those Alsatian prisoners I could imagine the German pioneers under the
same orders going about with charges in the cellars of the houses and
deep down in the mine-shafts and galleries setting their fuses and
touching them off from a safe distance. It was dirty work. Meanwhile,
our men advancing from Lievin, and through it, were having a hard and
costly task to rout out the machine-gun emplacements, especially in two
terribly strong redoubts known to us as Crook and Crazy Redoubts,
defending the western side of Lens. But though these were strong,
fortified positions, there were machine-guns in many other places among
all those groups of miners' cottages.
I ought to explain that each group or collection of streets in the
square blocks is called a "cite." In the northern part of Lens there are
the Cite St.-Pierre, the Cite St.-Edouard, the Cite St.-Laurent, the
Cite Ste.-Auguste, and the Cite Ste.-Elisabeth. Westward there are the
Cite Jeanne-d'Arc and the Cite St.-Theodore. South there are the Cite du
Moulin and the Cite de Riaumont. Each one of these places had its own
separate defences of barbed wire and sand-bag barricades, and each a
nest of machine-guns. It is clear that when these guns were served by
rear-guard posts, ordered to hold on to the last, a quick advance
through Lens would have been at great and needless sacrifice of
life. When our men were checked a while by the terrible sweep of
bullets in the northern and western cites our artillery opened heavy
fire and poured in shells, which I watched from ground below
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. I had walked on from that ridge and was looking
into Lens when I saw a movement of men below an embankment to the right
of the small hill in the south of the city called Bois de Riaumont.
Between the embankment and the hill was a sunken road leading just below
the hill to a long straight street of ruined houses lined with an avenue
of dead trees. There were belts of wire fixed down the hill-side from
the wood on the crest. This ground, swept by sunlight, was the scene of
a grim little drama which I watched with intense interest. At first I
thought our men were about to make a direct assault upon the hill-side.
They came swarming across the open ground in small groups widely
scattered, but in two distinct waves. For a while they took cover under
the embankment, while other groups crept up to them; then, after half an
hour or so, they advanced again, half-left, at the double, led by an
officer well in advance of all his men. They crossed the sunken road and
went up the slope on the south side of the hill; but, instead of
pressing up to the crest, suddenly disappeared into the long, straight
street fringed with trees. No sooner had they gone down that sinister
street then the enemy flung a barrage right along the embankment where
they had first assembled. If they had still been there it would have
been a tragic business, and I felt joyful that they had not waited
longer. Other men crept up from the ground below where I stood, steered
an erratic course, took cover in old German trenches, and then made
short, sharp rushes till they dropped also into the sinister street.
Later in the afternoon the enemy barraged his old line of trenches with
heavy crumps--which is a way he has when he leaves a place--and
presently shells began to fall unpleasantly near to where I stood,
getting closer as time passed. I found it wise to shift three times, but
on scaling the high ridge of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette again I lingered to
look at the great picture of war outspread below--that long seven-mile
stretch of miners' villages crowding densely up to Lens--the great
outbursts of red and black smoke between the slag-heaps and chimneys
away to the battlefield of Loos, across which sunlight and shadows
chased in long bars--and our shell-fire heavy around Lens church and far
beyond where enemy's troops and transport were hurrying in retreat.
Overhead there was the loud droning of many aeroplanes and flights of
invisible shells, shrill-voiced as they travelled with frightful speed.
* * * * *
LATER
The weather has changed again since yesterday, and there is no blue in
the sky to-day and no sunshine, but cold rain-storms, cloaking all the
line of battle in shrouds of mist. Fires are still burning in Lens, the
grey smoke is drifting across the mine-fields, and every hour there are
big explosions, showing that the German pioneers are still busy
destroying all the wealth of machinery in the city and blowing up the
roads before leaving. New prisoners describe all this frankly enough.
Down one mine-shaft they flung 20,000 hand-grenades. They have enormous
stores of explosives of every kind for this purpose, because this mining
district was crammed with German stores. They had to leave Lievin in
such haste that they could neither carry away this ammunition nor
destroy all of it, and vast quantities of bombs, trench-mortars and
shells have fallen into our hands.
Yesterday the English and Irish troops who had taken Bois-en-Hache with
such fine courage, in spite of the most severe conditions of weather and
ground, worked farther forward through Lievin. Explosions from concealed
charges burst around them, and machine-gun fire from many redoubts swept
down the long, straight streets of miners' cottages; but they worked
their way up under cover, rushed several of the concrete emplacements,
and took heroic risks with a most grim spirit. During the evening the
enemy recovered from his first panic and sent supporting troops back
into Lens to hold the line of trenches and machine-gun forts on the
western side in order to delay our advance on to Lens until he has had
more time to make ready his positions in the Drocourt-Queant line, the
Wotan end of the Hindenburg line, upon which we are forcing him to
withdraw. It makes a difference to a number of poor souls expecting
deliverance. According to prisoners there are about 2000 people, mostly
women, old men, and children, living in the district of Lens, and
waiting to break their way through to our side of the lines.
I set out to find them this morning, as there were reported rumours that
they had escaped through Lievin. But this is untrue. Owing to the German
rally they are still hemmed in by the enemy's machine-gun redoubts, and
I am told that they are down in the cellars of a neighbouring village,
taking cover from the shell-fire which we are pouring on the hostile
strong points located in their cites.
Meanwhile our guns are finding human targets for slaughter. The
sufferings of our men are great, their courage is tested by fire; but
the fate of the enemy's soldiers is atrocious beyond all imaginings. I
have seen with my own eyes the effect of our gun-fire during the last
fortnight, and it is annihilating. Owing to our destruction and capture
of many batteries and the necessity of the German retreat to save
further disaster, the enemy's infantry have been in desperate plight and
have suffered torture. We have smashed their trenches, broken their
telephone wires, imprisoned them in barrages through which no food can
come. In captured letters and memoranda we find cries for rescue,
pitiful in their despair. Here is a message from the 3rd Battalion, 51st
Infantry Regiment:
"Since the telephone connexion is so inadequate it becomes doubly
necessary to call on the artillery by light signals. These are only
of use if attended to. Failing to get artillery reply to the
enemy's fire I sent up red star-shells. The artillery took no
notice. The artillery should be bound to reply to such signals.
"For our infantry, which since the Somme battles has been on the
defensive, it is, from the point of view of moral, of importance to
count on artillery support with certainty. The infantry that comes
to regard itself morally as a target for the hostile artillery must
in the long run give way."
Here is an extract from a memorandum sent by a German machine-gunner:
"The relief of this detachment is earnestly requested. We have
already spent seven days in the greatest tumult. One section of
trench after another gets blown in. The detachment, which now
consists of three men, has eaten nothing since yesterday morning.
To-morrow what remains of the front trenches will probably be
shattered. If the position were not so frightfully serious, I would
not have written this report."
Yesterday I spent half an hour with one of our own batteries of
60-pounders, those long-nosed beasts which have a range of five miles
and have helped in this great slaughter of the enemy. The commanding
officer, once a judge-advocate of Johannesburg, was a man whose
joviality covered a grim, resolute spirit.
"My beauties," he said, "fired 1000 high-velocity shells at Old Fritz
before breakfast on Monday morning. We did some very pretty work on the
German lines."
I saw his store of shells--monstrous brutes--in spite of all this
expenditure; and listened to details of destruction in a wooden hut,
provided with a piano--made by a Paris firm and captured recently in a
German dug-out.
"Don't your gunners get worn out?" I asked.
He laughed and said, "They stick it till all's blue, night and day. What
they hate are fatigues and carrying up the shells for other batteries.
They'll work till they drop, serving their own guns."
He looked over to Lens and said, "We'll soon have old Fritz out of
that." I think they were some of his shells that I saw bursting behind
the Bois de Riaumont.
All through this battle our airmen have been untiring, too. Two of our
men, a pilot and an observer, were attacked by a squadron of
twenty-eight hostile machines, and the pilot was grievously wounded. He
was badly hit in the leg, and one of his eyes hung only by a thread.
But, with a supreme act of courage, he kept control of his machine and
landed safely. He was dying when he was helped on to a stretcher and
brought home to camp; but he made his report very clearly and calmly
until he was overcome by the last faintness of death.
Our men have still most bloody fighting before them. The enemy is still
in great strength. We shall have to mourn most tragic and fearful
losses. But the tide of battle seems to be setting in our favour, and
beating back against the walls of the German armies, who must hear the
approach of it with forebodings, because the barriers they built have
broken and there are no impregnable ramparts behind.
VI
THE SLAUGHTER AT LAGNICOURT
APRIL 16
What happened at Lagnicourt yesterday is one of the bloodiest episodes
in all this long tale of slaughter. At 4.30, before daybreak, the enemy
made a very heavy attack upon our lines, where we are far beyond the old
system of trenches and for a time in real open warfare of the old style,
which I, for one, never believed would come again. The enemy's lines
were protected with a new belt of barbed wire, without which he can
never stay on any kind of ground; but it was this which proved his
undoing. His massed attack against Australian troops had a brief
success. Battalions of Prussian Guards, charging in waves, broke through
our forward posts, and drove a deep wedge into our positions. Here they
stayed for a time, doing what damage they could, searching round for
prisoners, and waiting, perhaps, for reserves to renew and strengthen
the impetus of their attack. But the Australian staff officers were
swift in preparing and delivering the counter-blow, which fell upon the
enemy at 7.30. Companies of Australians swept forward, and with
irresistible spirit flung themselves upon the Prussians, forcing them to
retreat. They fell back in an oblique line from their way of advance,
forced deliberately that way by the pressure and direction of the
Australian attack. At the same time our batteries opened fire upon them
with shrapnel as they ran, more and more panic-stricken, towards their
old lines. The greatest disaster befell them, for they found themselves
cut off by their own wire, those great broad belts of sharp spiked
strands which they had planted to bar us off.
What happened then was just appalling slaughter. The Australian infantry
used their rifles as never rifles have been used since the first weeks
of the war, when our old regulars of the first expeditionary force lay
down at Le Cateau on the way of their retreat and fired into the
advancing tide of Germans, so that they fell in lines.
Yesterday, in that early hour of the morning, the Australian riflemen
fired into the same kind of target of massed men, not far away, so that
each shot found the mark. The Prussians struggled frantically to tear a
way through the wire, to climb over it, crawl under it. They cursed and
screamed, ran up and down like rats in a trap, until they fell dead.
They fell so that dead bodies were piled upon dead bodies in long lines
of mortality before and in the midst of that spiked wire. They fell and
hung across its strands. The cries of the wounded, long tragic wails,
rose high above the roar of rifle-fire and the bursting of shrapnel. And
the Australian soldiers, quiet and grim, shot on and on till each man
had fired a hundred rounds, till more than fifteen hundred German
corpses lay on the field at Lagnicourt. Large numbers of prisoners were
taken, wounded and unwounded, and five Prussian regiments have been
identified. The Prussian Guard has always suffered from British troops
as by some dire fatality. At Ypres, at Contalmaison, in several of the
Somme battles, they were cut to pieces. But this massacre at Lagnicourt
is the worst episode in their history, and it will be remembered by the
German people as a black and fearful thing.
VII
THE TERRORS OF THE SCARPE
APRIL 23
The battle of Arras has entered into its second phase--that is to say,
into a struggle harder than the first days of the battle on April 9,
when by a surprise, following great preparations, we gained great
successes all along the line.
This morning, shortly before five o'clock, English, Welsh, and Scottish
troops made new and strong assaults east of Arras upon the German line
between Gavrelle, Guemappe, and Fontaine-lez-Croisilles, which is the
last switch-line on this part of the Front between us and the main
Hindenburg line. It has been hard fighting everywhere, for the enemy was
no longer uncertain of the place where we should attack him. As soon as
the battle of Arras started it was clear to him that we should deliver
our next blow when we had moved forward our guns upon this "Oppy" line,
as we call it, which protects the Hindenburg positions north and south
of Vitry-en-Artois. His troops were told to expect our attack at any
moment, and to hold on at all costs of life. To meet our strength the
enemy brought up many new batteries, which he placed in front of the
Hindenburg line, and close behind the Oppy line, and massed large
numbers of machine-guns in the villages, trenches, and emplacements,
from which he could sweep our line of advance by direct and enfilade
fire. These machine-guns were thick in the ruins of Roeux, just north
of the River Scarpe; in Pelves, just south of it, in two small woods
called Bois du Sart and Bois du Vert, immediately facing Monchy, on the
slope of the hill; and in and about the village of Guemappe, which we
had assaulted and entered twice before. Many German snipers, men of good
marksmanship and tried courage, were placed all about in shell-holes
with orders to pick off our officers and men, and the enemy's gunners
had registered all our positions so that they were ready to drop down a
heavy barrage directly our men made a sign of attacking. For some days
after the second day of the battle of Arras they had fired a great many
shells along and behind our front lines in order to shake the nerve of
our troops, and had poured fire into Monchy-on-the-Hill after its
capture by our cavalry and infantry during those deadly hours of
fighting already described. It was only to be expected that this second
phase of the battle of Arras should be extremely hard. For our men it is
a battle to the death. Fighting is in progress at all the points
attained by our troops, and there is an ebb and flow of men--beaten back
for a while by intensity of fire, but attacking again and getting
forward. It is certain that Gavrelle is ours (thus breaking the Oppy
line north of the River Scarpe); that our men are beyond Guemappe, on
the south of the Scarpe, though the enemy is still fighting at this hour
of the afternoon in or about that village; and that on the extreme right
of the attack the enemy has suffered disaster north of Croisilles, and
has lost large numbers of men in killed and prisoners.
[Illustration: _Line on April 23, 1917_]
At the outset of the attack the enemy showed himself ready to meet it
with a fierce resistance. Last night was terribly cold, and our troops
lying out in shell-holes or in shallow trenches dug a day or two ago,
suffered from this exposure. The Scottish troops of the 15th Division on
the south of the Scarpe had fought in the first days' battles of Arras,
and, with English troops of the 37th, had gone forward to Monchy and
into the storm-centre of the German fire. Some of the men I met to-day
had been buried by German crumps, and had been dug out again, and as
they lay waiting for the hour of attack shells fell about them and the
sky was aflame with flashes of our bombs. The men craved for something
hot to drink. "I would have given all the money I have for a cup of
tea," said one of them. But they nibbled dry biscuits and waited for the
dawn, and hoped they would not be too numb when the light came to get up
and walk. The light came very pale over the earth, and with it the
signal to attack. Our bombardment had been steady all through the night,
and then broke into hurricane fire. As soon as our men left the trenches
our gunners laid down a barrage in front of them, and made a moving wall
of shells ahead of them--a frightful thing to follow, but the safest if
the men did not go too quick or fail to distinguish between the line of
German shells and our own. It was not easy to distinguish, for our men
had hardly risen from the shell-holes and ditches before the enemy's
barrage started, and all the ground about them was vomiting up fountains
of mud and shell-splinters. At the same time there came above all the
noise of shell-fire a furnace-blast of machine-guns. Machine-gunners in
Roeux and Pelves, in the two small woods in front of Monchy, and in
the ground about Guemappe were slashing all the slopes and roads below
Monchy-on-the-Hill.
"It was the most awful machine-gun fire I have heard," said a young
Gordon this morning, as he came back with a bullet in his hip. "The
beggars were ready for us, and made it very hot. But we folk went on,
those of us who weren't hit quickly, and made an attack on the village
of Guemappe."
"The enemy dropped his barrage on to us mighty quick," said a
Worcestershire lad, "but we managed, most of us, to get past his crumps.
It took a lot of dodging in shell-holes, and the worst was his
machine-gun fire, which was terrific."
Below Monchy the enemy was in trenches defended by enfilade fire from
redoubts along the Cambrai road, and when our English troops swept down
on them the Germans ran at once up their own slope to the cover of a
wood called Bois du Sart. Only one officer and two men remained, and
they were taken prisoner, and I saw them being marched back under
escort. The officer was a young Bavarian without a hat; he bore himself
very jauntily, though his face was white and he was covered with dirt.
The Worcesters and Hampshires of the 29th Division, farther north and
just south of the Scarpe, were held up for some time by the intensity of
the machine-gun fire, and before getting on had to wait the arrival of a
Tank which was crawling up by way of the lone copse. They were then
fighting heavily about Shrapnel-and-Bayonet Trench, and afterwards made
their way forward again under heavy fire, and passed a number of German
snipers lying in shell-holes to right and left of them. They were swept
by machine-gun fire and heavily counter-attacked.
To the north of the River Scarpe our progress was quicker, and Scottish
battalions of the 15th Division made their advance towards Roeux by
way of a fortified farm and chemical works, in which machine-guns were
hidden. Round about here the enemy lost very heavily. In trying to
escape from the ruins of the farm many of them were killed and lay in a
row to the left of the place. In the chemical works those who had not
escaped before our men were upon them surrendered at once. The attack
and capture of Gavrelle, which broke the Oppy line, was the best thing
done on the left of the attack. This is important ground for future
operations.
Guemappe, to the south of the river, is the scene of the most severe
attacks and counter-attacks; and it is clear that the enemy sets a great
price on this heap of bricks, because of its position on the Cambrai
road. Before this morning it has been the scene of fierce encounters;
and to-day the 3rd Bavarian Division (which has taken the place of the
18th Division, at whom they had jeered for losing so many prisoners in
recent battles) is at close quarters with our men; and round about the
village there is deadly hand-to-hand fighting. The trenches here are
full of Germans, and the enemy has sent up supports.
The 101st Pomeranian Regiment, belonging to the 35th Reserve Division,
surrendered in solid masses to our men in the neighbourhood of
Fontaine-lez-Croisilles. For several days they had suffered under our
bombardment, and it so shook their nerve that as soon as our troops
advanced they came out of their dug-outs in the support trenches--the
front line was not held at all--and gave themselves to our men in blocks
of 500 without any attempt to fight. On this ground between the Cojeul
and Sensee rivers, where our advance was on a curved line following the
shape of the rising ground, we took at least 1200 prisoners and a
battery of field-guns.
It is fortunate--in counting the high price of the battle--that many of
our wounded are only lightly touched by shrapnel and machine-gun
bullets. I saw these walking wounded coming back; tired, brave men, who
bore their pain with most stoic endurance, so that there was hardly a
groan to be heard among them. Now and again overhead was the shrill
whine of an approaching shell, "Whistling Percy" by name, but they paid
no heed after their great escape from the far greater peril. They formed
up in a long queue outside the dressing-station, where doctors waited
for them, and where there was a hot drink to be had. They were covered
with mud, and were too weary and spent to talk. That long line of
silent, wounded men will always remain in my memory.
Outside in the sunlight, waiting their turn to enter the
dressing-station, some of the men lay down on the bank in queer,
distorted attitudes very like death, and slept there. Others came
hobbling with each arm round the neck of the stretcher-bearers, or led
forward blind, gropingly. It was the whimper of these blind boys and the
agony on their faces which was most tragic in all this tragedy, those
and the men smashed about the face and head so that only their eyes
stared through white masks. Near by were German prisoners standing
against the sunlit wall, pale, sick, and hungry-looking men, utterly
dejected. A German aeroplane flew overhead on the way behind our lines,
shot at all the way by our anti-aircraft guns, but very bold. Our
kite-balloons, white as snow-clouds in the blue sky, stared over the
battlefield where our men are still fighting in the midst of great
shell-fire.
* * * * *
APRIL 25
This battle which is still in progress east of Arras is developing
rather like the early days of the Somme battles, when our men fought
stubbornly to gain or regain a few hundred yards of trenches in which
the enemy resisted under the cover of great gun-fire, and to which he
sent up strong bodies of supporting troops to drive our men out by
counter-attacks. In the ground east of Monchy, between the Scarpe and
the Sensee rivers, the situation is exactly like that, and, as I said
yesterday, the line of battle has ebbed to and fro in an astounding way,
British and German troops fighting forwards and backwards over the same
ground with alternating success.
An attack made by Scottish troops of the 15th Division yesterday
afternoon, and by English troops of the 29th at 3.30 this morning,
re-established our line on this side of the two woods called Bois du
Vert and Bois du Sart, and on the farther side of Guemappe. Parties of
British troops who had been cut off and were believed to be in the hands
of the enemy were recovered yesterday, having held out in a most gallant
way in isolated positions. Among them were some of the Argylls and men
of the Middlesex Regiment. Our barrage preceding an infantry attack
actually swept over them, and they gave themselves up for lost, but
escaped from the British shells and the German shells which burst all
round them and seemed in competition for their lives.
A similar case happened with a party of Worcester men recovered last
night. They were cut off in a small copse, and lay quiet there for
several days, surrounded by the enemy. They had their iron rations with
them, and lived on these until they were gone. They were then starving
and suffering great agony from lack of water. But still they would not
surrender, and last night were rewarded for their endurance by seeing
the enemy retire before the advancing waves of English troops.
The enemy is suffering big losses, but is replacing them each time by
fresh battalions. The Fourth Division of the Prussian Guards has now
been brought up against us, among several other new divisions. They
continue to show determination to hold us back from a nearer approach to
the Hindenburg line in spite of the frightful casualties already
suffered. There have been no fewer than eight counter-attacks already
upon the village of Gavrelle, and not one of them has reached our men,
but they have been broken and dispersed.
In the first counter-attack upon our line opposite Monchy, between 2000
and 3000 Germans left the Bois du Vert, but after many hundreds had
fallen retired to reorganize. The second attack was in greater numbers
and rolled back our line for a time, but has now been forced to retire
to its old position in the woods, which we keep continually under
intense fire, so that much slaughter must be there.
Our guns never cease their labouring night and day, and are shelling the
enemy's infantry positions, batteries, lines of communication,
rail-heads, and cross-roads, so that no troops may move except under the
menace of death or mutilation. Nevertheless, faced by great peril to his
main defensive lines, the enemy is massing troops rapidly for battle on
even a bigger scale. Our own men are passing through fiery ordeals with
that courage which is now known to the whole world, so that I need not
labour to describe it--a patient courage in great hardships,
self-sacrifice in the midst of great perils, sane and unbroken in spite
of horrors upon which the imagination dare not dwell.
From the colonel of the Worcesters of the 29th Division I heard to-day a
narrative which would surely make the angels weep, but though just out
of the infernal ordeal he told it calmly, and his hand only trembled
slightly as he pointed on his trench-map to positions which his men had
taken and where they had most suffered. His story deals with only a
small section of the battle front, and all the fighting which he
directed had for its object certain trenches which would mean nothing if
I gave their names. (They were Strong and Windmill Trench.)
His battalion headquarters were in a dug-out actually in the front
trench line from which his men attacked, and it was lucky, for after the
troops had gone forward the enemy's barrage fell behind them and
destroyed the ground. The colonel, with his adjutant, his
sergeant-major, and his servant, shared this battle headquarters with
the commanding officer and staff of the Hampshires, but not for long.
Heavy German crumps were smashing round them, and the enemy's
barrage-fire swept up and down searching for human life. The colonel of
the Hampshires was wounded, and two of his officers were killed. The
colonel of the Worcesters, who was left to record this history, could
tell very little of what was happening to his men there in the battle
less than a thousand yards away. A wounded sergeant came back and said
that the left company was holding out against German counter-attacks.
Later two young officers came back to Pick-and-Shrapnel Trench with a
party of men and said they had been ordered to retire by a strange
captain. The colonel rallied the men, and they went back and retook
Windmill Trench near by. Messages came down that men were half mad for
lack of water. The colonel sent up water by a carrying-party, but he
believes that they delivered it to the enemy, who had crept up through
the darkness which had now fallen. All through the day on each side of
this Worcestershire colonel great bodies of troops were fighting forward
under intense shell-fire. He saw the enemy's massed counter-attacks
slashed by our shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and our field-batteries
galloping to forward positions, but he could see nothing of his own men
after they had once gone forward down the sloping ground. His runners
were killed or fell senseless from shell-shock. He himself was buried by
a shell and dug out again by his sergeant-major. In the night he was
left quite alone, surrounded by dead.
That is one experience in the great battle, and thousands of our men
endured and are enduring dreadful things in the fierce fighting and
under intense fire. Once out of it, they are calm and self-controlled,
as I saw many of them to-day just as they had been relieved, and the
strongest expression they use is, "It is very hot, sir," or "I didn't
think I should come back."
The wounded are marvellous. The lightly wounded have a long way to walk,
hobbling for miles down unsafe roads. Many of them walked back through
Monchy when it was a flaming torch. Weary and dazed they came to the
casualty clearing-station, not even now beyond the range of shell-fire,
so that men who have escaped from the battlefields, waiting to have
their wounds dressed, hear the old shrill whistle of the approaching
menace, but do not care. It is only by such courage that our men can
gain any ground from the enemy, and it is such courage that beats back
all those heavy counter-attacks which the enemy is now hurling against
us up by Gavrelle and by Monchy-on-the-Hill.
VIII
THE BACKGROUND OF BATTLE
APRIL 30
There has been but little time lately to describe the scene of war or to
chronicle the small human episodes of this great battle between Lens and
St.-Quentin, with its storm-centre at Arras, where men are fighting in
mass, killing in mass, dying in mass. Some day one of our soldiers now
fighting--some young man with a gift of words--will write for all time
the story of all this: the beauty and the ugliness and the agony of it,
the colour and the smell and the movement of it, with intimate and
passionate remembrance. It is a memorable battle-picture in modern
history, and in the mass of hundreds of thousands of men, obedient to
the high command, which uses them as parts of the great war machine, is
the individual with his own separate experience and initiative, with his
sense of humour and his suffering, and his courage and his fear.
The scene of battle has changed during these last few days because
spring has come at last, and warm sunshine. It has made a tremendous
difference to the look of things, and to the sense of things. A week ago
our men were marching through rain and sleet, through wild quagmire of
old battlefields which stretch away behind our new front lines, through
miles of shell-craters and dead woods and destroyed villages. They
fought wet and fought cold, and their craving was for hot drink.
Yesterday, after a few days of warmth, our troops on the march were
powdered white with dust, and they fought hot and fought thirsty, and
the wounded cried for water to cool their burning throats. Men going up
to the lines in lorries stared out through masks of dust which made then
look like pierrots. Their steel helmets, upon which rain pattered a week
ago, were like millers' hats. More frightful now, even than in the worst
days of winter, is the way up to the Front. In all that broad stretch of
desolation we have left behind us the shell-craters which were full of
water, red water and green water, are now dried up, and are hard, deep
pits, scooped out of powdered earth, from which all vitality has gone,
so that spring brings no life to it. I thought perhaps some of these
shell-slashed woods would put out new shoots when spring came, and
watched them curiously for any sign of rebirth, but there is no sign,
and their poor, mutilated limbs, their broken and tattered trunks, stand
naked under the blue sky. Everything is dead with a white, ghastly look
in the brilliant sunshine except where here and there in the litter of
timber and brickwork which marks the site of a French village, a little
bush is in bud, or flowers blossom in a scrap-heap which was once a
garden. All this is the background of our present battle, and through
this vast stretch of barren country our battalions move slowly forward
to take their part in the battle when their turn comes, resting a night
or two among the ruins where other men who work always behind the lines,
road-mending, wiring, on supply columns, at ammunition dumps, in
casualty clearing-stations and rail-heads, have made their billets on
the lee side of broken walls or in holes dug deep by the enemy and
reported safe for use. Dead horses lie on the roadsides or in
shell-craters. I passed a row of these poor beasts as though all had
fallen down and died together in a last comradeship. Dead Germans, or
bits of dead Germans, lie in old trenches, and these fields are the
graveyards of Youth.
Farther forward the earth is green again in strips. The bombardment has
not yet torn it and pitted it, and the shell-craters are scarcer and
their sloping sides are fresh. One gets to know the date of a crater,
and its freshness is a warning sign that the enemy's guns dislike this
patch of ground and anything that may live there. So it is that one gets
close to the present fighting, and now under this first sunshine of the
year there is a strange and terrible beauty in the battle-picture.
I watched our shelling of the Hindenburg line at Queant from the ground
by Lagnicourt, where the Australians slaughtered the enemy in the recent
counter-attack. White as fleecy clouds in the sky was the smoke of our
shrapnel bursts, and there was the glinting and flashing of shells above
the enemy's trench, which wound like a tape on the slope of the rising
ground above the village of Queant, and through the fringe of trees
below. A storm of shells broke over Bullecourt to the left, and the
enemy was answering back with 5.9's, searching the valley which runs
down from Noreuil, as I watched it while it was under fire. The Germans
were barraging the crest of the hill, with their universal-shell
bursting high with black oily clouds. One of our aeroplanes had fallen,
and the enemy's gunners in the Hindenburg line tried to destroy it by
long-range sniping. Our own guns were firing steadily, so that the sky
was filled with invisible flights of shells, and always there came down
the humming song of our aeroplanes, and their wings were dazzling and
diaphanous as they were caught by the sun's rays. That is the picture
one sees now along any part of our line, but the adventure of the men
inside the smoke-drifts is more human in its aspect.
It was a queer scene when the Australians went into Lagnicourt. Some
Germans were still hiding in their dug-outs, and the Australian troops
searched for them with fixed bayonets. In some of these hiding-places
they found great stores of German beer, and it was a good find for men
thirsty and glad of a smoke. So this mopping-up battalion, as it is
called, mopped up the beer, which was very light and refreshing, and,
with fat cigars between their teeth, a bottle of beer in one hand and a
bayonet ready in the other, continued their hunt for prisoners. During
the fighting hereabouts 200 German soldiers came across under the white
flag as a sign of surrender, but they were seen by their own
machine-gunners, who shot them down without mercy. So one gets comedy
and tragedy hand-in-hand here, and, indeed, the whole tale of this
fighting on the way to Queant is a mixture of gruesome horror and
fantastic mirth, which makes men laugh grimly when telling the tale of
it.
I went about three days ago over the battlefield with a young Australian
officer, a gallant man and a quick walker, who was the first to get news
of the enemy's attack. He was at headquarters, awake but sleepy, in the
small hours of morning.
Presently the telephone bell tinkled. "Hallo," said the Australian
officer, and yawned. A small voice spoke: "The enemy has broken through.
He has got to Lagnicourt."
"What's that?" said the officer at the 'phone. It seemed a silly joke at
such an hour. The message was repeated, and my friend was very wide
awake, and what happened afterwards was very rapid.
The Australian Gunner-General gave orders to stop up the gaps in the
German wire through which the enemy had come. They were closed by
shell-fire. The attacking column, having failed in time to destroy the
field-guns, tried to escape, but found their retreat cut off. Three
thousand of them suffered appalling casualties, and I saw some of their
dead bodies lying on the ground three days ago, though most have now
been buried.
On another part of the line held by the English troops a queer bird was
captured the other day. It was a blue bird in the form of a German
officer wearing a gay uniform, with a big cloak and spurs, brought down
by one of our airmen. He seemed sleepy when caught, and yawned politely
behind a closed hand, and explained the cause of his unfortunate
appearance behind our lines. It appears that the commanding officer of
his air squadron at Cambrai went on leave, and his officers and other
friends consoled themselves by drinking good red wine. In the morning,
after a late night, they decided to go out on reconnaissance; and the
officer in the sky-blue cloak agreed that he also would make a flight,
and so perform his duty to the Fatherland. A pilot took him up; but,
instead of making a reconnaissance, he fell fast asleep and saw nothing
of a British aeroplane swooping upon him from a high cloud. A bullet in
the petrol-tank drove down the German machine, and the officer in the
sky-blue cloak stepped out, saluted, surrendered, and a little later
fell asleep again.
An air prisoner is always more noticeable than the batches of infantry
who come back to our lines after one of our attacks, but there was
something unusual in the sight of seventy-three Germans led by a young
English soldier from the zone of fire in this latest fighting. Our man
was a young private of Suffolks, chubby-faced and small in body, though
of a high spirit.
"What are you doing with those men?" asked an officer. "Why isn't there
a proper escort?"
"They are my prisoners," said the boy; "they have just surrendered to
me, and I'm taking them back to our camp."
During attacks near Monchy one of our young officers was lying in a
shell-hole with a thin line of men, mostly wounded. Presently a Tank
crawled up, and a voice spoke from it: "That's a hot spot of yours. You
had better come inside for a bit."
"How shall I get in?" said the young infantry officer. A voice from the
Tank said: "Come round to this side." The young officer climbed in
through a hole, and said "Thanks very much" to the Tank officer, who
drove him close to the enemy's line, enabled him to see the position,
and then brought him back to his shell-hole.
These things are happening on the field of battle, and there are many of
our officers and men who have such fantastic experiences, and tell them
as though they were normal adventures of life.
IX
HOW THE SCOTS TOOK GUEMAPPE
MAY 1
Birds are singing their spring songs on this May Day in the woods very
close to where men are fighting, and the fields on the edge of the
shell-crater country are yellow with cowslips, so that war seems more
hateful than ever, when the earth is so good, and all the colour and
scent of it. But the work of war goes on whatever the weather. To-day,
as well as yesterday, the enemy's chief targets were Arleux, captured by
the Canadians, and Guemappe, which fell to Scottish troops, both of
which places he has tried to take back by repeated and violent
counter-attacks. He is still in a trench on the east side of Guemappe,
running down to a bit of ruin called Cavalry Farm, where there has been
close fighting for several days since the great battle on April 23, when
Guemappe was taken by the Scots of the 15th Division.
That battle round Guemappe is a great episode in the history of the
Scottish troops in France. It was fighting which lasted for nearly a
week after the hour of attack in the first daylight of April 23. At that
hour long waves of the Seaforths, Black Watch, and Camerons left the
trenches they had dug under shell-fire, and went forward towards
Guemappe. They were faced at once by blasts of machine-gun fire, and
although our artillery barrage crashed across the field some of the
German strong points were still held in force. At one, about which I
know most, there was a gap between the Seaforths and Camerons owing to
the feeble light of the dawn, in which men could only dimly see, but
this was filled up by some companies of the Black Watch. For nearly
three hours the Scots were held up by the fire of German machine-guns
and artillery, and suffered many casualties, but they fought on, each
little group of men acting with separate initiative, and it is to their
honour as soldiers that they destroyed every machine-gun post in front
of them. One sergeant of the Black Watch fought his way down a bit of
trench alone and knocked out the gun-crew so that the line could
advance. Two hundred prisoners were taken in that first forward sweep,
when the Seaforths advanced in long lines and went through and beyond
the village of Guemappe with loud shouts and cheers. They were checked
again by machine-gun fire from many different directions, and
immediately from the ruin called Cavalry Farm ahead of them. This was
afterwards cleared, and many Germans lie dead there. Then between eleven
and twelve in the morning the enemy developed his first counter-attack.
He massed masses of men in the valley below Guemappe, flung a storm of
shells on to the village, and then sent forward his troops to work round
the spur on which the Highlanders held their line. It was then that the
Camerons and Black Watch showed their fierce and stubborn fighting
spirit. They tore rents in the lines of advancing Bavarians with
Lewis-gun and rifle-grenade fire, and the enemy's losses were great, so
that the supporting troops passed over lines of dead comrades. But the
attack was pressed by strong bodies of men, and the thin lines of the
Scots, exhausted by long hours of fighting, were forced to swing back.
We now know that first reports were wrong, when it was said that the
enemy retook Guemappe for a time. He never set foot in it again, though
the Scottish line fell back. Little groups of Highland officers and men
refused to retreat. Some of them held the cemetery and defended it
against all attacks. A captain of the Black Watch with seventy men
remained in the north of the village for four hours, though they had no
protection on either flank. One officer and twelve men of the Camerons
at another spot refused to leave during the retirement, and were found
still holding out when their comrades renewed their attack and regained
the ground. Another officer of the Camerons lost all the men of his
machine-gun team, but brought up the gun himself and worked it with
another officer already wounded. Afterwards, to save ammunition, he
sniped the enemy with their own rifles which they had dropped on the
field. Later the village of Guemappe was isolated, for our artillery
bombardment prevented all approach by the enemy. Then another brigade of
Scots streamed round by the north of the village, and the whole line of
Highland troops swept back the enemy. By that time the Bavarian troops
had no more fight in them, and knew they were beaten. They retired in
great disorder, leaving great numbers of dead and wounded.
For a day and a half the Scots were able to rest a little, though always
under shell-fire; but afterwards there was fierce patrol fighting round
Cavalry Farm and in outposts near by. The enemy's fire was intense, and
he commanded this position from the high ground to the north, but small
parties of Scots held on doggedly outside the ruins of the farm until,
after five days, they were withdrawn.
I have told all this briefly; but, even so, I hope it may reveal a
little of the stubborn courage with which those men refused to give way,
and when forced back for a few hours after great losses, regained the
ground they had captured with a spirit which belongs to the history of
their fighting clans.
X
THE OPPY LINE
MAY 2
There have been no strong infantry attacks along our front to-day, none
of any kind as far as I know. It has been a day for the guns alone, and
as my ears could bear witness, and every nerve in my body, they have
made the most of it under the blue sky. All our batteries were hard at
work, heavy howitzers with broad blunt snouts, long-muzzled long-ranged
60-pounders, and farther forward, on the landscape of the battlefield,
field-guns drumming out salvos with staccato knocks above the full deep
blasts of the monsters behind them.
Somehow in this bright sunlight, flooding all the countryside with a
golden haze and painting the fields with vivid colour--yellow where the
new shell-holes had dug deep pits, red-brown where it had lain quiet
since the war, emerald-green where strips of grass grew between the
plots of barbed wire and a tangle of old trenches--on such a day as
this, with a light wind driving fleecy clouds through the sky, and wild
flowers like little stars at one's feet, and larks singing with a high
ecstasy, war and blood and death seemed abominably out of place. Yet
they were there all three, round about Oppy and Gavrelle, and on the
ground below Bailleul, thrust before one's eyes, rising to one's
nostrils, making hideous noises about one. It would have been so much
better in such a May as this to stroll on the way to Oppy, in this first
sunshine of the year, without a thought of what men might be watching.
But when, standing on the crest above, I showed half my body above a bit
of earth, an officer who lives below the earth said, "It's better to
keep down. The blighters can see us all right."
And to stroll into Oppy one must have many machine-guns with one, and be
preceded by a storm of heavy shells, making a steel wall before one. One
day soon, I suppose, our men will go in again like that, to find a
litter of men's bodies, some living men trembling in cellars, and
another little bit of hell. We were making a hell of it to-day for any
young Germans there. Our guns made good target practice of it, flinging
up rosy clouds of dust from its ruins of red brick. But one house still
stands in Oppy Wood. It is a big white chateau, which is clearly visible
with empty windows and broken roofs through a thin fringe of dead trees.
A sinister ghostly place, even at broad noonday, and no man alive would
sit alone there in its big salon unless he had gone mad with
shell-shock, for that white house is another target for guns, and while
I watched our shells crashed through the trees about it.
Below Oppy, where our men fought a few days ago, is Gavrelle, which is
ours, above Greenland Hill, where there is a broken village among the
trees, from which we can look down across the River Scarpe. To the left
of Oppy is Arleux-en-Gohelle, recently captured by Canadians, who fought
through its streets, and to the southern side of it is the ruin of a
sugar factory, 500 yards or so from the outskirts of Bailleul, an old
grey place, with broken walls and roofs, and a railway station with a
deep embankment. These places were targets for the German guns,
especially Arleux and Bailleul railway station, and heavy crumps came
whining and then crashing, and flinging up clouds of black smoke--as
black and as big as the evil genii that came from the bottle and played
the devil.
The enemy's guns were very active to-day, as our communique would say.
But one of our forward observing officers, a young man in a dusty ditch,
with a telescope and a telephone, and a steel hat which is only a faith
cure for heavy shell-fire, was chuckling over this morning's business.
"It was very funny," he said. "The Boche started counter-battery work,
but we answered back too quick, and knocked out one of his batteries
smack in the eye. That group has kept quiet since then."
He pointed to some broken things lying about the field outside Oppy, and
said: "The aeroplanes have been dropping about a good deal. There has
been some very hot work in this part of the sky." The sky above us then
was full of the throb and hum of aeroplanes, and to the tune of them
birds went on singing, but other birds, invisible, sang louder than the
larks, with high, shrill, whistling cries which make one feel cold and
crouch low if they sing too close overhead. So the battle of guns went
on, and troops, marching over dusty ground pock-marked with
shell-craters, all white and barren, between belts of rusty wire, paid
no heed to bursting crumps, and in the new-made craters or in old
trenches, or in special holes just dug for shelter, sat down out of the
wind and cooked their food, and slept so much like other bodies who will
never wake, that once or twice I thought they were dead, these single
figures sprawling in the dust, with sand-bags for their pillows. Away on
the skyline were a few dim towers faintly pencilled against the golden
haze, and one taller than the others standing apart.
"Douai," said a gunner officer. Yes; it was Douai, old in history and
full of ancient buildings, which hold many memories of faith and
scholarship and peace. The tall, lone tower which I saw was the great
belfry of Douai. It seemed very far away, with the German lines on this
side of it; but I remember how I used to see the clock-tower of Bapaume
(no longer standing, alas!) as far and dim as this, so that it seemed as
though we should never fight our way to it. But one day I walked into
Bapaume with the Australian troops, who had entered it that morning. And
so one day we may walk into Douai, if luck is with us.
XI
THE BATTLE OF MAY 3
MAY 3
Another day of close, fierce, difficult fighting is now in progress,
having begun early this morning in the darkness and going on down a long
front in hot sunshine and dust and the smoke of innumerable shells.
Among the battalions engaged were the Royal Scots, East Yorks,
Shropshire Light Infantry, the Norfolks, Suffolks, East Kents and West
Kents, Royal Fusiliers, East Surreys, Worcesters, Hampshires, King's Own
Scottish Borderers, East Lancs and South Lancs, Gloucesters, Argylls,
Seaforths and Black Watch, and the Middlesex and London Regiments. They
belonged to the 3rd, 12th, 37th, 29th, 17th, 15th, and 56th Divisions.
At many points our troops have succeeded in getting forward in spite of
great resistance from fresh German regiments and intense artillery-fire.
The most important gains of the day are in the direction of the village
of Cherisy, where ground has been won by English battalions, and round
Bullecourt by the Australians with Devons and Gordons on their left.
This thrusts the enemy by Fontaine-lez-Croisilles, where he is still
holding out, into a narrow pointed salient, which should be utterly
untenable. The way to Cherisy was taken rapidly by men of the West Kents
and East Surreys of the 18th Division without any serious check,
although there was savage machine-gun fire. At Fontaine-lez-Croisilles
our men found it very difficult to get forward owing to the strength of
the enemy's defences south of the wood, and an abominable barrage of
heavy shell-fire. They bombed their way down 600 yards of trench, and
established themselves round Fontaine Wood on the north-west side of the
village.
Farther north fighting carried our line out from Guemappe towards
St.-Rohart Factory, just above Vis-en-Artois, but signal rockets sent up
here by our men may only come from advanced posts ahead of the main
line.
South of the Scarpe, between Monchy and those two woods of ill repute,
the Bois du Vert and Bois du Sart, the battle has been similar to other
struggles over the same ground, where the enemy stares across to our
lines from good cover and has every inch of earth registered by his
guns, with a clear field of fire for his machine-guns, of which he has
got numbers in enfilade positions. English and Scottish battalions
attacked here this morning, and would not give way under the terrific
fire, but fought forward in small bodies until they gained the line on
the crest of Infantry Hill and 300 yards short of the two woods, now
linked together by the Germans with belts of wire and well-dug trenches.
North of the River Scarpe there is great fighting round Roeux,
Gavrelle, and Oppy by the Household Battalion, Seaforths, Royal Irish
Fusiliers, Warwicks, South African Scottish of the 4th, 9th, and 6th
Divisions, and other English and Scottish battalions.
Gavrelle has already been the scene of many attacks and counter-attacks.
It was here that in the fighting last month the enemy advanced time
after time in close waves, only to be scythed down by our machine-guns,
so that heaps of those field-grey dead lie out there on the barren land.
To-day those dead were joined by many comrades. When our men advanced
they were met by masses of Germans, and once more the line of battle had
an ebb and flow, and both sides passed over the dead and wounded in
assault and retirement. Four times an old windmill beyond the village
changed hands. Four times the Germans who had dislodged our men were cut
to pieces and thrust out. Men are fighting here as though these bits of
brick and wood are worth a king's ransom or a world's empire, and in a
way they are worth that, for the windmill of Gavrelle is one point which
will decide a battle or a series of battles upon which the fate of two
Empires is at stake. So it happens in this war that a dust-heap like
that other windmill at Pozieres in the crisis of the Somme battles
becomes for hours or days the prize of victory or the symbol of defeat.
In Oppy, above Gavrelle, which I described yesterday as I saw it in the
golden haze, the Germans there, whom I could not see, have been very
busy. They knew this attack was coming; it was clear that it must come
to them, and at night they worked hard to protect themselves, fear being
their taskmaster. They made machine-gun emplacements not only in pits
and trenches, but in branches of many trees, and wired themselves in
with many twisted strands. The Second Guards Reserve, newly brought up,
held the village and wood and the white chateau, with its empty windows
and broken roofs, and kept below the ground when our gun-fire stormed
above them. So when our men attacked in that pale darkness of a May
night they found themselves at once in a hail of machine-gun bullets,
and later under shell-fire, which made a fury about them. They
penetrated into Oppy Wood, but owing to the massed German troops, who
counter-attacked fiercely, they did not go far into the wood or lose
themselves in such a death-trap. They were withdrawn to the outskirts of
Oppy, so that our guns could get at the enemy and drive him below ground
again.
Northwards we stormed and won long trenches running up from Oppy to
Arleux, and most necessary for further progress, linking up with the
Canadians, who made a great and successful attack upon the village of
Fresnoy, just south of Acheville.
That was certainly a very gallant feat in face of many difficulties of
ground and most savage fire. They completely surrounded the village and
caught its garrison in a trap from which they had no escape. After brief
fighting with bombs and bayonets the survivors surrendered, to the
number of eight officers and about 200 men belonging to the Fifteenth
Reserve Division of Prussians. What made them sick and sorry men is that
two of their battalions had just arrived in high spirits, having troops
in front of them who were weak, they had been told, and they were
ordered to attack Arleux this morning. The Canadians attacked first, and
by six o'clock these Prussians were sadder and wiser men. The prisoners
escaped our shell-fire, but were nearly done to death behind our lines
by their own guns. I saw this incident this morning. They had been put
in an enclosure, next to a Canadian field dressing-station flying the
Red Cross, when suddenly the enemy's guns began to shell the area with
five-point-nines. They burst again and again during half an hour with
tremendous crashes and smoke-clouds.
"If those Germans are still there," said a Canadian, "there won't be
much left of them."
When the shelling eased off I went towards their place but found it
empty. As soon as the shelling started their guards hurried them away to
safety farther back behind the lines, and the Canadian wounded were
diverted to another route. One of these Prussian officers was shown his
old lines captured on April 9, and he asked what regiment had done such
gallant work. "The Canadians did it," he was told, "and the same fellows
that captured Fresnoy this morning." The Prussian officer could hardly
believe it, but when he was convinced of its truth he complimented the
Canadian troops who had fought so hard and so far. They were proud young
officers, and when I spoke to one or two they would not admit that they
had been mastered in this war. They seem to have an unbounded faith in
Hindenburg's genius, and in the effects of submarine warfare.
I found no such spirit among the non-commissioned officers and men. They
spoke as men under an evil spell, hating the war, but seeing no end to
it. "Neither side will win," said one of them, "but who will stop it?
The papers write about the conditions of peace, but one party says one
thing and one party says another, and we don't know what to believe."
I asked them about the Russian revolution, and whether it had any
influence in the German trenches, but they seemed to have heard of it
only as a vague, far-off event, not affecting their own lives and ideas.
They were more interested about their food, and said their bread ration
had been reduced by one-third. Behind the lines the scene of war to-day
was on white, dusty plains under the glare of the sun, where men waiting
to go into battle slept beside their arms, where mules kicked and rolled
beside heavy batteries and transport. Guns were thundering close, and
hostile shells were bursting among the tents and kinema pavilions, and a
band was playing. No sane man would believe it unless he saw it with his
own eyes and heard it with his own ears, for it was all fantastic as a
nightmare of war, with wounded men hobbling back from the bloody strife
and wending their way through the old trenches, in which other men sat
polishing rifles, or whistling in tune with the band.
* * * * *
MAY 21
Before darkness, when the shadows were lengthening across the fields and
the glow of the evening sun was warm on the white walls of the French
cottages, I went into an old village to meet some men who have just come
out of the fires of hate. They were the East Kents of the 12th Division,
whom I met last, months ago now, during the battle of the Somme, where
they had hard fighting and tragic losses. In the twilight and dusk and
darkness I heard their tales of battle--the things these men had done
just a little while ago before coming down to this village of
peace--tales of frightful hours, of life in the midst of death, of
English valour put to the most bloody and cruel tests.
Men of Kent and boys of Kent. There was one boy with black eyes sitting
with his tunic off on the window-sill above a terraced porch who seemed
too young to be one of the King's officers, and is no more than
nineteen, but ninety in the experience of life and death. He told me how
he was sent up with some signallers to keep touch with his company, who
had gone forward in the attack at Monchy in the darkness before daybreak
on the morning of May 3. He lost his way, as other men did, because of
the darkness, and found his men being hit by machine-gun bullets. He put
them into shell-holes, and worked from one hole to the other, dodging
the heavy crumps which flung the earth up about them, and the more
deadly sweep of bullets. When the first glimmer of dawn came he met a
man of his company bringing down two prisoners, and heard that the
objective had been taken. It seemed good news and good evidence. The
young officer pushed on with what men were with him, and presently saw a
body of men ahead of him. Our fellows, he thought, and signalled to
them. He thought it queer that they didn't answer his signals, but waved
their caps in reply. He thought it more queer that they were wearing
overcoats, and he was sure his company had gone forward without coats.
But if those were not his men, where were they? That was where they
ought to be, or farther forward. He went forward a little way, uneasy
and doubtful, until all doubts were solved. Those men waving caps to
him, beckoning him forward, were Germans. The enemy had got behind our
men, who were cut off. It was a narrow escape for this boy of nineteen,
and he had others before he got back with a few men, sniped all the way
by the enemy on the hill-side. It was worse for men who had been
fighting forward there. They had gone over the ground quickly to the
first goal, though many had lost their way in darkness and many had
fallen. Then the enemy had dribbled in from positions on each side of
them and closed up behind them. The East Kents were cut off, like other
men of other regiments fighting alongside. Many officers were picked
off by snipers or hit by shells and machine-gun fire. Second lieutenants
found themselves in command of companies, sergeants and corporals and
privates became leaders of small groups of men. The Buffs were cut off,
but did not surrender. One young officer was the only one left with his
company. He cheered up the men and said it was up to the Buffs to hold
out as long as possible, and they built cover by linking up shell-holes
and making a defensive position. Three times the enemy attacked in heavy
numbers, determined to get their men, but each time they were beaten off
by machine-gun fire and bombs. Fifteen hours passed like this, and then
night came, and with it grave and dreadful anxiety to the officer with
what remained of the company of men who looked to him for leadership.
There were no more bombs. If another attack came, nothing could stop it.
"We must fight our way back," said the second lieutenant. Between them
and their own lines were two German trenches full of the enemy. It would
not be easy to hack a way through. But the East Kents left their
shell-holes, scrambled up into the open, and, with the second lieutenant
leading, stumbled forward through the darkness as stealthily as possible
to the German lines between them and our old positions. Then they sprang
into the enemy's trench, bayoneting or clubbing the sentries. A German
officer came out of a dug-out with a sword, which is an unusual weapon
in a trench, but before he could use it our second lieutenant shot him
with his revolver. So to the next trench, and so through again to a
great escape.
There were other officers and men who had to fight desperately for life,
like this. Young Kentish lads behaved with fine and splendid bravery. A
private belonging to a machine-gun team remained alone in a shell-hole
when all his comrades were killed, and stayed there for three days,
keeping his gun in action until relieved by our advancing troops. Three
days had passed when he rejoined his unit, and they, after a brief rest,
were moving forward again to the front line. The escaped man was given
the offer of remaining behind, but he said, "Thanks, but I'll go up
along, with the rest of the chaps," and back he went.
Another young private saw his company commander fall by his side. The
stretcher-bearers had not yet come up to that spot, though all through
the battle they did most noble work; and this private soldier was
desperate to get help for his officer. He resolved to make the enemy
help him, and went forward to where he saw Germans. By some menace of
death in his eyes, he quelled them--six of them--into surrender, and,
bringing them back as prisoners, made them carry the young officer back
to the dressing-station, so saving his life. I have told the story of
the Buffs, or a brief glimpse of it, and they will forgive me when I add
that what they have done has been done also by other English battalions,
not with greater valour but with as great, in many battles and in these
now being fought. Our English troops, through no fault of mine, get but
little praise or fame though they are the backbone of the Army, and are
in all our great attacks. The boys of England, like those of its garden
county of Kent, have poured out their blood on these fields of France,
and have filled the history of this appalling war with shining deeds.
XII
FIELDS OF GOLD
MAY 23
The beauty of these May days is so intense and wonderful after the cold,
grey weather and sudden rush of spring that men are startled by it, and
find it outrageously cruel that death and blood and pain should be
thrust into such a setting. Once in history two fat kings met in a field
of France, between silken tents and on strips of tapestry laid upon the
grass, so that this scene of glitter and shimmer was called for every
age of schoolboys "The Field of the Cloth of Gold." Out here in France
now there is a field of honour, stretching for more than a hundred
miles, held by British soldiers; and that is a true field of cloth of
gold, for everywhere behind the deep belt of cratered land, so barren
and blasted that no seed of life is left in the soil, there are miles of
ground where gold grows, wonderfully brilliant in the warm sunshine of
these days. It is the gold of densely growing dandelions and of
buttercups in great battalions. They cover the wreckage of old trenches,
and bloom in patches of ground between powdered fragments of brick- and
stone-work which are still called by the names of old villages swept off
the face of the earth by fierce bombardments.
If you wish to picture our Army out here now, the landscape in which our
men are fighting--and they like to think you want to do so--you must
think of them marching along roads sweet-scented with lilac and
apple-blossom, and over those golden fields to the white edge of the
dead land. They are hot under heavy packs all powdered with dust, so
that they wear white masks like a legion of Pierrots, and on their steel
helmets the sun shines brazenly. But there is a soft breeze blowing, and
as they march through old French villages showers of tiny white petals
are blown upon them from the wayside orchards like confetti at a wedding
feast, though it is for this dance of death called war. And these hot,
dusty soldiers of ours, closed about by guns and mule teams and
transport columns surging ceaselessly along the highways to the Front,
drink in with their eyes cool refreshing shadows of green woods set upon
hill-sides where the sun plays upon the new leaves with a melody of
delicate colour-music, and spreads tapestries of light and shade across
sweeps of grass-land all interwoven with the flowers of France.
Our soldiers do not walk blindly through this beauty. It calls to them,
these men of Surrey and Kent and Devon, these Shropshire lads and boys
of the Derbyshire dales, and at night in their camps, before turning in
to sleep in the tents, they watch the glow of the western sun and the
fading blue of the sky, and listen to the last song of birds tired with
the joy of the day, and are drugged by the scent of closing flowers and
of green wheat growing so tall, so quickly tall, behind the
battlefields. These tents are themselves like flowers in the darkness
when candlelight gleams through their canvas, and at night the scene of
war is lit up by star-shells and vivid flashes of light as great shells
fall and burst beyond the zone of tents, where British soldiers crouch
in holes and burrow deep into the earth. It is under the blue sky of
these days, and in this splendour of spring-time, that English boys and
young Scots go into the fires of hell, where quite close to them the
birds still sing, as I heard the nightingale amidst the crash of
gun-fire.
They were Shropshire lads of the King's Shropshire Light Infantry of the
glorious 3rd Division, who helped to turn the tide of battle on one of
these recent days when there was savage fighting through several days
and nights. The officer in command of one of their companies found the
ruined village of Tilloy-les-Mufflaines in front of him still held by
the enemy when our troops assaulted it. They were working their
machine-guns and raking another body of infantry.
"Come on, Shropshires," shouted the young officer, and his boys followed
him. They worked round the flank of the village, cut off ninety of the
enemy and captured them, and thereby enabled other troops to get
forward. One of these Shropshire officers went out with only a few men
200 yards beyond the front line that night, and took twenty prisoners in
a dug-out there.
Into that same village of Tilloy cleared by Shropshires an officer of
the King's Own Liverpools, with a lance-corporal, dashed into a ruined
house from which the enemy was sniping in a most deadly way, and brought
out two officers and twenty-eight men as prisoners. It was a subaltern
of the Suffolks who went out in daylight under frightful fire to
reconnoitre the enemy's lines and brought back knowledge which saved
many lives. On the night of May 3, when all the sky was blazing with
fire, it was the Royal Scots of the 3rd Division who held part of the
line against heavy counter-attacks. The men had been fighting against
great odds. Many of them had fallen, and the wounded were suffering
horribly. Thirst tortured them, not only the wounded but also the
unwounded, and there was no chance of water coming up through the
hellish barrage. No chance except for the gallantry of the adjutant of
the Royal Scots away back at battle headquarters near Monchy, where
heavy crumps were bursting. He guessed his men craved for water, and he
risked almost certain death to take it to them, going through all the
fire with a few carriers and by a miracle untouched. This same adjutant
went out again across the battle-ground under heavy fire to reorganize
an advanced signal-station where there were many dead and wounded, and
all the lines were cut. It was a young second lieutenant of the Royal
Fusiliers of the 3rd Division who took command of two companies when all
the other officers had been killed or wounded, and so comforted the men
that under his leadership they dug a line close to the German position
east of Monchy, and all through the day and night of tragic fighting
held it against strong attacks and under infernal shell-fire. Day after
day, night after night, our men are fighting like that. And when for a
little while they are relieved and given a rest they come back across
those fields of the cloth of gold, beyond those barren fields where so
many of their comrades lie, and look around and take deep breaths and
say, "By Jove, what perfect weather!" and become a little drunk with the
beauty of this world of life, and hate the thought of death.