a deep belt of high explosives.

Here under the sky they lay, a frightful witness against modern

civilization, a bloody challenge to any gospel of love which men profess

to believe. Over Nonne Boschen and Inverness Copse, and Polygon Wood

beyond, and the long claw-like hook of the Passchendaele Ridge, the sky

was clear at times and the water-pools reflected its light. But these

places had no touch of loveliness because of the light. Once in history

meek-eyed women walked in Nonne Boschen, which was Nun's Wood, and in

Inverness Copse, as we call it, maids went with their mates in the

glades. Now they are places haunted by ghastly memories, and there rises

from them a miasma which sickens one's soul. Yet bright above the evil

of them and clean above their filth there is the memory of that youth of

ours who came here through fire and flame and fell here, so that the

soil is sacred as their field of honour.

In the first phase of the battle of Flanders the new system of German

defence was formidable. It was that "elastic system" by which Hindenburg

hoped to relieve his men from the destructive fire of our artillery by

holding his front line thinly in concrete blockhouses and organized

shell-craters with enfilade positions for machine-gun fire, keeping his

local reserves at quick striking distance for counter-attack. Our first

waves of men flowed past and between these blockhouses in their struggle

to attain their objectives, and were swept by cross-fire as they went

forward, so that they were thinned out by the time they had reached the

line of their advance. The succeeding waves were sometimes checked by

German machine-gunners still holding out in undamaged shelters, and our

troops in the new front line, weak and exhausted after hours of

fighting, found themselves exposed to fierce counter-attacks in front

while groups of the enemy were still behind them. For several weeks

there were episodes of this kind, when our men had to give ground,

though the line of advance seldom ebbed back to its starting line, and

some progress was made however great the difficulties. Still the

"pill-box" trouble was a serious menace, costly in life, and new methods

of attack had to be devised during the progress of fighting when the

area of the 2nd Army was extended on our left so that the 5th Army was

relieved of some of its broad battle front. Our heavy howitzers

concentrated on every blockhouse that could be located by aeroplane

photographs or direct observation, with such storms of explosive that if

they were not destroyed the garrisons of machine-gunners inside were

killed or stupefied by concussion. Our method of attack in depth, as at

Wytschaete and Messines--battalions advancing in close support of each

other, so that the final objective was held by fresh troops to meet the

inevitable counter-attacks--succeeded in a most striking way, in spite

of the fearful condition of the ground. The enemy changed his new method

of defence to meet this new method of attack. He went back to strongly

held lines with support troops close forward, and had to pay the penalty

by heavier losses under our artillery. The abominable weather and state

of ground were his best lines of defence, and in August and October he

had astounding luck.

Through all these battles our men were magnificent--not demi-gods, nor

saints with a passion for martyrdom, nor heroes of melodrama facing

death with breezy nonchalance while they read sweet letters from

blue-eyed girls, but grim in attack and stubborn in defence, getting on

with the job--a damned ugly job--as far as the spirit could pull the

body and control the nerves. They were industrious as ants on this great

muck-heap of the battlefield. Transport drivers, engineers, signallers,

and pioneers laboured for victory as hard as infantry and gunners, and

worked, for the most part, in evil places where there was always a

chance of being torn to rags. The gunners, with their wheels sunk to the

axles, served their batteries until they were haggard and worn, and they

had little sleep and less comfort, and no hour of safety from infernal

fire. They were wet from one week to another. They stood to the tags of

their boots in mud. They had many of their guns smashed to spokes and

splinters. They were lucky if lightly wounded. But their barrage-fire

rolled ahead of the infantry at every attack and they shattered the

enemy's divisions. The stretcher-bearers seemed to give no thought to

their own lives in the rescue of the wounded; and down behind the

lines--not always beyond range of gun-fire--doctors and hospital

orderlies and nurses worked in the dressing-stations with the same

dogged industry and courage as men who carried up duck-boards to the

line, drove teams of pack-mules up tracks under fire, or unloaded

shells from trains that went puffing to the edge of the battlefields. It

was all part of the business of war. Wounded men who came back from

battle were dealt with as so many cases of damaged goods, to be packed

off speedily to make way for others. There was no time for

sentiment--and no need of it. I used to go sometimes to an old

mill-house on days of battle. During the Flanders fighting thousands of

wounded men came to this place as a first stage on their journey to base

hospitals. The lightly wounded used to sit in a long low tent beside the

mill, round red-hot braziers, waiting in turn to have their wounds

dressed. These crowds of men were of many battalions and of all types of

English, Scottish, and Irish troops, with smaller bodies of Australians,

New-Zealanders, Canadians, South-Africans, Newfoundlanders. They were

clotted with mud and blood, and numb and stiff until the warmth of the

braziers unfroze them. They sat silent as a rule, with their steel hats

tilted forward, but there was hardly a groan from them, and never a

whimper, nor any curse against the fate that had hit them. If I

questioned them they answered with a stark simplicity of truth about the

things they had seen and done, with often a queer glint of humour--grim

enough, God knows, but humour still--in their tale of escape from death.

Always after a talk with them I came away with a deep belief that the

courage, honesty, and humanity of these boys were a world higher than

the philosophy of their intellectual leaders, and I hated the thought

that we have been brought to such a pass by the infamy of an enemy

caste, and by the low ideals of Europe which have been our own law of

life, that all this splendid youth, thinking straight, seeing straight,

acting straight, without selfish motives, with clean hearts and fine

bodies, should be flung into the furnace of war and scorched by its

fires, and maimed, and blinded, and smashed. Only by the dire need of

defence against the enemies of the world's liberty can such a sacrifice

be justified, and that is our plea before the great Judge of Truth. Such

thoughts haunt one if one has any conscience, but when I went among the

troops on the roads or in their camps, and heard their laughter after

battle or before it, and saw the courage of men refusing to be beaten

down by the vilest conditions or heavy losses, and was a witness of

their pride in the achievements of their own battalions, I wondered

sometimes whether the sufferings of these men were not so pitiful as I

had thought. Their vitality helps them through many hardships. Their

interest in life is so great that until death comes close it does not

touch them--not many of them--with its coldness. In their comradeship

they find a compensation for discomfort, and their keenness to win the

rewards of skill and pluck is so high that they take great risks

sometimes as a kind of sport, as Arctic explorers or big game hunters

will face danger and endure great bodily suffering for their own sake.

Those men are natural soldiers, though all our men are not like that.

There are some even who like war, though very few. But most of them

would jeer at any kind of pity for them, because they do not pity

themselves, except in most dreadful moments which they put away from

their minds if they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse still,

with a most deadly hatred, all the talk about "our cheerful men." For

they know that however cheerful they may be it is not because of a jolly

life or lack of fear. They loathe shell-fire and machine-gun fire. They

know what it is "to have the wind up." They have seen what a battlefield

looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. It is not for

non-combatants to call them "cheerful." Because non-combatants do not

understand and never will, not from now until the ending of the world.

"Not so much of your cheerfulness," they say, and "Cut it out about the

brave boys in the trenches." So it is difficult to describe them, or to

give any idea of what goes on in their minds, for they belong to another

world than the world of peace that we knew, and there is no code which

can decipher their secret, nor any means of self-expression on their

lips.

In this book the messages which I wrote from day to day are reprinted

with only one alteration--though some are left out. For reasons of space

(there is a limit to the length of a book) I have not included any

narrative of the Cambrai battles, and thought it best to end this book

with the gain of Passchendaele. The alteration is one which makes me

very glad. I have been allowed to give the names of the battalions,

which I could not do during the progress of the fighting because the

enemy wanted to know our Order of Battle. For the first time, therefore,

the world will know the regiments who fought without fame in the dismal

anonymity of this war, with such Spartan courage, up to that high crest

of Passchendaele which was their goal, beyond the bogs and the beeks

where masses of men struggled and fell. There is no criticism in this

book, no judgment of actions or men, no detailed summing up of success

and failure. That is not within my liberty or duty as a correspondent

with the Armies in the Field. The Commander-in-Chief himself has

summarized the definite gains of the campaign in Flanders:

"Notwithstanding the many difficulties, much has been achieved. Our

captures in Flanders since the commencement of operations at the

end of July amount to 20,065 prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine-guns,

and 131 trench-mortars. It is certain that the enemy's losses

greatly exceeded ours. Most important of all, our new and hastily

trained armies have shown once again that they are capable of

meeting and beating the enemy's best troops, even under conditions

which required the greatest endurance, determination, and heroism

to overcome. The total number of prisoners taken in 1917, between

the opening of the spring offensive on April 9 and the conclusion

of the Flanders offensive, not including those captured in the

battle of Cambrai, was 57,696, including 1290 officers. During the

same period we captured also 109 heavy guns, 560 trench-mortars and

1976 machine-guns."

These are great gains in men and material, and the capture of the ridges

has given us strong defensive positions which should be of high value to

us in the new year of warfare calling to our men, unless the world's

agony is healed by the coming of Peace.

* * * * *

[_I am indebted to Mr. Robert Donald, editor of the_ Daily Chronicle_,

for permission to republish the articles which I have written for that

newspaper as a war correspondent with the British Army in the Field. My

letters from the Front also appeared in the_ Daily Telegraph _and a

number of Provincial, American, and Colonial papers, and I am grateful

for the honour of serving the great public of their readers._]

PART I

RETREAT FROM THE SOMME

I

A NEW YEAR OF WAR

NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1916

Last New Year's Eve--the end of a year which had been full of menace for

our fighting men, because, at the beginning, our lines had no great

power of guns behind them, and full of hopes that had been unfilled, in

spite of all their courage and all their sacrifice--an artillery officer

up in the Ypres salient waited for the tick of midnight by his

wrist-watch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and then

shouted the word "Fire!" ... One gun spoke, and then for a few seconds

there was silence. Over in the German line the flares went up and down,

and it was very quiet in the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the

sentries wondered at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave

the word of command again. This time the battery fired nine rounds. A

little while there was silence again, followed by another solitary shot,

and then by six rounds. So did the artillery in the Ypres salient salute

the birth of the New Year, born in war, coming to our soldiers and our

race with many days of battle, with new and stern demands for the lives

and blood of men.

To-night it is another New Year's Eve, and the year is coming to us with

the same demands and the same promises, and the only difference between

our hopes upon this night and that of a year ago is that by the struggle

and endeavour of those past twelve months the ending is nearer in sight

and the promise very near--very near as we hope and believe--its

fulfilment. The guns will speak again to-night, saluting by the same

kind of sullen salvo the first day of the last year of war. The last

year, if we have luck. It is raining now, a soft rain swept gustily

across the fields by a wind so mild after all our wild weather that it

seems to have the breath of spring in it. For a little while yesterday

this mildness, and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a

strange, rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of a

day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that the victory had

been won. It was queer. I stood looking upon Neuville-St.-Vaast and the

Vimy Ridge. Our trenches and the enemy's wound along the slopes in wavy

lines of white chalk. There to my right was the Labyrinth and in a

hollow the ruins of Souchez. When I had first come to these battlefields

they were strewn with dead--French dead--after fighting frightful and

ferocious in intensity. Unexploded shells lay everywhere, and the litter

of great ruin, and storms of shells were bursting upon the Vimy Ridge.

The last time I went to these battlefields the high ridge of Vimy was

still aflame, and British troops were attacking the mine-craters there.

Yesterday all the scene was quiet, and bright sunlight gleamed upon the

broken roofs of Neuville, and the white trenches seemed abandoned. The

wet earth and leaves about me in a ruined farmyard had the moist scent

of early spring. A man was wandering up a road where six months ago he

would have been killed before he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It

looked like peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was no

peace. Presently a battery began to fire. I saw the shells bursting over

the enemy's position. Now and again there was the sullen crump of a

German "heavy." And though the trenches seemed deserted on either side

they were held as usual by men waiting and watching with machine-guns

and hand-grenades and trench-mortars. There is no peace!

* * * * *

It was enormously quiet at times in Arras. The footsteps of my companion

were startling as they clumped over the broken pavement of the square,

and voices--women's voices--coming up from some hole in the earth

sounded high and clear, carrying far, in an unearthly way, in this great

awful loneliness of empty houses, broken churches, ruined banks and

shops and restaurants, and mansions cloistered once in flower gardens

behind high white walls. I went towards the women's voices as men in

darkness go towards any glimmer of light, for warmth of soul as well as

of body.

A woman came up a flight of stone steps from a vaulted cellar and stared

at me, and said, "Good day. Do you look for anything?"

I said, "I look only into your cellar. It is strange to find you living

here. All alone--perhaps."

"It is no longer strange to me. I have been here, as you say, alone, all

through the war, since the day of the first bombardment. That was on

October 6, 1914. Before then I was not alone. I was married. But my

husband was killed over there--you see the place where the shell fell.

Since then I am alone."

For two years and two months she and other women of Arras--one came now

to stand by her side and nod at her tale--have lived below ground,

coming up for light and air when there is a spell of such silence as I

had listened to, and going down to the dark vaults when a German "crump"

smashes through another roof, or when German gas steals through the

streets with the foul breath of death.

I asked her about the Kaiser's offer of peace. What did she think of

that? I wondered what her answer would be--this woman imprisoned in

darkness, hiding under daily bombardments, alone in the abomination of

desolation. It was strange how quickly she was caught on fire by a

sudden passion. All the tranquillity of her face changed, and there were

burning sparks in her eyes. She was like a woman of the Revolution, and

her laughter, for she began her answer with a laugh, was shrill and

fierce.

"Peace! William offers peace, you say? Bah! It is nothing but humbug [la

blague]. It is a trap which he sets at our feet to catch us. It is a

lie."

She grasped my arm, and with her other hand pointed to the ruins over

the way, to the chaos of old houses, once very stately and noble, where

her friends lived before the fires of hell came.

"The Germans did that to us. They are doing it now. But it is not

enough. What they have done to Arras they want to do to France--to smash

the nation to the dust, to break the spirit of our race as they have

broken all things here. They wish to deceive us to our further ruin.

There will be no peace until Germany herself is laid in ashes, and her

cities destroyed like Arras is destroyed, and her women left alone, with

only the ghosts of their dead husbands, as I live here alone in my

cellar. Peace! Je m'en fiche de ca!"

There was a queer light in her eyes for a moment, in the eyes of this

woman of Arras who saw down a vista of two years and two months all the

fire and death that had been hurled into this city around her, and the

bodies of little children in the streets, and her dead husband lying

there on the cobble-stones, where now there was a great hole in the

roadway piercing through to the vaults.

* * * * *

I met other women of Arras. Two of them were young, daintily dressed as

though for the boulevards of Paris, and they walked, swinging little

handbags, down a street where at any moment a shell might come to tear

them to pieces and make rags of them. Another was a buxom woman with a

boy and girl holding her hands. The boy had been born to the sound of

shell-fire. The girl was eight years old, but she now learns the history

of France, not only out of school books, but out of this life in the

midst of war.

"They are frightened--the little ones?" I asked. A solitary gun boomed

and shook the loose stones of a ruined house.

The woman smiled and shrugged her shoulders.

"They are used to it all. Peace will seem strange to them."

"Will there ever be peace?" I asked.

The woman of Arras looked for a moment like the one I had spoken to on

the steps of the cellar. Then she smiled, in a way that made me feel

cold, for it was the smile of a woman who sees a vengeance for the

wreckage of her life.

"There is no peace at Verdun," she said. "Our soldiers have done well

there."

I said good day to her and went through the ruins again and out of the

city, and stood watching an artillery duel up towards Souchez. The stabs

of flame from our batteries were like red sparks in the deepening mist.

They were like the fire in the eyes of the women who lived in cellars

away back there in Arras, with a smouldering passion in the gloom and

coldness of their lives.

* * * * *

In many French villages the pipes are playing the New Year in, and their

notes are full of triumph, but with a cry in them for those who have

gone away with the old year, lying asleep on the battlefields--so many

brave Scots--like "the flowers o' the forest" and last year's leaves. I

heard the pipes to-day in one old barn, where a feast was on, not far

from where the guns were shooting through the mist with a round or two

at odd moments, and though I had had one good meal, I had to eat

another, even to the Christmas plum pudding, just to show there was no

ill-feeling.

It was the pudding that threatened to do me down.

But it was good to sit among these splendid Seaforths and their feast,

all packed together shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, under high

old beams that grew in French forests five centuries ago. They were the

transport men, who get the risks but not the glory. Every man here had

ridden, night after night, up to the lines of death, under shell-fire

and machine-gun fire, up by Longueval and Bazentin, carrying food for

men and guns at their own risk of life. Every night now they go up again

with more food for men and guns through places where there are now

shell-craters in the roads, and the reek of poison gas.

The young transport officer by my side (who once went scouting in

Delville Wood when the devil had it all his own way there) raised his

glass of beer (the jug from which it had been poured stood a yard high

in front of me) and wished "Good luck" to his men in the New Year of

war, and bade them "wire in" to the feast before them. So in other

Scottish billets the first of the New Year was kept, and to-night there

is sword-dancing by kilted men as nimble as Nijinski, in their

stockinged feet, and old songs of Scotland which are blown down the wind

of France, in this strange nightmare of a war where men from all the

Empire are crowded along the fighting-lines waiting for the bloody

battles that will come, as sure as fate, while the New Year is still

young.

* * * * *

The queerest music I have heard in this war zone was three days ago,

when I was walking down a city street. The city was dead, killed by

storms of high explosives. The street was of shuttered houses, scarred

by shell-fire, deserted by all their people, who had fled two years ago.

I walked down this desolation, so quiet, so dead, where there was no

sound of guns, that it was like walking in Pompeii when the lava was

cooled. Suddenly there was the sound of a voice singing loud and clear

with birdlike trills, as triumphant as a lark's song to the dawn. It was

a woman's voice singing behind the shutters of a shelled city! ...

Some English officer was there with his gramophone.

II

AN ATTACK NEAR LE TRANSLOY

JANUARY 28, 1917

The "show" (as our men call it) near Le Transloy yesterday was more than

a raid--those daily in-and-out dashes which are doing most deadly work

along our line. It was an attack for the definite purpose of gaining an

important bit of ground on the slope which goes down to the ruined

village and of driving the enemy out of some strong points. The interest

of it, involving the capture of six officers and 352 men of picked

regiments, is the way in which we caught the enemy utterly by surprise

and the rapid, easy way in which the whole operation was done. A touch

which seems fantastic came at the end of the adventure when these young

Germans, still breathless with the amazement of their capture, were

bundled into omnibuses which had been brought up near the lines to wait

for them--the old London omnibuses which used to go "all the way to the

Bank--Bank--Bank!" in the days before the world began to crack--and

taken to their camp on our side of the battlefields.

It was a grim, cold morning--piercingly cold, with a wind cutting like a

knife across the snowfields. Not a morning when men might be expected to

go out into the nakedness of No Man's Land. It was a morning when these

German officers and men of the 119th and 121st Regiments, the

Wuertembergers of Koenigin Olga, were glad to stay down in the warmth of

their dug-outs, cooking coffee on the little stove with which each man

of these favoured troops was provided, to the great envy of Bavarians on

their right, who go on shorter rations and fewer comforts. They had some

good dug-outs in and near the Sunken Road--which runs up from Morval to

Le Transloy, and strikes through a little salient in front of our

lines--till yesterday morning. The trenches on either side of the Sunken

Road were not happy places for Wuertembergers. For months past our guns

had been pounding them so that they were mostly battered down, and only

held here and there by little groups of men who dug themselves in. There

was no wire in front of them, and here during the wet weather, and now

during the great frost, the German troops (as we know from the prisoners

to-day) suffered badly from trench-feet and stomach troubles, and in

spite of their moral (they were all stout-hearted men) from what the

French call the "cafard," and we call the "hump."

[Illustration: Map of the Bapaume Sector]

Yesterday morning one or two shivering wretches stood sentry in the

German line trying to gain shelter from the knife-blade of the wind. All

others were below ground round the "fug" of their braziers. They

believed the British over the way were just as quiet in the good work of

keeping warm. That was their mistake. In our trenches the men were

quiet, but busy, and above ground instead of below. They were waiting

for a signal from the guns, and had their bayonets fixed and bombs slung

about them, and iron rations hung to their belts. A rum ration was

served round, and the men drank it, and felt the glow of it, so that the

white waste of No Man's Land did not look so cold and menacing. They

were men of the Border Regiment and the Inniskillings of the 29th

Division. Suddenly, at about half-past five, there was a terrific crash

of guns, and at the same moment the men scrambled up into the open and

with their bayonets low went out into No Man's Land, each man's

footsteps making a trail in the snow. I think it took about four

minutes, that passage of the lonely ground which was a hundred yards or

so between the lines, all pock-marked with shell-holes, and hard as iron

after the freezing of the quagmire. There was no preliminary

bombardment. As soon as the guns went off the men went, with the line of

shells not far in front of them. They found no men above ground when

they pierced the German line. It was curious and uncanny--the utter

lifelessness of the place they came to capture. Good, too, for men

attacking, for men who always listen for the quick rush of bullets,

which is the ugliest sound in war. Not a single machine-gun spat at

them. They knew quickly that they had surprised the enemy utterly. They

found the dug-outs and called down the challenge and heard it answered.

The Wuertembergers came up dazed with the effect of the capture, hardly

believing it, as men in a dream. One of the officers explained: "We

thought it was just a morning strafe. We kept down in the dug-outs till

it was over. We had no idea of an attack. How did you get here so

quickly?"

They were abashed. They said they would have put up a fight if they had

had any kind of chance. But they were trapped. They could do nothing but

surrender with the best grace possible. On the right, from two isolated

bits of trench, there came a burst of rifle-fire. A few Germans there

had time to recover from the stunning blow of the first surprise and

fought pluckily till overpowered. The Borders and the Inniskillings went

on farther than the objective given to them, to a point 500 yards away

from the German first line, and established themselves there. From

neighbouring ground, through the white haze over the snowfields, red

lights went up with the SOS signal, and presently the German gunners got

busy. But the prisoners were bundled back to the omnibuses, and the men

took possession of the dug-outs. Proper organization was difficult above

ground. It was too hard to dig. From the farthest point, later in the

day, the men were withdrawn to the ground given to them for their

objectives and German attempts to organize counter-attacks were smashed

by our artillery, because we have absolute observation of their

movements from the higher ground won by great fighting in the Somme

battles. To-day there was much gunning in all the neighbourhood of the

fight, and the roar of guns rolled over the desolate fields of snow, the

wide lonely waste which makes one's soul shiver to look at it as I

stared at the scene of war, to-day and yesterday, in the teeth of the

wind.

III

THE ABANDONMENT OF GRANDCOURT

FEBRUARY 8

That the troops of our Naval Division (the 63rd) should have been able

to walk into Grandcourt yesterday and take the place after its

abandonment by the enemy (except for a few men left behind to keep up

appearances as long as possible, poor wretches) is a proof that the

German High Command prefers, at this point of the struggle, to save

casualties rather than to hold bad ground at any cost. It is a new

phase, worthy of notice. A year ago he would not let his pride do this.

Less than a year ago, when we took ground from him by a sudden assault,

he would come back with a frightful counter-blow, and there would be a

long and bloody struggle, as at the Bluff and St.-Eloi, over trenches

taken and retaken. Combles was the first place from which he crept away

without a fight. Grandcourt is the second place, abandoned for the same

reason--because it was caught in the pincers of our forward movements.

It lies low on the south side of the Ancre, below Miraumont, and it

became a place of misery to German troops after the capture of Beaucourt

and Beaumont-Hamel, on the other side of the river--still worse when on

Sunday last our men advanced north of Beaucourt, capturing a couple of

hundred prisoners and consolidating on a line of ground dominating

Grandcourt, on the north-west. It was probably then that the enemy

decided to withdraw to a stronger and higher position south of Miraumont

and Pys, which he has been digging and defending with rapid industry in

spite of the hard frost, which double the labour of the spade. Fear,

which is a great General makes him a hard digger, and he will burrow

underground while our men are scraping the snow away on our side of the

line. A few men, as I have said, were left behind to make a show. They

were seen moving about in the neighbourhood of a German trench barring

the way to Grandcourt on the south-west. It was some time before our

patrols, creeping out over the snow, saw that this half-mile of line was

empty of men, and that the enemy had gone back to some place unknown. On

Tuesday our troops moved into this position, watched by those few men,

left as scarecrows, who are now our prisoners, and who saw the English

soldiers get up out of their ditches and shell-craters and cross the

snowfield in open order with a steady trudge, their bayonets glittering,

and then drop down into the battered trench in which there was nothing

but the litter of former habitation and some dead bodies. Yesterday it

was decided to push on to Grandcourt. Observing officers could see the

snow on the broken roofs and ruined walls of that village, where bits of

brick and woodwork still stand after heavy bombardment. They could not

see whether the place was still held. Only actual contact would show

whether those quiet ruins would be noisy with the chatter of machine-gun

fire if our men went in. A sinister spot--with an evil-sounding name to

soldiers of the Somme, because here for many months the enemy had massed

his guns which fired down to Contalmaison and flung high explosives over

the country below the Pozieres Ridge.

It was in the afternoon that the entry was made beneath a great barrage

of our shells advancing beyond the infantry and through a heavy fire

from the enemy's guns, which did not check the advance of our men. A few

German soldiers were taken in rear-guard posts. They came out of

shell-craters with their hands up, and were sent back to our lines.

There was no fighting in the ruins of the village. Grandcourt was ours,

with its deep dug-outs littered with German clothes and stored with

rations of German soldiers, which our own men enjoyed as a change of

diet, while they took cover from the enemy's shell-fire over his old

home.

Last night in the light of a full moon, curiously red so that the snow

was faintly flushed, two more attacks were made and two more positions

taken, north and south-east of Grandcourt. On the north side of the

Ancre Baillescourt Farm was seized, and in its neighbourhood eighty

soldiers and one officer were made prisoner. They belonged to the same

corps as those I saw last Sunday, and were recruited from the

Hamburg-Altona district; all stout fellows, well nourished and well

clothed. They had not expected the attack, not so soon, anyhow, and were

caught in dug-outs by the ruined farmhouse, which some months ago was a

good landmark with its white walls and barns still standing. Now it is

but a litter of beams and broken plaster, like all houses along the line

of battle.

IV

THE GORDONS IN THE BUTTE DE WARLENCOURT

FEBRUARY 9

The frost lasts. Even in times of peace I suppose it would be remembered

years hence because of its intensity of cold and continuance. Here on

the Western Front it will be remembered by men who live, now very young,

and then with hair as white as the snow which now lies in No Man's Land,

because of its unforgettable pictures in sunlight and moonlight, its

fantastic cruelties of coldness and discomfort, and its grim effect upon

the adventures of war when the patrols go out by night and British

soldiers crawl across snow-filled shell-holes.

There was a queer episode of Canadian history--only a few days

old--which began when a sprightly young Dados (he's the fellow that gets

all the chaff from the Divisional Follies) startled a respectable old

lady behind the counter of a milliner's shop in a French village by

demanding 100 ladies' "nighties" ("chemises de nuit" he called them) of

the largest size. The village heard the story of this shopping

expedition, listened to the old lady's shrill cackle of laughter, and

wondered what joke was on among the Canadian troops. It was one of those

jokes which belong to the humours of this war, mixed with blood and

death. Up in the Canadian trenches there were shouts of hoarse laughter,

as over their khaki a hundred brawny young Canadians put on the

night-dresses. They had been tied up with blue ribbon. The old moon, so

watchful there in the steel-blue sky, had never looked down upon a

stranger scene than these white-robed soldiers who went out into No

Man's Land, with rifles and bombs. Some of the night-dresses, so clean

and dainty as they had come out of the milliner's shop, were stained red

before the end of the adventure. And Germans in their dug-outs caught a

glimpse of these fantastic figures before death came quickly, or a shout

of surrender. The Pierrots went back with some prisoners in the

moonlight, and Canadian staff officers chuckled with laughter along

telephone wires when the tale was told.

Some of the prisoners who are taken do nothing but weep for the first

few days after capture. "The prisoners are young," reports the

Intelligence officer about the latest batch, "and have wept copiously

since their capture." The men I have seen myself during the past few

days had a look of misery in their eyes. They hate these midnight raids

of ours, coming suddenly upon them night after night through the white

glimmer of the snowfields. They have taken dogs into the trenches now to

give a quicker and surer warning than young sentries, who are afraid to

cry out when they see white figures moving, because they think they see

them always, when shadows stir in the moonlight across the snow. Our men

during recent nights have heard these dogs giving short, sharp barks.

One of them came out into No Man's Land and sniffed about some black

things lying quiet under the cover of snow. No alarm was given when some

friends of mine went out to make an attack some nights ago, and it was

lucky for them, for if they had been discovered too soon all their plans

would have been spoilt, and white smocks would not have saved them.

They were the 8/10th Gordons of the 15th Division. Some of my readers

will remember the crowd, for I have described my meetings with them up

and down the roads of war. It is they who arranged the details of the

night's adventure, and because it is typical of the things that

happen--of the Terror that comes in the night--it is worth telling. The

Highlanders, when they took up their attacking line, were dressed in

white smocks covering their kilts, and in steel helmets painted white.

Their black arms and feet were like the smudges on the snow. They lay

very quiet, visible on the left, from the Butte de Warlencourt, that old

high mound in the Somme battlefields which was once the burial-place of

a prehistoric man and is now the tomb of young soldiers in the Durham

Light Infantry who fought and died there. The moon was bright on the

snow about them, but a misty vapour was on the ground. Each man had been

warned not to cough or sneeze. Their rifles were loaded, and with

bayonets fixed, so that there should be no rattle of arms or clicks of

bolts. They were in two parties, and their orders were to overthrow the

advanced German posts which were known to be in front of the Butte, and

to form a ring of posts round the position attacked while its dug-outs

were being dealt with. A heavy barrage was fired suddenly up and down

the German lines, so as to bewilder the enemy as to the point of attack,

and the Gordons in their white smocks rose up and advanced. Two shots

rang out from one of the German posts. No more than that. The two waves

of men went on. Those on the right flank had trouble in crossing the

ground. Several of them fell into deep shell-craters frozen hard. A

machine-gun was fired on the left, but was then silenced by our

shell-fire. The men inclined a little to the left, and came round on the

west side of the position, where there was a small quarry. On their way

they surprised an enemy post and took six prisoners.

[Illustration: THE RETREAT FROM THE SOMME

London: W^m. Heinemann _Stanford's Geog^l. Estab^t., London_]

A little way farther on they came across a trench-mortar, a dug-out, and

two terror-stricken men. An officer put a Stokes bomb down the mortar

and blew it up. The men were taken, and the dug-out was destroyed. Then

the Gordons went on to the Butte de Warlencourt. Underneath it were the

dug-outs of a German company, snow-capped and hidden. The Scots went

round like wolves hunting for the way down. There were four ways down,

and three of them were found low down about four yards apart. Men were

talking down there excitedly. Their German speech was loud and there was

the note of terror in it.

"Come out!" shouted the Gordons several times; but at one entrance only

one man came out, and at another only one, and at the third twelve men,

who were taken prisoners. The others would not surrender. Some bombs and

a Stokes shell were thrown down the doorways, and suddenly this nest of

dug-outs was seen to collapse, and black smoke came up from the pit,

melting the edges of the snow. Down below the voices went on, rising to

high cries of terror. Then flames appeared, shedding a red glare over No

Man's Land.

On the left the Gordons had been held up by machine-gun fire and

rifle-fire, which came across to them from a trench to which they were

advancing. At the west side of the trench, in a wired enclosure, the

machine-gun was troublesome. Some of the white smocks fell. An attempt

was made to rush it, but failed. Afterwards the gun and the team were

knocked out by a shell. A group of Germans came out of the trench and

started bombing, until a Stokes bomb scattered them. Then the Gordons

went down and brought out some prisoners, and blew up a dug-out.

It was time to go back, for the German barrage had begun; but the

Gordons were able to get home without many casualties. Nearly two hours

afterwards a loud explosion was heard across the way, as though a bomb

store had blown up. The sky was red over there by the flare of a

fire.... In the dug-outs of the Butte de Warlencourt a whole company of

Germans was being burnt alive.

V

THE BATTLE OF BOOM RAVINE

FEBRUARY 15

On the way to Miraumont there was a deep gully called Boom Ravine, and

here on February 17 there was fierce fighting by the Royal Fusiliers,

the Northamptons, and the Middlesex men of the 29th Division.

In difficulty, in grim human courage, in all its drama of fog, and

darkness, and shell-fire, and death, it seems to me to hold most of what

this war means to individual men--all that can be asked of them in such

hours.

The thaw had just set in and the ground was soppy, which was bad luck.

In spite of the thaw, it was horribly, damply cold, but the men had been

given a good meal before forming up for the attack, and officers brought

up the rum ration in bottles, so that the men could attack with some

warmth in them. In the utter darkness, unable to make any glimmer of

light lest the enemy should see, the brigades tried to get into line.

Two companies lost themselves, and were lost, but got into touch again

in time. It was all black and beastly. A great fire of high explosives

burst over our assembly lines. The darkness was lit up by the red

flashes of these bursting shells. Men fell, wounded and dead. The Royal

Fusiliers were specially tried, and their brigadier wondered whether

they would have the spirit to get up and attack when the hour arrived.

But when the moment came the survivors rose and went forward, and fought

through to the last goal. They were the first to get to Grandcourt

Trench, which lay between them and the Boom Ravine. The wire was not

cut, and there was a hammering of machine-guns and the swish of

machine-gun bullets. This battalion had already lost all its officers,

who had gone forward gallantly, leading their men and meeting the

bullets first. A sergeant-major took command, shouted to his men to keep

steady, and found a gap through the wire. They forced their way through,

passed Grandcourt Trench, and, with other men, dropped into Boom Ravine.

That place is a sunken road, almost parallel with Grandcourt Trench, and

with South Miraumont Trench beyond. Before war came--even last summer,

indeed--it was like a Devonshire lane, with steep shelving banks, thirty

to forty feet high, and trees growing on either side, with overhanging

roots. It was not like a Devonshire lane when our men scrambled and fell

down its banks. It was a ravine of death. Our shell-fire had smashed

down all the trees, and their tall trunks lay at the bottom of the

gulley, and their branches were flung about. The banks had been opened

out by shell-craters, and several of the German dug-outs built into the

sides of them were upheaved or choked. Dead bodies or human fragments

lay among the branches and broken woodwork. A shell of ours had entered

one dug-out and blown six dead men out of its doorway. They sprawled

there at the entrance. Inside were six other dead. From dug-outs not

blown up or choked came groups of German soldiers, pallid and

nerve-broken, who gave themselves up quickly enough. One man was

talkative. He said in perfect English that he had been coachman to an

English earl, and he cursed our artillery, and said that if he could get

at our blinking gunners he would wring their blighted necks--or words to

that effect.

But the battle was not over yet. While Boom Ravine was being cleared of

its living inhabitants by the Royal Fusiliers other waves were coming

up; or, rather, not waves, but odd groups of men, dodging over the

shell-craters, and hunting as they went for German snipers, who lay in

their holes firing until they were pinned by bayonet-points. Their

bodies lie there now, curled up. Some of them pretended to be dead when

our men came near. One of them lay still, with his face in the moist

earth. "See that that man is properly dead," said an officer, and a

soldier with him pricked the man. He sprang up with a scream, and ran

hard away--to our lines. Six prisoners came trudging back from the

Ravine, with a slightly wounded man as an escort. On the way back they

found themselves very lonely with him, and passed some rifles lying in

their way. They seized the rifles and became fighting men again, until a

little Welsh officer of the South Wales Borderers met them, and killed

every one of them with a revolver.

VI

THE ENEMY WITHDRAWS

FEBRUARY 18

The enemy is steadily withdrawing his troops from many positions between

Hebuterne and the ground south-west of Bapaume, and our patrols are

pushing forward into abandoned country, which they have penetrated in

some places for nearly three miles beyond our former line. They are

already north-west of Serre, south of Irles, above Miraumont,

Petit-Miraumont and Pys, which are now in our hands without a battle. We

have gained a number of German strongholds which we expected to win only

by heavy fighting, and the enemy has yielded to our pressure, the

ceaseless pressure of men and guns, by escaping to a new line of defence

along the Bapaume Ridge. This is the most notable movement which has

taken place in the war since the autumn of the first year. The German

retirement in the battle of the Marne was forced upon them only by

actual defeat on the ground. This is a strategical retreat, revealing a

new phase of weakness in their defensive conditions. It has not come to

our Generals as a surprise. After the battle of Boom Ravine, there were

several signs that the enemy contemplated a withdrawal from the two

Miraumonts, and our recent capture of Baillescourt Farm and the ground

on the north of the Ancre seriously menaced Serre. Yesterday morning,

through a heavy grey mist, fires were seen burning along the German

front line. For several days the enemy's field-batteries had been firing

an abnormal amount of ammunition, and it seemed likely that they were

getting rid of their supplies in the forward dumps before withdrawing

their guns. Patrols sent out had a queer, uncanny experience. It was

very quiet in the mist, almost alarmingly quiet. They pushed in after

the enemy. Not a sound, not a shot came from Serre.... These reports

were sent back, and more patrols were sent forward in various

directions. They pushed on, picking up a few prisoners here and there

who were sniping from shell-holes and serving solitary machine-guns.

These men confessed that they had been left behind with orders to keep

firing and to make a show so that we might believe the ground was still

strongly held. Farther on the right the same thing was happening.

Patrols went out and sent back messages saying that no enemy was ahead.

They went into Miraumont, and in the centre of the main road a mine blew

up with a loud explosion; but by great good luck none of our men were

hurt. At the end of the street six Germans were seen among the ruins.

They were fired at and disappeared. Miraumont was taken without another

shot than this, and with it Little Miraumont, next door.

Last night our troops advanced towards Warlencourt and south of Irles,

and they took possession of the famous Butte, that high mound above the

bones of some prehistoric man, for which there had been so much bloody

fighting in the autumn and the first month of this year. From the

direction of Bapaume the noise of heavy explosions was heard, as though

ammunition dumps were being blown up, and for the first time perhaps

since the German retreat from the Marne the enemy was destroying his own

material of war on his way back.

VII

OUR ENTRY INTO GOMMECOURT

FEBRUARY 28

Last night the German troops abandoned Gommecourt and Pusieux and our

men followed the first patrols, who had felt forward and took possession

of the salient which keeps to the line of the park surrounding the

famous old chateau.

This entry into Gommecourt without a fight was most sensational. It was

here on July 1 of 1916 that waves of London men of the 56th Division

assaulted an almost impregnable position, and by the highest valour and

sacrifice broke and held its lines until forced back by massed gun-fire

which threatened them with annihilation. Many of our dead lay there, and

the place will be haunted for ever by the memory of their loss and great

endurance. At last the gates were open. The enemy's troops had stolen

away in the dusk, leaving nothing behind but the refuse of trench life

and the litter of trench tools. In order to keep the way open for their

withdrawal, strong posts of Germans with machine-guns held out in a

wedge just south of Rossignol Wood and in Biez Wood, which is west of

Bucquoy. These rear-guard posts, numbering an officer or two and

anything between thirty to sixty men with machine-guns, and telephones

keeping them in touch with the main army, were chosen for their tried

courage and intelligence, and stayed behind with orders to hold on to

the last possible moment.

All the tricks of war are being used to check and kill our patrols. In

addition to trip-wires attached to explosives, German helmets have been

left about with bombs concealed in them so as to explode on being

touched, and there are other devices of this kind which are ingenious

and devilish. The enemy's snipers and machine-gunners give our men

greater trouble, but are being routed out from their hiding-places.

There were a lot of them in the ruins of Pusieux, but last night, after

sharp fighting and a grim man-hunt among the broken brickwork, the enemy

was destroyed in this village, and our line now runs well beyond it to

Gommecourt, on the left and down to Irles on the right. The enemy has

destroyed Irles church tower, as he has destroyed the church of

Achiet-le-Petit, and the famous clock tower of Bapaume, on which we

tried to read the time from the high ground westward during the battles

of the Somme. This is to get rid of observation which might be useful to

us in our advance.

Heavy shell-fire has been concentrated by enemy batteries on the village

of Irles, and he is also barraging with high explosives upon Serre,

Miraumont, Grandcourt, and other places from which he has withdrawn. It

is probable that he is using up his reserves of ammunition in the dumps

along the line of his retirement. Many of his heavy guns still remain

on railway mountings behind Bapaume--we are now less than a mile from

that town--and they are doing double duty by quick firing. The latest

village to fall into our hands is Thilloy, north of Ligny-Thilloy, and

just south of Bapaume, and the enemy is now retiring to Loupart Wood,

Achiet-le-Petit, and Bucquoy, strongly defended for the time being by a

thick belt of wire.

It is enormously interesting to speculate upon this new plan of the

German High Command. It is a plan forced upon him by steady pressure of

our attacks, which thrust him into bad ground, where the condition of

his troops was hideous, but, beyond all, by the fear that our fighting

power in the spring might break his armies if they stayed on their old

line. Now he is executing with skill, aided by great luck--for the foggy

weather is his luck--a manoeuvre designed to shorten his line, thereby

increasing his offensive and defensive man-power, and to withdraw in the

way that he intends to make it difficult for pursuit, and so to gain

time to fall back upon new and stronger lines of defence.

* * * * *

It is difficult to describe the feelings of our men who go forward to

these villages and capture them, and settle down in them for a day or

two, unless you have gazed at those places for months through narrow

slits in underground chambers, and know that it would be easier to go

from life to eternity than cross over the enemy's wire into those

strongholds while they are inhabited by men with machine-guns.

You cannot imagine the thrill of walking one day into Gommecourt, or

Miraumont, or Irles, without resistance, and seeing in close detail the

way of life led by the men who have been doing their best to kill you.

There is something uncanny in handling the things they handled, in

sitting at the tables where they took their meals, in walking about the

ruins which our guns made above them. I had this thrill when I walked

through Gommecourt--Gommecourt the terrible, and the graveyard of so

many brave London boys who fell here on July 1--and up through

Gommecourt Park, with its rows of riven trees, to a point beyond, and to

a far outpost where a group of soldiers attached to the Sherwood

Foresters of the 46th Division, full of spirit and gaiety, in spite of

the deadly menace about them, had dragged up a heavy trench-mortar and

its monstrous winged shells, which they were firing into a copse 500

yards away where Fritz was holding out. So through the snow I went into

Gommecourt down a road pitted with recent shell-holes, and with a young

Sherwood Forester who said, "It's best to be quick along this track. It

ain't a health resort."

It was not a pretty place at all, and there were nasty noises about it,

as shells went singing overhead, but there was a sinister sense of

romance, a look of white and naked tragedy in snow-covered Gommecourt.

Our guns had played hell with the place, though we could not capture it

on July 1. Thousands of shells, even millions, had flung it into

ruin--the famous chateau, the church, the great barns, the school-house,

and all the buildings here. Not a tree in what had once been a noble

park remained unmutilated. On the day before the Germans left a Stokes

mortar battery of ours fired 1100 shells into Gommecourt in a quarter of

an hour.

"No wonder old Fritz left in a hurry," said the young officer who had

achieved this record. He chuckled at the thought of it, and as he went

through Gommecourt with me pointed out with pride the "top-hole" effect

of all our gun-fire. To him, as a gunner, all this destruction was a

good sight. He stopped in front of a hole big enough to bury a country

cottage, and said, "That was done by old Charley's 9.45 trench-mortar.

Some hole, what?"

"Looks as if some German officer had had to walk home," said the

trench-mortar officer, who was a humorous fellow, as he glanced at a

shattered motor-car.

So many of the young officers of ours are humorous fellows, and I am

bound to say that I never met a merrier party than a little lot I found

at a spot called Pigeon Wood, far beyond Gommecourt, where the enemy

flings shells most of the day and night, so that it is a litter of

broken twigs and branches.

A sergeant-major took me up there and introduced me to his officers.

"This is the real Street of Adventure," he said, "though it's a long way

from Fleet Street"--which I thought was pretty good for a sergeant-major

met in a casual way on a field of battle. It appeared that there was to

be a trench-mortar "stunt" in half an hour or so, and he wanted me to

see "the fun." Through the driving snow we went into the bit of wood,

trampling over the broken twigs and stepping aside from shell-holes, and

because of the nasty noises about--I hear no music in the song of the

shell--I was glad when the sergeant-major went down the entrance of a

dug-out and called out for the officer.

It was one of the deep German dug-outs thirty or forty feet down, and

very dark on the way. In the room below, nicely panelled, were the merry

grigs I had come to meet, and in less than a minute they had made me

welcome, and in less than five I was sitting on a German chair at a

German table, drinking German soda-water out of German glasses, with a

party of English boys 500 yards from the German outposts over the way.

They told me how they had brought their trench-mortar up. It was an

absolute record, and they were as proud and pleased as schoolboys who

have won a game. They roared with laughter at the story of the senior

officer chased by two Boches, and roared again when the captain sent

round to the "chemist's shop" next door for some more soda-water and a

bottle of whisky. They had found thousands of bottles of soda-water, and

thousands of bombs and other things left behind in a hurry, including a

complete change of woman's clothing, now being worn by one of our

Tommies badly in need of clean linen.

"This dug-out is all right," said one of the younger officers, "but you

come and see mine. It's absolutely priceless."

It was one of the best specimens of German architecture I have ever seen

on a battlefield. It was not only panelled but papered. It was furnished

elegantly with a washhand-stand and a gilded mirror and German coloured

prints--and not all our shells could touch it, because of its depth

below the ground. ... I saw the trench-mortar "stunt," which flung up

volcanoes in the German ground by Kite Copse, and stood out in the snow

with a party of men who had nothing between them and the enemy but a

narrow stretch of shell-broken earth, and went away from the wood just

as the enemy began shelling it again, and sat down under the bank with

one of the officers when the enemy "bracketed" the road back with

whiz-bangs, and stopped on the way to take a cup of tea in another

dug-out, and to make friends with other men who were following up the

enemy, and moving into German apartments for a night or so, before they

go farther on, with that keen and spirited courage which is the only

good thing in this war. They are mostly boys--I am a Rip Van Winkle to

them--and with the heart of boyhood they take deadly risks lightly and

make a good joke of a bad business, and are very frightened sometimes

and make a joke of that, and are great soldiers though they were never

meant for the trade. The enemy is falling back still, but these boys of

ours are catching him up, and are quick in pursuit, in spite of the foul

ground and the foul weather and the barrage of his guns.

VIII

WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW

MARCH 3

The weather is still favourable to the enemy in his plan of withdrawal.

Yesterday there was over all the battlefields such a solid fog, after a

night of frost which condensed the earth's moisture, that one could not

see fifty yards ahead. Our airmen, if they had thought it worth while

mounting, would have stared down into this white mist and seen nothing

else. Our gunners had to fire "off the map" at a time when direct

observation would have been most valuable. I do not remember to have

seen anything so uncanny on this front as the effect of our men moving

in this heavy wet darkness like legions of shadows looming up in a grey

way, and then blotted out. The fog clung to them, dripped from the rims

of their steel helmets, made their breath like steam. The shaggy coats

of horses and mules plastered with heavy streaks of mud were all damp

with little beads of moisture as white as hoar-frost.

Nothing so far in this German movement has been sensational except the

fact itself. Fantastic stories about gas-shells, battles, and great

slaughter in the capture of the enemy's positions are merely conjured up

by people who know nothing of the truth.

The truth is simple and stark. The enemy decided to withdraw, and made

his plans to withdraw with careful thought for detail in order to

frustrate any preparations we might have made to deal him the famous

knock-out blow and in order to save his man-power, not only by escaping

this great slaughter which was drawing near upon him as the weeks

passed, but by shortening his line and so liberating a number of

divisions for offensive and defensive purposes. He timed this

strategical withdrawal well. He made use of the hard frost for the

movement of men and guns and material, and withdrew the last men from

his strongholds on the old line just as the thaw set in, so that the

ground lapsed into quagmire more fearful than before the days of the

long frost, and pursuit for our men and our guns and our material was

doubly difficult. He destroyed what he could not take away, and left

very little behind. He fired many of his dug-outs, and left only a few

snipers and a few machine-gunners in shell-holes and strong posts to

hold up our patrols while the next body of rear-guard outposts fell back

behind the barbed wire in front of the series of diagonal trench lines

which defend the way to Bapaume. In Gommecourt our troops found only one

living man, and he was half dead and quite blind. He had been wounded

twenty-four hours previously by a bomb from one of our scouts and had

crawled back into a dug-out. It is astounding, but, I believe, quite

true, that he knew nothing about the abandonment of Gommecourt, even

when it had been achieved. He would not believe it when our men told

him. He had lain in his earth-hole wondering at the silence, believing

himself deaf as well as blind, except that he could hear the crash of

shells. He was frightened because he could hear no movement of his

fellow-soldiers.

The German scheme is undoubtedly to delay our advance as much as

possible and at the cheapest price to himself, so that much time may

have elapsed (while his submarines are still at work, and his diplomats,

and his propaganda) before we come up to him with all our weight of men

and metal upon the real lines to which he is falling back. By belts of

barbed wire between the lines of retirement, down past Loupart Wood, and

then past Grevillers and Achiet, and outside Bapaume, as well as by

strong bodies of picked troops holding on to these positions until the

last moment before death or capture or escape, and by massing guns

eastward of Bapaume in order to impede our pursuit by long-range fire

from his "heavies," and to hold the pivot while his troops swing back in

this slow and gradual way, he hopes to make things easy for himself and

damnably difficult for us.

* * * * *

MARCH 12

Loupart Wood, a high belt of trees, thick and black against the sky, is

the storm-centre of the battle line on this part of the front. Our guns

were busy with it, flinging shells into its network of naked branches.

The shell-bursts were white against its blackness, and the chalky soil

in front of it was tossed up in spraying fountains. From the enemy's

side high explosives were dropping over Miraumont, and Irles was being

heavily bombarded. It was like a day in the first battles of the Somme,

and brought back to me old memories of frightfulness. Behind me were the

Somme battlefields, one vast landscape of the abomination of desolation

strewn still with the litter of great conflict, with thousands of

unexploded shells lying squat in mud, and hideously tormented out of all

semblance of earth's sweet beauty by millions of shell-holes and the

yawning chasms of mine-craters, and the chaos of innumerable trenches

dug deep and then smashed by the fury of heavy guns. That is an old

picture which I have described, or failed to describe, a score of times

when over this mangled earth, yard by yard, from one ruin to another,

from one copse of broken woodland to another group of black gallows

which were trees, our men went fighting, so that here is the graveyard

of gallant youth, and the Field of Honour which is sacred to the soul of

our race. It was the old picture, but into it came to-day as yesterday

new men of ours who are carrying on the tale to whatever ending it may

have. They came through mud and in mud and with mud. The heavy horses of

the gunners and transport men were all whitened with the wet chalk to

the ears. Mules were ridiculous, like amphibious creatures who had come

up out of the slime to stare with wicked eyes at what men are doing with

the earth's surface. Eight-inch guns were wallowing in bogs from which

their shiny snouts thrust up, belching forth flame. Over the wide,

white, barren stretch of hell which we call the battlefield their

monstrous shells went howling after the full-throated roars which

clouted one's ear-drums like blows from a hammer. And between the guns,

and in front of the guns, and past the guns went our marching men, our

mud men, with wet steel helmets, with gobs of mud on their faces, with

clods of mud growing monstrously upon their boots at every step.

A grim old war, fantastic in its contrasts and in its stage properties!

Once when I heard the chimes of midnight in Covent Garden and stood

drinking at a coffee-stall by Paul's Church I never guessed I should

find such a place of wayside refreshment, such a house on wheels, in

the middle of Armageddon. But there it was to-day, a coffee-stall bang

in the middle of the battlefield, and there, asking for a "mug o'

thick," stood a crowd of English soldiers, worse scarecrows than the

night birds of the London slums and more in need of warmth for body and

soul. Not far away, well under shell-fire, was a London omnibus, and as

a mate in evil days, a Tank.

The rain came down in a thick drizzle. Loupart Wood disappeared like a

ghost picture. Irles was blotted out. Our eight-inch shells went howling

out of a cotton-wool mist. Our men went marching with their steel hats

down against the beat of the rain. It was a wintry scene again--but on

the moist air there was a faint scent not of winter--a smell of wet

earth sweeter than the acrid stench of the battlefields. It was the

breath of spring coming with its promise of life. And with its promise

of death.

* * * * *

The enemy is still holding out in Achiet-le-Petit and Bucquoy, though I

believe his residence there is not for long. From what I saw to-day

watching our bombardment of the line to which he has retreated, it seems

certain that he will be compelled to leave in a hurry, just as he left

Loupart Wood the night before last.

As I went over the battlefields to-day it was made visible to me that

the enemy has suffered most devilish torments in the ground from which

he is now retreating. All north of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys,

and below Loupart Wood, this wild chaos--all so upturned by shell-fire

that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling of our

mother earth--is strewn with bodies of dead German soldiers. They lie

grey wet lumps of death over a great stretch of ground, many of them

half buried by their comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are

stark above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. I stood to-day

in a ravine to which the Regina Trench leads between Pys and Miraumont,

and not any morbid vision of an absinthe-maddened dream of hell could be

more fearful than what I stared at standing there, with the rain beating

on me across the battlefield, and the roar of guns on every side, and

the long rushing whistles of heavy shells in flight over Loupart Wood.

The place was a shambles of German troops. They had had machine-gun

emplacements here, and deep dug-outs under cover of earth-banks. But our

guns had found them out and poured fire upon them. All this garrison had

been killed and cut to pieces before or after death. Their bodies or

their fragments lay in every shape and shapelessness of death, in

puddles of broken trenches or on the edge of deep ponds in

shell-craters. The water was vivid green about them, or red as blood,

with the colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like faces, with holes for

eyes, seemed to stare back at me as I stared at them, not with any

curiosity in this sight of death--for it is not new to me--but counting

their numbers and reckoning the sum of all these things who a little

time ago were living men. Some of our dead lay among them, but out of

850 lying hereabouts, 700 were German soldiers.

Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves nothing alive or

whole when it is concentrated on a place like this, deliberate in

smashing it. Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made

rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of

rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs,

littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing.

Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is

all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly clustered.

For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and

leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity,

killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. Over it

to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was not a soldier, though he

had a steel hat on his head and a khaki uniform. He was a padre who,

with a fellow-officer and a few men, is following up the fighting men,

burying those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their

identity discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has done this, and,

though he is sickened, he goes on with a grim zeal, searching out the

new dead, directing the digging of new graves, covering up Germans who

lie so thick. He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, and

I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good courage in the

abomination of desolation which is our battle-ground.

The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. To save

themselves from another such shambles they are falling back to new

lines, where they hope to be safer from our massed artillery. But as I

saw to-day our gun-fire is following them closely and forcing them back

at a harder pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is

still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, though

that may be long, O Lord! from now.

IX

THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME

MARCH 17

To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops entered Bapaume.

Achiet-le-Petit and Biefvillers also fell into our hands and the enemy

is in retreat across the plains below the Bapaume Ridge.

I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this morning, and the luck

to come out again, and now, sitting down to tell the history of this

day--one of the great days in this war--I feel something of the old

thrill that came to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Marne

and retreated to the Aisne.

Bapaume is ours after a short, sharp fight with its last rear-guard

post. I don't know how much this will mean to people at home, to whom

the town is just a name, familiar only because of its repetition in

dispatches. To us out here it means enormous things--above all, the

completion or result of a great series of battles, in which many of our

best gave their lives so that our troops could attain the ridge across

which they went to-day, and hold the town which is the gateway to the

plains beyond. For this the Canadians fought through Courcelette, where

many of their poor bodies lie even now in the broken ground. For this

the Australians struggled with most grim heroism on the high plateau of

Pozieres, which bears upon every yard of its soil the signs of the most

frightful strife that mankind has known in all the history of warfare.

For another stage on the road to Bapaume London regiments went up to

Eaucourt-l'Abbaye, and the Gordons stormed the white mound of the Butte

de Warlencourt. For the capture of Bapaume our patrols with machine-guns

and trench-mortars, and our gunners with their batteries, have pushed on

through the day and night during recent weeks, gaining La Barque and

Ligny and Thilloy, not sleeping night after night, not resting, so that

beards have grown on young chins, and the eyes of these men look glazed

and dead except for the fire that lights up in them when there is

another bit of work to do. For this, thousands of British soldiers have

laboured like ants--it is all like a monstrous ant-heap in

commotion--carrying up material of war, building roads over quagmires,

laying down railroads under shell-fire, plugging up shell-craters with

bricks and stone so that the horse transport can follow, and the guns

get forward and the way be made smooth for the fall of Bapaume.... So

Bapaume is ours. Years ago, and months ago, and weeks ago, I have

travelled the road towards Bapaume from Amiens to Albert, from that city

of the Falling Virgin, past the vast mine-crater of La Boisselle to

Pozieres and beyond, and always I and comrades of mine have glanced

sideways and smiled grimly at the milestones which said so many

kilometres to Bapaume--and yet a world of strife to go. Now those stones

will not stare up at us with irony. There is no longer a point on the

road where one has to halt lest one should die. To-day I walked past the

milestones--ten, seven, four, three, one--and then into Bapaume, and did

not die, though to tell the truth death missed me only a yard or two. I

have had many strange and memorable walks in war, but none more

wonderful than this, for really it was a strange way this road to

Bapaume, with all the tragedy and all the courage of this warfare, and

all the ugly spirit of it on every side. I walked through the highway of

our greatest battles up from Pozieres, past Courcelette, with

Martinpuich to the right, past the ruins of Destremont Farm, and into

the ruins of Le Sars. Thence the road struck straight towards Bapaume,

with the grey pyramid of the Butte de Warlencourt on one side and the

frightful turmoil of Warlencourt village on the other. I did not walk

alone along this way through the litter of many battles, through its

muck and stench and corruption under a fair blue sky, with wisps of

white cloud above and the glitter of spring sunshine over all the white

leprous landscape of these fields. Australian soldiers were going the

same way--towards Bapaume. Some of them wore sprigs of shamrock in their

buttonholes, and I remembered it was St. Patrick's Day. Some of them

were gunners, and some were pioneers, and some were Generals and high

officers, and they had the look of victory upon them and were talking

cheerily about the great news of the day. It was in the neighbourhood of

a haunted-looking place called "La Coupe-gueule," which means

Cut-throat, once I imagine a farmstead or estaminet, that the road

became the scene of very recent warfare--a few hours old or a few

minutes. One is very quick to read how old the signs are by the look of

the earth, by smells and sounds, by little, sure, alarming signs. Dead

horses lay about--newly dead. Shell-craters with clean sides pock-marked

the earth ten feet deep. Aeroplanes had crashed down, one of them a few

minutes ago. A car came along and I saw a young pilot lying back

wounded, with another officer smoking a cigarette, grave-eyed and

pallid. Pools of red mud were on either side of the road, or in the

middle of it. Everywhere in neighbouring ground hidden batteries were

firing ceaselessly, the long sixty-pounders making sharp reports that

stunned one's ears, the field-guns firing rapidly with sharp knocks. Up

in the blue sky there was other gunning. Flights of our aeroplanes were

up singing with a loud, deep, humming music as of monstrous bees. Our

"Archies" were strafing a German plane, venturesome over our country.

High up in the blue was the rattle of machine-gun fire. Down from

Bapaume came a procession of stretcher-bearers with wounded comrades

shoulder high, borne like heroes, slowly and with unconscious dignity,

by these tall men in steel helmets. The enemy had ruined the road in

several places with enormous craters, to stop our progress. They were

twenty yards across, and very deep, and fearful pitfalls in the dark.

Past the ruins of La Barque, past the ruins of Ligny-Thilloy and

Thilloy, went the road to Bapaume. Behind me now on the left was Loupart

Wood, the storm-centre of strife when I went up to it a few days ago,

and Grevillers beside it, smashed to death, and then presently and quite

suddenly I came into sight of Bapaume. It was only a few hundred yards

away, and I could see every detail of its streets and houses. A street

along the Bapaume road went straight into the town, and then went

sharply at right angles, so that all the length of Bapaume lay in front

of me. The sun was upon it, shining very bright and clear upon its

houses. It was a sun-picture of destruction. Bapaume was still standing,

but broken and burnt.

[Illustration: Map of the front from Arras to Soissons]

In the middle of Bapaume stood the remnant of the old clock-tower, a

tower of brown brick, like the houses about it, but broken off at the

top, only two-thirds of its former height, and without the clock which

used to tell us the time miles away when we gazed through telescopes

from distant observation-posts, when we still had miles to go on the way

to Bapaume. On the right of the old tower the town was burning, not in

flames when I entered, but with volumes of white smoke issuing slowly

from a row of red villas already gutted by fires lighted before the

Germans left.

A Colonel came riding out of Bapaume. He was carrying a big German

beer-jug, and showed me his trophy, leaning down over his saddle to let

me read the words:

Zum Feldgrauen Hilfe

"Is it pretty easy to get into Bapaume?" I asked.

"Barring the heavy stuff," he said. "They're putting over shells at the

rate of two or three a minute."

They were, and it was not pleasant, this walk into Bapaume, though very

interesting.

It was when I came to an old farmhouse and inn--the shell of a place--on

the left of the road (Duhamel-Equarriseur, Telephone No. 30) that I knew

the full menace of this hour was above and about. The enemy was firing a

great number of shells into Bapaume. They came towards us with that

rushing, howling noise which gives one a great fear of instant death,

and burst with crashes among the neighbouring houses. They were high

explosives, but shrapnel was bursting high, with thunderclaps, which

left behind greenish clouds and scattered bullets down. I went through

the outer defences of Bapaume, walking with a General who was on his way

to the town, and who pointed out the strength of the place. Lord! It was

still horribly strong, and would have cost us many lives to take by

assault. Three belts of wire, very thick, stood solid and strong, in a

wide curve all round the town. The enemy had dug trenches quite

recently, so that the earth was fresh and brown, and dug them well and

perfectly. Only here and there had they been broken by our shell-fire,

though some of the dug-outs had been blown in.

Just outside Bapaume, on the south-east side, is an old citadel built

centuries ago and now overgrown with fir-trees which would have given a

great field of fire to German machine-gunners, and I went afterwards

into snipers' posts, and stood at the entrance of tunnels and

bomb-proof shelters, not going down or touching any of the litter about

because of the danger lurking there in dark entries and in

innocent-looking wires and implements. There was a great litter

everywhere, for the German soldiers had left behind large numbers of

long-handled bombs and thousands of cartridges, and many tools and

implements.

Before getting into Bapaume I crossed the railway line from Arras,

through Biefvillers, which was now on fire. They had torn up the rails

here, but there was still the track, and the signal-boxes and signs in

German.

Im Bahnhof

Nur 10 Km.

That is to say, the speed of trains was to be only 10 kilometres an hour

into the station.

Another signboard directed the way for "Vieh" and "Pferde" (cattle and

horses), and everywhere there were notice-boards to trenches and

dug-outs:

Nach 1 Stellung

Fuer zwei Offizieren

As I entered Bapaume I noticed first, if my memory serves, the Hotel de

Commerce, with "garage" painted on a shell-broken wall, and immediately

facing me an old wooden house with a shoot for flour. Many of the houses

had collapsed as though built of cards, with all their roofs level with

the ground. Others were cut in half, showing all their rooms and

landings, and others were gutted in ways familiar to English people

after Zeppelin raids. Higher up on the right, as I have said, rows of

red-brick villas were burnt out, and smoke was rising in steady volumes

from this quarter of the town. The church, a white stone building, was

also smouldering. There were no Germans in the town, unless men are

still hiding there. The only living inhabitant was a little kitten which

ran across the square and was captured by our patrols, who now have it

as a pet.

There were other men living early in the morning, but they are now dead.

It was a company of German machine-gunners who held out as the last

rear-guard. They fired heavily at our men, but were quickly overpowered.

The first message that came back from the entering troops was laconic:

"While entering Bapaume we came across a party the whole of which

was accounted for. The mopping-up of Bapaume is now complete."

I did not stay very long in the town. It was not a health resort. High

explosives were crumping every part of the town, and the buildings were

falling. Pip-squeaks were flung about horribly, and when I came out with

the General and another officer a flush of them came yelling at us and

burst very close, flinging up the ground only a few yards away. The

roadway of "pave" had been hurled up in huge chumps of stone, and

shrapnel was again breaking to the right of us. I struck across country

eastwards to see the promised land, and on the way to the near ridge

turned and stared back at Bapaume in the glow of the sunset. Ours at

last!

The fires were still burning in the other villages, and it was such a

scene of war as I saw first when Dixmude was a flaming torch and Pervyse

was alight in the beginning of the world-conflict.... At about half-past

nine that night the enemy fired several quick rounds from his

field-batteries. Then there was a strange silence, unbroken by any

shell-fire. The Germans had fired their last shot in the battles of the

Somme.

X

THE RESCUE OF PERONNE

MARCH 18

To-day at 7 A.M. a battalion of the Royal Warwicks of the 48th Division

entered Peronne.

Standing alone that statement would be sensational enough. The French

fought for Peronne desperately through more than two years of war, and

now it is the luck of the British troops to enter it, as yesterday we

entered Bapaume, after a short action with the enemy's rear-guards. But

the news does not stand alone. The whole of the old German line south of

Arras, strong as one vast fortress, built by the labour of millions of

men, dug and tunnelled and cemented and timbered, with thousands of

machine-gun redoubts, with an immense maze of trenches, protected by

forests of barbed wire, had slipped away as though by a landslide, and

the enemy is in rapid retreat to new lines some miles away. As he goes

he is laying fire and waste to the countryside. North-east of Bapaume,

into which I went yesterday with our troops, and west of Peronne, scores

of villages are burning. One of them, larger than a village, the town of

Athies, is a flaming torch visible for miles around. Others are

smouldering ruins, from which volumes of smoke are rolling up into the

clear blue sky. Of all this great tract of France, which the enemy has

been forced to abandon to avoid the menace of combined attack, there is

no beauty left, and no homesteads, nor farms, but only black ruins and

devastation everywhere. The enemy is adopting the full cruelty of war's

malignancy. He has fouled the wells in his wake, so that if our

soldiers' horses should drink there they will die. Over the water-ways

he has burnt his bridges. Cross-roads have been mined, opening up

enormous craters like those I saw yesterday outside Bapaume.

High-explosive traps have been placed in the way of our patrols, to

scatter them in fragments if they lack caution.

It is impossible to give our exact line at the present moment. We have

no exact line. Village after village has fallen into our hands since

midday yesterday. Our cavalry patrols are over the hills and far away.

Our infantry patrols are pushing forward unto new territory, so that

only aeroplanes know the exact whereabouts. As one aviator has reported:

"Our men are lighting fires and taking their dinners at places off

the map. They are going into pubs which have been burnt out to find

beer which is not there."

North and east of Bapaume our patrols have gone beyond the villages of

Rocquenes, Bancourt, Favreuil, and Sapignies. Intelligence officers

riding out on bicycles to these places were scared to find themselves so

lonely, and believed that the enemy must be close at hand. But the enemy

was still farther off. Our cavalry, working up past Logeast Wood,

penetrated east of Acheit-le-Grand and turned the German line of

Behagnies-Ytres.

Much farther south, in the neighbourhood of Nesle, French and British

cavalry patrols came into touch to-day, and one of our aviators reports

that he saw French civilians waving flags and cheering them.

The Germans have a cavalry screen behind their rear-guards. They were

seen yesterday north of Bapaume and southwards beyond Roye. And some of

them were chased by a British airman at a place called Ennemain. He

swooped low like an albatross, and brought a man off his horse by a

machine-gun bullet. Others stampeded from this terrible bird.

This morning our troops were through Eterpigny beyond Barleux, and found

the villages of Misery and Marchelepot. There was some fighting last

night and this morning in the neighbourhood of Peronne. The enemy had

snipers and machine-gunners about, and kept some of their batteries back

until the last possible moment, flinging 5.9's and smaller shells over

our side of the lines, and firing heavily until about ten o'clock. Then

the gun-fire ceased, and there was not a shot. His guns were going back

along the dark roads, his rear-guards moved away, leaving behind them

their great defensive works of the Bapaume Ridge, and burning villages.

* * * * *

MARCH 19

Refusing to give battle, the enemy has retired still farther over open

country east of Bapaume, and our cavalry patrols are in touch with his

mounted rear-guards. The exact location is vague, as the movement

continues, and our cavalry is in small units, moving cautiously between

a large number of burning villages, which are everywhere alight. Small

parties of the enemy were encountered last night in the open near Ytres

and Berthincourt, and some snipers in an omnibus opened fire upon a

cavalry patrol, and were scattered by an aeroplane which swooped low,

sweeping them with machine-gun bullets.

South of the Somme our cavalry got in touch with German cavalry at Rouy

and with German cyclists at Potte. All the bridges have been destroyed

to cover the enemy's retreat, as at Rouy and Breuil, and all the wells

have been filled with filth and rubbish.

It is a most extraordinary experience to follow up through this

abandoned country from which the enemy has fled, as I have found to-day

in tramping through the district of Peronne and into that deserted and

destroyed town. A few weeks ago I went a journey to the new lines we had

taken over from the French south of the Somme. Then it was under the

full blast of shell-fire, and not a day passed without the enemy

flinging high explosives into the ruined villages of Herbecourt,

Estrees, Flaucourt, and Biaches. From Mont-St.-Quentin, on the flank of

Peronne, he had the observation of all our ground, so that it was

horrible to see that hill staring down on one, and by daylight in the

open country one moved always under the menace of death. To-day that

menace had gone. The evil spell had lifted, and we moved freely in the

sight of Mont-St.-Quentin, unafraid and with a strange sense of safety.

He had gone from there yesterday morning, and, at the same time, had

crept away from the trenches at Biaches, and across his wooden bridges

to Peronne, and out of this town to the open country, hurrying through

the night to escape from our pursuit.

I went down into Biaches, a wild chaos of trenches and dug-outs and

ruin, and passed through the front line held by our troops until about

6.30 yesterday morning, and went with difficulty through the German

barbed wire still uncut, so that we were tangled and caught in it. Then

I passed into the old German lines, and went across the wooden causeway

built by them over the marshes down to the bank of the Somme. On the

other side of the river loop I saw for the first time Peronne, taken by

the enemy in the autumn of 1914, and fought for furiously by the French,

who regained it for a while and lost it again. It was dead quiet over

there. No shell burst over it, but a little smoke rolled above its

houses. From that distance, the broad river's width, it did not look

much destroyed. It was only afterwards that I saw how much. Several

wooden bridges spanned the Somme, and I tried two of these to get

across, but there were great gaps which I could not jump. Before leaving

the enemy had broken them and tried to hide the damage from the view of

our airmen by putting up straw screens. All the trees in the marshes had

been slashed by our shell-fire. Empty barrels floated in the water with

broken boats, and the old barge, called Notre Dame d'Amiens, was blown

in half. Snipers' posts had been built, outfacing our lines, and German

ammunition and bombs and coiled wire and a great litter of timber lay

about.

I managed at last to get into Peronne by a wide curve through the

Faubourg de Paris, over the piled stones of a broken bridge with planks

across the gaps put there by our soldiers so that the enemy could be

followed in pursuit. He had been careful to check us as long as

possible, though it was not very long, for an hour after his going the

Royal Warwicks and some Londoners marched unto the Grande Place. Down

the Faubourg de Paris all the trees had been cut down, so that they had

crashed across the street, making a great barricade. Before going,

firebrands had been at work, setting alight all the houses not already

smashed by shell-fire. They were burning, when I passed them, so

fiercely that the hot breath of the flames was upon my face. Even now it

was possible to see that Peronne had once been a little town of

old-world dignity and charm. Frontages of some of these gutted houses

were richly carved in Renaissance style, among them being the ruins of

the Palais de Justice and the Hotel de Ville and the Maison Municipale.

Here and there along the Rue St.-Fursy and in the Grande Place was an

old French mansion built before the Revolution, now just a skeleton of

broken brickwork and timber. Though many houses were still standing

enough to see they were houses, there was hardly one that had escaped

the wrath of war. It was pitiful to see here and there old signs,

showing the life of the town in peace, such as the "Librairie Nouvelle,"

the "Teinturerie Parisienne" belonging to Mme. Poitevineau, the Notary's

house, full of legal books and papers scattered on a charred floor

beneath a gaping roof, a shop for "articles de chasse" kept by one

Monsieur Bourdin. Those signboards, reminding one of Peronne before the

war, were side by side with other signboards showing the way of German

life until 6.30 yesterday morning. At the entrance to the town is a

notice: "Durchgang bei Tage streng Verboten."

Most houses are labelled, "Keller fuer 60 Mann." At the entrance to a

dug-out below the town hall is the notice, "Verwundete und Kranke" (For

wounded and sick). The only inhabitants of the Grande Place were a big

black cat, looking sick and sorry for itself, and a dummy figure dressed

as a French Zouave, sprawling below the pedestal of a statue to

Catherine de Poix, heroine of the siege of 1870. The statue had been

taken away, like that of Faidherbe in the square of Bapaume. On top of

the pedestal had been laid the dummy figure in French uniform, but our

soldiers removed it. Peronne was a dead town, like Ypres, like Bapaume,

like all those villages in the wake of the German retreat. Over its old

fortifications, built by Vauban, and over its marshes wild duck are

flying.