It was a wonderful scene to-day among all these Australian lads, who had

just been relieved and were talking over the scenes of yesterday's

history in small groups while they scraped off the mud and shaved before

bits of broken mirror, and polished up German rifles and machine-guns

and handled their souvenirs, found in the dug-outs and blockhouses. Many

of them were stripped to the waist, some of them wore German caps, some

of them slept like drugged men in spite of all the noise about them.

After taking the first objective they had to wait for two hours before

they went on, and there were queer scenes about the blockhouses and in

the felled woods. They had found the German rations, and besides the

sausages and bread and gallons of cold coffee in petrol-tins, which the

boys shared among themselves, quantities of long, fat, and excellent

cigars. Hundreds of Australians smoked these cigars while they waited

for the barrage to lift, and when they went on again hundreds of them

were still puffing them as they trudged on to Polygon Wood. They had a

good day. I have met some of them, who said they enjoyed it, and would

not have missed it for worlds. The excitement of it all kept them going.

The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of

people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with

lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting

and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages

and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men

back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own

barrage-fire on their way to our lines. An Australian doctor had his arm

smashed, but stayed among the boys, regardless of his own hurt. A V.C.

officer of the Dardanelles was killed as he went back wounded on a

stretcher. German wounded lay crying for help, and our men rescued them.

So about Glencorse Wood and Polygon Wood human agony and the wild

spirits of Australian youth, death, and the vitality of boyhood in the

passion of a great adventure were queerly mixed, and one side of this

picture of war would be hopelessly untrue if it left out the other side.

One enthusiasm of the Australians was about the English soldiers who

fought on their right, the Yorkshire boys and others who went through

Inverness Copse. Again and again yesterday I heard them loud in praise

of the Tommies.

"By gosh, they'll do for me! They went ahead in grand style. They

couldn't be stopped anyhow, though they came up against a durned lot of

machine-gun fire. They were just fine."

Far north of all this, above the Zonnebeke, were the Londoners of the

58th Division and the Highlanders of the 51st Division, and, as I have

already written in previous messages, they had severe fighting and had

to bear the brunt of great counter-attacks. The ground in front of the

London Territorials was bad and difficult--bad because it was

intersected with swamps and cut up by weeks of shell-fire, and horribly

difficult because of a ridge rising up on the left to the German strong

point of Wurst Farm.

The London boys swung left in order to attack Wurst Farm, and, avoiding

a frontal assault, worked left-handed all the time till they reached the

ridge, and then rushed the blockhouse from the rear. The garrison was

surprised and caught. They fought desperately, but the Londoners

overpowered them. The surviving Germans complained bitterly, and said it

was impossible to use their machine-guns on every side at once. "It is

not a fair way of fighting," said a German officer, and the Londoners

laughed and said, "Not half!" and "I don't think!" and other ironical

words.

In a big dressing-station up there they captured two doctors and sixty

men, of whom many were wounded. The German doctors said, "Have you any

wounded we can help? We are not fighting men." And they made themselves

useful, and were good fellows.

Down in the valley the Londoners came face to face with a party of

Germans who showed fight, but the Londoners--little fellows some of

them--walked through them and over dead bodies who had fallen before

their rifle-fire. There was a lot of musketry both then and afterwards

when the enemy counter-attacked, and they fired like sharpshooters. Down

below them and almost behind them the line dropped away to the fort of

Schuler Farm, where the enemy still held out. "There are a lot of Boches

down there," said an officer on the brigade staff of the London

Territorials. "No," said the brigade major, and then: "Yes, and, by the

Lord, there's a German officer staring at me. The blighter is telling

one of his men to take a pot at me. See!" The brigade major ducked down

his head as a bullet flattened against the blockhouse wall.

It was an awkward situation for the Londoners, but they formed a

defensive flank and sent some lads to help the troops who were attacking

the position. "Domine dirige nos" is the London motto, and there were

many London boys who had it in their hearts that day, and said with the

dear old Cockney accent, "Gord 'elp us." That was when the German

counter-attacks developed, but were smashed by gun-fire.

In all this fighting, as far as I can find, the Highland Territorials of

the 51st Division upon the left had the bloodiest fighting. They gained

their ground with difficulty, because a battalion of the Royal Scots was

badly held up by wire and bogs and machine-gun fire at a stream called

the Lekkerbolerbeek. They had to fall back, reorganize, and attack

again, which they did with splendid gallantry, and held their ground

only by most grim endurance, because the enemy counter-attacked them

violently all day long after the objectives had been gained.

The enemy's losses were certainly appalling to him. Officers in this

fighting, who have been through many of our great battles, tell me that

they have never seen before so many dead as lie upon this ground. In one

section of Pheasant Trench a hundred yards long there are nearly a

hundred dead. Before the attack our barrage rolled forward slowly, like

a devouring fire. Instantly all along the German line green lights rose

as SOS signals, but as the barrage swept on, followed by the Scots, the

lights went out. They rose again from the farther lines, and then those

ceased as the shells reached them. Only in the blockhouses and the

dug-outs down by the Lekkerbolerbeek were any Germans left alive.

The blockhouses were dealt with by small parties of Highlanders, who had

been in training to meet them, and went like wolves about them, firing

their machine-guns and rifles through the loopholes if the garrisons

would not come out. So they swept on to their final goal, which was at

Rose House and the cemetery beyond Pheasant Farm. These men had some

terrible hours to face. By ill-luck their left flank was utterly

exposed, and hostile aeroplanes, flying very low, saw this and flew back

with the news. The enemy was already developing a series of

counter-attacks by his "Stosstruppen," or storm troops, of the 234th

Division, which from three o'clock in the afternoon till seven o'clock

that evening made repeated thrusts against the Highlanders' front, and

the heaviest weight of two and a half battalions was sent forward

against this flank. It was preceded by the heaviest German barrage ever

seen by these Scots, who have had many experiences of barrage-fire.

Officers watching from a little distance were horrified by that

monstrous belt of fire, and the garrison of Gordons seemed lost to them

for ever. It was not so bad as that. Eventually this flank fell back

from Rose House to Pheasant Farm Cemetery and other ground, where they

were rallied by a battalion commander, one of the youngest men of his

rank in the British Army, who supplied them with fresh ammunition and

directed them to hold up the German infantry advancing under cover of

their bombardment. In spite of their losses our men fought their way

back and regained part of the ground by desperate valour. Our guns wiped

out the other counter-attacks one by one, inflicting frightful losses on

the enemy. They were caught most horribly as they came along the road.

Thirty machine-guns played a barrage-fire on his lines where German

soldiers tried to escape across the shell-craters. The Highlanders used

their rifles effectively, one man firing over 500 rounds. And a gun was

brought into action from a Tank which had come up as far as an advanced

blockhouse, in spite of the boggy ground.

There was great slaughter among the enemy that day. Since then the

slaughter has gone on, for his counter-attacks have not ceased. His guns

have been very active, bombarding parts of our line intensely, and in

the air his scouts and raiders have been flying over our lines in the

endeavour to observe and destroy our troops and batteries, flying low

with great audacity, and using machine-guns as well as bombs. But we

hold all the important ground gained last Thursday.

XVI

THE WAY TO PASSCHENDAELE

SEPTEMBER 26

During the past forty-eight hours there has been hard and prolonged

fighting north and south of the Menin road, and in spite of formidable

counter-attacks by the enemy which began early yesterday morning and

still continue, our troops have made a successful advance in the

neighbourhood of Zonnebeke and southward beyond the Polygon Wood

racecourse, which now belongs to the Australians.

It is south of that, by Cameron House and the rivulet called the

Reutelbeek, that the enemy's pressure has been greatest, and where the

battalions of the 33rd and 39th Divisions on the right of the

Australians, including the Queen's, have had the hardest time under

incessant fire and attack since dawn yesterday, but on their right

Sherwood Foresters and Rifle Brigade men, also severely tried, have

swept across the Tower Hamlets Ridge in the direction of Gheluvelt.

It was fully expected that any new endeavour of ours to advance beyond

the ground gained in the battle of September 20 would be met by the

fiercest opposition. The capture of Polygon Wood and Westhoek seriously

lessened the value of Passchendaele Ridge, which strikes northward and

forms the enemy's great defensive barrier, and it was certain that in

spite of the heavy losses he has already suffered in trying to get back

that high ground above Inverness Copse he would bring up all his

available reserves to hinder our further progress at all costs.

For two days before yesterday he made no sign of movement in his lines,

and was kept quiet by the breakdown of all his previous counter-attacks,

which our men repulsed with most bloody losses to the enemy, so that

their divisions were shattered and demoralized. The German Command used

that time to drag the broken units out of the line and to replace them

or hurry up to their support the reserves who had been waiting in the

rest areas behind. These men were rushed up by motor-omnibus and

railways to points where it was necessary to take to the roads and march

to the assembly positions ready for immediate counter-attacks. Those

were in the Zandvoorde and Kruiseik neighbourhood, south-east of

Gheluvelt, ready to strike up to the Tower Hamlets Ridge while others

could be assembled behind the Passchendaele Ridge.

No doubt our attack for this morning did not leave out of account the

strength of resistance likely to be offered. The enemy showed signs of

desperate anxiety to check us on the Polygon Wood line, and the ground

going south of it to the Gheluvelt Spur, and he made a great effort by

massed artillery to smash up the organization behind our lines, and by a

series of thrusts to break our front. On Monday afternoon, increasing to

great intensity yesterday, he flung down his barrage-fire in Glencorse

Wood and Inverness Copse, fired large numbers of heavy long-range shells

over Westhoek Ridge, Observatory Ridge, Hooge, and other old spots of

ill-fame, and concentrated most fiercely on the ground about Cameron

House, Black Watch Corner, and the Tower Hamlets.

At six o'clock yesterday morning, supported by this terrific fire, he

launched his first attack on the Surreys, Scottish Rifles, Middlesex

Regiment, and other troops around the Tower Hamlets, and owing to their

losses they were obliged to fall back some little way in order to

reorganize for an assault to recapture their position. These fought

through some awful hours, and several of their units did heroic things

to safeguard their lines, which for a time were threatened.

While they were fighting in this way the 4th and 5th Australians, on the

high ground this side of Polygon Wood racecourse and the mound which is

called the Butte, also had to repel some fierce attacks which opened on

them shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. The enemy was unable to

pierce their line, and fell back from this first attempt with great

losses in dead and wounded. It was followed by a second thrust at midday

and met the same fate. At two o'clock in the afternoon the Australians

sent some of their men to help the Surreys and the English troops on

their right, who were passing through a greater ordeal owing to the

storm of fire over them and the continued pressure of the enemy's storm

troops, who were persistent through the afternoon in spite of the trails

of dead left in their tracks. It was a serious anxiety on the eve of a

new battle, but it failed to frustrate our attack. All the area through

which the enemy was trying to bring up his troops was made hideous by

artillery-fire and the work of the Royal Flying Corps.

It was a clear moonlight night, with hardly a breath of air blowing, and

all the countryside was made visible by the moon's rays, which silvered

the roofs of all the villages and made every road like a white tape. Our

planes went out over the enemy's lines laden with bombs, and patrolled

up and down the tracks and made some thirty attacks upon the German

transport and his marching columns. All his lines of approach were kept

under continual fire by our guns of heavy calibre, and for miles around

shells swept the points which marching men would have to pass, so that

their way was hellish. Our aircraft went out and flew very low, and

dropped bombs wherever they saw men moving through the luminous mists of

the night. Behind our own lines air patrols guarded the countryside.

They carried lights, and as they flew in the starlit sky they themselves

looked like shooting stars until they dropped low, when their planes

were diaphanous as butterfly's wings in sunlight. On the battlefield

then was no unusual gun-fire for several hours after dark. Guns on both

sides kept up the usual night bombardment in slow sullen strokes, but at

least on the Australian front it was not until about 4.45 in the morning

that the enemy opened a heavy barrage in Glencorse Wood. The Australian

troops were already massed beyond that ground for the attack which was

shortly due. On the north, up by Wurst Farm, on the lower slopes of the

Gravenstafel, our London Territorials were also waiting to go "over the

bags," as they call it. Against them the German guns put over a heavy

barrage, but that line of explosives failed to stop or check the

assault.

It was almost dark when our London lads went forward through a thick

ground mist, which was wet and clammy about them. Our artillery had

opened before them the same monstrous line of barrage-fire which they

had followed on the 20th. and they went after it at a slow trudge, which

gave them time to avoid shell-craters and get over difficult ground

without lagging behind that protecting storm. That violence of fire was

as deadly and terrifying this morning as on that other day. Through the

mist our men saw the Germans running and falling, and many of them did

not stay in the blockhouses, though it was almost certain death to come

out into the open before the barrage passed. There were dead men in many

shell-craters before our men reached them, and others afterwards, as

they passed through clumps of ruin which had once been hamlets and

farms. There was such a mess of brickwork and masonry at Aviatik Farm,

where Germans hiding in concrete walls fired machine-guns and rifles for

a time until the British troops closed on them.

Something like 150 prisoners were taken in this section of the attack,

and one of them was a queer bird who belonged to the sea. That is to

say, he had been a sailor on the _Dresden_ and was in the battle of

Falkland Island and off Coronel, where he was picked up by a Swedish

boat and taken back to Germany. To his disgust he was put in the 10th

Ersatz Division, and now, after his soldier life, wants to work in a

British shipyard. He was surprised at the food given to him, and thought

it was a bribe to get information from him, believing that England is

agonizing with hunger.

About a hundred and fifty prisoners were taken also, by the troops on

the right of this section, belonging mostly to the 23rd Reserve

Division, with some of the 3rd Guards. Our men who attacked in the

direction of Zonnebeke village were Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, East

Yorks, Royal Scots, Gordons, and King's Own, and they had some stiff

fighting on the way to the Windmill Cabaret and Hill Forty, which seems

to be the key to the position. Here they came against some of the

blockhouses at Toronto Farm and Van Isackere Farm, but did not meet

great trouble there. Some of them had been so badly knocked by

shell-fire that the garrisons inside were killed, by concussion, and

from others men came out to surrender as soon as our men were near them.

Near the village of Zonnebeke the fight was more serious against the

Royal Scots and East Yorks, and the enemy's gun-fire, which had not been

very heavy on the other ground of attack, smashed along the line of the

railway embankment.

The Australian advance across the racecourse of Polygon Wood and

northward across the spur to below Zonnebeke Chateau was steady and

successful. There was a regular chain of blockhouses on the way, but

there again the old black magic of the pill-box failed. The men rallied

inside them, many of them being Poles of the 49th Regiment, who hate the

Prussians in a fierce way and ask us to kill as many as possible for

their sake. Most of them were quick and glad to surrender. A platoon of

them were taken in some wooden dug-outs below the high mound of Polygon

Wood, that old Butte which is supposed to be the burial-place of a

prehistoric chief, though by the Australians it is believed to be the

observation-post of Sir Douglas Haig in 1914.

The enemy's gun-fire was heavy over part of the ground, and there was a

nest of machine-guns along a road which gave some trouble, but in the

main attack the losses of the Australians were not heavy up to the time

they gained the last objective. It was our aircraft which brought back

the first news of the Anzacs on the racecourse in Polygon Wood, and

later they had reached the farthest goal, where prisoners were

surrendering freely. On the left of their front the Australians were

quite satisfied with their position. On the right they had great anxiety

because of the check to the troops below them. At one time it was found

advisable for the Australians to swing back their flank a little in

order to avoid its exposure. But the Australians are full of confidence

and are sure that they can handle any counter-attack which may be

launched against them. It has been a hard day for all our men,

especially for those who bore the brunt of the enemy's fire, and I

believe will be counted as one of the biggest days of fighting in this

war. Its decision is of vital importance to the enemy and to ourselves,

and so far it is in our favour.

XVII

THE BATTLE OF POLYGON WOOD

SEPTEMBER 27

The battle which began yesterday morning, after a whole day of

counter-attacking by the enemy, in great numbers and by great gun-fire,

lasted until nightfall, and, as I told yesterday, did not pass without

anxious hours for those in command, and trying hours for some of our

fighting men.

From the left above Zonnebeke down to the Australian front on the

heights of the Polygon Wood Racecourse the advance was made with fair

ease through the blockhouse system and without severe losses, as they

are reckoned in modern warfare, in spite of difficult bits of ground and

the usual snags, as our men call them, in the way of unexpected

machine-gun fire, odd bits of trench to which small groups of Germans

clung stubbornly, dirty swamps which some of our men could not cross

quickly enough to keep up with the barrage, and danger zones upon which

the enemy heaped his explosives.

There were incidents enough for individual men to be remembered for a

lifetime, hairbreadth escapes, tight corners in which men died after

acts of fine heroism, and strong points like Hill 40, on the left of the

ruins of Zonnebeke, around which some of our troops struggled with

fortune.

[Illustration: The Ypres salient]

Apart from local vicissitudes here and there during those first hours of

the battle it became clear by midday, or before, that from the extreme

left of the attack down to the vicinity of Cameron House, on the right

of the Australians, the general success of the day was good. The

critical situation was on the right of the 4th and 5th Australians, and

involving their right because of the enemy's violent pressure on

British troops there during the previous day, and again when our new

attack started, so that their line had been somewhat forced back and the

Australian right flank was exposed.

Hour after hour reports coming from this part of the field were read

with some anxiety when it was known how heavily some of our battalions

were engaged. This menace to our right wing was averted by the courage

of men of the Middlesex and Surrey Regiments of the 33rd Division, with

Argylls and Sutherlands and Scottish Rifles, and by the quick, skillful,

and generous help of the Australian troops on their left. It is an

episode of the battle which will one day be an historic memory when all

the details are told. I can only tell them briefly and in outline.

After terrific shelling, on Tuesday last, the enemy launched an attack

at six o'clock against our line by Carlisle Farm and Black Watch Corner,

south of Polygon Wood, and forced some of our English troops to fall

back towards Lone House and the dirty little swamp of the Reutelbeek.

These boys of Middlesex and Surrey suffered severely. For some time it

was all they could do to hold out, and the enemy was still pressing. A

body of Scottish Rifles was sent up to support them, and by a most brave

counter-thrust under great gun-fire restored part of the line, so that

it was strong enough to keep back any advancing wave of Germans by rifle

and machine-gun fire.

Another body of men, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, held out on

exposed ground, isolated from the main line, and threatened with being

cut off by the enemy's assault troops. Sir Douglas Haig has mentioned

them specially in his message yesterday, and they deserve great honour

for the heroic way in which they held on to this ground for many hours

that day and night under harassing fire from coal-boxes, or 5.9's, which

threatened to wipe out their whole strength. Yesterday they had strength

and spirit left to renew the attack, and to make another attempt to get

back the lost ground into which the enemy had driven a wedge.

At the same time the Australians had realized the dangerous situation

which exposed their right flank, and they directed a body of their own

troops to strike southward in order to thrust back the German outposts.

Those Australian troops shared the peril of their comrades on the

right, and withstood the same tornado of shelling which was flung over

all the ground here; but in spite of heroic sacrifice did not at first

wholly relieve the position of the Australian right, which remained

exposed. After the great attack by the Anzacs in the morning their line

was thrust right out beyond Cameron House, but the English and Scottish

troops of the 33rd Division, who had also gone forward in the new attack

south of them, were again met by a most deadly barrage-fire and checked

at a critical time. I was with some of the Australians yesterday when

all this was happening, and when there was cause for worry. They were

unruffled, and did not lose confidence for a moment.

"Give us two hours," said one of them who had a right to speak, "and we

will make everything as sound as a bell." In those two hours they drew

back their flank to get into line on a curve going back towards Lone

House, and established defensive posts which would hold off any attack

likely to be launched against them.

"It is hard luck on the English boys down there," said the Australians,

"but they have had a bad gruelling, and they will come along in spite of

it. There is not an Australian in France who doesn't know how the

Tommy-Boys fought on the 20th, and that will do for us."

The "Tommy-Boys," as the Australians call them, fought as they have

fought in three years of great battles, and in spite of the ordeal

through which they had passed--and it was not a light one--they saved

the situation on that ground below Polygon Wood, and made it too

dangerous and too costly for the enemy to stay. Early this morning the

survivors of the Germans who had thrust a wedge between our lines past

Cameron House crawled out again and our line was straightened.

How the Australians established themselves on Polygon Wood Racecourse

and beyond the big mound called the Butte I told in my message

yesterday. Farther north the Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, Royal Scots,

Gordons, and King's Own of the 59th and 3rd Divisions had attacked north

of the Ypres-Roulers railway, running at right angles to the

Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. On that road, barring the way, was the

station of Zonnebeke, now a mass of wreckage, fortified with

machine-gun redoubts, and farther south the ruins of Zonnebeke church

and village. Across the road was the Windmill Cabaret, an old inn which

has been blown off the map on the high ground of Hill 40, which rises

gradually to a hump a hundred yards or so north of the station. It was

bad ground to attack, and strewn with little blockhouses of the new

type, though they are still called pill-boxes after an older and smaller

type. The blockhouses did not give much trouble. Our new form of

barrage, the most frightful combination of high explosives and shrapnel

that has yet appeared in war, rolled backwards and forwards about them,

so that the garrisons huddled inside until our men nipped behind them

and thrust rifles or bombs through the machine-gun loopholes, if they

had not previously escaped to shell-craters around where they might have

more chance of escape.

And here I might say in passing that the enemy has already modified his

methods of holding the blockhouses, and while only a few men remain

inside, distributes the rest of the garrison in shell-holes on either

side, with their machine-guns in the organized craters. Some of them

were found by our men, and though many of them had been killed by our

gun-fire, others remained shooting and sniping until they were routed

out.

The worst part of the ground on this line of attack was around a

blockhouse called Bostin Farm, where there was a dismal, stinking swamp

so impassable that the Royal Scots, Scottish Fusiliers, and East Yorks

of the 3rd Division who tried to make their way through it lost touch

with the barrage, which rolled ahead of them, and had to work round and

up towards Hill 40. Here they came under machine-gun fire, and although

some men forced their way up the slope of the knoll on which the

Windmill Cabaret stood, they did not quite reach the crest.

Meanwhile men of the Gordons, Suffolks, and Welsh Fusiliers were

attacking round about Zonnebeke, where the ground was swept by

machine-gun bullets, and seized the ruin of the church and the outskirts

of the station yard. There was heavy shelling from the enemy all day,

which caused the line to fall back a little, and at six o'clock

yesterday evening the enemy launched two counter-attacks from Zonnebeke

and another around Hill 40. Half an hour later the Royal Scots and

Royal Scottish Fusiliers moved forward to thrust the enemy back, and at

exactly the same time another counter-attack of his advanced in their

direction. Each body of men were protected by barrage-lines of heavy

shell-fire, and our shells and the German shells mingled and burst

together in a wide belt of fury, and sometimes neither side could cross

it.

Farther north South Midland men did well. They advanced from Zevenkote

on the right and Schuler Farm on the left to Van Isackere Farm and Dochy

Farm and other blockhouses on each side of the high road between

Langemarck and Zonnebeke with hardly a check. They found many of the

blockhouses badly damaged after the heavy fire that had been poured on

each one of them, and if they were not damaged the men inside were so

nerve-shaken that they were eager to surrender. Apparently they had not

expected the attack to follow the hurricane bombardment, because there

had been other shoots of this kind before, and they made no real attempt

to get their machine-guns into action. It was from the slopes of the

Gravenstafel and the Abraham Heights beyond that machine-gun fire fell

upon the Midland men, and the enemy's guns were shooting down the

gullies between these ridges. But the ground in this part of our attack

yesterday was taken without grave trouble and without great losses.

Most of the prisoners taken on this ground were Saxons, and those I have

seen marching down to a captivity which they prefer to the field of

battle are men of a good physique, and smart, soldierly look. It is

astonishing how quickly they recover from the effect of bombardment and

the great horror of battle as soon as they get beyond the range of

shell-fire. But they are gloomy and disheartened. The officers

especially acknowledge that things are going badly for Germany, and say

that there is, for the time at least until the new class is ready, a

dearth of men of fighting age, so that the drafts they get are miserable

and unfit. They are overwhelmed with the thought of the monstrous

gun-power which we have brought against them to counteract their own

artillery, which once had the mastery, and they are struck by the

audacity of our air service.

Certainly our flying men have been doing all in their power to make life

intolerable on the German side of the lines. I have already described

how they went out on Tuesday night and broke up the columns of men

marching to attack us. One of these birds found a different kind of

prey. It was opposite the Australian front where a team of German

gunners were getting a gun away. Our airman flew low over the heads of

the gunners and played his machine-gun on to them and dropped bombs. He

smashed up the gun-limber and laid out the gunners, and the gun remains

there still, with the bodies of men and horses around it. To-day out

beyond Ypres I saw flights of our men going out again beyond the German

lines for that battle in the air which has never ceased since the battle

of Flanders two months ago.

The weather is still in our favour, and there is a blue sky to-day and a

soft, golden light over all this Flemish countryside where our troops go

marching up to the lines with their bands playing, or lie resting in the

hop-fields on the way. That old place of horror, the Yser Canal,

reflected the blue above, and in the air there was that sense of peace

which belongs to the golden days of autumn. But the guns were loud, and

the flight of their shells went crying through the sky.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 2

Through the haze which lies low over Flanders, though above there is

still a blue sky, the noise of great gun-fire goes on, rising and

falling in gusts, and, like the beat of surf to people who live by the

sea, it is the constant sound in men's ears, not disturbing their work

unless they are close enough to suffer from the power behind the

thunder-strokes. The trees are yellowing into crinkled gold, and there

is the touch and smell of autumn in the night air, and the orchards of

France are heavy with fruit. Wonderful weather, the soldiers say. The

artillery battle is endless, and on both sides is intense and

widespread. It was followed yesterday by five German counter-attacks,

which did not reach our lines. In a very desperate way the enemy is

trying to push us back from positions which are essential to the

strength of his defence. All his guns are at work. Is it the last phase

of the war? Does the enemy know that he must win or lose all? Our men

have that hope in their hearts, and fight more grimly and with higher

spirit because of it. The success of the last two battles has deepened

the hope, and men come back from the line, back to the rest-billets,

with the old conviction newly revived that at last they have the enemy

down and under and very near hopelessness. In the rest-billets are the

men who come back. They come marching back along the dusty roads from

the fire-swept zone, first across ground pitted with new-made

shell-holes, with the howl of shells overhead, and then through broken

villages on the edge of the battlefields, and then through standing

villages where only a gap or two shows where a haphazard shell has gone,

and then at last to the clean, sweet country which no high explosives

reach, unless a hostile airman comes over with his bombs.

In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle told by men

who were there, and it is worth while, as yesterday, when I sat down at

table with the officers of a battalion of Suffolks in a Flemish

farmhouse. The men were camped outside, and as I passed I liked the look

of these lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights of

the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's rest, and they

stood in groups telling their yarns in the good old dialect of their

county, laughing as though it had all been a joke, though it was more

than a joke with death on the prowl.

"Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suffolks, and he

smiled as though he liked my words, and said, "You couldn't get their

tails down with a crowbar. It was a good show, and that makes all the

difference. They have been telling the Australian boys that you have

only got to make a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. They

knocked the stuffing out of the enemy."

Inside the farmhouse there was the battalion mess, at one long table and

one short, because it was felt better for all the officers to be

together instead of splitting up into company messes. I looked down the

rows of faces, these clean-cut English faces, and was glad of the luck

which had brought so many of these young officers back again. They told

the tale of the battle, and each of them had some detail to add, because

that was his part of the show, and it was his platoon, and they had left

the fighting-line the night before. They spoke as though all the things

had happened long ago, and they laughed loudly at episodes of gruesome

interest and belonging to those humours of war which are not to be

written.

There was a thick mist when they went away at dawn, so dense that they

could not see the line of our barrage ahead, though it was a deep belt

of bursting shells. They had been told to follow close, and they were

eager to get on. They went too fast, some of them almost incredibly

fast, over the shell-craters, and round them, and into them, and out of

them again, stumbling, running, scrambling, not turning to look when any

comrade fell.

"I was on the last position three-quarters of an hour before the barrage

passed," said a young officer of the Suffolks. He spoke the words as if

telling something rather commonplace, but he knew that I knew the

meaning of what he said, a frightful and extraordinary thing, for with

his platoon he had gone ahead of our storm of fire and had to wait until

it reached and then passed them. Some of their losses were because of

that, and yet they might have been greater if they had been slower

because the enemy was caught before they could guess that our men were

near. They put up no fight in the pill-boxes, those little houses of

concrete which stank horribly because of the filth in them, and from the

shell-craters where snipers and machine-gunners lay men rose in terror

at the sight of the brown men about them, and ran this way and that like

poor frightened beasts, or stood shaking in an ague of fear. Some ran

towards their own lines with their hands up, shouting "Kamerad,"

believing they were running our way. They were so unready for attack

that the snipers had the safety-clip on their rifle-barrels, and others

were without ammunition.

In one shell-hole was an English-speaking German. "I saved him," said

one of the young Suffolk officers. "He was a downhearted fellow, and

said he was fed up with the war and wanted nothing but peace."

Near another shell-hole was a German who looked dead. He looked as if he

had been dead for a long time, but an English corporal who passed close

to this body saw a hand stretch out for a bayonet within reach, and the

man raised himself to strike. Like a man who sees a snake with his fangs

out, the corporal whipped round, grabbed the German's bayonet and ran

him through. The way to the last objective was easy on the whole, and

the enemy was on the run with our men after them until they were ordered

to stop and dig in. The hardest time came afterwards, as it nearly

always comes when the ground gained had to be held for three more days

and nights without the excitement of attack and under heavy fire. That

is when the courage of men is most tried, as this battalion found. The

enemy had time to pull themselves together. The German gunners adapted

their range to the new positions and shelled fiercely across the ways of

approach, and scattered 5.9's everywhere. It was rifle-fire for the

Suffolk men all the time. They had not troubled to bring up a great many

bombs, for the rifle has come into its own again, now that the old

trench warfare is gone for a time, or all time, and with rifle-fire and

machine-gun fire they broke down the German counter-attacks and caught

parties of Germans who showed themselves on the slopes of the

Passchendaele Ridge, and sniped incessantly. They used a prodigious

quantity of small-arms ammunition, and the carriers risked their lives

every step of the way to get it up to them. They fired 30,000 rounds and

then 16,000 more. There was one officer who spent all his time sniping

from a little patch of ground that had once been a garden. He lay behind

a heaped ruin and used his field-glasses to watch the slopes of rising

ground on his left, where human ants were crawling. Every now and then

he fired and picked off an ant until his score reached fifty. German

planes came flying over our troops to get their line, flying very low,

so that their wings were not a tree's height above the shell-craters,

and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away. Some of the hostile

planes were red-bellied, and others which came searching the ground were

big, porpoise-like planes. They dropped signal-lights and directed the

fire of the 5.9's. A private of the Suffolks, lying low but watchful,

saw a light rise from the ground as one of these machines came over, and

it was answered from the aeroplane. "That's queer," he thought; "dirty

work in that shell-hole." He crept out to the shell-hole from which the

signal had come, and found three German soldiers there with rockets.

They tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man brought

back their rifles and kit as souvenirs.

More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time passed, and the carriers

took frightful risks to bring it. The drums of the Suffolks did well

that day as carriers and stretcher-bearers, passing up and down through

the barrage-fire, and there was a private who guided a party with

small-arms ammunition--ten thousand rounds of it--to the forward troops,

with big shells bursting over the ground. Twice he was buried by

shell-bursts, which flung the earth over him, but on the way back he

helped to carry a wounded man 800 yards to the regimental aid post under

hot fire. He was a cool-headed and gallant-hearted fellow, and went up

again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on the same night

crawled out on a patrol with a young lieutenant to reconnoitre a

position on the left which was still in German hands. From farther left,

on rising ground, the Germans sprinkled machine-gun fire over the

battalion support lines, and the earth was spitting with those bullets.

But in their own lines the German soldiers were moving about with Red

Cross flags picking up their wounded, and they did not fire at our

stretcher-bearers, apart from the barrage-fire of 5.9's through which

they had to make their way. Only once did they play a bad trick. Under

the Red Cross flag some stretcher-bearers went into a pill-box which had

been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun fire came from it. That is

the kind of thing which makes men see red.

XVIII

ABRAHAM HEIGHTS AND BEYOND

OCTOBER 4

Another great battle has opened to-day, and in a wide attack from the

ground we captured on September 26, north and south of the Polygon Wood

crest, our troops have advanced upon the Passchendaele Ridge, and have

reached the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, which crown a western spur

of the ridge, and Broodseinde, which is the high point and keystone of

the enemy's defence lines beyond Zonnebeke. South of that they are

fighting between Cameron House and Becelaere, across the Reutelbeek and

its swampy ground, and down beyond Polderhoek to the south end of the

Menin road. The divisions engaged, from north to south, were the 29th,

4th, 11th, 48th, New Zealand, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Australians.

This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back across the

battlefield, and crowds of them within the barbed-wire enclosures set

apart for them behind our lines. Our lightly wounded men coming down the

tracks for walking wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages,

of a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete victory. "We

have him beat," say the men, and they are sure of this, sure of his

enormous losses and of his broken spirit, although the fighting has been

bloody because of the great gun-fire through which our men have had to

pass. It has been a strange and terrible battle--terrible, I mean, in

its great conflict of guns and men--and the enemy, if all goes well with

us, may have to remember it as a turning-point in the history of this

war, the point that has turned against him with a sharp and deadly edge.

For, realizing his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the

Passchendaele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that--all signs showed

him that, and all our pressure on these positions--he prepared an attack

against us in great strength in order to regain the ground he lost on

September 26, or, if not that, then so to damage us that our advance

would be checked until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small

counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they were not

weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammering at the right wing by

Cameron House, below Polygon Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our

line, though for a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave

anxiety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and critical.

But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and now the German High

Command decided for a big blow, and it was to be delivered at seven

o'clock this morning. It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was

fixed for an hour before his.

And so it happened that our men had to pass through a German barrage to

follow their own, a barrage which fell upon them before they leapt up to

the assault, and it happened also most terribly for the enemy that our

men were not stopped, but went through that zone of shells, and on the

other side behind our barrage swept over the German assault troops and

annihilated their plan of attack.... They did not attack. Their defence

even was broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached and

broke the second and third waves of the men who had been meant to

attack, caught them in their support and reserve positions, and we can

only guess what the slaughter has been. It is a slaughter in which five

German divisions are involved.

This battle of ours, which looks like one of the greatest victories we

have had in the war, was being prepared on a big scale as soon as the

last was fought and won. No words of mine can give more than a hint of

what those preparations meant in the scene of war. For several days past

the roads to the Front have been choked with columns of men marching

forward, column after column of glorious men, hard and fit, and

hammering a rhythm on the roads with the beat of their feet, and

whistling and singing, in tune and out of tune, with the fifes and drums

far ahead of them. Always, night and day, there was the sound of this

music, always in the stillness of these moonlight nights the thud, thud

of those tramping feet, always, along any track that led towards the

salient, the vision of these battalions led forward by young officers

with their trench sticks swinging and a look of pride in their eyes

because of the fellows behind them. Their steel helmets flashed blue in

the sun so that a column of them seen from a distance was like a blue

stream winding between the hop-fields, or the broken ruins of old

villages, or the litter of captured ground. With them and alongside of

them went the tide of transport--lorries, wagons, London buses,

pack-mules, guns and limbers, and the black old cookers with their

trailing smoke. Everywhere there has been a fever of work, Tommies,

"Chinkies," coloured men piling up mountains of ammunition to feed the

guns. Under shell-fire, bracketing the roads on which they worked,

pioneers carried on the tracks, put down new lengths of duck-board, laid

new rails. The enemy's artillery came howling over to search out all

this work, which had been seen by aeroplanes, and at night flocks of

planes came out in the light of the moon to drop bombs on the men and

the work. Now and again they made lucky hits--got a dump and sent it

flaming up in a great torch, killed horses in the wagon-lines or

labouring up with the transport, laid out groups of men, smashed a train

or a truck; but the work went on, never checked, never stopping in its

steady flow of energy up to the lines, and the valour of all these

labourers was great and steady in preparing for to-day. Knowing the

purpose of it all, the deadly purpose, the scene of activity by any

siding filled one with a kind of fear. It was so prodigious, so vastly

schemed. I passed a dump yesterday, and again to-day, in the waste

ground on the old battlefield near Ypres and saw the shells for our

field-batteries being unloaded. There were thousands of shells,

brand-new from the factories at home, all bright and glistening and

laid out in piles. The guns were greedy. Here was food for a monstrous

appetite. We watched all this--the faces of the men going up so

bright-eyed, so splendid in their youth, so gay, and all these shells

and guns and materials of war, and all this movement which surged about

us and caught us up like straws in its tide, and then we looked at the

sky and smelt the wind, and studied a milky ring which formed about the

moon. Rain was coming. If only it would come lightly or hold another day

or two--one night at least.

Rain fell a little yesterday. The ground was sticky when I went up

beyond Wieltje to look at the Passchendaele Ridge to see some boys

getting ready for the "show" to-day, and to watch the beginning of the

great bombardment.... Curse the rain! It would make all the difference

to our fighting men, the difference perhaps between great success and

half a failure, and the difference between life and death to many of

those boys who looked steadily towards the German lines which they were

asked to take. What damnable luck it would be if the rain fell heavily!

Last night the moon was hidden and rain fell, but not very hard, though

the wind went howling across the flats of Flanders. And this morning,

when our men rose from shell-holes and battered trenches and fields of

upheaved earth to make this great attack, the rain fell still but

softly, so that the ground was only sticky and sludgy, but not a bog.

The rain was glistening on their steel helmets, and the faces of our

fighting men were wet when they went forward. They had passed already

through a fiery ordeal, and some of them could not rise to go with their

comrades, and lay dead on the ground. Along the lines of men, these

thousands of men, the stretcher-bearers were already busy in the dark,

because the enemy had put over a heavy barrage at 5.30, and elsewhere

later, the prelude to the attack he had planned. His old methods of

defence and counter-attack had broken down in two battles. The spell of

the pill-box, which had worked well for a time, was broken, so that

those concrete blockhouses were feared as death-traps by the men who had

to hold them. The German High Command hurried to prepare a new plan,

guessing ours, and moved the guns to be ready for our next attack,

registered on their own trenches, which they knew they might lose, and

assembled the best divisions, or the next best, ready for a heavy blow

to wind us before we started and to smash our lines, so that the advance

would be a thousand times harder. The barrage which the Germans sent

over was the beginning of the new plan. It failed because of the fine

courage of our troops first of all, and because the German infantry

attack was timed an hour too late. If it had come two hours earlier it

might have led to our undoing--might at least have prevented anything

like real victory to-day. But the fortune of war was on our side, and

the wheel turned round to crush the enemy.

The main force of his attack, which was to be made by the Fourth Guards

Division, with two others, I am told, in support, was ready to assault

the centre of our battle-front in the direction of Polygon Wood and down

from the Broodseinde cross-roads. It was our men who fought the German

assault divisions at the Broodseinde cross-roads, and took many

prisoners from them before they had time to advance very far. The

enemy's shelling had been heavy about the ground of Inverness Copse and

Glencorse Wood, where a week or so ago I saw the frightful heaps of

German dead, and spread over a wide area of our line of battle along the

Polygon Wood heights and the low ground in front of Zonnebeke. The men

tell me that it did not do them as much harm as they expected. The

shells plunged deep into the soft ground, bursting upwards in tall

columns, as I saw them this morning on the field, and their killing

effect was not widespread. Many of them also missed our waves

altogether. So, half an hour later, our men went away behind our own

barrage, which was enormous and annihilating. The wet mist lay heavily

over the fields, and it was almost dark except for a pale glamour behind

the rain-clouds, which brightened as each quarter of an hour passed,

with our men tramping forward slowly to their first objective.

The shell-craters on the German side were linked together here and there

to form a kind of trench system, but many of these had been blown out by

other shell-bursts, and German soldiers lay dead in them. From others,

men and boys, many boys of eighteen, rose with their arms upstretched,

as white in the face as dead men, but living, and afraid. Across these

frightful fields men came running towards our soldiers. They did not

come to fight, but to escape from the shell-fire, which tossed up the

earth about them, and to surrender. Many of them were streaming with

blood, wounded about the head and face, or with broken and bleeding

arms. So I saw them early this morning when they came down the tracks

which led away from that long line of flaming gun-fire.

The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great and terrible

picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts in the minds of men who

saw it. The ruins of Ypres were vague and blurred in the mist as I

passed them on the way up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump

of the Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the fretted

outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so fair a city once,

leapt out in light which flashed redly and passed. So it was all along

the way to the old German lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to

show that buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and

farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about great piles of

greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. Through shell-holes in

fragments of walls red light stabbed like a flame, and out of the

darkness of the mist they shone for a second with an unearthly

brightness. It was the light of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere

in the low concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to avoid

the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. Flashes leapt from

them with only the pause of a second or two while they were reloaded.

There was never a moment within my own range of vision when hundreds of

great guns were not firing together. They were eating up shells which I

had seen going up to them, and the roads and fields across which I

walked were littered with shells. The wet mist was like one great damp

fire, with ten miles or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through

which the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. The

noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of those big-bellied

howitzers was to me an agony. It rose like a beast stretching out its

neck, and there came from it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and

shook one's body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were all

firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken with their blasts

of fire. The enemy was answering back. His shells came whining and

howling through all this greater noise, and burst with a crash on either

side of mule tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on

each side of the paths down which German prisoners came staggering with

their wounded. Fresh shell-holes, enormously deep and thickly grouped,

showed that he had plastered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the

morning, his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do over

there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, unless the guns lay

smashed, with their teams lying dead around them, killed by our

counter-battery work with high explosives and gas; for in the night we

smothered them with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and

all others.

I went eastward and mounted a pile of rubbish and timber, all blown into

shapelessness and reeking with foul odours, and from that shelter looked

across to the Passchendaele Ridge and Hill 40 on the west of Zonnebeke

and the line of the ridge that goes round to Polygon Wood. It was all

blurred, so that I could not see the white ruins of Zonnebeke as I saw

them the other day in the sunlight, nor the broken church tower of

Passchendaele. It was all veiled in smoke and mist, through which the

ridge loomed darkly with a black hump where Broodseinde stands. But

clearly through the gloom were the white and yellow cloud-bursts of our

shell-fire and the flame of their shell-bursts. It was the most terrible

bombardment I have seen, and I saw the fire of the Somme, and of Vimy,

and Arras, and Messines. Those were not like this, great as they were in

frightfulness. The whole of the Passchendaele Crest was like a series of

volcanoes belching up pillars of earth and fire. "It seemed to us," said

soldier after soldier who came down from those slopes, "as if no mortal

man could live in it, yet there were many who lived despite all the

dead."

I saw the living men. Below the big pile of timber and muck on which I

stood was a winding path, and other tracks on each side of it between

the deep shell-craters, and down these ways came batches of prisoners

and the trail of our walking wounded. It was a tragic sight in spite of

its proof of victory, and the valour of our men and the spirit of these

wounded of ours, who bore their pain with stoic patience and said, when

I spoke to them, "It's been a good day; we're doing fine, I think." The

Germans were haggard and white-faced men, thin and worn and weary and

frightened. Many of them, a large number of them, were wounded. Some of

them had masks of dry blood on their faces, and some of them wet blood

all down their tunics. They held broken arms from which the sleeves had

been cut away, and hobbled painfully on wounded legs. The worst were no

worse than some of our own men who came down with them and among them.

It has been a bad defeat for them, and they do not hide their despair.

They did not fight stubbornly for the most part, but ran one way or the

other as soon as our barrage passed and revealed our men. Our gun-fire

had overwhelmed them. In the blockhouses were groups of men who gasped

out words of surrender. Here and there they refused to come out till

bombs burst outside their steel doors. And here and there they got their

machine-guns to work and checked our advance for a time, as at Joist

Farm, on the right of our attack, and at a chateau near Polderhoek,

where there has been severe fighting. There was heavy machine-gun fire

from a fortified farm ruin to the north of Broodseinde, and again from

Kronprinz Farm on the extreme left. The enemy also put down a heavy

machine-gun barrage from positions around Passchendaele, but nothing has

stopped our men seriously so far.

The New-Zealanders and Australians swept up and beyond the Gravenstafel

and Abraham Heights, went through and past the ruins of Zonnebeke

village, and with great heroism gained the high ground about

Broodseinde, a dominating position giving observation of all the enemy's

side of the country. It has been a wonderful battle in the success that

surmounted all difficulty, and if we can keep what we have gained it

will be a victorious achievement. The weather is bad now and the rain is

heavier, with a savage wind blowing. But that is not good for the

enemy's plans, and may be in our favour now that the day has gone well.

Our English troops share the honour of the day with the Anzacs, and all

were splendid.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 5

The men who were fighting in the great battle yesterday, and after the

capture of many strong positions held their ground last night in spite

of many German counter-attacks and heavy fire, tell grim tales, which

all go to build up the general picture of the most smashing defeat we

have inflicted on the enemy.

On one section of the Front, where the Warwicks, Sherwoods, Lancashire

Fusiliers and other county troops of the 48th and 11th Divisions fought

up to Poelcappelle and its surrounding blockhouses, six enemy battalions

in the front line were either taken or killed. The men themselves do

not know those figures. They only know that they passed over large

numbers of dead and that they took many prisoners.

The New-Zealanders and the Australians on their right, fighting up the

Abraham Heights, took over 2000 prisoners, and say that they have never

seen so many dead as those who lay shapeless in their tracks. Other

Australians fighting for the Broodseinde cross-roads have counted 960

dead Germans on their way. The full figure of the German dead will never

be counted by us. They lie on this battle-ground buried and half-buried

in the water of shell-holes, in blockhouses blown on top of them, and in

dug-outs that have become their tombs. They fought bravely in some

places with despairing courage in or about some of the blockhouses which

still gave them a chance of resistance, and sometimes worked their

machine-guns to the last. Men lying in shell-craters still alive among

all their dead used their rifles and sniped our men, knowing that they

would have to pay for their shots with their lives. That is courage, and

New-Zealanders I met to-day, and English lads, were fair to their enemy,

and said Fritz showed great pluck when he had a dog's chance, though

many of them ran when we got close to them behind the barrage. It was

the barrage that made them break. The Fourth Guards Division seems to

have fought well on the line of our first objective, though after that

they would not stand firm, and ran or surrendered like the others.

Owing to the coincidence of the simultaneous attack from both sides

yesterday morning, and the complete overthrow of the German assault

divisions who were about to advance on us, there seems no doubt that

some confusion prevailed behind the German lines and on the left and

centre of our attack. All their attempts at counter-thrusts were badly

planned, and led to further disaster. They did not advance in orderly

formation, but straggled up from local reserves and supports, and were

smashed in detail by our artillery. So it happened with two battalions

who came down the road to Poelcappelle, but withered away. The

Lancashire Fusiliers of the 11th Division in that region say the thing

was laughable, though it is the comedy of war, and not mirthful in the

usual sense. Small groups of Germans wandered up in an aimless way, and

were shot down by machine-gun and rifle fire. On the right of the

battle-front the enemy's attacks have been more serious and thrust home

with grim persistence against the "Koylies," Lincolns, West Kents, and

Scottish Borderers of the 5th Division.

It was after the advance of our men on Polderhoek and its chateau by the

Gheluvelt spur of the Passchendaele Ridge. Some of the Surreys, Devons,

and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry swung round the stream and

marshlands of the Reutel and accounted for many of the enemy in close

and fierce fighting. The Devons were astride the stream and, working

north of it, attacked a slope called Juniper Spur.

In Polderhoek was a nest of machine-guns, which fired out of the ruins

of the chateau, and for some time our men had difficult and deadly work.

This was worst against the Scottish Borderers, who were facing the

chateau grounds, but they dug in and made some cover, while behind the

prisoners, about 500 of them, were getting back to the safety of our

lines.

It was at three o'clock in the afternoon that the enemy sent a very

strong counter-attack down the slopes of the Gheluvelt Spur against the

5th and 7th Divisions. Six times through the afternoon masses of men

appeared and tried to force their way forward, but each time they were

caught under rifle-fire and machine-guns and artillery.

It was at seven o'clock that the heaviest attack came, under cover of

savage shelling, and our men had to fall back on the ground beyond

Cameron House, which is the scene of the enemy's fierce attacks on

September 25, when they were for some little time a serious menace to

us. This morning the enemy had driven a wedge into our line in this

neighbourhood, and it is quite possible that he will deliver other blows

in the same direction. Last night he made no great endeavour to get back

ground. It was a dirty night for our men, who had been fighting all day.

The rain fell heavily, filling the shell-holes and turning all the

broken ground of battle to the same old bog which made so much misery in

Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood and other positions attacked on July

31 and afterwards.

"I lay up to my waist in water," said one of the Devons who came down

wounded this morning; "it was bitter cold, and Fritz was putting over

his 5.9's; he was also putting over a lot of machine-gun fire, and the

bullets came over the heads of our men like the cracking of whips." It

was bad for the wounded and the stretcher-bearers--the splendid

stretcher-bearers, who worked all through the night up and down through

fierce barrage-fire. Most of them got through with their burdens by

that queer miracle of luck which is often theirs. But one little party

came down when the fire was fiercest, and took cover in a shell-hole

close beside some Warwickshire boys who were crouching in another hole

until the storm of shells had passed. Suddenly they heard the howl of a

monstrous shell--an eight-inch or even a twelve-inch by the noise if it.

It fell and burst right inside the shell-crater where the

stretcher-bearers were huddled with their wounded men, and they were

blown out of it yards high, so that their bodies were tossed like straws

in a fierce wind.... I met many men who worked their way down under fire

like that, and some who had been wounded already were wounded again, and

some of the comrades who trudged with them were killed.

The Warwickshire battalions of the 48th Division on the left of the

New-Zealanders had some very hard fighting, lasting all through the day,

which concluded with an attack on a position called Terrier Farm, above

the pill-boxes of Wellington House and Winchester House, which they had

captured after some bad quarters of an hour.

The Warwicks had started with great luck. In spite of the German

shelling they had got away to their first objective with only three

casualties. They went through the first line of blockhouses without much

trouble, picking up prisoners on the way in most of them. Their first

trouble came from one of these concrete places called Wellington House.

Machine-gun fire came crackling from it, and bullets were also sweeping

the ground from hidden emplacements. After twenty minutes' struggle

Wellington House fell, and the flanks on either side closed up and went

forward, the Warwicks helped on the right by a body of New Zealand men.

In the centre the machine-gun fire from those concrete walls ahead

caused a check and a gap, and although they tried many times with great

gallantry under brave officers, to silence that fire and work round the

blockhouses, they could not do this without greater loss, and decided to

link up with their flanks by digging a loop-line in front of those

positions, which make a small wedge, or pocket, in our line there.

The attack against Terrier Farm was done by other Warwickshire lads, who

were very game after a long day under fire, but for all their spirit

tired and cold. They stood almost knee-deep in mud, and they were wet

to the skin, as it was now raining steadily, so a Tank came up to help

them, and drew close enough to Terrier Farm to fire broadsides at its

concrete and machine-gun its loophole. A white rag thrust through a hole

in the wall was the sign of the enemy's surrender. But the conditions

were too bad for any greater progress, and the men dug in for the night,

while brother Tank crawled back.

All the Tanks used in the battle did well, in spite of the bad going,

and helped to reduce several of the blockhouses. They had only two

casualties among their crews, and most of them got back to their

hiding-places without damage from German shells.

It is astounding that the German counter-attacks were so quickly

signalled to the guns, for the light all day was bad, and the weather

was dead against the work of the flying men. They did their best by

flying low and risking the enemy's fire. There was one pilot who is the

talk of the Australians to-day. They watched that English child doing

the most amazing "stunts" over the fighting-lines. He was out all day,

swooping low, so that his plane seemed just to skim over the craters.

The Germans tried to get him by any manner of means. They turned their

"Archies" on to him and their machine-guns, and then tried to bring him

down with rifle-fire, and that failing, though they pierced his wings

many times, they called up the heavies and tried to snipe him with

5.9's, which are mighty big and beastly things. But he went on flying

till many of his wires were cut and his struts splintered, and his

aeroplane was a rag round an engine. He was bruised and dazed when he

came to earth, making a bad landing in our own lines, but not killing

either himself or the observer, who shares the honour and the marvel of

this exploit.

It was a great day for the Australians and the New-Zealanders, their

greatest and most glorious day. I saw them going up--these lithe,

loose-limbed, hatchet-faced fellows, who look so free and fine in their

slouch hats and so hard and grim in their steel helmets. There were many

thousands of them on the roads or camped beside the roads, and Flanders

for a time seemed to have become a little province of Australia.

Then the New-Zealanders came along, a type half-way between the English

of the old country and the Australian boys--not so lean and wiry, with

more colour in the cheeks, and a squarer, fuller build. It was good to

see them--as fine a set of boys as one could see in the whole world, so

that it was hard to think of them in the furnace fires up there, and to

know that some of them would come back maimed and broken. In a dug-out

on the battlefield I talked with some of them, and they were cheery

lads, full of confidence in the coming battle. They wanted to go as far

as the Australians, to do as well, and among the Australians also there

was a friendly rivalry, the new men wanting to show their mettle to

those who are already old in war, one battalion keen to earn the honour

which belongs by right of valour to another which had fought before. It

was certain they would get to the Broodseinde cross-roads if human

courage could get there against high explosives, and they were there

without a check, over every obstacle, regardless of the enemy's fire,

too fast some of them behind their own. So the New-Zealanders went up to

Abraham Heights and carried all before them. The hardest time was last

night in the mud and the cold, under heavy fire now and then, but they

have stuck it out, as our English boys have stuck it through many foul

days and in harder times than these, and that is good enough.

The German prisoners do not hide their astonishment at the spirit of our

men, and they know now that our troops are terrible in attack, and

arrive upon them with a strange, fearful suddenness behind the barrage.

One man, a German professor of broad intelligence and a frank way of

facing ugly facts, said that our artillery was too terrific for words.

They got harassed all the way up to the front line, and lost many men.

When they got there they had to lie flat in the bottom of shell-holes,

and the next thing they knew was when they were surrounded by masses of

English soldiers. He described our men as gallant and chivalrous. This

professor thinks it will not be long before Germany makes a great bid

for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By midwinter she will yield

Alsace-Lorraine, Russia will remain as before the war, except for an

autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany

will get back some of her colonies, he thinks. He laughed when an

indemnity was mentioned, and said "Germany is bankrupt." He describes

the German Emperor as a broken man and all for peace, the Crown Prince

posing as the head of the military party but being unpopular. If the

German people knew that the submarine threat had failed they would

demand that the war should stop at once. That is the opinion of one

educated German who has suffered the full horror of war and his words

are interesting if they represent no more than his own views.

XIX

SCENES OF BATTLE

OCTOBER 7

The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet

mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has

been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds

are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country

round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the

monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up

against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light,

very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the

great arena of human slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer

luminance were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of

ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen masonry.

Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly all the night, and as

it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from the ground where the

shell-craters were already ponds brimming over into swamps of mud.

Through the murk our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the

drum-fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack from our

side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, uncanny thing to hear all

that crashing of gun-fire and the wail of great shells in flight to the

German lines through this midday darkness.

I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long--so long through

the days and nights--feeding those monsters. The infantry have a hard

time. It is they who fight with flesh and blood against the machinery of

slaughter which is set against them. It is they who go out across the

fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners,

standing by the heavies and the 18-pounders in the sodden fields, with

piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy,

pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I saw the enemy's

shells searching for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries,

ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close

neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, between one round and

another, a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those

howling beasts which seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of

their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky

shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and a high torch rises to

the dark sky, and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells

are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult

of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and

nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven,

unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the line of guns

saying, "Are you ready, Number One?--Number One, fire!" with no sign of

the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in progress.

For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before

the infantry advance, it lulls a little and then breaks out into new

fury when the German counter-attacks begin. It does not end when the SOS

signals have been answered by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to

keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter

their gun positions.

So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back behind the

Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements

from which they can pour explosives on the ground we have captured, our

gunners could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy and

followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners in these

frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit

of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to

marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the

mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the

battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by

shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek

and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the

upheaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. They were the

old winter pictures of war that I saw yesterday round about the old

Ypres salient, when wet men gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs

with cold rain sweeping upon them, so that their waterproof capes

stream with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp

metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and New Zealand

horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' flanks splashed with heavy

gobs of mud. Gun-wagons and transports pass, flinging mud from their

wheels. Ambulances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go

threading their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of muddy

boots upturned beneath the blankets which show through the flap behind,

and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled together, with their steel hats

clashing and their tired eyes looking out on the traffic of war which

they are leaving for a time. They come down cold and wet from the line,

but in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-stations,

between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined houses, still within

range of shell-fire, but safer than the fields from which these men have

come.

"If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, "give him a

hot-water bottle." To a man who had been lying in cold mud until an hour

or two before it was like offering him a place by the fireside at home.

The Y.M.C.A. is busy in another tent or another dug-out. It has a cheery

way of producing hot cocoa on the edge of a battlefield and of thrusting

little packets of chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes, and matches into the

hands of lightly wounded men as soon as they have trudged down the long

trail for walking wounded and reached the first dressing-station, where

there is a little group of men waiting to bandage their wounds, to say,

"Well done, laddy; you did grandly this morning," and to fix them up

with strange and wonderful speed for the journey to the base hospital,

where there are beds with white sheets--sheets again, ye gods!--and rest

and peace and warmth.

There are queer little groups between the sand-bags of those forward

dressing-stations. On one bench I saw a tall New-Zealander and some

Warwick boys--the Warwicks of the 48th Division did famously in this

battle--and a farmer's lad from the West Country, who said "It seems to

Oi," and spoke with a fine simple gravity of the things he had seen and

done; and a thin-faced Lancashire boy, who still wanted to kill more

Germans and put them to a nasty kind of death; and a fellow of the

Lincolns, who said, "Our lads went over grand."

Near by was a wounded German soldier who had clotted blood over his face

and a bloody bandage round his head. A friendly voice spoke to him and

said, "Wie gehts mit Ihnen?" ("How are you getting on?") And he looked

up in a dazed way and said, "Besser hier als am Kampfe" ("Better here

than on the battlefield.")

The tall New-Zealander said: "Fritz fought all right. His

machine-gunners fired till we were all round them."

"'Twas a bit of a five-point-nine that hit Oi in the arm," said the

farmer's lad. "He put over a terrible big barrage, and Oi was a-laying

up till the waist in a shell-hole all filled with mud, and Oi was

starved with cold."

"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire boy. "They ran

so hard I couldn't catch them with my bayonet. Then a bullet came and

went slick through my head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire

boy by the smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull.

The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and they bear out

what I have heard from their officers elsewhere. There were numbers of

German soldiers who lay about in shell-holes after our barrage had

passed over their lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers

and men as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not

surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last supreme courage of

the human beast at bay. There was one of these who lay under the

wreckage of an aeroplane, and from that cover he shot some of our men at

close range; but because there were many bullets flying about, and

shells bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was not

discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the Warwicks who saw him

first, and just in time. The German had his rifle raised at ten yards

range, but the sergeant whipped round and shot him before he could turn.

Some of these men were discovered after the general fighting was over,

and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who went with his

Divisional General to see the captured ground next day. The General, who

is a quick walker, went ahead over the shell-craters, and the A.D.C.

suddenly saw two Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the

General from one of the deep holes.

"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling for his

revolver. But when he came up he heard the General telling two wounded

Germans that the English had won a very great victory, and that if they

were good boys he would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down.

All over the battlefield there were queer little human episodes thrust

for a minute or two into the great grim drama of this advance by British

and Overseas troops up the heights of the Passchendaele Ridge, where

thousands of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them were

caught by the rolling storm of shells which smashed the earth about them

and mingled them with its clods. One tragic glimpse like this was on the

Australian way up to the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole

position, after a body of those Australians had marched many miles

through the night over appalling ground under scattered shell-fire, and

were only in their place of attack half an hour before it started. The

story of that night march is in itself a little epic, but that is not

the episode I mean. The Australians drew close to one of the

blockhouses, and the sound of their cheering must have been heard by the

Germans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just passed and its

line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went travelling ahead.

Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen men or so came running, and

the Australians shortened their bayonets. From the centre of the group a

voice shouted out in English, "I am a Middlesex man, don't shoot. I am

an Englishman." The man who called had his hands up, in sign of

surrender, like the German soldiers.

"It's a spy," said an Australian. "Kill the blighter." The English voice

again rang out: "I'm English." And English he was. It was a man of the

Middlesex Regiment who had been captured on patrol some days before. The

Germans had taken him into their blockhouse, and because of our gun-fire

they could not get out of it, and kept him there. He was well treated,

and his captors shared their food with him, but the awful moment came to

him when the drum-fire passed and he knew that unless he held his hands

high he would be killed by our own troops.

The New-Zealanders had many fights on the way up to the Gravenstafel and

Abraham Heights, and one thing that surprised them was the number of

pill-boxes and blockhouses inhabited by the enemy close to their own

lines. They believed that the foremost ones had been deserted. But it

must not be forgotten that running all through the narrative of this

battle is the thwarted plan of the enemy to attack us in strength the

same morning and at nearly the same hour. For that reason he had thrust

little groups of men into advanced posts and into these most forward

blockhouses with orders to hold them at all costs until the attacking

divisions should reach and pass them. And for that reason, as we know,

the enemy's guns laid down a heavy barrage over our lines half an hour

before our attack started.

The New-Zealanders did not escape this shelling, and their brigadiers

were under the strain of intense anxiety, not knowing in their dug-outs,

over which the enemy's fire passed, whether their boys were so cut up

that a successful assault would be impossible. As it happened, the

New-Zealanders were not seriously hurt nor thrown into disorder. When

the moment came they went away in waves, with the spirit of a pack of

hounds on a good hunting morning. As fierce as that and as wild as that.

They had not gone more than a few yards before they had fifty prisoners.

This was at a blockhouse just outside the New Zealand assembly line.

There was no fight there, but the garrison surrendered as soon as our

men were round their shelter. The Hanebeek stream flows this way, but it

was no longer within its bounds. Our gun-fire had smashed up its track,

and all about was a swamp made deeper by the rains.

The New Zealand lads had a devil of a time in getting across and

through. Some of them stuck up to the knees and others fell into

shell-holes, deep in mud, as far as their belts. "Give us a hand, Jack,"

came a shout from one man, and the answer was, "Hang on to my rifle,

Tom." Men with the solid ground under their feet hauled out others in

the slough, and all that was a great risk of time while the barrage was

travelling slowly on with its protecting screen of shells.

The only chance of life in these battles is to keep close to the

barrage, risking the shorts, for if it once passes and leaves any enemy

there with a machine-gun, there is certain death for many men. The New

Zealand boys nearly lost that wall of shells because of the mud, but

somehow or other managed to scramble on over 800 yards in time enough to

catch it up. Many blockhouses yielded up their batches of prisoners, who

were told to get back and give no trouble. The first fight for a

blockhouse took place at Van Meulen Farm, just outside the

New-Zealanders' first objective. The barrage went ahead and sat down--as

one of the officers put it, though the sitting down of a barrage is a

queer simile for that monstrous eruption of explosive force. From Van

Meulen Farm came the swish of machine-gun bullets, and New Zealand boys

began to drop. They were held up for half an hour until the "leap-frog"

battalions--that is to say, the men who were to pass through the first

waves to the next objective--came up to help.

It was a New Zealand captain, beloved by all his men for his gallantry

and generous-hearted ways, who led the rush of Lewis-gunners and bombers

and riflemen. He fell dead with a machine-gun bullet in his heart, but

with a cry of rage because of this great loss the other men ran on each

side of the blockhouse and stormed it.

On the left of the New-Zealanders' line, one of their battalions could

see Germans firing from concrete houses on the slopes of the

Gravenstafel, and although they had to lose the barrage, which was

sweeping ahead again, they covered that ground and went straight for

those places under sharp fire. Some of them worked round the concrete

walls and hauled out more prisoners. "Get back, there," they shouted,

but there was hardly a New-Zealander who would go back with them to act

as escort. So it happened that a brigadier, getting out of his dug-out

to see what was happening to his men away there over the slopes,

received the first news of success from batches of Germans who came

marching in company formation under the command of their own officers,

and without escort. That was how I saw many of them coming back on

another part of the field. From the Abraham Heights there was a steady

stream of machine-gun fire until the New-Zealanders had climbed them and

routed out the enemy from their dug-outs, which were not screened by our

barrage so that they were able to fire. Only the great gallantry of

high-spirited young men could have done that, and it is an episode which

proved the quality of New Zealand troops on that morning of the battle,

so keen to do well, so reckless of the cost. On Abraham Heights a lot of

prisoners were taken and joined the long trail that hurried back through

miles of scattered shell-fire from their own guns.

The next resistance was at the blockhouse called Berlin, and the

New-Zealanders are proud of having taken that place, because of its

name, which they will write on their scroll of honour. It is not an

Imperial place. It is a row of dirty concrete pill-boxes above a deep

cave, on the pattern of the old type of dug-outs. But it was a strong

fortress for German machine-gunners, and they defended it stubbornly. It

was a five minutes' job. Stokes mortars were brought up and fired thirty

rounds in two minutes, and then, with a yell, the New-Zealanders rushed

the position on both sides and flung pea-bombs through the back door,

until part of the garrison streamed out shouting their word of

surrender. The other men were dead inside. A battalion commander and his

staff were taken prisoners in another farm, and the New-Zealanders drank

soda-water and smoked high-class cigarettes which they found in this

place, where the German officers were well provided. After that

refreshment they went on to Berlin Wood, where there were several

pill-boxes hidden among the fallen trees and mud-heaps. They had to make

their way through a machine-gun barrage, and platoon commanders

assembled their Lewis-gunners and riflemen to attack the house in

detail. From one of them a German officer directed the fire, and when

the gun was silenced inside came out with another and fired round the

corner of the wall until our men rushed upon him. Even then he raised

his revolver as though to shoot a sergeant, who was closest to him, but

he was killed by a bayonet-thrust.

At other parts of the line our English boys were fighting hard and with

equal courage, and some of them against greater fire. It was on the

right that the enemy's gun-fire was most fierce, and our old English

county regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions--Devons and Staffords,

Surreys and Kents, Lincolns with Scottish Borderers, Northumberland

Fusiliers, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry--opposite Gheluvelt and

Polderhoek and the Reutelbeek had to endure some bad hours. I have

already mentioned in earlier messages how the enemy made ceaseless

thrusts against this right flank of our attacking front, driving a wedge

in for a time, so that our men had to fall back a little and form a

decisive flank. It is known now that they were misled somewhat by some

isolated groups of the enemy who held out in pill-boxes behind Cameron

House. When these were cleared out our line swept forward again and

established itself on the far side of that wood. Our men hold the outer

houses of Gheluvelt.

The whole of the fighting here was made very difficult by the swamps of

the Reutelbeek, worse even than those of the Hanebeek, through which the

New-Zealanders crossed, and our English boys were bogged as they tried

to cross. But they fought forward doggedly, and by sheer valour

safeguarded our right wing in the hardest part of the battle. Meanwhile,

far on the north in the district of the Sehreiboom astride the Thourout

railway, Scottish and Irish troops were fighting on a small front but on

an heroic scale. It was the Dublin Fusiliers who fought most recklessly.

They had begged to go first into this battle, and they went all out with

a wild and exultant spirit. The ground in front of them was a mud-pit,

and they had to swing round to get beyond it. They did not wait for the

barrage. They did not halt on their final objective, but still went away

into the blue, chasing the enemy and uplifted with a strange fierce

enthusiasm until they were called back to the line we wanted to hold.

They excelled themselves that morning, and could not be held back after

the word "Go!"

XX

THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

OCTOBER 9

Another battle was fought and another advance was made by our troops

to-day with the French, in a great assault on their left. Our Allies

gained about 1200 yards of ground in two strides, captured some hundreds

of prisoners and many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large

numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombardments which have

preceded it. The Allied troops are within a few hundred yards of that

forest of which Marlborough spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst

Forest holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards in depth

along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres-Gheluvelt road. The

enemy has suffered big losses again. Two new divisions just brought into

the line--the 227th straight from Rheims only getting into the line at

three o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia--have

received a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three other

divisions--the 16th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Division--have been hard

hit and are now bleeding from many wounds and have given many prisoners

from their ranks into our hands.

How was this thing done? How did we have any success to-day when even

the most optimistic men were preyed upon last night by horrid doubts?

Our troops, we know, are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked

to do which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death to do.

But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless in the morning except

to men who had weighed all the chances, who had all the evidence in

their hands--evidence, I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength

and spirit--and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go!" to

the start of this new battle.

It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily after heavy

rains. The wind howled and raged across Flanders with long, sinister

wailings as it gathered speed and raced over the fields. Heavy

storm-clouds hiding the moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came

down, drenching all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks,

making ponds about them where they stood. And it was cold, with a

coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of the wind, and there was no

glimmer of light in the darkness. To those of us who know the

crater-land of the battlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone

stumbling through it, picking their way between the shell-holes in

daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might have seemed

impossible that great bodies of troops could go forward in assault over

such country and win any kind of success in such conditions. That they

did so is a proof, one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our

troops have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal laws of

life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they will face them and

grapple with them, and, if the spirit and flesh of man can do it,

overcome the impossible itself. This battle seems to me as wonderful as

anything we have done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division

captured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More wonderful even than

that, because on a greater scale and in more foul weather.

This morning I have been among the Lancashire and West Riding men of the

66th and 49th Divisions who lay out last night before the attack, which

followed the first gleams of dawn to-day, and who marched up--no, they

did not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in the attack.

These men I met had come back wounded. Only in the worst days of the

Somme have I seen such figures. They were plastered from head to foot in

wet mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like the hands

and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of sacking round their legs,

and this was stuck on them with clots of mud. Their belts and tunics

were covered with a thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and

their hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who had been

buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke to them I found that

some of them had been buried alive and unburied while they still had

life. They told me this simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A shell

burst close," said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the

neck." "Do you mean up to the neck?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, up to

the neck." There were many like that, and others, without being flung

down by a shell-burst or buried in its crater, fell up to their waists

in shell-holes and up to their armpits, and sank in water and mud.

A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to

join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with

rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I

thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France.

They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division.

It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and

it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to

go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half

an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long

struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind

blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that

their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against

each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs

off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts

until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were

filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and

afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a

yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that

figure ahead fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep

shell-hole and disappeared.

"Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For

God's sake give me a hand, old lad."

There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one

of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a

yard or two."

So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying

to work across the shell-holes.

"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in.

'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out,

but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime

with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and

some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the

cold. But somehow we got on."

Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the

line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their

drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying

out in the shell-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and

waist-high in water.

Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the

night, and big shells were coming over. Thirty men were killed or

wounded with one shell, and others were hit and fell into the

water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers--the splendid

stretcher-bearers--came up to search for them.

The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all

that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink,"

said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."

Some of them had rum served out to them. They were the lucky ones, for

it gave them a little warmth. But others could not get a drop.

One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met him this morning, had a

pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I had a jar of rum in my pack," he said,

"and the boys said to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first

objective. We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped my

pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!'"

They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold and hungry and

exhausted after a dreadful night, and they gained their objective and

routed the enemy, and sent back many prisoners. I marvel at them, and

will salute them if ever I meet them in the world when the war is done.

There were a number of German blockhouses in front of them, beyond

Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel. These were Yetta House and

Augustus House and Heine House on the way to Tober Copse and Friesland

Copse just outside their line of assault. On their left there was a

blockhouse called Peter Pan, though no little mother Wendy would tell

stories to her boys there, and instead of Peter Pan's cockcrow there was

the wail of a wounded man. Beyond that little house of death were Wolfe

Copse and Wolfe Farm, from which the fire of German machine-guns came

swishing in streams of bullets. There was no yard of ground without a

shell-hole. They were linked together like the holes in a honeycomb, and

the German troops, very thick because of their new method of

defence--very dense in the support lines though the front line was more

lightly held--were scattered about in these craters. Large numbers were

killed and wounded when our barrage stormed over them, but numbers

crouching in old craters were left alive, and as the barrage passed they

rose and came streaming over in small batches, with their hands

high--came to meet our men, hoping for mercy. Many prisoners were made

before the first objective was reached, and after that by harder

fighting. Some of the men in shell-holes, wet like our men and cold like

our men, decided to keep fighting, and fired their rifles as our lads

struggled forward. The boy who lost his rum-jar met three of these men

in a shell-hole, and he threw a bomb at them, and said, "This is to pay

back for the gas you gave me a month ago."

A little farther on there was another German in a shell-hole. He was a

boy of sixteen or so, and he raised his rifle at the lad of the rum-jar,

who flung the bayonet on one side by a sudden blow, but not quick enough

to escape a wound in the arm. "I couldn't kill him," said the Lancashire

lad; "he looked such a kid, like my young brother, so I took him

prisoner and sent him down."

Not all the prisoners who were taken came down behind our lines. The

enemy was barraging the ground heavily, and many of their own men were

killed, and some of our stretcher-bearers, as they came down with the

wounded. Up in the leafless and shattered trees on the battlefield were

Germans with machine-guns, and German riflemen who sniped our men as

they passed. Many of these were shot up in the trees and came crashing

down. Up on the left of the attack, where our troops were in liaison

with the French, the enemy were taken prisoners in great numbers,

officers as well as men, and the hostile bombardment was not so heavy as

on the right, so that the casualties seem to have been light there. In

spite of the frightful ground all the objectives were taken, so that our

line has drawn close to Houthulst Forest.

There was heavy fighting by the Worcesters of the 29th Division at a

place called Pascal Farm, and a lot of concrete dug-outs on the

Langemarck-Houthulst road gave trouble with their machine-guns. Adler

Farm, just outside our old line, somewhat south of that, also held out a

while, but was mastered, and opened the way to the second objective,

which on the right carried the attack through Poelcappelle. Here there

was hard fighting, by the Lancashire Fusiliers, South Staffords, and

Yorkshires of the 11th, and the German garrison put up a desperate

resistance in the brewery of Poelcappelle. On the right there has been

grim fighting again in the old neighbourhood of Polderhoek Chateau, but

on either side of it our troops of the 5th Division have made good

progress, in spite of intense and concentrated fire from many heavy

batteries. The enemy has again had a great blow, and has lost large

numbers of men--dead, wounded, and captured. That our troops could do

this after such a night and over such foul ground must seem to the

German High Command like some black art.

* * * * *

OCTOBER 10

In my message yesterday I described the appalling condition of the

ground and of the weather through which our men floundered in their

assault towards Houthulst Forest and Passchendaele. That is the theme of

this battle, as it is told by all the men who have been through its

swamps and fire, and it is a marvel that any success could have been

gained. Where we succeeded--and we took a great deal of ground and many

prisoners--it was due to the sheer courage of the men, who refused to be

beaten by even the most desperate conditions of exhaustion and

difficulty; and where we failed, or at least did not succeed, in making

full progress or holding all the first gains, it was because courage

itself was of no avail against the powers of nature, which were in

league that night with the enemy's guns.

The brunt of the fighting fell yesterday in the centre upon the troops

of North-country England, the hard, tough men of Lancashire and

Yorkshire, and it was Lancashire's day especially, because of those

third-line Territorial battalions of Manchesters and East Lancashires

and Lancashire Fusiliers, with other comrades of the 66th Division.

There were some amongst them who went "over the bags," as they call it,

for the first time, and who fought in one of the hardest battles that

has ever been faced by British troops, with most stubborn and gallant

hearts. I know by hearing from their own lips, to-day and yesterday, the

narrative of the sufferings they endured, of the fight they made, and of

the wounds they bear without a moan.

The night march of some of these men who went up to attack at dawn seems

to me, who have written many records of brave acts during three years of

war, one of the most heroic episodes in all this time. It was a march

which in dry, fine weather would have been done easily enough in less

than three hours by men so good as these. But it took eleven hours for

these Lancashire men to get up to their support line, and then, worn out

by fatigue that was a physical pain, wet to the skin, cold as death,

hungry, and all clotted about with mud, they lay in the water of

shell-holes for a little while until their officers said, "Our turn,

boys," and they went forward through heavy fire and over the same kind

of ground, and fought the enemy with his machine-guns and beat

him--until they lay outside their last objective and kept off

counter-attacks by a few machine-guns that still remained unclogged, and

rifles that somehow they had kept dry. Nothing better than that has been

done, and Lancashire should thrill to the tale of it, because their sons

were its heroes. Dirty, blood-stained, scarecrow heroes, as I met some

of them to-day, lightly wounded, but hardly able to walk after the long

trail back from the line. It was eleven hours' walking on the way up,

and then, after the wild day and half a night under shell-fire and

machine-gun fire, eleven hours down again, in shell-holes and out of

them, falling every few yards, crawling on hands and knees through slimy

trenches, staggering up by the help of a comrade's arm and going on

again with set jaws, and the cry of "No surrender!" in their soul....

Gallant men. They had no complaint against the fate that had thrust them

into this morass, nor any whimper against their hard luck. They told of

the hard time they had had simply and gravely, without exaggeration and

without self-pity, but as men who had been through a frightful ordeal

with many thousands of others whose luck was no better than theirs and

whose duty was the same. They came under severe machine-gun fire from

some of the German blockhouses, especially on their flanks. Our

barrage-fire had gone travelling beyond them, and because of the swamps

and pools it was impossible to keep pace with it. Men were lugging each

other out of the bogs, rescuing each other free from the rain-filled

shell-pits. So they lost the only protection there is from machine-guns,

the screen of great belts of gun-fire, and the Germans had time to get

out of the concrete houses and to get up from the shell-holes and fire

at our advancing groups of muddy men. Many Germans were sniping from

these holes, and others were up broken trees with machine-guns on small

wooden platforms. I met one man to-day who had eleven comrades struck

down in his own group by one of the snipers. A party was detached to

search for the German rifleman, but they could not find him. They got

ahead through Peter Pan House and then they had to face another blast of

machine-gun fire. The German garrison, in a place called Yetta House,

gave trouble in the same way, and there was a nest of machine-guns ahead

at Bellevue. Some Yorkshire lads of the 49th Division went up there to

rout them out, but what happened is not yet known.

All through the day and last night the Lancashire men were under the

streaming bullets of a machine-gun barrage, which whipped the ground

about them as fast as falling hailstones, so that no man could put his

head above a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat.

I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean through, but with

the men who wore them still alive and able to smile grimly enough when

they pointed to these holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried

to get back had a desperate time trying to find their way. Some of them

walked away to the German lines and were up to the barbed wire before

they found out their mistake. It was difficult to get any sense of

direction in the darkness, but the German flares helped them. They rose

with a very bright light, flooding the swamps of No Man's Land with a

white glare, revealing the tragedy of the battlefield, where many

bodies lay still in the bogs, for many men had been killed. Before the

darkness German aeroplanes came over, as it were, in dense flocks. One

Lancashire boy declared he counted thirty-seven as he lay looking up to

the sky from a shell-hole, and they flew low to see where our men had

made their line. Our stretcher-bearers worked through the day and night,

but it was hard going even with empty stretchers, and they fell and got

bogged like the fighting men, and many were hit by shell-fire and

machine-gun bullets. With full stretchers they made their way back

slowly, and each journey took many hours, and on the way they stuck many

times in bogs and slipped many times waist-deep in shell-holes. The

transport and the carriers struggled with equal courage through the

slough of despond, trying to get up rations to their cold and hungry

comrades and ammunition wanted by riflemen and machine-gunners. Even in

water beyond their belts the men tried to clean their rifles and their

belts from the mud which had fouled them, knowing that later on their

lives might depend on this. And it is a wonderful thing that some

counter-attacks were actually repulsed by rifle-fire and by

machine-guns, which jam if any speck of dirt gets in their mechanism.

That was on the left, when the Coldstream, Irish, and Welsh Guards and

some old county regiments of England--Middlesex, Worcesters, Hampshires,

Essex--and a gallant little body of Newfoundlanders in the 29th Division

had fought forward a long way with rapid success.

The losses of the Guards in going over to the first objective were not

heavy. They preceded the attack by a tremendous trench-mortar

bombardment, which so frightened the enemy and caused such loss among

them that before the infantry advanced many of them came rushing over to

our lines to surrender. On the second objective there was heavy fighting

at a strong place called Strode House, which was surrounded with uncut

wire and defended by heavy machine-gun fire. The Guards, after being

checked, rushed it from all sides and captured it with all its garrison.

There was more fighting of the same kind farther south, at ruins close

to Houthulst Forest, on the edge of the swamps, which seem to be a No

Man's Land, because the ground is too wet for the Germans to live there.

Very quickly after the attack the enemy countered heavily on the Guards'

left, but the Guards held firm and beat it off.

Farther south the Middlesex, Royal Fusiliers, and the Newfoundlanders of

the 29th Division went straight through to their objective as far as

Cinq Chemins Farm (the Farm of the Five Roads), and they had to resist a

series of counter-attacks, starting before half-past eight in the

morning. The first of these was shattered by rifle-fire, and the second

by artillery-fire, but afterwards, owing no doubt to heavy shelling, our

line withdrew a little in front of the Poelcappelle road.

On the left centre of our attack our progress was not maintained. The

ground here was deplorable, as the two streams of the Lekkerbolerbeek

and the Stroombeek had been cut through by shell-fire, so that their

boundaries were lost in broad floods. Mortal men could not pass through

quick enough to keep up with a barrage, and after desperate struggles

they were forced to withdraw from the forward positions beyond Adler

Farm and Burns House.

Round the village of Poelcappelle, now no more than a dust-heap of ruin,

there was fierce fighting, and the enemy held out in the brewery, from

which he swept the ground with machine-gun bullets so that all approach

was deadly. The Yorkshire men of the 11th Division here made repeated

rushes, but without much success, it seems.

Meanwhile, on the extreme right of the attack some very grim and

desperate work was being done by English troops of famous old regiments

round about Reutel and Polderhoek. At Polderhoek the enemy had a nest of

dug-outs and machine-gun emplacements behind the chateau, and in spite

of the assaults of Warwicks and Norfolks held them by unceasing fire.

On the north of Polderhoek success was complete in the attack on Reutel,

though the village was defended by machine-guns in a cemetery beyond

Reutel, and several defended blockhouses. These were attacked and taken

by the H.A.C., Warwicks, and Devons, and our line of objectives was made

good beyond Reutel and Judge Copse, which have been thorns in our

side--spear-heads rather--for many days.

Splendid and chivalrous work was done on this part of the ground by the

stretcher-bearers. Out of two hundred and fifty labouring in these

fields over a hundred were hit, and all of them took the utmost risk to

rescue their fallen comrades in the fighting-lines. The sappers and the

pioneers, the transport and the runners, fought not against the enemy

from Germany, but against an enemy more difficult to defeat, and that

was the mud.