THE BATTLE OF ARRAS
I
ARRAS AND THE VIMY RIDGE
APRIL 9
To-day at dawn our armies began a battle which, if Fate has any kindness
for the world, may be the beginning of the last great battles of the
war. Our troops attacked on a wide front including the Vimy Ridge--that
grim hill which dominates the plain of Douai and the coalfields of
Lens--and the German positions around Arras. In spite of bad fortune in
the weather at the beginning of the day, so bad that there was no
visibility for the airmen, and our men had to struggle forward in a
heavy rain-storm, the first attacks have been successful, and the enemy
has lost much ground, falling back in retreat to strong rear-guard lines
where he is now fighting desperately.
The line of our attack covers a front of some twelve miles southwards
from Givenchy-en-Gohelle, and is a sledge-hammer blow threatening to
break the northern end of the Hindenburg line, already menaced round
St.-Quentin. As soon as the enemy was forced to retreat from the country
east of Bapaume and Peronne, in order to escape a decisive blow on that
line, he hurried up divisions and guns northwards to counter our attack
there, while he prepared a new line of defence known as the Wotan line,
as the southern part of the Hindenburg line, which joins it, is known as
the Siegfried position, after two great heroes of old German mythology.
He hoped to escape there before our new attack was ready, but we have
been too quick for him, and his own plans were frustrated. So to-day
began another titanic conflict which the world will hold its breath to
watch, because of all that hangs upon it.
I have seen the fury of this beginning, and all the sky on fire with it,
the most tragic and frightful sight that men have ever seen, with an
infernal splendour beyond words to tell. The bombardment which went
before the infantry assault lasted for several days, and reached a great
height yesterday, when coming from the south I saw it for the first
time. I went up in darkness long before light broke to-day to watch the
opening of the battle. It was very cold, with a sharp wind blowing from
the south-east and rain-squalls. The roads were quiet until I drew near
to Arras, and then onwards there was the traffic of marching men going
up to the fighting-lines, and of their transport columns, and of many
ambulances. In darkness there were hundreds of little red lights, the
glow of cigarette ends. Every now and then one of the men would strike a
match, holding it in the hollow of his hands and bending his head to it,
so that his face was illumined--one of our English faces, clear-cut and
strong. The wind blew sparks from cigarette ends like fireflies. Outside
one camp a battalion was marching away, a regiment of shadow-forms, and
on the bank above them the band was playing them out with fifes and
drums, such a merry little tune, so whimsical and yet so sad also in the
heart of it, as it came trilling out of darkness. On each side of me as
I passed by men were deeply massed, and they were whistling and singing
and calling out to each other. Away before them were the fires of death,
to which they were going very steadily, with a tune on their lips,
carrying their rifles and shovels and iron rations, while the rain
played a tattoo on their steel hats.
I went to a place a little outside Arras on the west side. It was not
quite dark, because there was a kind of suffused light from the hidden
moon, so that I could see the black mass of the cathedral city, the
storm-centre of this battle, and away behind me to the left the tall,
broken towers of Mont-St.-Eloi, white and ghostly looking, across to the
Vimy Ridge. The bombardment was now in full blast. It was a beautiful
and devilish thing, and the beauty of it and not the evil of it put a
spell upon one's senses. All our batteries, too many to count, were
firing, and thousands of gun-flashes were winking and blinking from the
hollows and hiding-places, and all their shells were rushing through
the sky as though flocks of great birds were in flight, and all were
bursting over German positions, with long flames which rent the darkness
and waved sword-blades of quivering light along the ridges. The earth
opened, and pools of red fire gushed out. Star-shells burst
magnificently, pouring down golden rain. Mines exploded east and west of
Arras, and in a wide sweep from Vimy Ridge to Blangy southwards, and
voluminous clouds, all bright with a glory of infernal fire, rolled up
to the sky. The wind blew strongly across, beating back the noise of
guns, but the air was all filled with the deep roar and the slamming
knocks of single heavies and the drum-fire of field-guns.
The first attack was at 5.30. Officers were looking at their
wrist-watches as on a day in July last year. The earth lightened. In
rank grass, looking white and old, scrubs of barbed wire were black on
it. A few minutes before 5.30 the guns almost ceased fire, so that there
was a strange, solemn hush. We waited, and pulses beat faster than
second-hands. "They're away," said a voice by my side. The bombardment
broke out again with new and enormous effects of fire and sound. The
enemy was shelling Arras heavily, and black shrapnel and high explosives
came over from his lines. But our gun-fire was twenty times as great.
Around the whole sweep of his lines green lights rose. They were signals
of distress, and his men were calling for help. It was dawn now, but
clouded and storm-swept. A few airmen came out with the wind tearing at
their wings, but they could see nothing in the mist and driven rain. I
went down to the outer ramparts of Arras. The eastern suburb of Blangy
was already in our hands. On the higher ground beyond our men were
fighting forward. I saw two waves of infantry advancing against the
enemy's trenches, preceded by our barrage of field-guns. They went in a
slow, leisurely way, not hurried, though the enemy's shrapnel was
searching for them.
"Grand fellows," said an officer lying next to me on the wet slope. "Oh,
topping!"
Fifteen minutes afterwards groups of men came back. They were British
wounded and German prisoners. They were met on the roadside by medical
officers, who patched them up there and then before they were taken to
the field-hospitals in ambulances. From these men, hit by shrapnel and
machine-gun bullets, I heard the first news of progress. They were
bloody and exhausted, but claimed success.
"We did fine," said one of them. "We were through the fourth lines
before I was knocked out."
"Not many Germans in the first trenches," said another, "and no real
trenches either, after our shelling. We had knocked their dug-outs out,
and their dead were lying thick, and living ones put their hands up."
There were Tanks in action. Some of the men had seen them crawling
forward over the open country, and then had lost sight of them. In the
night the enemy had withdrawn all but his rear-guard posts to the
trenches farther back, where he resisted fiercely with incessant
machine-gun fire. The enemy's trench system south of Arras was
enormously strong, but our bombardment had pounded it, and our men went
through to the reserve support trench, and then on to the chain of posts
in front of the Hangest Trench, which was strongly held, and after heavy
fighting with bombs and bayonets to the Observatory Ridge, from which
for two years and a half the enemy has looked down, directing the fire
of his batteries against the French and British positions. Our storm
troops in this part of the line were all men of the old English county
regiments--Norfolks, Suffolks, Essex, Berkshires, Sussex, Middlesex,
Queen's, Buffs, and Royal West Kents of the 12th Division. There was
fierce fighting in Tilloy, to the south of Arras, by the Suffolks,
Shropshire Light Infantry, and Royal Welsh Fusiliers of the 3rd
Division, and afterwards they were held up by machine-gun fire from two
formidable positions called the "Harp" and "Telegraph Hill," the former
being a fortress of trenches shaped like an Irish harp, the latter
rising to a high mound. These were taken by English troops and the Scots
of the 15th Division, with the help of Tanks, which advanced upon them
in their leisurely way, climbed up banks and over parapets, sitting for
a while to rest and then waddling forward again, shaking machine-gun
bullets from steel flanks, and pouring deadly fire into the enemy's
positions, and so mastering the ground.
North of the Scarpe (north-east of Arras) the whole system of trenches
was taken; and north again, along the Vimy Ridge, the Canadians and
Highlanders of the 51st Division achieved a heroic success by gaining
this high dominating ground, which was the scene of some of the
fiercest French battles in the first part of the war, and which is a
great wall defending Douai. It was reckoned up to noon to-day that over
3000 prisoners had been taken. They are streaming down to prisoners'
camps, and to our men who pass them on the roads they are the best
proofs of a victorious day.
Those of us who knew what would happen to-day--the beginning of another
series of battles greater perhaps than the struggle of the Somme--found
ourselves yesterday filled with a tense, restless emotion. Some of us
smiled with a kind of tragic irony, because it was Easter Sunday. In
little villages behind the battle lines the bells of French churches
were ringing gladly because the Lord had risen; and on the altar steps
priests were reciting the old words of faith, "Resurrexi et adhuc tecum
sum! Alleluia!" The earth was glad yesterday. For the first time this
year the sun had a touch of warmth in it--though patches of snow still
staved white under the shelter of the banks--and the sky was blue, and
the light glinted on wet tree-trunks and in the furrows of the
new-ploughed earth. As I went up the road to the battle lines I passed a
battalion of our men--the men who are fighting to-day--standing in a
hollow square with bowed heads, while the chaplain conducted the Easter
service. It was Easter Sunday, but no truce of God. I went to a field
outside Arras, and looked into the ruins of the cathedral city. The
cathedral itself stood clear in the sunlight, with a deep black shadow
where its roof and aisles had been. Beyond was a ragged pinnacle of
stone--the once glorious town hall and a French barracks--and all the
broken streets going out to the Cambrai road. It was hell in Arras,
though Easter Sunday. The enemy was flinging high explosives into the
city, and clouds of shrapnel burst above, black and green. All around
the country too, his shells were exploding in a scattered, aimless way,
and from our side there was a heavy bombardment all along the Vimy
Ridge, above Neuville-St.-Vaast, and sweeping round above St.-Nicholas
and Blangy, two suburbs of Arras, and then south-west of the city on the
ridge above the road to Cambrai. It was one continuous roar of death,
and all the batteries were firing steadily. I watched our shells burst,
and some of them were monstrous, raising great lingering clouds above
the German lines.
There was one figure in this landscape of war who made some officers
about me laugh. He was a French ploughman who upholds the tradition of
war. Zola saw him in 1870, and I have seen him on the edge of the other
battlefields; and here he was again driving a pair of sturdy horses and
his plough across the sloping field--not a furlong away from the town
where the German shells were raising rosy clouds of brick-dust. So he
gave praise to the Lord on Easter morning, and prepared the harvests
which shall be gathered after the war.
All behind the front of battle was a great traffic, and all that modern
warfare means in the organization and preparation of an enormous
operation was here in movement. I had just come from our outpost lines
down south from the silence of that great desert which the enemy has
left in the wake of his retreat, east of Bapaume and Peronne, and from
that open warfare with village fighting, where small bodies of our
infantry and cavalry have been clearing the countryside of rear-guard
posts. Here, round about Arras, was the concentration for the old form
of battle attack upon entrenched positions, fortified hills and strong
natural fortresses, defended by massed guns as before the battles of the
Somme. For miles on the way to the front were great camps, great stores,
and restless activity everywhere. Supply columns of food for men and
guns moved forward in an endless tide. Transport mules passed in long
trails. Field-batteries went up to add to the mass of metal ready to
pour fire upon the German lines. It was a vast circus of the world's
great war, and everything that belongs to the machinery of killing
streamed on and on. Columns of ambulances for the rescue, and not for
that other side of the business, came in procession, followed by an army
of stretcher-bearers, more than I have ever seen before, marching
cheerily as though in a pageant. In some of the ambulances were Army
nurses, and men marching on the roads waved their hands to them, and
they laughed and waved back. In the fields by the roadsides men were
resting, lying on the wet earth, between two spells of a long march or
encamped in rest, the same kind of men whom I saw on July 1 of last
year, some of them the same men--our boys, clean-shaven, grey-eyed, so
young-looking, so splendid to see. Some of them sat between their
stacked rifles writing letters home. And the tide of traffic passed them
and flowed on to the edge of the battlefields, where to-day they are
fighting.
[Illustration: LENS, VIMY RIDGE AND ARRAS
London: W^m. Heinemann _Stanford's Geog^l. Estab^t., London_]
* * * * *
APRIL 10
The enemy has lost already nearly 10,000 prisoners and more than half a
hundred guns, and in dead and wounded his losses are great. He is in
retreat south of the Vimy Ridge to defensive lines farther back, and as
he goes our guns are smashing him along the roads. During the night the
Canadians gained the last point, called Hill 145, on the Vimy Ridge,
where the Germans held out in a pocket with machine-guns, and this
morning the whole of that high ridge, which dominates the plains to
Douai, is in our hands, so that there is removed from our path the high
barrier for which the French and ourselves have fought through bloody
years. Yesterday before daylight and afterwards I saw this ridge of Vimy
all on fire with the light of great gun-fire. The enemy was there in
strength, and his guns were answering ours with a heavy barrage of high
explosives. This morning the scene was changed as by a miracle. Snow was
falling, blown gustily across the battlefields, and powdering the capes
and helmets of our men as they rode or marched forward to the front. But
presently sunlight broke through the storm-clouds and flooded all the
countryside by Neuville-St.-Vaast and Thelus and La Folie Farm, up to
the crest of the ridge, where the Canadians and Highlanders of the 51st
Division had just fought their way with such high valour. Our batteries
were firing from many hiding-places, revealed by short, sharp flashes of
light, but few answering shells came back, and the ridge itself, patched
with snowdrift, was quiet as any hill of peace. It was astounding to
think that not a single German stayed up there out of all these who had
held it yesterday, unless some poor wounded devils still cower in the
deep tunnels which pierce the hill-side. It was almost unbelievable to
me, who have known the evil of this high ridge month after month and
year after year, and the deadly menace which lurked about its lower
slopes. Yet I saw proof below, where all Germans who had been there at
dawn yesterday, thousands of them, were down in our lines, drawn up in
battalions, marshalling themselves, grinning at the fate which had come
to them and spared their lives.
The Canadian attack yesterday was astoundingly successful, and carried
out by high-spirited men, the victors of Courcelette in the battles of
the Somme, who had before the advance an utter and joyous confidence of
victory. On their right were the Highland Brigades of the 51st Division
who fought at Beaumont-Hamel, and who shared the honour of that day with
the Canadians, taking as many prisoners and gaining a great part of the
ridge. They went away at dawn, through the mud and rain which made
scarecrows of them. They followed close and warily to the barrage of our
guns, the most stupendous line of fire ever seen, and by 6.30 they had
taken their first objectives, which included the whole front-line system
of German trenches above Neuville-St.-Vaast, by La Folie Farm and La
Folie Wood, and up by Thelus, where they met with fierce resistance. The
German garrisons were for the most part in long, deep tunnels, pierced
through the hill as assembly ditches. There were hundreds of them in
Prinz Arnault Tunnel, and hundreds more in Great Volker Tunnel, but as
the Canadians and Scots surged up to them with wave after wave of
bayonets German soldiers streamed out and came running forward with
hands up. They were eager to surrender, and their great desire was to
get down from Vimy Ridge and the barrage of their own guns. That barrage
fell heavily and fiercely upon the Turco Trench, but too late to do much
damage to our men, who had already gone beyond it. The Canadian
casualties on the morning of attack were not heavy in comparison with
the expected losses, though, God knows, heavy enough, but the German
prisoners were glad to pay for the gift of life by carrying our wounded
back. The eagerness of these men was pitiful, and now and then
grotesque. At least the Canadian escorts found good laughing matter in
the enormous numbers of men they had to guard and in the way the
prisoners themselves directed the latest comers to barbed-wire
enclosures, and with deep satisfaction acted as masters of the ceremony
to their own captivity. I have never seen such cheerful prisoners,
although for the most part they were without overcoats and in a cold
blizzard of snow. They were joking with each other, and in high good
humour, because life with all its hardships was dear to them, and they
had the luck of life. They were of all sizes and ages and types. I saw
elderly, whiskered men with big spectacles, belonging to the professor
tribe, and young lads who ought to have been in German high schools.
Some of their faces looked very wizened and small beneath their great
shrapnel helmets. Many of them looked ill and starved, but others were
tall, stout, hefty fellows, who should have made good fighting men if
they had any stomach for the job. There were many officers standing
apart. Canadians took over two hundred of them, among whom were several
forward observing officers, very bad tempered with their luck, because
the men had not told them they were going to bolt and had left them in
front positions. All officers were disconcerted because of the
cheerfulness of the men at being taken. I talked with a few of them.
They told me of the horrors of living under our bombardment. Some of
them had been without food for four days, because our gun-fire had boxed
them in.
"When do you think the war will end?" I asked one of them.
"When the English are in Berlin," he answered, and I think he meant that
that would be a long time.
Another officer said, "In two months," and gave no reason for his
certainty.
"What about America?" I asked one of them. He shrugged his shoulders,
and said, "It is bad for us, very bad; but, after all, America can't
send an army across the ocean."
At this statement Canadian soldiers standing around laughed loudly, and
said, "Don't you believe it, old sport. We have come along to fight you,
and the Yankees will do the same."
By three o'clock in the afternoon the Canadians and the Highland
Brigades had gained the whole of the ridge except the high strong post
on the left of Hill 145, captured during the night. Our gun-fire had
helped them by breaking down all the wire, even round Heroes' Wood and
Count's Wood, where it was very thick and strong. Thelus was wiped
utterly off the map. This morning Canadian patrols pushed in a
snow-storm through Farbus Wood, and established outposts on the railway
embankment. Some of the bravest work was done by forward observing
officers, who climbed to the top of Vimy Ridge as soon as it was
captured, and through the heavy fire barrages reported back to the
artillery all the movements seen by them in the country below.
In spite of the wild day, our flying men were riding the storm and
signalling to the gunners who were rushing up their field-guns. "Our
60-pounders," said a Canadian Officer, "had the day of their lives."
They found many targets. There were trains moving in Vimy village and
they hit them. There were troops massing on sloping ground and they were
shattered. There were guns and limber on the move, and men and horses
were killed.
Above all the prisoners taken yesterday by the English, Scottish, and
Canadian troops the enemy's losses were frightful, and the scenes behind
his lines must have been hideous in slaughter and terror. On the right
of Arras there was hard and costly fighting in Blangy and Tilloy and
onwards to Feuchy. On this side the Germans fought most fiercely, and
the Shropshires, Suffolks, Royal Fusiliers, and Welsh Fusiliers of the
3rd Division were held up near Feuchy Chapel and other strong points
until our gun-fire knocked out these works and made way for them.
Fifty-four guns were taken here on the east side of Arras, and to-day
the pursuit of the beaten enemy continues.
II
LONDONERS THROUGH THE GERMAN LINES
The Londoners' attack at dawn was one of the splendid episodes of the
battle. They went through the German lines in long waves, and streamed
forward like a living tide, very quick and very far, taking a thousand
prisoners on their way through Neuville-Vitasse and Mercatel. Later in
the day they were held up in their right flank by enfilade fire, as the
troops on their right were in difficulties against uncut wire and
machine-guns, and from that time onwards the London men of the 56th
Division had perilous hours and hard, costly fighting. They were forced
to extend beyond their line on the left to join up the gap between
themselves and the troops to their north, and to work down with bombing
parties on the right to gain ground in which the Germans were holding
out desperately and inflicting many casualties on our men. In the centre
the 56th Division was ordered to attack fortified villages from which
machine-gun bullets swept the ground and where our assault was checked
by stout belts of wire with unbroken strands. It was in those hours on
April 9 and 10 that many young London men showed the highest qualities
of spirit, risking death, and worse than death, with most desperate
gallantry.
A young subaltern of the Middlesex Regiment saw those wire traps in the
centre of Neuville-Vitasse, and led the way to them with a party of
bombers and Lewis-gunners, smashed them up, and jumped on the
machine-guns beyond. It opened the gate to all the other
Londoners--Kensingtons, Rangers, and London Scottish--who swept through
this village and beyond. Many officers fell, but there was always some
one to take command and lead the men--a sergeant with a cool head, a
second lieutenant with a flame in his eyes.
It was a boy of nineteen who took command of one company of the
Middlesex Regiment when he was the only one to lead. He had never been
under fire before, and had never seen all this blood and horror. He was
a slip of a fellow, who had been spelling out fairy-tales ten years ago,
which is not far back in history. Now, he led a company of fighting men,
who followed him as a great captain all through that day's battle, and
from one German line to another, and from one village to another, until
all the ground had been gained according to the first plan. This gallant
boy was afterwards reported missing, and his comrades believe that he
was killed.
It was a battle of second lieutenants of London, owing to the heavy
casualties of commanding officers. One of them was wounded in the head
early in the day, but led his men until hours later he fell and fainted.
Another young officer went out with three men in the darkness, when the
infantry was held up by serious obstacles, and under heavy fire brought
back information which saved many lives and enabled the whole line to
advance.
There was a second lieutenant of the London Rangers who behaved with a
quick decision and daring which seemed inspired by something more than
sound judgment. The enemy was holding out in a trench and sweeping men
down with that death-rattle of bullets which is the worst thing in all
this fighting. In front of them was uncut wire, which is always a trap
for men. Our London lieutenant did not go straight ahead. He flung his
platoon round to the flank, smashed through the wire here, and sprang at
the German gun-team with a revolver in one hand and a bomb in the other.
The whole team was destroyed except one man, who fell wounded, and above
those dead bodies the second lieutenant waved his revolver to his men
and said, "Let's get on."
The London men went on for nine days, which is like ninety years on such
a battlefield. They went on until they were checked and held by the
enemy, who had time to rush up strong reserves and bring up new weight
of guns. But they smashed through the Cojeul Switch and broke the
Hindenburg line at Heninel.
Shell-fire increased hour by hour. From many hidden places machine-guns
poured bullets across the ground. German snipers lay out in shell-holes
picking off our men. This sniping was intolerable, and a second
lieutenant and sergeant crawled out into No Man's Land to deal with it.
They dragged three snipers out of one hole, and searched others and
helped to check this hidden fire. One London rifleman went forward to
kill a machine-gun with its hideous tat-tat-tat. It was a bolder thing
than St. George's attack on the dragon, which was a harmless beast
compared with this spitfire devil. The rifleman armed himself with a
Lewis gun, carried at his hip, and fired so coolly that he scattered the
German team and captured the gun.
All through those nine days, and afterwards in a second spell worse than
those, the London men lived under great fire, those that had the luck to
live, and though their nerves were all frayed with the strain of it, and
they suffered great agonies and great losses, they never lost courage
and kept their pride--London Pride.
One medical officer's orderly never tired of searching for stricken men,
and seemed to have some magic about him, with shells bursting everywhere
round about his steps and bullets spitting on each side of him. He
organized stretcher-bearer parties, gave some of his own magic to them,
and saved many lives. A captain of the R.A.M.C. went out under heavy
fire and dressed the wounds of men lying there in agony and brought them
back alive. A London private remained out looking after the wounded in
an exposed place, and in his spare time saved other men attacked by
small parties of Germans, by killing nine of them and taking one man
prisoner. Another second lieutenant, one of those boys who have poured
out the blood of youth upon these battlefields, took two Vickers guns
with their teams through two barrages--only those who have seen a
barrage can know the meaning of that--and by great skill and cunning
brought his men through without a single casualty, so that the infantry
followed with high hearts.
Out of a burning billet and out of an exploding ammunition dump, a
transport driver brought out some charges urgently needed for the
battle. A man who entered a cage of tigers to draw their teeth would not
want greater nerve than this.
When the blinds were drawn across the windows of many little London
houses, when dusk crept into Piccadilly Circus and shadows darkened down
the Strand, when the great old soul of London slept a while in the
night, these boys who had gone out from her streets were fighting, and
are fighting still, in the greatest battle of the world, and as they lie
awake in a ditch, or wounded in a shell-hole, their spirit travels home
again, through the old swirl of traffic, to quiet houses where already,
perhaps, there is the scent of may-blossom.
III
THE STRUGGLE ROUND MONCHY
APRIL 11
This morning our men advanced upon the villages of Monchy-le-Preux and
La Bergere, on each side of the Cambrai road, beyond the ruins of
Tilloy-les-Mofflaines, and occupied them after heavy fighting. British
cavalry were first into Monchy, riding through a storm of shrapnel, and
heavily bombarded in the village so that many of their horses were
killed and many men wounded.
I saw the whole picture of this fighting to-day, and all the spirit and
drama of it. It was a wonderful scene, not without terror, and our men
passed through it alert and watchful to the menace about them. Going out
beyond Arras through suburbs which were in German hands until Monday
last--they had scribbled their names and regiments on broken walls of
strafed houses, and men of English battalions who captured them had
scrawled their own names above these other signatures--I came to the
German barbed wire which had protected the enemy's lines, and then into
three systems of trenches which had been the objectives of our men on
the morning when the battle of Arras began. Here was Hangest Trench, in
which the enemy had made his chief resistance, and Holt Redoubt and
Horn Redoubt, where his machine-guns had checked us, and a high point on
the road to Tilloy, to which a Tank had crawled after a lone journey out
of Arras to sweep this place with machine-gun fire, so that our men
could get on to the village. It is no wonder that the Germans lost this
ground, and that those who remained alive in their dug-outs surrendered
quickly, as soon as our men were about them. The effect of our
bombardment was ghastly. It had ploughed all this country with great
shell-craters, torn fields of barbed wire to a few tattered strands, and
smashed in all the trenches to shapeless ditches.
Tilloy still had parts of houses standing, bits of white wall having no
relation to the wild rubbish-heaps around. The Germans had torn up the
rails to make barricades, and had used farm carts, ploughs, and
brick-heaps as cover. But they could have given no protection when the
sky rained fire and thunderbolts. Dead bodies lay about in every shape
and shapelessness of death. I passed into Devil's Wood--well named,
because here there had been hellish torture of men--and so on to
Observatory Ridge and ground from which, not far away, I looked into
Monchy and across the battlefields where our men were fighting then. The
enemy was firing heavy shells. They fell thick about Monchy village and
on the other side of the Cambrai road, roaring horribly as they came and
flinging up volumes of black earth and mud. The enemy's gunners were
scattering other shells about, but in an aimless way, so that they found
no real target, though they were frightening, especially when some of
these crumps spattered one with mud.
Flights of British aeroplanes were on the wing, and German aeroplanes
tried to fight their way over our lines. I saw several with the swish of
machine-gun bullets and the high whining shells of British "Archies"
about them. I have never before seen so great a conflict in the skies.
It was a battle up there, and as far as I could see we gained a mastery
over the enemy's machines, though some of them were very bold.
On the earth it was open warfare of the old kind, for we were beyond the
trenches and our men were moving across the fields without cover. Some
of our machine-gunners were serving their weapons from shell-holes, and
the only protection of the headquarters staff of the cavalry was a
shallow ditch in the centre of the battlefield sheltered by a few
planks, quite useless against shell-fire, but keeping off the snow,
which fell in heavy wet flakes. There the officers sat in the ditch,
shoulder to shoulder, studying their maps and directing the action while
reports were called down the funnel of a chimney by an officer who had
been out on reconnaissance.
"It is villainously unhealthy round here," said this officer, who spoke
to me after he had given his news to the cavalry general. He looked
across to Monchy, and said, "Old Fritz is putting up a stiff fight." At
that moment a German crump fell close, and we did not continue the
conversation.
Across the battlefield came stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded
shoulder high, and the lightly wounded men walked back from Monchy and
Guemappe very slowly, with that dragging gait which is bad to see. I
spoke to a wounded officer and asked him how things were going.
"Pretty hot," he said, and then shivered and said, "but now I feel cold
as ice."
Snow fell all through the afternoon, covering the litter of battle and
the bodies of all our dead boys, giving a white beauty even to the ugly
ruins of Tilloy and changing the Devil's Wood by enchantment to a kind
of dream-picture. Through this driving snow our guns fired ceaselessly,
and I saw all their flashes through the storm, and their din was
enormous. Away in front of me stretched the road to Cambrai, the high
road of our advance. It seemed so easy to walk down there--but if I had
gone farther I should not have come back.
In a hundred years not all the details of this battle will be told, for
to each man in all the thousands who are fighting there is a great
adventure, and they are filled with sensations stronger than drink can
give, so that it will seem a wild dream--a dream red as flame and white
as snow.
For this amazing battle, which is bringing to us tides of prisoners and
many batteries of guns, is being fought on spring days heavy with snow,
as grim as sternest winter except when in odd half-hours the sun breaks
through the storm-clouds and gives a magic beauty to all this whiteness
of the battlefields and to trees furred with bars of ermine and to all
the lacework of twigs ready for green birth. Now as I write there is no
sun, but a darkness through which heavy flakes are falling. Our soldiers
are fighting through it to the east of Arras, and their steel helmets
and tunics and leather jerkins are all white as the country through
which they are forcing back the enemy.
While the battle was raging on the Vimy heights English and Scottish
troops of the 15th, 12th, and 3rd Divisions were fighting equally
fiercely, with more trouble to meet round about Arras. Beyond the facts
I have already written there are others that must be recorded quickly,
before quick history runs away from them.
Some day a man must give a great picture of the night in Arras before
the battle, and I know one man who could do so--a great hunter of wild
beasts, with a monocle that quells the human soul and a very "parfit
gentil knight," whose pen is as pointed as his lance. He spent the night
in a tunnel of Arras before getting into a sap in No Man's Land before
the dawn, where he was with a "movie man," an official photographer
(both as gallant as you will find in the Army), and a machine-gunner
ready for action. Thousands of other men spent the night before the
battle in the great tunnels, centuries old, that run out of Arras to the
country beyond, by Blangy and St.-Sauveur. The enemy poured shells into
the city, which I watched that night before the dawn from the ramparts
outside, but in the morning they came up from those subterranean
galleries and for a little while no more shells fell in Arras, for the
German gunners were busy with other work, and were in haste to get away.
The fighting was very fierce round Blangy, the suburb of Arras, where
the enemy was in the broken ruins of the houses and behind garden walls
strongly barricaded with piled sand-bags. But our men smashed their way
through and on. Troops of those old English regiments were checked a
while at strong German works known as the Horn, Holt, Hamel, and Hangest
positions, and at another strong point called the Church Work. It was at
these places that the Tanks did well on a day when they had hard going
because of slime and mud, and after a journey of over three miles from
their starting-point knocked out the German machine-guns, and so let the
infantry get on. Higher north at a point known as Railway Triangle,
east-south-east of Arras, where railway lines join, Gordons, Argylls,
Seaforths, and Camerons of the 15th Division were held back by
machine-gun fire. The enemy's works had not been destroyed by our
bombardment, and our barrage had swept ahead of the troops. News of the
trouble was sent back, and presently back crept the barrage of our
shell-fire, coming perilously close to the Scottish troops, but not too
close. With marvellous accuracy the gunners found the target of the
Triangle and swept it with shell-fire so that its defences were
destroyed. The Scots surged forward, over the chaos of broken timber and
barricades, and struggled forward again to their goal, which brought
them to Feuchy Well, and to-day much farther. A Tank helped them at
Feuchy Chapel, cheered by the Scots as it came into action scorning
machine-gun bullets. The Harp was another strong point of the enemy's
which caused difficulty to King's Own Liverpools, the Shropshire Light
Infantry, Royal Fusiliers, East Yorks, Scottish Fusiliers, and Royal
Scots, as I have already told, on the first day of battle, and another
Tank came up, in its queer, slow way, and the gallant men inside served
their guns like a Dreadnought, and so ended the business on that
oval-shaped stronghold.
So English and Scottish troops pressed on and gathered up thousands of
prisoners. "So tame," said one of our men, "that they ate out of our
hands." So ready to surrender that a brigadier and his staff who were
captured with them were angry and ashamed of men taken in great numbers
without a single wounded man among them. Fifty-four guns were captured
on this eastern side of Arras, and six were howitzers, and two of these
big beasts were taken by cavalry working with the troops. Some of the
gunners had never left their pits after our bombardment became intense
four days before, and were suffering from hunger and thirst.
Trench-mortars and machine-guns lay everywhere about, in scores,
smashed, buried, flung about by the ferocity of our shell-fire. German
officers wearing Iron Crosses wept when they surrendered. It was their
day of unbelievable tragedy. A queer thing happened to some German
transport men. They were sent out from Douai to Fampoux. They did not
know they were going into the battle zone. They drove along until
suddenly they saw British soldiers swarming about them. Six hours after
their start from Douai they were eating bully-beef on our side of the
lines, and while they munched could not believe their own senses. Our
troops treated them with the greatest good humour, throwing chocolates
and cigarettes into their enclosures and crowding round to speak to men
who knew the English tongue. There seemed no kind of hatred between
these men. There was none after the battle had been fought, for in our
British way we cannot harbour hate for beaten enemies when the
individuals are there, broken and in our hands. Yet a little farther
away the fighting was fierce, and there was no mercy on either side.
* * * * *
APRIL 12
In spite of the enemy's hard resistance and the abominable weather
conditions which cause our troops great hardships, we are making steady
progress towards the German defensive positions along the Hindenburg
line.
North of Vimy Ridge this morning his lines were pierced by a new attack,
delivered with great force above Givenchy; and south of the village of
Wancourt, below Monchy-le-Preux, we have seized an important little
hill-top.
Monchy itself is securely in our hands this morning, after repeated
counter-attacks yesterday and last night. In my last dispatch I
described in the briefest way how I went up towards Monchy yesterday
across the crowded battlefield and looked into that village, where
fierce fighting was in progress. Then the village was still standing,
hardly in ruins, so that I saw roofs still on the houses and unbroken
walls, and the white chateau only a little scarred by shell-fire. Now it
has been almost destroyed by the enemy's guns, and our men held it only
by the most resolute courage. It is a small place that village, but
yesterday, perched high beyond Orange Hill, it was the storm-centre of
all this world-conflict, and the battle of Arras paused till it was
taken. The story of the fight for it should live in history, and is full
of strange and tragic drama.
Our cavalry--the 10th Hussars, the Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues--helped
in the capture of this high village, behaving with the greatest acts of
sacrifice to the ideals of duty. I saw them going up over Observation
Ridge, and before they reached that point; the dash of splendid bodies
of men riding at the gallop in a snow-storm which had covered them with
white mantles and crowned their steel hats. Afterwards I saw some of
these men being carried back wounded over the battlefield, and the dead
body of their general, on a stretcher, taken by a small party of
troopers through the ruins of another village to his resting-place. Many
gallant horses lay dead, and those which came back were caked with mud,
and walked with drooping heads, exhausted in every limb. The bodies of
dead boys lay all over these fields.
[Illustration: Map of the Arras front GEORGE PHILIP & SON LTD 32 Fleet
St., E.C.]
But the cavalry rode into Monchy and captured the north side of the
village, and the enemy fled from them. It is an astounding thing that
two withered old Frenchwomen stayed in this village all through this
fighting. When our troopers rode in these women came running forward,
frightened and crying "Camarades," as though in face of the enemy. When
our men surrounded them they were full of joy, and held up their
withered old faces to be kissed by the troopers, who leaned over their
saddles to give this greeting. Yet the battle was not over, and the
shell-fire was most intense afterwards.
The women told strange stories of German officers billeted in their
houses. After the battle of Arras began on Monday these officers were
very nervous; but, although the sound of gun-fire swept nearer they did
not believe that the English troops would get near Monchy for some days.
Late on Wednesday night, after preparing for the defence of the village,
they went to bed as usual, looking exhausted and nerve-racked, and told
the women to wake them at six o'clock. They were awakened by another
kind of knocking at the door. English and Scottish soldiers were firing
outside the village, and the German officers escaped in such a hurry
that they had no time to pull down the battalion flag outside their
gate, and our men captured it as a trophy.
The attack on Monchy was made by English and Scottish troops--the Scots
of the 15th Division--who fought very fiercely to clear the enemy out of
Railway Triangle, where they were held up for three hours. Afterwards
they fought on to Feuchy Redoubt, where they found that the whole of the
German garrison had been buried by our bombardment, so that none escaped
alive. At Feuchy Weir they captured a German electrical company, a
captain and thirteen men, who were unarmed. The enemy shelled Feuchy
village after our troops had passed through and gone far forward, where
they dug in for the night under heavy shelling. Here they stayed all day
on Tuesday close by a deep square pit, where four eight-inch howitzers
had been abandoned to our cavalry.
Meanwhile English troops of the 37th Division--Warwicks and Bedfords,
East and West Lancashire battalions, and the Yorks and Lanes--were
advancing on the right and linking up for the attack on Monchy in
conjunction with the Jocks. On the left bodies of cavalry assembled for
a combined attack with Hotchkiss and machine guns; and at about five
o'clock yesterday morning they swept upon the village. The cavalry went
full split at a hard pace under heavy shrapnel-fire, and streamed into
the village on the north side. They saw few Germans, for as they went in
the enemy retreated to the southern side, hoping to escape by that way.
Here they found themselves cut off by our infantry, the English
battalions mixed up with Scots before the fight was over. It was hard
fighting. The enemy had many machine-guns, and defended himself from
windows and roofs of houses, firing down upon our men as they swarmed
into the village streets, and fought their way into farmyards and
courtyards. It was a house-to-house hunt, and about two hundred
prisoners were taken, though some of the garrison escaped to the trench
in the valley below, where they had machine-gun redoubts. At about eight
o'clock yesterday morning, twenty Scots and a small party of English
went forward from Monchy with a Tank which had crawled up over heavy
ground and shell-craters, and now trained its guns upon bodies of
Germans moving over the ridge beyond. By this time English troops had a
number of machine-guns in position for the defence of the village
against any counter-attacks that might come. Some of our men had already
explored the dug-outs and found them splendid for shelter under
shell-fire. Under the chateau was a subterranean system furnished
luxuriously and provided with electric light. Half an hour after the
capture of the village some English and Scottish officers were drinking
German beer out of German mugs.
The peace of Monchy did not last long. At nine o'clock the enemy shelled
the place fiercely, and for a long time, with 5.9 guns, as I saw myself
at midday from Observation Ridge, which was also under fire.
German airmen, flying above, watched our cavalry and infantry, and
directed fire upon them. They were terrible hours to endure, but our men
held out nobly; and when the enemy made his counter-attacks in the
afternoon and evening, advancing in waves with a most determined spirit,
they were hosed with machine-gun bullets and fell like grass before the
scythe. Our 18-pounders also poured shell into them. This morning our
men are in advance of the village, and the enemy has retreated from the
trench below. The night was dreadful for men and beasts. Snow fell
heavily, and was blown into deep drifts by wind as cold as ice. Wounded
horses fell and died, and men lay in a white bed of snow in an agony of
cold, while shells burst round them. As gallant as the fighting men were
the supply columns, who sent up carriers through blizzard and
shell-fire. At four o'clock in the morning a rum ration was served out,
"And thank God for it," said one of our officers lying out there in a
shell-hole with a shattered arm. Strange and ironical as it seems, the
post came up also at this hour, and men in the middle of the
battlefield, suffering the worst agonies of war, had letters from home
which in darkness they could not read.
That scene of war this morning might have been in Russia in midwinter,
instead of in France in spring-time. Snow was thick over the fields,
four foot deep where it had drifted against the banks. Tents and huts
behind the lines were covered with snow roofs, and as I went through
Arras this poor, stricken city was all white. Stones and fallen masonry
which have poured down from great buildings of mediaeval times were
overlaid with snow--until, by midday, it was all turned to water. Then
our Army moved through rivers of mud, and all our splendid horses were
pitiful to see.
IV
THE OTHER SIDE OF VIMY
APRIL 13
The enemy's Headquarters Staff is clearly troubled by the successes
gained by our troops during these first days of the battle of Arras, and
all attempts to repair the damage to his defensive positions upon which
his future safety depends have been feeble and irresolute. It is certain
that he desired to make a heavy counter-attack upon the northern edge of
the Vimy Ridge. Prisoners taken yesterday all believed that this would
be done without delay. The 5th Grenadiers of the Prussian Guards Reserve
were hurriedly brought up to relieve or support the Bavarian troops, who
had suffered frightfully, and massed in a wood, called the Bois
d'Hirondelle, or Swallows' Wood, in order to steal through another
little wood called Bois-en-Hache to a hill known by us as the Pimple,
and so on to recapture Hill 145, taken by the Canadians on Monday night
after heavy and costly fighting. This scheme broke down utterly.
Swallows' Wood was heavily bombed by our aeroplanes, so that the massed
Prussians had an ugly time there, and yesterday morning Canadian troops
made a sudden assault upon the Pimple, which is a knoll slightly lower
than Hill 145, to its right, and gained it in spite of fierce
machine-gun fire from the garrison, who defended themselves stubbornly
until they were killed or captured. At the same time Bois-en-Hache,
which stands on rising ground across the little valley of the River
Souchez, was attacked with great courage by the 24th Division, and the
enemy driven out.
It was difficult work for our infantry and gunners. The ground was a bog
of shell-craters and mud, and there was a blizzard of snowflakes. The
attack was made with a kind of instinct, backed with luck. Our men
stumbled forward in a wake of snow-squalls and shells, fell into
shell-holes, climbed out again, and by some skill of their own kept
their bombs and rifles dry. Machine-gun bullets whipped the ground about
them. Some fell and were buried in snow-drifts; others went on and
reached their goal, and in a white blizzard routed out the enemy and his
machine-guns. It was an hour or two later that German officers,
directing operations at a distance and preparing a counter-attack on the
Vimy Ridge, heard that the Pimple and Bois-en-Hache had both gone--the
only places which gave observation on the south side of Vimy and made
effective any attack. Their curses must have been deep and full when
that message came over the telephone wires. They ordered their batteries
to fire continuously on those two places, but they remain ours, and our
troops have endured intense barrage-fire without losing ground. Now we
have full and absolute observation over Vimy Ridge to the enemy's side
of the country reversing all the past history of this position, and we
are making full and deadly use of it. The enemy still clings to Vimy
village on the other side of the slopes, and to the line of railway on
the eastern side of Farbus, but it is an insecure tenure, and our guns
are making life hideous for the German soldiers in those places, and in
the villages farther back in the direction of Douai, and along the road
which he is using for his transport. In the village of Bailleul down
there are a number of batteries which the enemy has vainly endeavoured
to withdraw. We are smothering them with shell-fire, and he will find it
difficult to get them away, though he can ill afford the loss of more
guns. The enemy has been in great trouble to move his guns away rapidly
enough owing to the dearth of transport horses. Even before the battle
of Arras began the German batteries had to borrow horses from each other
because there were not enough for all, and some of his guns have been
abandoned because of that lack. He cannot claim that he has left us only
broken and useless guns.
When the Scottish and South African troops of the 9th Division made the
great attack on Monday last the South-Africans were led forward by their
colonels, and took the first German line without a single casualty.
Afterwards they fought against wicked machine-gun fire, but, sweeping
all before them, and gathering in hundreds of prisoners, they seized a
number of guns, including several 5.9 howitzers. A vast amount of
ammunition lay about in dumps, and our men turned the guns about, and
are using them against the enemy. To South-Africans who fought in
Delville Wood--I have told the story of this tragic epic in the battle
of the Somme--this is a triumph that pays back a little for old memories
under German gun-fire. Their revenge is sweet and frightful, and they
call the captured guns, those monstrous five-point-nines, their
trench-mortar battery.
During this fighting our airmen have flown with extraordinary valour,
and have done great work. They flew in snow-storms, as I saw them and
marvelled, on the east side of Arras, and circled round for hours taking
photographs of the enemy's positions and spotting his batteries so
accurately, in spite of weather which half blinded them, that the German
gunners who are now our prisoners say that they were terrorized by being
made targets for our fire.
Farther south yesterday and to-day we have made new breaches in the
Hindenburg line by the capture of Wancourt and Heninel, villages south
of Monchy. The fighting here has been most severe, and our men of the
14th and 56th Divisions--London Rangers, Kensingtons, Middlesex, London
Scottish, and King's Royal Rifles--lying out on open slopes in deep snow
and under icy gales at night, swept by machine-gun barrages from
Guemappe and with the sky above them flashing with shrapnel bursts and
high explosives, have had to endure a terrible ordeal. They have done so
with a noble spirit, and young wounded men to whom I spoke yesterday, in
the great crypt to which they had crawled down from the battlefield, all
spoke of their experience as though they would go through as much again
in order to ensure success, without bragging, with a full sense of the
frightful hours, but with unbroken spirit.
"I am not out here to make a career," said a Canadian; "I am out to
finish an ugly job."
It is to end this filthy war quickly that our men are fighting so grimly
and with such deadly resolution. So the Londoners have fought their way
into Wancourt and Heninel, and there were great uncut belts of wire
before them--the new wire of the Hindenburg line--and trenches and
strong points from which machine-guns gushed out waves of bullets. One
of the strong points hereabouts is called the Egg, because of its oval
hummock, which was hard to hatch and crack, but as one of our officers
said to-day, the Egg gave forth two hundred prisoners.
In the fighting for the two villages the Londoners were held up by those
great stretches of wire before them and were menaced most evilly by the
enfilade fire of machine-guns from Guemappe and a high point south. Two
Tanks came to the rescue, and did most daring things.
"Romped up," said an officer, though I have not seen Tanks romping.
Anyhow, they came up in their elephantine way, getting the most out of
their engines and most skilfully guided by their young officers and
crews, who were out on a great and perilous adventure. Climbing over
rough ground, cleaving through snow-drifts and mud-banks with their
steel flanks, thrusting their blunt noses above old trenches and
sand-bag barricades, they made straight for the great hedges of barbed
wire, and drove straight through, leaving broad lanes of broken strands.
One cruised into Wancourt, followed from a distance by the shouts and
cheers of the infantry. It wandered up and down the village like a bear
on the prowl for something good to eat. It found human food and trampled
upon machine-gun redoubts, firing into German hiding-places. The second
Tank struck a zigzag course for Heninel, and in that village swept down
numbers of German soldiers, so that they fled from this black monster
against which bombs and rifles were of no avail. For forty hours those
two Tanks--let me be fair to the men inside and say those officers and
crews--did not rest, but went about on their hunting trail, breaking
down wire and searching out German strong points, so that the way would
be easier for our infantry.
Even then our men had no easy fighting. The enemy defended themselves
stubbornly in places. Their snipers and bombers and machine-gunners did
not yield at the first sight of the bayonets. While some of our troops
bombed their way down trenches towards Wancourt, others worked up from
the south, and at last both parties met exultantly behind this section
of the Hindenburg line, greeting each other with cheers. Nearly two
hundred prisoners were taken hereabout, all Silesian mechanics, like
those I met at Loos in September 1915--rather miserable men, with no
heart in the war, because, as Poles, it is none of their making.
It is true to say--utterly true--that all the prisoners we have taken
this week, Prussians, Bavarians, Hamburgers, have lost all spirit for
this fighting, hate it, loathe it as a devilish fate from which they
have luckily escaped at last with life. Not one prisoner has said now
that Germany will win on land. Their best hope is that the submarine
campaign will force an early settlement. Their pockets are stuffed with
letters from wives, sisters, and parents telling of starvation at home.
It is not good literature for the spirit of an army. The prisoners
themselves come to us starving. It is not because their rations in the
trenches are insufficient. They are on short commons, but have enough
for bodily strength. It is because our bombardment prevented all
supplies from reaching them for three or four days. In one prisoners'
enclosure, when our escort brought food, the men fought with each other
like wild beasts, ravenous, and had to be separated by force and
threats. The officers in charge of these prisoners' camps are
overwhelmed by the masses of men. In one of them, where 4000 were
gathered, they broke the barriers. A captain and subaltern of ours were
alone to deal with this situation; but their own non-commissioned
officers helped to restore order.
The position of the enemy now is full of uncertainty for him. It is
possible that he will try to avoid any disaster by falling back farther
to the Drocourt-Queant line, and by slipping away farther north. The
Hindenburg line is pierced, but he has established a series of
switch-lines which will enable him to stand until our guns are ready
again to make those positions untenable. The weather so far is in his
favour, except that his troops are suffering as much as ours from cold
and wet.
V
THE WAY TO LENS
APRIL 14
The capture of the Vimy Ridge by heroic assault of the Canadians and
Scots, and their endurance in holding it under the enemy's heavy fire,
have been followed swiftly by good results. Our troops have pushed
forward to-day through Lievin, the long and straggling suburb of Lens,
clearing street after street of German machine-gunners and rear-guard
posts, and our patrols are on the outskirts of Lens itself, the great
mining town, which is famous in France as the capital and centre of her
northern mine-fields.
The retaking of this city of mine-shafts and pit-heads, electrical power
stations, and great hive of mining activity, where a population of
something like 40,000 people lived in rows of red-brick cottages, under
a forest of high chimneys and mountainous slag-heaps, would cause a
thrill through all France, and be one of the greatest achievements of
the war--a tremendous feat of arms for the British troops. I looked into
the city to-day, down its silent and deserted streets, and I saw a body
of our men working forward to get closer to it. They attacked the little
wooded hill called the Bois de Riaumont, just to the south of the city,
and with great cunning and courage encircled its lower slopes, and made
their way into the street of houses behind the line of trees which is
the southern way towards Lens. From the western side, up through Lievin,
the other troops were advancing cautiously. The enemy was still there in
machine-gun redoubts, which will be very troublesome to our men. But
they are only rear-guards, for the main body of the enemy has already
retreated. When the Canadians swept over the Vimy Ridge, capturing
thousands of prisoners, and when yesterday our 24th Division and
Canadian troops seized the Bois-en-Hache and the Pimple, two small
ridges or knolls below Hill 145, at the northern end of the Vimy Ridge,
the enemy saw that his last chance of successful counter-attack was
foiled, and at once he was seized with fear and prepared for instant
retreat in wild confusion. Lens and Lievin had been stacked with his
guns. Both towns had been fortified in a most formidable way, and were
strongholds of massed artillery. It is certain that the enemy had at
least 150 guns in that great network of mines and pit-heads. But they
were all threatened by an advance down the northern slopes of Vimy, and
the Canadians were not likely to stay inactive after their great
triumph. They were also threatened by the British advance from the Loos
battlefields by way of that great pair of black slag-hills called the
Double Crassier, famous in this war for close, long, and bloody
fighting, where since September of 1915 our men have been only a few
yards away from their enemy, and where I saw them last a month or two
ago through a chink of wall in a ruined house. German staff officers
knew their peril yesterday, and before. From prisoners we know that wild
scenes took place in Lens, frantic efforts being made to get away the
guns and the stores, to defend the line of retreat by the blowing up of
roads, to carry out the orders for complete destruction by firing
charges down the mine-shafts, flooding the great mine-galleries so that
French property of enormous value should not be left to France, and
withdrawing large bodies of troops down the roads under the fire of our
long-range guns. Up to dawn yesterday the enemy in Lens hoped that the
British pursuit would be held back by the German rear-guards in Vimy and
Petit-Vimy villages. But that hope was flung from them when the
Canadians swept down the ridge and chased the enemy out of those places
on the lower slopes towards Douai.
To-day, as I went towards Lens over Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and the valley
beyond, I met a number of those men coming back after their victorious
fighting. Amongst them were Nova-Scotians and young lumbermen and
fishermen from the Far West. They came in single file, in a long
procession through a wood--the Bois de Bouvigny--where once, two years
ago, young Frenchmen fought with heroic fury and died in thousands to
gain this ground, so that even now all this hill is strewn with their
relics.
The boys of Nova Scotia came slowly, dragging one foot after another in
sheer exhaustion, stumbling over loose stones and bits of sand-bags and
strands of old wire. They were caked with clay from head to foot. Even
their faces had masks of clay, and they were spent and done. But through
that whitish mud their eyes were steel-blue and struck fire like steel
when they told me of the good victory they had shared in, and of the
enemy's flight before them--all this without a touch of brag, with a
fine and sweet simplicity, with a manly frankness. They have suffered
tragic hardships in those five days since the battle of Arras began, but
there was no wail in them. When they first emerged from the tunnels on
the morning of the great attack they had been swept by machine-gun fire,
but by good luck escaped heavy casualties, though many fell.
"Our losses were not nearly so high as we expected," said one lad, "but
it was pretty bad all the same. Old Heine had an ugly habit of keeping
one hand on his machine-gun till we were fifty paces from him, and then
holding up the other hand and shouting 'Mercy! Mercy!' I don't call that
a good way of surrendering."
The enemy surrendered in hundreds on that day, as I have already
described, and the worst came afterwards for the Canadians. The enemy's
barrage was heavy, but even that was not the worst. It was difficult to
get food up, more difficult to get water. I met lads who had been
without a drop for three days. One of them, a fine, hefty fellow, strong
as a sapling, could hardly speak to me above a whisper. All of them had
swollen tongues and licked their dry lips in a parched way. Some of them
had been lucky enough to find French wine in the German dug-outs. Then a
wild snow-storm came. "I thought I should die," said one man, "when for
hours I had to carry wounded through the snow over ground knee-deep in
mud and all slippery. All my wounded were terribly heavy."
But, in spite of all this, those brave, weary men went down the Vimy
slopes at dawn yesterday with the same high, grim spirit to clear "Old
Heine," as they call him, out of Vimy and Little Vimy villages.
"They didn't wait for us," said a young Canadian officer. "One would
think that the war would be over in a month by the way they ran
yesterday."
"Old Heine was scared out of his wits," said another lad. "He ran
screaming from us. In a dug-out I found two Germans too scared even to
run. They just sat and trembled like poor, cowed beasts. But there was
one fellow we took who got over his fright quick, and spoke in a big
way. He had been a waiter and spoke good English.
"'When will the war end?' we asked.
"'Germany will fight five years,' he said, 'and then we will win.
"'Don't you believe it, old sport,' said we, 'you're done in now, and
it's only the mopping up we have to do.'"
Down in the Bois-en-Hache one of our English soldiers of the 24th
Division on the Canadians' left had a grim adventure, which he describes
as "a bit of orl rite." His way was barred by a burly German, but not
for long. After a tussle our lad took him inside, and there found the
dead body of a German officer lying by the side of the table, which was
all spread for breakfast. It was our English lad who ate the breakfast,
keeping one eye vigilant on his living prisoner and not worrying about
the dead one.
There was another soldier of ours, one of the Leinsters, also of the
24th Division, who ate his breakfast in Angres, but he was in jovial
company. He came across a German at the entrance and fought with him,
but in a friendly kind of way. After knocking each other about they came
to an understanding, and sat down together in a dug-out to a meal of
German sausage, cheese, black bread, and French wine. They found a great
deal of human nature in common, and were seen coming out later arm in
arm, and in this way the Irishman brought back his prisoner.
The colonel of the Leinsters told another queer tale of an Irishman in
the outskirts of Lens. The colonel saw him after the battle of
Bois-en-Hache, which was a terrible affair and a fine feat of arms in
the mud and snow, bringing back a German horse under machine-gun fire
and shrapnel. He was guiding this poor lean beast over frightful ground,
round the edge of monstrous shell-craters, through broken strands of
barbed wire, and across trenches and parapets. "What are you doing with
that poor brute?" asked the commanding officer. "Sure, sir," said the
Irishman, "I'm bringing the horse back for Father Malone to ride." The
horse was in the last stages of starvation, and the padre weighs
nineteen stone, according to the popular estimate of the men, who adore
him, and that is part of the story's humour, though the Irish soldier
was very serious. It is a tribute, anyhow, to the affection of the men
for this Irish padre-a laughing giant of a man--who is always out in No
Man's Land when there are any of his lads out there, going as far as
the German barbed wire to give the last rites to dying men. To-day, when
I called on the Leinster battalion, he was away burying the poor boys
who lie in the mud of the battlefield. There is no humour in that side
of war, though Irish soldiers, and English soldiers too, refuse to be
beaten by the foulest conditions until the last strength is out of them.
In addition to the ordeal of battle they are enduring now a weather so
abominable, when it is in the fields of battle, that men fight for days
wet to the skin, lie out at night frozen stiff, and struggle after the
enemy up to the knees in mud. So it was in this little battle of
Bois-en-Hache, an historic episode in the battle of Arras, because it
broke the enemy's last hope of a counter-attack against Vimy Ridge.
Through the blinding blizzard of snow, the English and Irish troops
attacked this hill above the River Souchez, and had to cross through a
quagmire, so that numbers of them stuck up to the waist and could go
neither forward nor backward, while they were swept by machine-gun and
rifle fire. From that other hill, called the Pimple, to their right,
which was not yet taken by the Canadians, one man came back wounded over
that abominable ground under rifle-fire which spat bullets about him. He
stumbled into shell-holes and crawled out again, and just as he reached
the trench, fell dead across the parapet. Nearly all our men were hit in
the head and body, none in the legs. That was because they were
knee-deep in mud. Our men came back from this fighting like figures of
clay, and so stiff at the joints that they can hardly walk, and with
voices gone so that they speak in whispers.
All over this lower slope of the Vimy Ridge is a litter of enormous
destruction caused by our gun-fire. German guns and limbers,
machine-guns and trench-mortars lie in fragments and in heaps in
infernal chaos of earth, which is the graveyard of many German dead. The
first hint that the Germans were in retreat from Lievin, near Lens, was
given by the strange adventure of two of our airmen. They had to make a
forced landing near Lens, and one of them was wounded in the leg. Our
observing officers watching through glasses expected them to be made
prisoners, but they were seen afterwards smoking cigarettes and slapping
themselves to keep warm. It now turns out that the German soldiers did
not wait to take them, and finding one man wounded left the other to
look after him. The next sign that the enemy was about to go was when
the fires and explosions went up in Lievin and Lens, and when he began
to shell his own front lines outside those places. All through the night
the sky was aflame with these fires, and this morning I saw that the
enemy was making a merry little hell in Lens and all its suburbs and
dependent villages. I had no need to guess the reason of all this. On
the way I had met two young Alsatian prisoners just captured. They had
been left with orders and charges to blow up mine-shafts, but had been
caught before they had done so. They had no heart in the job anyhow,
being of Alsace, and with their comrades had already petitioned to fight
on the Eastern instead of the Western Front. They described the panic
that reigned in Lens, and the fearful haste to destroy and get away. For
hours to-day I watched that destruction while our troops were working
forward through Lievin to get the better of the nests of machine-gun
redoubts at the entrance to Lens, from which intense fire still came.
I had an astounding view of all this work in Lens, and it was as
beautiful as a dream-picture and weird as a nightmare. The snows had
melted, and the wind had turned south, and the sun was pouring down
under a blue sky across which white fleece sailed. Below, outspread, was
a wide panorama of battle, from Loos to Vimy, the great panorama of
French mining country, with all its slag-hills casting black shadows
across the sun-swept plain, and thousands of miners' cottages, "corons"
as they are called, all bright and red as the light poured upon them,
all arranged in straight rows and oblong blocks of streets in separate
townships. Not one of these houses was without shell-holes and broken
walls, for the war has swept round them and over them for two years and
more, but they looked strangely new and complete. Between them and
beyond them and all about them tall chimneys stood and enormous steel
girders and gantries of pit-head and power stations. To the left of Lens
the tower of the main waterworks was crowned with a white dome like a
Grecian temple, and to the right was Lens Church, behind a hill where I
saw our men fighting. It was like looking at war in Bolton or Wigan, but
more beautiful than those towns of ours, because the walls were not
black and there was a bright, fine light over all this mining country.
The Double Crassier on the edge of the Loos battlefields was to the
left of where I stood, curiously white and chalky as the sun flung its
rays upon those two close hillocks. Moving forward towards Lens I looked
straight down the streets of that city. If a cat had moved across one of
those roads I should have seen it. If Germans had come out of any of
those houses I should have seen them. But nothing moved up the streets
or down them. All those straight streets were empty. It looked as if
those thousands of red houses were uninhabited. But all the time I
watched enormous explosions rose in Lens and Lievin, sending up volumes
of curly smoke. The enemy was destroying the city and its priceless
mining works. As the mines exploded it looked as if the earth had opened
among all this maze of works and cottages, letting forth turbulent
clouds of fire and smoke. It was mostly smoke with a stab of flame in
the heart of it. Some of these thick, rising clouds were richly coloured
with the red dust of cottages, but others were of absolute black,
spreading out in mushroom shape monstrously.