In gun-power the enemy was and is strong. He had prepared a large

concentration of guns south-east of our right flank, and whatever may be

his reserves of ammunition he has gathered up great stores for this

present battle. On the right of our attack he stood on high ground, the

crest of Polygon Wood, and the slopes down from Abraham Heights and the

Gravenstafel Ridge. It is the big door which he must slam in our face at

all costs, because it opens out to his plains beyond; and against it he

has massed all his weight. Our men, it will be seen, were not likely to

have a walk-over. They did not, but took all they gained by hard

fighting. It could in no sense of the word be a walk-over. The ground

was hideous, worse than in the winter on the Somme. That seems strange,

with a hot sun shining overhead and dust rising in clouds along traffic

roads behind the battle-line as I saw it to-day. That is the irony of

things. Where our men were fighting yesterday and to-day there are

hundreds of thousands of shell-holes, some three feet deep and some ten

feet deep, and each shell-hole is at least half full of water, and many

of them are joined so that they form lakes deep enough to drown men and

horses if they fall in. So it was, and is, around the place where

Langemarck village stood, and where the old lake of the chateau that no

longer stands has flooded over into a swamp, and where a double row of

black tree-stumps goes along the track of the broken road where the

people of Langemarck used to walk to church before the devil did in so

many old churches and established little hells of his own on their

rubbish-heaps. So it was yesterday and remains to-day all about, the

stumps of trees sticking up out of a mush of slimy, pitted ground which

go by the romantic names of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and

Shrewsbury Forest and Polygon Wood. The photographs of our airmen taken

yesterday in low flights over these damned places reveal the full

foulness of them. Seen from this high view, they are long stretches of

white barren earth pock-marked by innumerable craters, where no man or

human body is to be seen, though there are many dead and some living

lying in those holes, and they are all bright and shining, because the

sun is glinting on the water which fills them, except where dense clouds

of smoke from great gun-fire drift across.

The courage of men who attacked over such ground was great courage. The

grim, stubborn way in which our soldiers made their way through these

bogs and would not be beaten, though they slipped and fell and stuck

deep while the enemy played machine-gun bullets on to their lines and

flung high explosives over the whole stretch of bog-land through which

they had to pass, is one of the splendid and tragic things in our poor

human story.

I told yesterday how some of our English battalions took Langemarck like

this, leaving many comrades bogged, wounded, and spent, but crawling

round the concrete houses, over the old cellars of the village and

routing out the Germans who held them with machine-guns. At the

blockhouse on the way up, called Au Bon Gite, an oblong fort of concrete

walls ten feet thick, the Germans bolted inside as soon as they saw our

men, slammed down an iron door, and for a time stayed there while our

bombers prowled round like hungry wolves waiting for their prey. Later

they gave themselves up because our line swept past them and they had no

hope.

In another place of the same kind, called Reitre Farm, from which came a

steady blast of machine-gun fire, our men made several desperate rushes

and at last, when many lay wounded, a machine-gunner of ours got close

and thrust the barrel of his weapon through a slit in the wall and swept

the inner chamber with a flood of bullets.

There were savage fights in some of the dark cellars of Langemarck

between men who would not surrender and men who would not turn back, and

men who fell heavily against other men and knew that in these

underground holes it must be their life or the other's, and the quicker

the better. They fought their way beyond Langemarck yesterday, and on

the left of our advance we hold to-day all the ground that was taken,

which follows the curve of the Langemarck-Gheluvelt line, dug and wired

by months of labour according to the orders of the German command,

afraid of our coming menace, and now blotted out. The fighting all about

this ground was by groups of English soldiers, in some cases without

officers, and in some cases led by privates with a sense of leadership

and fine, stern courage. They were Royal Fusiliers, Lancashire

Fusiliers, Middlesex, Guernseys, and other battalions of the 29th

Division, the Light Infantry battalions of the 20th Division, the

Yorkshires, Lancashires, South Staffords, Lincolns, and Borderers of the

11th Division, and the Oxfords, Gloucesters, and Berkshires of the 48th

Division. So things happened on the left of the battle. All ground was

gained as it had been planned, and all held, and many hundreds of

prisoners were taken, though that is not the best proof of success.

On the right it was different. It was on the right that the enemy fought

hardest, counter-attacked most fiercely and most often, and concentrated

the heaviest artillery. There were the Irish Brigades here, and English

county troops of the 8th Division, and London battalions of the 56th.

All this side of the attack become involved at once in desperate

fighting. The ground was damnable--cratered and full of water and

knee-deep in foul mud--and beyond them was high ground, struck through

with gully-like funnels, through which the enemy could pour up his storm

troops for counter-attack; and away in the mud were the same style of

concrete forts as up north, still unbroken by our bombardments and

fortified again with new garrisons of machine-gunners, taking the place

of those who on July 31 were killed or captured when this ground was

stormed and, later, lost.

The English and the Irish battalions made progress in spite of heavy

fire on them and no light losses; but in the afternoon of yesterday they

had to withdraw from their advanced positions under the pressure of

fierce counter-attacks by fresh troops. They fought these rear-guard

actions stubbornly. Irish as well as English fought sometimes in small

groups in isolated posts, until they were killed or captured. They made

the enemy pay a big price in blood for his old ground, but their own

casualties could not be light in view of the desperate character of this

struggle.

As yet I know very few details of the Irish side of things. I know more

about the Londoners, for I have been to see them to-day, and they have

told me the facts of yesterday. They are tragic facts, because for

English troops it is always a tragedy to withdraw from any yard of soil

they have taken by hard fighting, and many good London lads will never

come back from that morass. But there is nothing the matter with London

courage, and to me there is something more thrilling in the way these

boys fought to the death, some of them in the bitterness of retreat,

than in the rapid and easy progress of men in successful attack. Lying

out all night in the wet mud under heavy fire, they attacked at dawn up

by Glencorse Wood, in the direction of Polygon Wood. On the right they

and their neighbours at once came under blasts of fire from five

machine-guns in a strong point, and under a hostile barrage-fire that

was frightful in its intensity They could not make much headway. No

mortal men could have advanced under such fire, and so their comrades on

the left were terribly exposed to the scythe of bullets which swept them

also.

Men of London regiments--the Queen's Westminsters and the old "Vics" and

the Rangers and the Kensingtons--fought forward with a wonderful spirit

which is a white shining light in all this darkness--through Glencorse

Wood and round to the north of Nuns' Wood, avoiding the most deeply

flooded ground here, where there was one big boggy lake. Parties of the

Middlesex went into Polygon Wood, which is a long way forward, and

actually brought prisoners out of that place. At a strong point near the

Hooge-Gheluvelt road they killed thirty-four Germans and captured the

redoubt. But there were Germans still left in other concrete houses

near by, and they were very strong at the Zonnebeke position on the

north-west.

Very soon counter-attacks developed from the south out of Inverness

Copse, and from the north. The Londoners were exhausted after their

dreadful night and all this fighting over foul ground; they were in

exposed positions, and they were shut in by the most terrible gun-fire.

What happened with the Irish and other troops happened here. Our airmen,

flying low, saw small isolated groups of London boys fighting separate

battles against great odds. The enemy was encircling them, and they were

trying to hold rear-guard positions, so that their comrades could

withdraw in good order. A signalled message that found its way to

headquarters tells one such story. I read to-day the little pink slip

bearing the words as they came in. They are from a Middlesex officer.

"Am in shell-hole before second objective, and two strong points held by

the enemy. Have ten men with me. We are surrounded, and heavy

machine-gun fire is being turned on us. Regret no course but to

surrender. Can't see any of our forces."

That message was the only one of its kind received, but there were many

small groups of London men, led by young officers, or without officers,

who held on to the last like that, and did not let down the pride of

their great city, so gay, so ignorant yesterday afternoon, with a tide

of traffic swirling down its streets, while out here on the wet barren

earth, under the same sun, these boys of London fought and died, or in

small groups rose from among their dead and wounded and went white-faced

into the circle of the enemy who had surrounded them.

X

SOMERSETS AT LANGEMARCK

AUGUST 19

The enemy, after denying our taking of Langemarck, now admit their loss

of it. Our prisoners who were brought through the place had the German

wireless read out to them and were abashed by the untruth of the

message. It was a German sergeant-major who put up the only excuse. He

laughed and said: "In this war it is only those who win who can afford

to tell the official truth. A reverse is always covered by a lie."

We are well beyond Langemarck, and to-day I went among the men who got

there first--the 20th Division--fighting their way past machine-gun

blockhouses, which is the new system of German defence, past the deadly

machine-gun fire that came out of them, and through to the village and

its surrounding swamps. These young officers, who have lost many of

their comrades, and these men of theirs belonging to light-infantry

battalions, were sleeping and resting in their tents behind the

fighting-lines, and cleaning themselves up after days in wet mud and the

filth of the battlefield. But they were keen to tell the tale of their

adventures, and if I could put them down just as they were told, one man

adding to another man's story, the excitement of remembrance rousing

them from their weariness, and queer grim laughter breaking out when

they spoke of their greatest dangers, it would be a strange narrative.

They were men who had escaped death by prodigious chance, and officers

and men greeted each other joyfully and with a splendid spirit of

comradeship as brothers-in-arms who were glad to see each other alive

and remembered how they had stuck it together in the worst hours. They

belonged to the Somerset Light Infantry of the 20th Division, and they

came from old towns like Bridgwater and Crewkerne and Yeovil, which seem

a million miles away from such scenes of war. One young officer of the

Somersets knew most of what had happened, and his own adventures that

day would fill a book if told in detail. He took me into his tent and

showed me how his kit had been pierced by bullets and torn by the blast

of shell-fire, and he marvelled that he had no more than a hurt hand cut

against the teeth of a German sniper and a body bruised all over, but

with a whole skin. "A bit of luck," he said. This young man must have

been born under a lucky star, for the things he went through that day

would have frightened a cat relying on nine lives and taking a hundred

chances on the score of them.

On the way up to Langemarck to the left of that solid blockhouse called

Au Bon Gite, where the enemy held out behind iron doors while our troops

went past them swept by machine-gun fire, there were many German snipers

lying about in shell-holes. They were very brave men, put out into

these holes to check our advance, and knowing that they were bound to

die, because that is the almost certain fate of snipers on such ground.

They lay doggo, pretending to be corpses when any of our men were near

enough to see, but using their rifles with deadly aim when they had any

elbow-room. I heard that one man killed four of our officers, and

another killed fourteen men and wounded eleven before he was shot

through the head. One of these men well behind our advancing waves lay

very still, close to the young officer of the Somersets of whom I spoke,

and who saw the fellow move and raise his rifle. He pounced on him and

struck him across the face with his bare fist and tore his hand open

against the man's teeth. They were bad teeth, and the hand is now

festering. Another sniper gave himself away, and the young officer shot

him through the head with a revolver, which was very busy all that day.

I have already told how these light-infantry men had to struggle through

bogs around Langemarck, how they fell into shell-holes full of water,

and how, under great fire, they made their way into the place where

Langemarck village had once been and attacked the dug-outs and

blockhouses there. Some of the strangest episodes happened between the

village and a point called the Streiboom. There were two more

blockhouses on the Langemarck road girdled by machine-gun fire. The

first one was rushed by twenty men, led by this young officer I have

been telling about, and bombed until thirty Germans tumbled out and

surrendered. But beyond was the other blockhouse, and upon this the

officer of the Somersets advanced with only six men. A machine-gun was

firing from the right of it, and it was a strong place of concrete with

no open door. The seven Somersets went straight for it, and the officer

flung two bombs through the loopholes, but they did not seem to take

effect. Then he hurled two more bombs, which were his last, at the iron

door, but they did not burst. With his bare fists he beat at the door

and shouted out, "Come out, you blighters, come out." Presently, to his

surprise, they came out, not two or three, nor six or seven, but

forty-two stout and hefty men. Among them was an English soldier badly

wounded, who had been taken prisoner three days before. He was a

Yorkshireman, who had lain among the enemy, well treated, but dying. The

Germans could not send him behind their lines because of our

bombardment, which had cut off their supplies, so that they were four

days hungry when they surrendered. In another dug-out was another

Yorkshireman, and he is now safe and well behind our own lines.

There were eight machine-guns in that last blockhouse, one of which I

saw to-day, and two of them, fitted up with new springs, were used

against the enemy. One of them was worked on a hydraulic lift, so that

it could be got into action very quickly from its underground place. In

the blockhouse from which the forty-two had been taken by this small

body of Somersets was a great store of 5.9 shells. All told this little

group of men took 100 prisoners that day, and their officer himself is

said to have killed sixteen Germans and to have wounded many more. After

the blockhouse affair he chased a number of the enemy running down the

Langemarck road, and, using his revolver in the cowboy fashion, dropping

his wrist from the shoulder, he plugged them as he ran. After that he

went on and held an exposed advanced post with a mixed lot of Somersets

and "Koylies" (King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) and Rifle Brigade

men. They had next to no ammunition, but they held on all night, hoping

for the best, but not sure of it. And this young officer who was their

leader told me to-day that--great God!--he "enjoyed" himself and was

"fearfully bucked" with his day's work. The excitement of it all was in

his eyes, as he told me, in much more detail than I have given, the

story of the thirty-six hours.

It is indeed an astounding chapter of courage all this attack on

Langemarck by men who before the attack had been bombarded with gas and

other shells, and who then floundered in deep bogs, where they got stuck

up to the waist, but worked in small parties up and on, fighting all the

way against an enemy who put up a gallant and stubborn resistance and

sold every hundred yards of ground as dearly as he could. The runners

who went back again and again through that slough of despond under

damnable fire were real heroes. The stretcher-bearers who carried down

the wounded all that day and night regardless of their own lives were

beyond words splendid, and the carriers who brought up rations so that

the men in front should have enough to eat and drink were as brave as

those who fought. In the midst of all this turmoil, all this death, all

this mud and blood, men kept their sense of humour and their shrewd wit

in a way which beats me. "Do you speak English?" said a sergeant-major

to a German non-commissioned officer who came out of a dug-out full of

men. "Nein, nein," said the man. "Well, you've got to learn bally

quick," said the sergeant-major, "so go and tell those pals of yours to

come out before something happens to them." And the German learnt enough

English in the sergeant-major's eyes to deliver the command correctly

enough.

I have spoken only of the Somersets. Other light infantry--the Durhams

and the "Koylies" and the D.C.L.I.--who worked with them and who took

Reitres Farm and other strong points, were not less dogged, and this day

at Langemarck was a glorious revelation of the old spirit of the West

Country, which is still strong and fine.

* * * * *

And now I must write again about the Canadians, whose attack towards

Lens I watched the other day among our guns.

That story is not yet finished, and has been going on ever since that

morning when the Canadians took Hill 70 and the cites of St.-Emile and

St.-Laurent, working forward towards the heart of Lens. It is clear that

the enemy's command issued orders for Hill 70 and the other ground to be

retaken at all costs. There have been no fewer than thirteen

counter-attacks against the Canadian troops, and men of the 4th Guards

Division, and later of the 220th Regiment, have come forward in wave

after wave and hurled themselves with desperate courage against the

Canadian defence.

Time after time they have been seen assembling by our flying men and

observers, and time after time their ranks have been shattered by our

guns. To the north of Lens there is a chalk quarry, which was not gained

by the Canadians in their first attack, so that they established their

line on the west side of it, and it was against this line that repeated

efforts were made. Each attempt was smashed up, and then the Canadians

advanced into the quarry and captured ninety men of many units and

twenty machine-guns. The prisoners complain that their officers had lost

their heads, and had been utterly demoralized. After violent attacks on

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the enemy made a great effort with

every weapon of frightfulness on Friday evening, using poison-gas and

flame-jets and a hurricane of high explosives in order to drive the

Canadians off Hill 70. It failed with great losses to themselves when

the German infantry attacked, and the attacks yesterday have had no

greater success. The Canadians claim that the enemy's losses must be at

least three times as great as their own. There were moments when the

Canadians were hard pressed, and one of them was when a battalion

commander was warned that the Germans were behind him. "I'm all right,"

he said cheerily, and then suddenly he said, "Good Lord, so they are."

He was not heard from again for two hours and a half, and in that time

he had organized his clerks and batmen and signallers and driven out a

party of Germans who had worked out round No Man's Land and thrust a

wedge behind him. The fighting has been savage and fierce, and the

Canadians have used the bayonet at close quarters and fought hand to

hand in the dark cellars of the mining cites. This phase of the war is

as bloody as anything that has been done in the history of human strife.

XI

THE IRISH IN THE SWAMPS

AUGUST 21

It is of the Irish now that I will write, though their story is four

days old and not a tale of great victory. It is easier to write of

success than of failure, and of great advances than of grim rear-guard

actions fought by men desperately tried but still heroic. But I want to

tell the story of the Irish who went forward over bad ground on the

morning of August 16, that morning when there was great success at

Langemarck on the left, and something less than success on the right.

These Irishmen had no luck at all. They gained ground but lost it again.

It is up to the Irish to tell this tale, for they were grand men and

they fought and fell with simple valour. They were the Southern Irish

and the men of Ulster side by side again, as they were at Wytschaete,

where I met them on the morning of the battle and afterwards, glad

because they had taken a great share in one of the finest victories of

the war. Their laughter rang out then as they told me their adventures,

all their young officers keen to say how splendid their men had been,

and the men themselves drawing cheerful comparisons between this day's

luck and that other day at Ginchy, on the Somme, when they gained

another victory, but with thinned ranks, so that when I met them

marching out they had but the remnants of battalions, and their general

called out words of good cheer to them with a break in his voice. After

Wytschaete they were in high spirits. Quick in attack, full of the old

Irish dash, they were the men for a sudden assault, needing an impetuous

advance, while they were fresh and unspoilt. But they had no luck this

time.

Let me tell first the happenings of the Irish troops on the right, the

Catholic Irish, whose own right was on the Roulers railway, going up to

the Potsdam Redoubt. An hour or so before the attack the enemy, as

though knowing what was about to come, flung down a tremendous and

destructive barrage, answered by our own drum-fire, which gave the

signal for the Irish to advance. The Dublin Fusiliers and the Royal

Irish Rifles went forward on the right and the Inniskillings on the

left. In front of them were numbers of German strong points, the now

famous pill-boxes, or concrete blockhouses, which the enemy has built as

his new means of defence to take the place of trench systems. They were

Beck House, Borry Farm, and the Bremen Redoubt--sinister names which

will never be forgotten in Irish history. There were also odd bits of

trench here and there for the use of snipers and small advanced posts.

As the first wave of the Irish assaulting troops advanced Germans rose

from those ditches and ran back to the shelter of the concrete works,

and immediately from those emplacements and from other machine-gun

positions echeloned in depth behind them swept a fierce enfilade fire of

machine-gun bullets, even through the barrage of our shell-fire, which

went ahead of the Irish line. Many men in the first wave dropped, but

the others kept going, and reached almost as far as they had been asked

to go. The Royal Irish Rifles worked up the Roulers railway to the level

crossing, and captured two German officers and thirty prisoners. The

Dublin Fusiliers, on their left, were held up by machine-guns from the

Bremen Redoubt, and later a message came down from that small party. It

was from a young Irish subaltern. "I am lying out here in a shell-hole.

All officers and men killed or wounded." Other men joined him, but were

cut off and taken prisoners. On the left the Inniskillings, who had

crossed over the Zonnebeke river, made good and rapid progress,

capturing two strong redoubts and seizing an important little hill--Hill

37--which was one of the keys of the position. The success of the day

would have been gained if the centre had been carried, and if the

supporting troops could have come up. But neither of these things

happened. The supporting waves were caught by the cross-fire of

machine-guns, and they could make hardly any headway. The Borry Farm

Redoubt gave most trouble. It contained five machine-guns and a garrison

of sixty expert and determined gunners, and never fell all day. It broke

the centre of the Irish attack, and was the cause of heroic but deadly

efforts by the Irish Rifles, followed by Inniskillings. The Royal Irish

Fusiliers attacked it by direct assault, knowing that everything was

staked on their success. They went for it like tigers, but without

avail. One of the battalion officers, seeing this failure, but knowing

how all depended upon the capture of that fort, thereupon led another

attack by a company of the Royal Irish Rifles. This met the same fate.

Meanwhile the men of the Ulster Division were fighting just as

desperately. They had ahead of them several of the concrete forts, one

of which, near Pond Farm, was a strong defensive system with deep

dug-outs and overhead cover proof against shell-fire. This and other

strong points had wooden platforms above the concrete walls, on which

the gunners could mount their machines very quickly, firing them behind

two yards thickness of concrete.

Opposite the Pommern Redoubt stands a small hill which the enemy has

used for a long time as one of his chief observation-posts, as it gives

a complete view of our ground. Beyond that the country rises to a

saddle-back ridge, with double spurs guarded on the lower slope by a

small fort called Gallipoli, and from these spurs he could fling a

machine-gun barrage across the low ground. An ugly position to attack.

It was worse for the Ulster men because of the state of the ground,

which was a thin crust over a bog of mud. On the left some of the

Inniskillings and Irish Rifles rushed forward as far as a network of

trenches and wired defences, which they took in a fierce assault against

a Bavarian garrison, who fought to a finish. Here they recaptured one of

our Lewis guns lost in the fighting on July 31. On the right the Irish

Rifles and the Fusiliers, walking through the fire of many machine-guns,

made a straight attack upon Hill 35, which dominated the centre of the

Ulster attack. Before it were some gun-pits, and the Ulster men, by most

desperate efforts, took and crossed these pits and fought up the slopes

of the hill beyond. But they could not keep the hill nor the pits. So

after many hours of frightful fighting the situation was that some

scattered groups of Dublins and Royal Irish held out on a far goal with

exposed flanks, with some Inniskillings clinging to the slopes of Hill

37, while on the other side of the Zonnebeke river the Ulster men had

been forced off their little hill, and had been unable to get beyond the

German chain of concrete houses.

The enemy's aeroplanes came over to survey the situation, and, taking a

leaf from our book, flew very low, firing their machine-guns at the

advanced posts of Irish lying in shell-holes and in the hummocky ground.

They were in a desperate position, those advanced posts.... Then the

enemy launched his counter-attack from the direction of Zonnebeke, and

gradually the shattered lines of the Irish fell back, slowly fighting

little rear-guard actions in isolated groups. Many of them were

surrounded and cut off, or had to fight their way back in the night or

the dawn of next day.

All through the worst hours an Irish padre went about among the dead and

dying, giving absolution to his boys. Once he came back to headquarters,

but he would not take a bite of food or stay, though his friends urged

him. He went back to the field to minister to those who were glad to see

him bending over them in their last agony. Four men were killed by

shell-fire as he knelt beside them, and he was not touched--not touched

until his own turn came. A shell burst close, and the padre fell dead.

There were many other men who gave up their lives for their friends that

day--stretcher-bearers, who had a long way to go under fire, and

runners, who had to crawl on their stomachs from shell-hole to

shell-hole, and carrying-parties and medical officers. Near the

Frezenberg Redoubt, which was on the right of the Catholic Irish, a

doctor worked, never sleeping for days and nights, but going out of his

dug-out to crawl after wounded men and bandaging up their wounds under

heavy fire. The first man he found was not one of his Irish. Away in

front of the line, in No Man's Land, was a bogged Tank, and Irish

sentries heard a wail from it. The doctor heard of this and crept out to

the Tank and found a Scottish soldier there badly wounded, as he had

crept into this shelter days before. The doctor bandaged him, and,

without calling for help, carried him back on his own shoulders. Another

Scot was found in a shell-hole wounded in both legs. He was one of the

Gordons, and had been lying there since July 31. He is "in a good state

of health," was the report of the Irish patrol, and will be sent home

to-night.

Before the battle and after it the Bavarians behaved decently about the

wounded, and allowed the stretcher-bearers to work in the open without

being shelled, though some of them were hit in the machine-gun barrage.

It is good to know that, and fair to say it. The Bavarians against the

Irish fought, as I am told by Irishmen, in a clean, straight way, and

their defence was stronger than our attack. The Irish troops had no

luck. It was a day of tragedy. But poor Ireland should be proud of these

sons of hers, who struggled against such odds and fought until their

strength was spent, and even then held on in far posts with a spirit

scornful of the word "surrender." Some very noble young officers gave up

their lives rather than say that word, and all these dear Irish boys

went to the last limit of human endurance before they fell back. Not by

any hair's-breadth did they lose the honour they won at Wytschaete and

Ginchy.

XII

THE WAY THROUGH GLENCORSE WOOD

AUGUST 22

There was severe fighting again to-day eastwards of St.-Julien (3-1/2

miles north-east of Ypres), extending south across the Zonnebeke, beyond

the Frezenberg Redoubt, while on the right our troops again penetrated

Glencorse Copse (due east of Ypres), and fought on that ugly rising

ground which the enemy is defending in great strength. The Divisions

engaged, from north to south, are the 29th, 38th, 11th, 48th, 18th,

61st, 15th, 19th, 47th, 14th, and 24th.

On the left progress has been made from the high road of St.-Julien to

the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, which cuts across it, guarded on the

enemy's side by two strong points with the usual concrete shelters which

the Germans have adopted as their new means of forward defence. Below

them there is another strong position called Winnipeg, about which our

men were heavily engaged in the early hours of this morning, and below

that again the same series of pill-boxes and concrete blockhouses

against which the Irish battalions went forward with such desperate

valour on the 16th of this month, as I described in my message

yesterday.

Scottish troops of the 15th Division attacked to-day where the Southern

Irish were engaged six days ago. Before them they had those sinister

forts, Beck House and Borry Farm, and Vampire Point guarding the way to

the Bremen Redoubt, which will be remembered always in the history of

the Irish brigades as places of heroic endeavour, just as now this

morning they will take their place in the annals of our Scottish

fighting. To the left of them are other forts, round which the Ulster

men were fighting last week--Pond Farm, Schuler Farm, and others on the

way to the Gallipoli Redoubt. About these places Warwickshires and other

Midland troops of the 61st Division have been fighting, and have met

with the same difficulties, apart from the state of the ground, which

has dried a little. It has not dried much, for our shell-fire has broken

up the gullies and streams with which it was drained, and the country is

water-logged, so that the pools remain until the sun dries them up. The

shell-holes and these ponds are not so full of water as when the Irish

went across, and the surface of the shell-broken earth is hardening. But

it is only a thin crust over a bog, so that the Tanks which went forward

to-day here and there could not get very far without sinking in. One

Tank was taken by a gallant crew almost as far as a German strong point

nearly half a mile beyond our old front line very early in the morning,

and did good work up there. The enemy put down a furious barrage-fire

soon after the attack had started to-day, and kept the Frezenberg

Redoubt under intense bombardment. But as soon as the attack developed

he could not use his artillery against our men at many points, not

knowing what forts and ground were still held by his own troops. He

relied again upon the cross-fire of machine-guns, arranged very

skilfully in depth, for enfilade barrages, and upon the garrisons who

held his concrete redoubts in the advanced positions. In one of the

blockhouses this morning our Warwickshire men captured forty-seven

prisoners, who, when they were surrounded, took refuge in tunnelled

galleries running to the right of the main fort, called Schuler Farm.

Some of our men fought through the enfilade fire of machine-guns as far

as the slopes of Hill 35, and to the right of this the Scots made a

gallant and fierce assault towards Bremen Redoubt.

* * * * *

AUGUST 30

The sky of Flanders is still full of wind and water, and heavy

rain-storms driven by the gale sweep over the battlefield, flinging down

trees already broken by shell-fire. Behind the lines some of the

hop-fields round Poperinghe and other villages are sadly wrecked. Many

of the hop-poles have fallen, and the long trailing hops lie all tangled

in the mire. Many telephone wires were down also just after the gale,

and the signallers had a rough windy time in getting them up again. But

it is on the field of battle that this weather matters most, and there

in such places as Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse and Sanctuary Wood

on our side of the lines, the linked shell-craters are ponds. In and

between them is a quagmire.

I write of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse rather than of the ground

farther north, in the valley of the Steenbeek, though that is just as

bad, or a little worse, because yesterday I went to see the troops of

the 14th Division who made the last attack in those sinister woodlands

in the track of the London men who fought there so desperately on July

31.

The last attack, beginning on August 22, was made by light-infantry

regiments, among whom were the Duke of Cornwall's and the Somerset Light

Infantry. They were fine well-trained men--trained hard and trained long

in the tactics of assault--and though they took ground which they could

not hold, because the enemy was in great strength against them and they

were weakened after hard fighting in frightful ground, they held off

repeated counter-attacks and indicted great loss upon the enemy, and

held their original line intact against most fierce assaults. The

enemy's storm troops advanced against them through Inverness Copse, and

in encircling movements which tried to get round and through their

flanks again and again during two days of violent fighting, they

counter-attacked behind the barrage-fire of many batteries, so that all

the ground held by our men was swept by high explosives and shrapnel

hour after hour, and when these waves of Saxons and Prussians were

broken or repulsed, others came with a sheet of flame before them--from

"flammenwerfer" machines, which project fire like water from a fireman's

hose. Our riflemen and light infantry did not break before this

advancing furnace, but fired into the heart of it, and saw some of the

"flammenwerfer" men go up in their own flame like moths bursting in the

light of a candle with loud reports, "a loud pop" as the men describe

it, so that nothing of them was left but a little smoke and a few

cinders.

But that was at the end of the battle, and the light-infantry battalions

had fought through terrible hours before they faced that last ordeal.

Before the attack they held a line opposite Glencorse Wood on the left

and running down on the right past Stirling Castle, the old German fort

above a nest of dug-outs, which has become famous in all this fighting.

In front of them lay Inverness Copse, a thousand yards long by 500 deep,

with many concrete blockhouses hidden, or half hidden, among the fallen

trees and tattered stumps and upheaved earth of this blasted wood; and

north-east of that, ruins of an old chateau called Herenthage Castle.

Facing our left were three lines of battered trenches north of Inverness

Copse, and two blockhouses called L-shaped Farm--on an aeroplane

photograph it looks exactly like the capital letter--and Fitzclarence

Farm. These places were strongly garrisoned, and the German

machine-gunners were safe within their concrete walls from any

shell-splinters. Our barrage swept on to the enemy's lines, flung up the

earth, crashed among the trees, and tore all this belt of land to chaos,

where already it was deeply cratered by the earlier bombardment. Behind

that barrage went over the light-infantry battalions, and immediately

they came under gusts of machine-gun fire from the blockhouses which

still stood intact. It was then 7 o'clock in the morning. They forced

their way into Inverness Copse, followed by some Tanks, and roved round

one of the blockhouses, where thirty Germans sat inside with their steel

doors shut and their machine-guns firing through the loopholes. Some

sappers were sent for, and blew in the doors, and the garrison were

killed fighting.

The Duke of Cornwall's men were checked for a time by machine-gun fire

from Glencorse Wood, and advance waves were held up round a blockhouse

with a garrison of sixty men north of Inverness Copse, but after fierce

fighting this place fell, and not a man escaped. The Somerset Light

Infantry passed on, and fought their way to the rubbish-heap called

Herenthage Chateau, where a hundred and twenty Germans of the 145th

Infantry Regiment held out in concrete chambers. Only their officer

remained alive after the fighting here, and he was brought in a

prisoner.

The Somersets established themselves in their goal with posts in front

of Inverness Copse and Herenthage Castle, but on the left the Cornish

lads were held up by machine-gun fire east of "Clapham Junction," where

there was another fortified farm with sixty men and six machine-guns

inside. A Tank came up and sat outside the place, firing point-blank at

its walls, and the Cornwalls followed it and burst the doors in and

fought until again not a single German remained alive, after a terrible

bayonet contest. So the attack had succeeded, but with forces now

heavily reduced. It was now ten o'clock in the morning. The story that

follows is one long series of counter-attacks. It began with a barrage

which came down with a tempest of shells half-way through Inverness

Copse. For miles around the German batteries concentrated their fire on

this ground and raked it. From the east of Inverness Copse, and at the

same time from the south, storming parties of Germans advanced behind

this great gun-fire and, though the first attack was broken and then the

second by rifles and machine-guns, a third developed in greater

strength. A runner came down from the Somersets--one of those brave

runners who all day long and next day worked to and fro through dreadful

barrage-fire until many were killed and other men went out to search for

those dead boys and look for their dispatches, unless they had been

blown to bits. The message from the Somersets reported that they could

not hold on. They were being enclosed on both flanks, and proposed to

fall back half-way through Inverness Copse, and this was done. Some

reserves from light-infantry battalions were thrown in to strengthen the

line, and the Cornwalls threw out a defensive flank with strong points.

At midday another attack was made on the Somersets, and driven off by

rifles and machine-guns, and at two o'clock they reported that the enemy

was massing in an attempt to turn their left flank, which was then

weak. The artillery answered an urgent call, and the German assembly was

destroyed. So the evening came and the night, and the Light Infantry

held on east of Stirling Castle and partly in Inverness Copse with many

dead and wounded about them, and lines of German dead in front of them,

awaiting riflemen coming to their support.

In a brigade headquarters a group of officers waited more anxiously for

this help, having more responsibility. They sat with wet towels about

their heads and eyes, in poisonous fumes and dreadful stenches which

crept down from above, where heavy shells burst incessantly, shaking all

the earth and blowing out the candles. The concrete ceiling bulged in.

Runners came in white-faced and shaking, after frightful journeys, and

officers bent to the candlelight to read scribbled messages sent down by

hard-pressed men. Outside were the groans of wounded men.

At dawn, Tanks went out to attack the strong points north of Inverness

Copse, where the enemy had rallied again, and one of them approached

Fitzclarence Farm and broke up a counter-attacking preparation there.

Some Germans ran into the blockhouse there and shot down the steel doors

and lay doggo. Others came out of a trench to attack the Tank, but fled

before the fire. Later in the morning German aeroplanes came out and

flew very low and played their machine-guns on to our men, but without

doing much harm.

From 1 A.M. to 3.30 A.M. the enemy kept a terrific barrage over all our

ground, and then flamed out all along the line the signal of a new

counter-attack. It was the "flammenwerfer" attack against the Duke of

Cornwall's Light Infantry, and the whole sky was red with the light of

these advancing fire-jets. For a time, in spite of the enemy's heavy

losses, the Cornwalls had to retire before these far-reaching flames,

but they rallied and went forward again, driving the enemy part of the

way back, where he was swept by our artillery-fire. The enemy kept up a

steady barrage-fire over three wide belts, and an officer who went up to

report the position had the worst hours of his life on that journey

through bursting shells and over the fields of dead. But in spite of a

message that had come down reporting a new withdrawal, it was found that

the line was intact, and that the thin ranks of Light Infantry and

King's Royal Rifles had beaten back all the enemy's assaults, and had

destroyed their spirit for further attacks by most deadly losses. We

could not hold Inverness Copse, but the fighting here was worthy of men

who, during two years of war, have fought with steadfast courage and

have many acts of heroism in their long record.

XIII

THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS

AUGUST 23

One day, when it is possible to get in and around Lens, the veil will be

torn from a human charnel-house, or, rather, from charnel-houses which

none of us may yet enter or see through the drifting smoke. Yesterday I

looked down on Lens and saw its roofless buildings and its gaping walls,

but I could only guess at the scenes which are hidden below ground there

in the tunnels where the Germans assemble for their counter-attacks

against the Canadians, and to which they drag back their dead and

wounded. Those places must reek with the smell of death and corruption,

for the losses of the Prussian Guards during the last few and of other

divisions who have come up against the Canadians, have been, I am told

and believe, enormous. The Canadians tell me that their troops have

never had harder or more prolonged fighting, not even in their old days

of the Ypres salient nor on the Somme. Every hundred yards of the ground

they have taken, and during the last week or so they have taken

thousands of yards of open country and of ruined streets in and about

the mining cites, until they have forced their way into Lens itself,

have been contested by desperate fighting and held against unceasing

counter-attacks delivered by great bodies of picked German troops

supported by monstrous bombardments. Imagination can, if it likes,

picture the slaughter involved in all this to those German assault

troops, because they have not succeeded in gaining their purpose, and

counter-attacks like that, in those numbers and in that strength, are

shattered when they do not succeed. It is a wonderful tribute to the

Canadians and to their grim tenacity that, after all the repeated

counter-attacks against them, and after storms of fire from batteries

which have increased in number every day, they hold their lines round

Lens intact as they stood on August 15 and 16, and have gained an entry

into the streets of Lens and swung up southwards with increasing

pressure.

Lens is packed tight with German troops. They belong to the 4th Guards

Division, and latterly to the 1st Guards Reserve, the crack division of

the German army, which had a month's rest at Cambrai before being sent

into this slaughter-house. For although that city is tunnelled

throughout, all the cellars being linked up and strengthened with

massive concrete, so that even heavy shells cannot pierce down to them,

men cannot fight in tunnels if they are on the offensive, and must get

out of them to make their counter-attacks. It is at those times that

they suffer more hideously than in any other battle.

Our aeroplanes are always watching for these assemblies. To take only

one case out of many, they reported a mass of men in a certain square of

Lens the day before yesterday. Our guns turned on to them, not only our

field-guns but our heavies, up to those howitzers which could batter

down a massive fortress after a few rounds. Men under the fire of such

shells as those things send do not escape in great numbers. Most of them

die. The Prussians in the square of Lens were caught by this hurricane

fire, and before they could get into the tunnels many were blown to

bits.

Yesterday as I looked down on Lens the fire had quietened on both sides,

as though the guns were tired. For several minutes at a time there was a

great quietude over the city of doom, and as the afternoon sun lay warm

upon its red walls, and cast black shadows across its deserted streets,

where no single figure walked, it was hard to believe that a few hours

before swarms of men had been fighting on the edge of those houses, and

that the place was full of new dead and old. The water of the Souchez

river was as blue as the sky, which was deep bright blue above wispy

clouds. A little light glinted from the white church tower which a shell

has smashed off at the top. Perhaps some German officer was there

staring through his glasses, or perhaps it was only a bit of metal

caught by the sun. A smoke-barrage drifted densely across the northern

side of the city, and every now and then there came a sharp vicious

hammering of machine-guns to show that somewhere in those ruins men wore

alive and watchful. Then the guns got busy again, but in a slow,

unhurried way. The enemy had a hate against the outer edge of Lievin,

and every two minutes smote it with a great shell, which burst with big

billowing smoke-clouds, and a flash which was followed by a low, sullen

roar. He flung shells as big as this into Angres and Avion, but seemed

to rely on machine-gun fire to barrage our lines nearest to his own.

Behind me to the right were some of our big howitzers, old friends of

mine, whose voices I prefer at a mile or two's distance. They tuned up

their bass viols and played their dead march. Perhaps it was their

shells I saw smashing on to the German defences. Rosy clouds went up,

and in those clouds the dust of red-brick houses went up, too, leaving

gaps of nothingness where the buildings had once been. There was a

kite-balloon in the sky behind me with the wispy clouds like white

horse-tails all curled about it, and presently there came riding above

it several coveys of aeroplanes, so that the sky was filled with their

loud drone-song. They flew round about Lens, and only a few German

"Archies" tried to strafe them with bursts of shrapnel. They flew not

very high above the mining city, circling round and round like hawks

before swooping to their prey. The guns were loud but shrill; and sweet

and clear above them a bugle sounded from some camp of ours behind the

lines among the cornfields all gold and glowing in the evening light,

with a little shadow sleeping beside each stook; and it blew the evening

retreat. It is the first time I have heard a bugle play that call so

near to the guns, and it stirred one's heart with a queer sense of

emotion, as though its music belonged to the spirit world. The night

closed down on the battlefields but did not bring peace. Below the stars

there were many strange lights and fires and sounds. A tall bank of

clouds was pierced with lightning so like shell-fire, except for a

longer tremor of light, that men looked and wondered what devilry was on

over there in the back areas. The devilry was round about. It was time

for the German raiders to come out under the cover of darkness, and they

came and dropped their bombs over quiet villages and among the

cornfields and the hop-gardens. The explosions came up with sharp

flashes and gruff roars from dark fields between black belts of trees.

From the earth hands of light stretched up, reaching up to the clouds

and touching them with their finger-tips. They felt their way for those

flying raiders, groped about like hands searching in a dark room, and

then clasped each other. In the archway below their long straight arms

shrapnel glinted like confetti. Our anti-aircraft guns had got their

target. Along the lines rockets were rising, giving a second or two of

white steady light to No Man's Land, with fringes of trees etched

blackly against it. Somewhere a dump--ours or the enemy's--had been hit,

and the clouds above it were tipped with scarlet flame. So then the

night scene began as usual, and as it is played out below the stars

every night. And somewhere in Lens the Prussians were preparing for a

new counter-attack, while German doctors in deep tunnels stared down

upon a mass of wounded which was their day's harvest. Into one of the

houses there the night before, where fifteen German soldiers lay in the

cellar after a day of prodigious fighting, a party of Canadian raiders

appeared and dragged them all out to a ditch over the way in the

Canadian lines. Well may the German prisoners say to these men of ours,

"You give us no rest." There is never a night's rest in Lens nor round

about it unless men are put to sleep for ever. Many of them were put to

sleep by thousands of gas-shells fired into the town by our artillery a

night ago as an answer to German gas. Perhaps they were glad of it, for

the wakeful hours in Lens must be hell on earth.

* * * * *

AUGUST 24

To the south of Lens there is a slag-heap overgrown with weeds called

the Green Crassier. It is clearly visible across the Souchez river

beyond a broken bridge, and I have often seen it from the lower slopes

of Vimy. It was the scene of fierce fighting yesterday, for in the

morning the Canadians, who are showing an indomitable spirit after ten

days of most furious attacks and counter-attacks, launched an assault

upon it and seized the position. Later in the day the enemy came back in

strength and, after violent efforts, succeeded in thrusting the

Canadians off the crest of this old mound of cinders, though they still

cling to the western side. It is another incident in the long series of

fierce and bloody encounters which since the battle of Vimy, on April 9,

have surrounded the city of Lens and given to its streets and suburbs a

sinister but historic fame. The Canadians have fought here with

astounding resolution. They have hurled themselves against fortress

positions, and by sheer courage have smashed their way through streets

entangled with quick-set hedges of steel, through houses alive with

machine-gun fire, through trenches dug between concrete forts, through

tunnels under red-brick ruins, sometimes too strong to be touched by

shell-fire, and through walls loopholed for rifle-fire and hiding

machine-gun emplacements designed to enfilade the Canadian line of

advance. Through the cites of St.-Laurent, St.-Theodore, and St.-Emilie,

to the north and west of Lens, they have fought past high slag-heaps and

pit-heads, along railway embankments, and down sunken roads, until they

have broken a route through frightful defences to the western streets of

the inner city.

Every day, and sometimes many times a day, they have been

counter-attacked by swarms of Germans coming up out of their tunnels,

and between these attacks they have been under terrific gun-fire from a

wide semicircle of heavy batteries. In the early days of the war the

French fought like this through the streets of Vermelles, smashing their

way from one wall to another, from one house to another, and over

trenches dug across the streets. That fighting in Vermelles stands as

one of the most frightful episodes of the war, and when I first went

there I stood aghast at the relics of this bloody struggle. But

Vermelles is hardly more than a village, and the mining district of

Lens, with all its suburbs, covers several square miles of ground, so

that the Canadians have had a longer and a harder task. Six German

divisions have attacked them in turn, and have been shattered against

them. These are the 7th and 8th, the 4th Guards Division, the 11th

Reserve, the 220th, and the 1st Guards Reserve Division. In addition to

these six divisions, some portions, at any rate, of the 185th Division

and of the 36th Reserve Division have been engaged. The total German

strength used at Lens must well exceed fifty battalions, and the German

losses may perhaps be estimated at between 12,000 to 15,000 men.

The Canadians themselves have been hard pressed at times, but have

endured the exhaustion of a savage struggle with amazing strength of

spirit, grimly and fiercely resolved to hold their gains, unless

overwhelmed by numbers in their advanced positions, as it has sometimes

happened to them. But it is no wonder that some of the men whom I met

yesterday coming out of that city of blood and death looked like men who

had suffered to the last limit of mental and bodily resistance. Their

faces were haggard and drawn. Their eyes were heavy. Their skin was grey

as burnt ash. Some of them walked like drunken men, drunk with sheer

fatigue, and as soon as they had reached their journey's end some of

them sat under the walls of a mining village with their chalky helmets

tilted back, drugged by the need of sleep, but too tired even for that.

They were men of the battalions who three days ago came face to face

with the enemy in No Man's Land, a stretch of barren cratered earth

between St.-Emilie and the northern streets of Lens, and fought him

there until many dead lay strewn on both sides, and their ammunition was

exhausted. An officer of one of these battalions came out of a miner's

cottage to talk to me. He was a very young man with a thin, clean-shaven

face, which gave him a boyish look. He was too weary to stand straight

and too weary to talk more than a few jerky words. He leaned up against

the wall of the miner's cottage, and passed a hand over his face and

eyes, and said:

"I'm darned tired. It was the hell of a fight. We fought to a finish,

and when we had no more bombs of our own we picked up Heine's bombs and

used those." [The Canadians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz.]

"Heine was at least three times as strong as us, and we gave him hell.

It was hand-to-hand fighting--rifles, bombs, bayonets, butt-ends, any

old way of killing a man, and we killed a lot. But he broke our left

flank, and things were bloody in the centre. He had one of his strong

points there, and swept us with machine-gun fire. My fellows went

straight for it, and a lot of them got wiped out. But we got on top of

it and through the wire, and held the trench beyond until Heine came

down with swarms of bombers."

This young Canadian officer was stricken by the loss of many of his men.

"The best crowd that any fellow could command," and he had been through

indescribable things under enormous shell-fire, and he had had no sleep

for days and nights, and could not sleep now for thinking of things. But

he smiled grimly once or twice when he reckoned up the enemy's losses.

The remembrance of the German dead he had seen seemed like strong wine

to his soul. "We made them pay," was his summing up of the battle. The

nightmare of it all was still heavy on him, and he spoke with a quiet

fierceness about the enemy's losses and the things he had endured in a

way which would scare poor, simple souls who think that war is a fine

picturesque business.

A senior officer of a battalion on the flank of his was a different type

of man--a very tall, strong-featured man of middle age, like an English

squire of the old style, with a fine smiling light in his eyes, in spite

of all he had been through, and with a vivid way of speech that would

not come fast enough to say splendid things about his men, to describe

the marvellous way in which they had fought in frightful conditions, to

praise first one and then another for the things they had done when

things were at their worst. He had been addressing some of the survivors

of this battle when I came upon him, and I saw them march away,

straightening themselves up before this officer of theirs, and proud

because he was pleased with them. He thanked them for one thing above

all, and that was for the gallant way in which, after all their

fighting, they had gone out to fetch in their dead and wounded, so that

not one wounded man lay out there to die or to be taken prisoner, and

the dead were brought back for burial. He said a word, too, for Heine,

as they call him. The Germans had not sniped or machine-gunned the

stretcher-bearers, but had sent their own men out on the same mission

too. That was after the battle, and there was no surrendering while the

fighting was on.

This officer's story was as wonderful as anything I have heard in this

war. And the man himself was wonderful, for he had had no sleep for six

days and nights, and had suffered the fearful strain of his

responsibility for many men's lives; yet now, when I met him straight

from all that, he was bright-eyed and his mind was as clear as a bell,

and the emotion that surged through him was well controlled. He

described the things I have attempted to describe before--the fortified

streets and houses of Lens, which make it one great fortress, tunnelled

from end to end with exits into concrete forts two yards thick in

cement, in the ruined cottages. On the morning of our attack the enemy

was expecting it, and within a minute and a half of our barrage put down

his own barrage with terrific intensity. So there were the Canadians

between two walls of high explosives, and it was between that inferno

that they fought in the great death struggle. For the Canadians had

already advanced towards the enemy's line, and in greater numbers--three

times as great--he had advanced to ours, and the two forces met on the

barren stretch of earth crossed by twisted trenches, which for a time

had been No Man's Land.

While the battalion on the left was heavily engaged fighting with rifles

and bombs until their ammunition gave out, and then with bayonets and

butt-ends, the battalion on the right was working southward and eastward

to the northern outskirts of Lens. They came up at once against the

fortress houses from which machine-gun and rifle fire poured out. The

Canadians in small parties tried to surround these places, but many were

swept down. Some of them rushed close to the walls of one house, which

was a bastion of the northern defences of Lens, and were so close that

the machine-guns, through slits in the walls, could not fire at them.

They even established a post behind it and beyond it, quite isolated

from the rest of their men, but clinging to their post all day. The

enemy dropped bombs upon them through the loopholes and sand-bagged

windows, fired rifle-grenades at them, and tried to get machine-guns at

them, but there were always a few men left to hold the post, until at

last, when the line withdrew elsewhere, they were recalled. One house

near here, into which a party of Canadians forced their way, was a big

arsenal. Its cellars were crammed with shells and piled boxes of bombs.

In other cellars were dead bodies, and the stench of corruption mingled

with the stale vapour of gas. Down in one of these vaults a young

Canadian soldier stayed with his officer, who was badly wounded, and

could not leave him, but waited until night, when he carried the officer

back to safety.

Before that night came there were great German counter-attacks. Masses

of men carrying nothing but stick-bombs, which they had slung around

them, advanced down the communication-trenches and flung these things at

the Canadians of the left battalion, who were fighting out in the open,

and in another communication-trench with the right battalion. The enemy

walked over the piled corpses of his own dead before he could drive back

the Canadians, but by repeated storming parties he did at last force

them to give way and retreat down the trench to gain the support of

their comrades of the other battalion, which had not been so hard

pressed. These came to the rescue, and for a long time held the German

grenadiers at bay. The fighting was fierce and savage on both sides.

At last, weakened by their losses and with failing stores of ammunition,

these two battalions were given the order to retire to a trench farther

back, and the survivors of the most desperate action in Canadian

history withdrew, still fighting, and established blocks in the

communication-trenches down which the enemy was bombing, so that they

could not pass those points to the line upon which here on the north of

Lens the Canadians had fallen back. Southward there had been no

withdrawal, and other battalions had forced their way forward a good

distance, shutting up that entrance to the city and getting down into

the deep tunnels, over which there howled the unceasing fire of the

German heavies. Our own guns were hard at work, and I have already told

how the Prussians were destroyed in the square of Lens by 12-inch shells

and shrapnel.

I could write more, but I have written enough. The Canadians never had

fighting so hard as this, but the losses they have inflicted upon the

enemy have made Lens a Prussian tomb, so that its tunnels are death

vaults. The heart of the city is still a fortress, and the new garrison

is still strong there, so that, like Thiepval, which held out for many

weeks after it was enclosed on three sides, Lens will not fall in a

night. But as a dwelling-place for German troops it is a city of

abomination and dreadfulness.

XIV

THE AGONY OF ARMENTIERES

SEPTEMBER 15

The harvests of France and Flanders have been gathered in, and already

the plough, driven by men too old to fight or boys too small and young,

or by peasant women whose men are somewhere near St.-Quentin or Verdun,

is turning up the stubble in the fields and making a brown landscape

where three weeks ago it was all gold and bronze.

The trees are turning brown also, deepening to a reddish tint in all the

woods between Boulogne and the battlefields, where there are only dead

trees. Round about Poperinghe the trailing hops have been pulled down

from their poles, already stripped in places by last month's gale, and

the sticks are all bare. Outside the wooden huts built on the edge of

war by refugees from Ypres and shell-broken villages, Flemish women sit

with the hops in their laps and in great baskets beside them, and

British soldiers on the march with dry throats exchange remarks about

the good beer which they may never have the luck to drink. White

cloud-mountains which turn black and threaten a deluge between bursts of

sunshine are banked up above the russet foliage and the brown earth and

the old black windmills which wave their arms across the landscape, and

in the wind there is a smell of moisture and mist, and the first faint

sniff of rotting leaves. It is the autumn touch--the autumn touch of a

war in which some of us have seen four harvests gathered into French

barns and four winters come. It makes one feel a bit sad, that thought.

It puts an autumn touch for a second or two into the souls of men coming

back from leave as I came back with some of them two days ago.

By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot go anywhere

near the lines without seeing that aerial activity which has become

intense and fierce lately. Yesterday I saw a great flight of our

aeroplanes over the dead town of Armentieres. There were between twenty

and thirty of them making their way over the German lines, and the enemy

hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft guns got to work savagely and

bursts of black shrapnel filled the sky all about those steady wings,

but did not bring them down. He hated other aircraft watching over his

lines--a long line of kite-balloons, "clustered like grapes," as some

one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as white as snow

when the sun touched them, and made tempting targets for long-range

guns. Some German gunners registered on one of them nearest to

Armentieres, and I saw a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it

that it seemed like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon

stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute demonstration by

our observers in the basket. The drone of our aeroplanes and the reports

of German anti-aircraft guns made the only noise in Armentieres--that

and the sound of two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the

streets of that town which is dead.

It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of which all life has

gone, and queer to me especially in Armentieres, because I knew it not

long ago when there were many women and girls about its streets, and

when one could take one's choice of tea-shops--though only eighteen

hundred yards away from the German line--and get an excellent little

dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have one's hair cut and a

shampoo to the musical accompaniment of field-batteries outside the

town, and buy most of the things a man wants in the simple life of war

(except peace) in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen--women too brave and

too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the enemy's line as

though it were eighteen miles. Armentieres was a modern little

manufacturing town for lace and thread, with neat red-brick houses kept

by well-to-do people who liked good comfortable furniture, and put a

piano into their front parlour and a little marble Venus and other

knick-knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good taste

above the mere sordid interest of money-making.

For a long time in the war that town has been known to British soldiers

who have passed it on their way to Plug Street as "Armentears." They

made friends with some of the girls in the tea-shops, and said "Hallo,

granny! Tray bong!" to old ladies who sold them picture post cards. Now

it is a town of tears to any people who once lived there. The tea-shops

have been smashed to bits and the women and the girls have gone, unless

their bodies lie in the cellars beneath the ruins. The agony of

Armentieres began at the end of June, when the enemy first began to

bombard it with systematic violence, and though there is no life left in

it the broken houses are still battered by more shells when the enemy's

gunners have nothing else to do. When I walked through its streets

yesterday I was the witness of the horror that had passed. The German

bombardment began quite suddenly one night, and the old women and the

girls and the children were in their beds. They rushed down into their

cellars, not for the first time, because during nearly three years of

war stray shells had often come into the town. But never like this.

These were not random shells, scattered here and there. They came with a

steady and frightful violence into every part of the town, sweeping down

street after street, blowing houses to dust, knocking the fronts off the

shops, playing fantastic, horrible tricks of choosing and leaving, as

shell-fire does in any town of this size. There were gas-shells among

the high explosives, and their poison filtered down into the cellars. A

fire broke out in one of the squares beyond the old church of St.-Vaast,

and the houses were gutted by flames, which licked high above their

roofless walls.

The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the church of

St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins--great blocks of masonry

hurled from its dome and buttresses amidst a mass of broken glass.

Inside there is a tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos

among the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the great

organ have been flung out of their framework, but curiously the side

altars, with the figures of apostles and saints, and the central figure

of the Sacred Heart, are hardly touched, and stand unscathed amidst this

great destruction. There is nothing new in all this. For three years I

have been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it has the

grim interest of recent history, and Armentieres is the scene of a

tragedy to its civilian population which makes one's heart ache with a

new revolt against this monstrous cruelty of war upon the innocent and

the helpless.

It was easy to see what had happened during those days and nights of

terror some weeks ago. I looked into the blown-out fronts of little

shops and houses, and saw how everything had been abandoned in that rush

of women and children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the

upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the rooms were

intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, with its cash-box on the

bar counter, and games such as soldiers love--dominoes and darts, and

quoits and bagatelle, set out as though for an evening's entertainment.

Here was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the shelves,

though most of the house was blown across the street. I looked through a

hole in the wall to a drawing-room, with a piano, standing amid a litter

of broken furniture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the

sofa and chairs.

But it was in the cellars that the pitiful drama had been--in those

cellars down which I peered wondering whether any poor bodies lay there

still. The shells had pierced down to some of the women hiding in them.

Poison-gas came to choke some of them. Rescue parties of our R.A.M.C.

went into Armentieres immediately to get the poor creatures away, and

risked their lives a score of times on each journey they made. It is an

amazing thing that even then, in spite of their terror and their agony

and their wounds, many of the old women could hardly be made to leave

the town, and clung desperately to their homes, though these had fallen

down on top of them.

Outside Armentieres yesterday I met one of the R.A.M.C. lads who had

helped in this rescue work--he has been given a Military Medal for

it--and he told me of his trouble with two old ladies when things were

at their worst. Neither had a rag of clothing on except the blankets he

wrapped round them as they lay on stretchers; but when his attention

wandered from them, owing to shells which burst close to the ambulance,

one of these old dames scrambled up and ran off naked down the street.

He went after her, and on his return found that the other old lady had

given him the slip.

He had astounding experiences, this Wessex boy who is an expert in

bandaging wounds, and through many days of dreadfulness and many nights

he worked in Armentieres under heavy fire, and did not turn a hair. He

was such a Mark Tapley that when everything was falling about him and

Hell was let loose he became more and more cheerful and refused to take

things seriously.

"I don't think I ever laughed so much," he told me yesterday. "I don't

know how it was, but I couldn't help seeing the comical side of it all,

in spite of the ghastly sights." I suppose this boy's sense of humour

was touched by the monstrous idiocy of the shell-fire, which produced

effects like those on a music-hall stage when the funny man breaks all

the crockery and brings the roof down over his head. He laughed like

anything when he was shelled out of his makeshift dressing-station on

one side of the street, and had to establish his quarters on the other

side of another street.

"How's it going, my lad!" asked his officer, who came to visit the aid

post.

"Well, sir," he answered, "it's rather hotter than the last place,

except for direct hits."

He laughed "like anything" again when a shell came through the kitchen

and smashed up the stove, and failed to kill an old lady, already

covered with bruises but very talkative. He laughed again when they had

to pack up traps in a hurry, with the stiff body of a small dead child

on the top of the kit and a barrage down the street.

"This is the funniest old show I ever did see," was the comment of the

boy from Wessex, and certainly, when one comes to think of it, it is a

funny thing that such things should happen in this civilized world of

ours and in this Christian age. But the boy from Wessex, and others like

him, did not let their sense of humour get the better of their pity or

their work of rescue. They crawled out and dragged in the bodies of

dead or wounded people.

Down below in the cellars was a crowd of poor people, mostly women and

girls, and when the shell-fire was at its height their wailing and their

prayers were rather troublesome to the Wessex boy and his comrades

upstairs bandaging the wounded. The R.A.M.C. men, at most deadly risk to

themselves, managed to clear most of the cellars, carrying out the

people on shutters, and taking them away in ambulances to hospitals. To

one of these casualty clearing-stations was brought a boy of nineteen,

who had been gassed. He was a life-long paralytic and wizened like an

old man, and deaf and dumb. Nobody knew where he had come from or to

whom he belonged, but he had one creature faithful to him. It was a

small dog, who came on the stretcher with him, sitting on his chest. It

watched close to him when he lay in the hospital, and went away with

him, sitting on his chest again, when he was sent farther away to

another clearing-station. This dog's fidelity to the paralysed boy, who

was deaf and dumb and gassed, seems to men who have seen many sights of

war and this agony in Armentieres the most pitiful thing they know.

Yesterday, apart from the knocking of anti-aircraft guns and the drone

of our planes, it was all quiet there, and I walked through the silent

streets over the broken bricks and glass, and was startled by the utter

death of the town. For this quietude and ruin of a place that one has

seen full of life gives one a sinister sensation, and one is frightened

by one's loneliness.

XV

THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD

SEPTEMBER 20

Our troops attacked this morning before six o'clock on a wide front

north and south of the Ypres-Menin road, and have gained important

ground all along the line. It is ground from which during the past six

weeks there has been that heroic and desperate fighting which I have

described as best I could in my daily messages, giving even at the best

only a vague idea of the difficulties encountered by those men of ours

who made great sacrifices in great endeavours. It is the ground which

in the centre rises up through the sinister woodlands of Glencorse Copse

and Inverness Wood to the high ground of Polygon Wood and the spurs of

the Passchendaele Ridge, which form the enemy's long defensive barrier

to the east of the Ypres salient. Until that high land was taken

progress was difficult for our troops on the left across the Steenbeek,

as the enemy's guns could still hold commanding positions. The ground

over which our men have swept this morning had been assaulted again and

again by troops who ignored their losses, and attacked with a most

desperate and glorious courage, yet failed to hold what they gained for

a time, because their final goal was attained with weakened forces after

most fierce and bloody fighting. The Empire knows who those men

were--the old English county regiments, who never fought more gallantly;

the Scots, who only let go of their forward positions under overwhelming

pressure and annihilating fire; the Irish divisions, who suffered the

most supreme ordeal, and earned new and undying honour by the way they

endured the fire of many guns for many days. As long as history lasts,

the name of these woods, from which most of the trees have been swept,

and of these bogs and marshes which lie about them, will be linked with

the memory of those brave battalions who fought through them again and

again. They are not less to be honoured than those who with the same

courage, just as splendid, attacked once more, over the same tracks,

past the same death-traps, and achieved success. By different methods,

by learning from what the first men had suffered, this last attack has

not as yet been high in cost, and we hold what the enemy has used all

his strength and cunning to prevent us getting. He used much cunning and

poured up great reserves of men and guns to smash our assaulting lines.

For the first time on July 31 we came up against his new and fully

prepared system of defence, and discovered the power of it. Abandoning

the old trench system which we could knock to pieces with artillery, he

made his forward positions without any definite line, and built a large

number of concrete blockhouses, so arranged in depth that they defended

each other by enfilade fire, and so strong that nothing but a direct hit

from one of our heavier shells would damage it. And a direct hit is very

difficult on a small mark like one of those concrete houses, holding

about ten to twenty men at a minimum, and fifty to sixty in their

largest. These little garrisons were mostly machine-gunners and picked

men specially trained for outpost work, and they could inflict severe

damage on an advancing battalion, so that the forward lines passing

through and beyond them would be spent and weak. Then behind in reserve

lay the German "Stosstruppen," specially trained also for

counter-attacks, which were launched in strong striking forces against

our advanced lines after all their struggle and loss. Those blockhouses

proved formidable things--hard nuts to crack, as the soldiers said who

came up against them. There are scores of them whose names will be

remembered through a lifetime by men of many battalions, and they cost

the lives of many brave men. Beck House and Borry Farm belong to Irish

history. Wurst Farm and Winnipeg, Bremen Redoubt and Gallipoli, Iberian

and Delva Farm, are strongholds round which many desperate little

battles, led by young subalterns or sergeants, have taken place on the

last day of July and on many days since. English and Scots have taken

turns in attacking and defending such places as Fitzclarence Farm,

Northampton Farm, and Black Watch Corner in the dreadful region of

Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood. To-day the hard nut of the concrete

blockhouse has been cracked by a new method of attack and by a new

assault, planned with great forethought, and achieved so far with high

success.

Among the troops engaged on the 2nd Army front were the Australians and

South-Africans, Welsh and Scottish battalions, and many of the old

English regiments, including the Cheshires, Warwicks, Worcesters,

Staffords, Wiltshires, Gloucesters, Berkshires, Oxford and Bucks, York

and Lancashires, Sherwood Foresters, and Rifle Brigade. The Divisions to

which they belonged were, from north to south, the 2nd Australians, 1st

Australians, the 23rd and 41st (with the 21st and 23rd in reserve), the

39th, the 19th, the 30th, 14th, and 8th.

I should like to give the full details of the preparations which have

made this success possible and the methods by which some at least of the

terrors of the blockhouse have been laid low, but it cannot yet be done,

and it is enough now that good results have been attained. One thing was

against us as usual last night. After several fine days the weather

turned bad again, and last night many men must have looked up at the

sky, groaned, and said, "Just our luck." At half-past ten it began to

rain heavily, and all through the night there was a steady drizzle. It

was awful to think of that ground about the woodlands, already full of

water-holes and bogs, becoming more and more of a quagmire as the time

drew near when our men have to rise from the mud and follow the barrage

across the craters. All through the night our heavy guns were slogging,

and through the dark wet mist there was the blurred light of their

flashes. Before the dawn a high wind was raging at thirty miles an hour

across Flanders, and heavy water-logged clouds were only 400 feet above

the earth. How could our airmen see? When the attack began they could

not see even when they flew as low as 200 feet. They could see nothing

but smoke, which clung low to the battlefields, and they could only

guess the whereabouts of German batteries. Later, when some progress had

been made at most points of the attacking line, the sky cleared a

little, blue spaces showed through the black storm-clouds, and there

were gleams of sun striking aslant the mists.

This sky on the salient was a strange vision, and I have seen nothing

like it since the war began. It was filled with little black specks like

midges, but each midge was a British aeroplane flying over the enemy's

lines. The enemy tried to clear the air of them, and his anti-aircraft

guns were firing wildly, so that all about them were puffs of black

shrapnel. Behind, closely clustered, were our kite-balloons, like

snow-clouds where they were caught by the light, staring down over the

battle, and in wide semicircles about the salient our heavy guns were

firing ceaselessly with dull, enormous hammer-strokes, followed by the

shrill cry of travelling shells making the barrage before our men, and

having blockhouses for their targets and building walls of flying steel

between the enemy and our attacking troops. In the near distance were

the strafed woods of old battle-grounds like the Wytschaete Ridge and

Messines, with their naked gallows-trees all blurred in the mist.

Our men had lain out all night in the rain before the attack at

something before six. They were wet through to the skin, but it is

curious that some of them whom I saw to-day were surprised to hear it

had been raining hard. They had other things to think about. But some of

them did not think at all. Tired out in mind and body under the big

nervous strain which is there, though they may be unconscious of it,

they slept. "I was wakened by a friend just before we went over," said

one of them. The anxiety of the officers was intense for the hours to

pass before the enemy should get a hint of the movement. It seemed that

in one part of the line he did guess that something was in the wind and

in the mist. This was on the line facing Glencorse Wood. An hour or two

before the attack he put over a heavy barrage, but most of it missed the

heads of the battalions. There were many casualties, but the men stood

firm, never budging, and making no sound. They all thought that some of

their comrades must have been badly caught, but, as far as I can find,

it did not do great damage.

All along the line the experience of the fighting was broadly the same.

Apart from local details and difficulties, the ground was not quite so

bad as had been expected, though bad enough, being greasy and boggy

after the rain, but not impassable. The shell-holes were water-logged,

and they were dangerously deep for badly wounded men who might fall in,

but for the others there was generally a way round over ground which

would hold, and our assaulting waves who led the advance were lightly

clad, and could go at a fair pace after the barrage. "I saw wounded men

fall in the shell-holes," said a Warwickshire lad to-day, "and God knows

how they got out again, unless the stretcher-bearers came up quick, as

most of them did; but as for me, I had lain in a shell-hole all night up

to the waist in mud, and I was careful to keep out of them." The barrage

ahead of them was terrific--the most appalling fence of shells that has

ever been placed before advancing troops in this war. All our men

describe it as wonderful. "Beautiful" is the word they use, because they

know what it means in safety to them.

In the direction of Polygon Wood the plan of attack seems to have worked

like clockwork. The Australians moved forward behind the barrage stage

by stage, through Westhoek and Nonne Boschen, and across the Hanebeek

stream on their left, with hardly a check, in spite of the German

blockhouses scattered over this country. In those blockhouses the small

garrisons of picked troops had been demoralized, as any human beings

would be, by the enormous shell-fire which had been flung around them.

Some, but not all, it seems, of the blockhouses had been smashed, and in

those still standing the German machine-gunners got their weapons to

work with a burst or two of fire, but then, seeing our troops upon them,

were seized with fear, and made signs of surrender. At nine o'clock this

morning the good news came back that the Australians were right through

Glencorse Wood. Later messages showed that our troops were fighting

their way into Polygon Wood. They swept over the strong points at Black

Watch Corner, Northampton Farm, and Carlisle Farm. There was stiff

fighting round a blockhouse called Anzac Corner, east of the Hanebeek

stream, and it was necessary to organize two flank attacks and work

round it before the enemy machine-gun fire could be silenced by bombs.

In another case near here the enemy came out of a blockhouse ready to

attack, but when they saw our men swarming up, they lost heart and held

up their hands. It is difficult to know how many prisoners were taken

here in these woods and strong points. The men's estimates vary

enormously, some speaking of scores and others of hundreds.

All this time the enemy's artillery reply was not exceptionally heavy,

and, though it was prompt to come after the first SOS signals went up

from his lines, it was erratic and varied very much in the success of

our counter-battery work, which all through the night and for days past

has been smothering his guns. South of the attack in Glencorse Copse and

Polygon Wood the assault in Inverness Copse and Shrewsbury Forest,

across the bog-lands round the Dumbarton Lakes, was made by English

battalions, including the Queen's, the East and West Kents, the

Northumberland Fusiliers, Sherwood Foresters, the King's Royal Rifles,

and the West Riding battalions. It was the vilest ground, low-lying and

flooded, and strewn with broken trees and choked with undergrowth, but

the troops here kept up a good pace, and flung themselves upon the

blockhouses which stood in their way. At an early hour our men were

reported to be on a ridge south-east of Inverness Copse and going strong

towards Veldhoek. The enemy's barrage came down too late, and one

officer, who was wounded by a shell-splinter, led his men, 160 of them,

to their first position with only nine casualties.

Most of our losses to-day were from machine-gun fire out of the

blockhouses, and that varied very much at different parts of the line.

There was some trouble at Het Pappotje Farm in this way, where a party

of German machine-gunners put up a desperate resistance, shutting

themselves in behind steel doors before they were routed out by a

bombing fight. Southward from a strong point called Groenenburg, or

"Green Bug" Farm, to Opaque Wood by the Ypres-Comines Canal, the attack

by the Cheshires, Wiltshires, Warwicks, Staffords, and Gloucesters was

successful, though the enemy still holds out up to the time I write in

Hessian Wood, where he is defending himself in a group of blockhouses

against the Welsh Regiment and Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

I have dealt so far with the centre of the attack, and I know very

little as to the fighting on the north by the 5th Army, except that the

Highlanders, London Territorials, Lancashire and Liverpool battalions,

and Scots and South-Africans have swept past a whole system of

blockhouses, like Beck House and Borry Farm, running up through

Gallipoli, Kansas Cross, and Wurst Farm, across the Langemarck-Zonnebeke

road. All through the morning our lightly wounded men came filtering

down to the safer places in the Ypres salient and then to the quiet

fields behind, and they were in grand spirits in spite of the mud which

caked them and the smart of their wounds. Some of them were brought down

on the trolley trains, which go almost as far as the battle-line, and

some in open buses, and some by German prisoners, but there were many

Germans among the wounded--some of them with very ghastly wounds, and

these took their place with ours and mingled with them in the

dressing-stations, and were given the same treatment. Our wounded told

some strange tales of their experiences, but there was no moan among

them, whatever they had suffered.

One man of the Cheshires described to me how he saw a German officer run

out of a dug-out, which had been a blockhouse blown in at each end by

our heavy shell-fire, and make for another one which still stood intact.

With some of his comrades, our man chased him, and there was a great

fight in the second blockhouse before the survivors surrendered, among

them the officer, who gave to my friend a big china pipe and a case full

of cigars as souvenirs. He was killed afterwards by one of his own men,

who sniped him as he was walking back to our lines. In another strong

point there was a great and terrible fight. The Prussian garrison

refused to surrender, and a party of ours fought them until they were

destroyed. "It was more lively than Wytschaete," said a man who was in

this fight. "It was less tame-like, and the Fritzes put up a better

show." They fought hard round Prince's House and Jarrock's Farm and

Pioneer House, not far from Hollebeke Chateau.

The prisoners I saw to-day were shaken men. Most of them were young

fellows of twenty-one, belonging to the 1916 class, and there were none

of the youngest boys among them. But they were white-faced and haggard,

and looked like men who had passed through a great terror, which indeed

was their fate. They belonged mostly to the 207th Prussian Division, and

had suffered before the battle from our great shell-fire, which had

caused many casualties among their reliefs and ration parties. Many

other prisoners belonged to the 121st Division. I can only give this

glimpse or two of the crowded scenes and the many details of to-day's

battle. To-morrow there will be time perhaps to write more, giving a

deeper insight into this day of good success, which is cheering after so

much desperate fighting--over the same fields, although never to so far

a goal.

* * * * *

SEPTEMBER 21

In spite of many German counter-attacks yesterday and many vain and

costly attempts to counter-attack to-day, we hold all the ground gained

by our men yesterday, except at one or two strong points, after their

victorious progress. This morning when I went again among the men who

have been fighting--there was a blue sky over the rags and tatters of

the City of Ypres, and behind the tall, solitary tree-stumps on the

ridge that goes up to Polygon Wood by way of Glencorse Copse, and all

the air was filled with the song of many aeroplanes--all that I learned

yesterday about the battle was made more certain by the narratives of

these young soldiers, who are proud and glad of what they call a real

good show. The wounded men walking down over the wide stretch of fields,

which are still under gun-fire, weak with loss of blood, suffering the

first pain of their wounds, and shaken by their experiences under shells

and machine-gun fire, spoke with a quiet enthusiasm of the day's

success, and said "It was easy" behind such a colossal barrage as our

guns rolled in front of them. Some of them in their eagerness went too

fast for the barrage in order to chase the enemy, and I have met

Australians here and there and some men of the Welsh Regiment, who

fought farther south, wounded because they ran in front of the

barrage-lines, and were caught in our shell-splinters. But that was a

rare episode, and along the whole line of attack the men followed the

moving walls of shells, vast shells that fling up masses of earth like

suburban villas, and the smaller shells that fell like confetti, all

glinting in the wet mist, and felt sure that the enemy in front of them,

would have lost all his fight when they reached his hiding-places, if

any lived. Many Germans died on that ground, so that the shell-holes

between the blockhouses are wet graves in which their bodies lie, and

many of the blockhouses which resisted so long in former attacks are

smashed, or at least so battered that the garrisons inside were dazed

and demoralized by the fearful hammering at their walls.

There was a broad belt of death across that mile deep of woods and

ridges and barren fields, but here and there, as I have already told,

men stayed alive in the concrete houses and fought with their

machine-guns to the last, and even kept sniping from shell-holes in

which they had escaped, up to the time our troops reached them. They

were brave men, most of them, for it needs great courage to show any

fighting spirit after such a fury of gun-fire, and 50 per cent. of our

prisoners are wounded, as I have seen myself, and the others are haggard

and spent after their frightful adventure. An hour or two ago I met a

column of them on the road, marching down slowly through a ruined

village, and staring hollow-eyed at all the movement of our troops, at

all the transport behind our lines, at all our whistling, busy Tommies,

who glance back at them without any malice now that the battle is over.

In a dressing-station a young wounded German sprang to his feet as I

came in, and said, "Good day, sir," very politely, but the pallor of his

face was that of a dead man. The German officers who are prisoners show

the same kind of eagerness to salute, which is a rare thing for them,

and I hear that they do not disguise that yesterday was a day of great

defeat for themselves, and of great victory for us. The completeness and

quickness of it staggered them, and they speak of our barrage-fire as an

awful phenomenon that has undone all their plans and destroyed the new

method of defence which they believed could save them to the end. As

wounded men or prisoners they see things darkly, and we should be deep

in folly if we believed that all the enemy's strength of resistance is

destroyed. But at least this is clear after yesterday, that the new

German method of holding his lines lightly by small garrisons in

blockhouses, with reserves behind for counter-attacks, has broken down,

and by reverting to the old system of strong front lines he would suffer

again as he suffered in the Somme under the ferocity of our artillery.

The German officers have hard words to say about their Higher Command

which has led them into this tragedy, and their own pride is broken.

Yesterday the reserve divisions, which were brought up in buses and then

assembled in places near our new front, to be flung against our advanced

lines, had a dreadful time, and must have suffered great losses. After

the rain of the night and the mist of the morning, the weather cleared

in time for our airmen to go out reconnoitring, as I saw them in swarms

in yesterday's sky, and they were quick to report the massing of the

enemy. Our guns were quick to fire at these human targets. These

counter-attacks developed several times against the English and Highland

troops, who were fighting across the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road,

north-west of the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, at a place called

the Schreiboom, north of Langemarck. Some of the Rifle Brigade and

King's Royal Rifles, with other light-infantry troops, failed at first

to get a certain trench, and very hard fighting took place during the

day in a pocket with desperate courage. At the same time the Highlanders

south of them were fighting very hard also round about the blockhouses

by Rose House, Pheasant Farm, and Quebec Farm beyond the Pilkem Ridge,

into which I looked a week or two ago, when things were quiet on the

line. The Highlanders were driven back for a while, and the enemy's

counter-attacks were made in strong force at about ten o'clock in the

morning, and several times later. But they were broken up each time by

the rifle-fire of the Scottish troops, and by our field-batteries.

Large numbers of the enemy were killed here in our first attack and

afterwards. Besides the artillery, a heavy bombardment was made before

the men went out by trench-mortars, which raked a small area of

shell-holes so thoroughly that the German snipers in them were

destroyed, and an important trench was taken by the Scots with hardly

any casualties. A good deal more than 100,000 rounds of shells must have

gone over from the guns before the battle, and afterwards the German

storm troops who tried to recover the ground were smothered with fire.

Six times they came on with much determination, and six times their

waves were broken up. Some London Territorials had to repel part of the

assaulting waves, after a gallant struggle for their objectives, and one

young officer among them earned special honour by gathering a company of

men together and leading them against the advancing enemy, whom they

scattered with bombs and rifles.

Most of the Germans here in this district round Wurst Farm, east of

Winnipeg, were men of the 36th and 208th Divisions, and were a mixture

of Prussians and Poles, who seem to have been stout-hearted fellows.

Their local reserves were quickly exhausted, and in the afternoon, when

they threw in further reserves, these were broken up in the same way. A

frightful fate met a German division which was brought up in the

afternoon near Roulers to be hurled against the Londoners and

Highlanders. Our guns broke up their columns, and when they rallied and

re-formed, broke them again. Our aeroplanes flew low over them, strafing

them with machine-gun fire, and at intervals gas clouded about them, so

that they had to put on their masks, if they had time to put them on

before they fell, and marched blindly forward to another doom, for some

of those who came within range were shot down by the London men, little

fellows, some of them, with the Cockney accent which makes me homesick

for the Fulham Road when I hear it along the roads of Flanders, but with

big, brave hearts. Three of the German battalions deployed and drove

against the Highlanders at Delva Farm and Rose House, and fought so hard

that they could only be driven back when the Highlanders rallied, and at

eight o'clock in the evening swept them out and away. Strong

counter-attacks were made between six and seven in the evening in the

neighbourhood of Hill 37 and the country round Bremen Redoubt, against

the King's Liverpools, where the South-African Scots held their line.

There were a great many blockhouses in this district, some of them

damaged and some still intact, and in those undamaged forts little

parties of men, who fired their machine-guns to the last moment before

death or surrender. Hill 37 was a hard place to attack, as the Irish

found it, and here Lancashire men fought their way up and round in spite

of the waves of machine-gun bullets that swept the ground about them.

The Bremen Redoubt, which had been so costly to the Irishmen on July 31,

was carried by the South-Africans in a fine assault, while Scottish

troops were gaining other strong points and drawing tight nets round any

blockhouse from which came any fire. Out of these places, in all that

part of the line, many prisoners were taken, and they made their way

down anxiously through their own shell-fire, which was barraging these

fields. A great party of Germans, white-faced and afraid, were found in

the long galleries running out of a fortified place called Schuler Farm.

South of all this the Australians were fighting in the centre of

yesterday's great attack where the ground rises to the foul heights of

Polygon Wood. The Australian lads were in their most perfect form. They

had had some rest since the hard, bad days at Bullecourt and in the

dreadful valley of Noreuil, where I went to see them outside the

Queant-Drocourt line. Since then I had seen them in the harvest-fields

of France, in the market squares of Flemish towns, along the dusty roads

which lead up to the Front. Always I felt it good to see those

easy-going fellows in their flap hats, so lithe, so clean-cut, so fresh.

It was an honour to get a salute from them now and then, for they are

not great at that sort of thing, and one could see with half an eye that

they have not lost any of their quality since some of them fought their

great epic at Helles and Suvla Bay, and afterwards at Pozieres gained

and held their ground under months of great shell-fire, and then at

Bullecourt fought with the grim endurance of men who will not yield to

any kind of hammering if their pride is in the job. They are boys, many

of them, and simple-looking fellows who were not cut to the model of

barrack-room soldiers. They have a wildish gipsy look when one sees them

camped in the fields, and free-and-easy manners in the village

estaminets. When I heard they were going to attack Polygon Wood I knew

that we should get it, if human courage could have the say, for the

Australians are not easily denied if they set their mind on a thing, and

for all their boyishness--though they have middle-aged follows among

them too--they have a grim passion in them at such times. Yet they are

free-and-easy always, even on the battlefield, and a bit impatient of

checks and restraints. Knowing them, and the heart and soul of them, one

of their commanding officers arranged a method of preventing them from

getting bored with the long strain of a two hours' wait, which was

ordered when they should have gained their first objective. He sent up

to them by the carrying parties bundles of the previous day's papers,

all the picture papers especially, and large quantities of cigarettes.

The idea worked beautifully, and it was the strangest thing that has

happened in any great battle. The Australian lads got at the papers, and

on the ground which they had just captured spread them out and studied

the news of the day and smoked their cigarettes with quiet enjoyment,

while ahead of them rolled a stupendous barrage, with thousands of heavy

shells that came screaming over their heads from our guns behind them,

answered by other shells that came the other way, and burst farther back

on the battlefield. So they were seen by one of our airmen, who was

surprised by what he saw.

The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was told to-day by some

of the men whom I met slightly wounded along the Menin road. The enemy

seemed to smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just

before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Australians, and

might have demoralized them if they had not been so high in heart. They

got away in good order, and kept going to keep pace with the travelling

storm of shells which broke before them. One queer thing happened near

Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a raid with

"flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these devilish engines, at the

very time of the attack and they were met by the Australian shock of

assault, and fell before it. While some of the Australians worked round

Glencorse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others fought up by

Westhoek across the Hanebeek towards the post called by a curious

coincidence Anzac Corner. After heavy fighting for a little while at one

of the blockhouses the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and

waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was marshy and encumbered

with fallen trees, but the boys struggled through somehow, and then

started for the Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom is

in these places when our artillery has done its work, but only some

blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse Wood and round about it there

were a good many Germans, and they fought hard. Fifty of them were

killed in hand-to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a

blockhouse on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison would not

surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was taken by a bombing

attack. So after a two hours' wait at the end of the first lap the

Australians flung away their cigarettes and the assaulting waves passed

on to the ridge of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they

had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked on the

right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a crescent, which had its

right ear somewhere by Carlisle Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner,

until supports came up to make good their losses on the way, and they

were able to go forward and straighten out. After that the

counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up by artillery-fire, and

when one of the German divisions was flung in, the only men who reached

our lines were those who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns

put over their assembly position. I should like to give a fuller history

than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness Copse and the bogs of

the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tangled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I

have no time, as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who

fought there over most difficult country, crowded with blockhouses, and

under severe fire from the enemy's guns. Men from Surrey and Kent, from

the Midlands, from Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and

14th Divisions, all fought and won with equal courage and success.

* * * * *

SEPTEMBER 23

The enthusiasm of the troops who fought in Thursday's battle of the

Menin road is good enough proof that they achieved success that morning

without those great losses which take the heart out of victory. All the

men I have seen are convinced that the enemy's losses are heavy. Not so

much in the actual attack, where he held his blockhouse system with

small garrisons, as afterwards, when he tried to counter-attack.

I have already put on record some of the attempts he made to regain

ground on the afternoon of the battle. Yesterday and to-day he has

continued his efforts with even more disastrous results to his unhappy

troops. About midday yesterday a German regiment was sent up in

motor-omnibuses to a point behind the enemy's lines to make a new

assault upon our positions in Polygon Wood. The three battalions then

took to the road, and were seen very quickly by our observers. The

artillery made that road a way of fire, and the German soldiers were

caught in it and dispersed. Odd companies of them worked their way

forward by other tracks, but lost themselves in the chaos of

shell-craters, where other heavy shells burst among them. They were no

longer battalions or companies, but a terror-stricken collection of

individual soldiers, taking cover in holes and without guidance or

command. An officer collected fifty of them and led them back to

reorganize. He had no notion of what had happened to the rest of the

regiment, except that it was broken and ineffective, in this wild

turmoil of crater earth. He went forward again on reconnaissance, and

walked into a body of Australians, who took him prisoner.

So it happened with another column at Zandvoorde. One of our aerial

observers watched the long trail of men marching up the road and sent a

message to the guns. They were the heavy guns which found the target

with 9.2 shells and with twelve-inchers, which are monstrous and

annihilating. Down there at Zandvoorde it must have been hell. We can

only guess how many men were blown to pieces, and it is not a picture on

which the imagination should care to linger. It was a bloody shambles.

Along the Menin road later in the day came another long column of

marching men. They were men of the Sixteenth Bavarian Division, who had

been sent up in urgent haste without knowledge of the ground, without

maps, and with officers who seem to have had no definite instructions

except to fling their men in an attack somehow and anyhow. Over their

heads in the darkness under the stars flew a British aeroplane with a

bomb of the heaviest kind. When our airman saw these hostile troops

advancing, flying low like a great black bat he dropped his frightful

thing on the head of the column. It burst with a deafening roar and

scattered the leading company. Flying in the same sky-space as the big

aeroplane was a number of other night raiders of ours. They also flew

low above the marching troops, and all down the road dropped their

explosives. Our guns added their help, and they fired many rounds down

the Menin road, bracketing the ditches. It is a dreadful thing to walk

along a road which is being "bracketed," and with those birds of prey

above them the Bavarians must have suffered the worst kind of horror.

They did not get near to our lines with any counter-attack.

None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near Polygon Ridge,

which is the ground most wanted by the enemy, and the nearest seems to

have been yesterday afternoon, when some of the Australian boys with

whom I talked to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets

in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the movement of men for a

minute of two, and after that a fury of shells which fell into the wood

and filled it with flame and smoke.

"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived through that," said one

of these lads. "If any Fritz got out of that without being cracked he

must have had the luck of Old Harry."

There were many of these Australian boys among whom I went to-day before

they had cleaned themselves of the dirt of battle, and while they were

still on fire with the emotion of their amazing adventure. Some of them

had escaped only by enormous luck. I talked with one stretcher-bearer, a

fine, big, bullet-headed fellow with an unshaven chin and a merry smile,

who was astounded to find himself alive. He had spent the day and night

bandaging wounded, and, with his mates, carrying them down to the

dressing-station, a mile and more back. All the time he walked and

worked with bursting shells about him. They knocked out several of his

mates, but left him untouched. They killed two or three of the wounded

on his stretchers going down, but did not scratch him. They blew up

dug-outs just as he had gone out of them, and trenches through which he

made his way. He was buried in earth flung up by heavy shells, and he

fell many times into deep craters, and men dropped all round him, but

to-day he still had a whole skin and a queer, lingering smile, in which

there is a look of wonderment because of his escape.

An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles and the Somme and

Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Australian, with a delicate, clean-cut

face, thoughtful and grave, with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a

wounded lad on to a stretcher when a shell came over his head, killed

the boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this

slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, sixty men

and a German battalion staff in their headquarter dug-outs below Polygon

Wood.

"Where is your revolver?" he said to the captain. The German hesitated,

and said: "You will shoot me if I fetch it." "I will shoot you if you

don't," said the little Australian. And he meant what he said, as I

could see by the set of his lips when he told me the tale. But the

German captain handed over his revolver quietly, and his maps, which

were very useful.