THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING
I.
_March, 1919._
Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are
naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just
described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid--an
evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along
the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the
Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building
at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army
Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture; the eastern
battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel,
through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral
emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of
motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the
Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne
battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his
right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mézières; General
Pershing in his office, and General Pershing _en petit comité_ in a
friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure,
with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant
eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished
rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British
General Staff worked during the war, when it was not moving in its
staff train up and down behind the front.
But I do not intend to make these letters a mere _omnium gatherum_ of
recollections. All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main
outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past
eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians,
men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval
between the régime of _communiqués_ and war-correspondence under which
we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories
which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either
writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war.
Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British
Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the
great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed.
There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time
to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare
which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued,
are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead. And
considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and
investigating the battles of a hundred years ago--(look for instance
at the lists of recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the
Cambridge Moddern History!)--we may guess at the time mankind will
take hereafter in writing about and elucidating a war, where in many
of the great actions, as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo
might have been lost without being missed, or won without being more
than a favourable incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.
At the same time, this generation has got somehow--as an ingredient in
its daily life--to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war
as a whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France. For
the history of those last months is at the present moment an _active
agent in the European situation_. What one may call the war-consciousness
of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the
Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on
the one hand--her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in
material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate
protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the
war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially
on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports,
the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of
1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and
brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning
of that series of great actions on the British front which finished
the war--all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in
efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as
it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense
of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the
irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European
affairs:--amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the
visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year. And
then, of course, there was the Belgian war-consciousness--a new thing
for Belgium and for Europe. But with that I was not concerned.
Let me try to show by an illustration or two drawn from my own recent
experience what the British war-consciousness means.
It was a beautiful January day when we started from the little inn at
Cassel for Ypres, Menin, Lille, Lens, and Vimy. From the wonderful
window at the back of the inn, high perched as Cassel is above a wide
plain, one looked back upon the roads to St. Omer and the south, and
thought of the days last April, when squadron after squadron of French
cavalry came riding hot and fast along them to the relief of our
hard-pressed troops, after the break of the Portuguese sector of the
line at Richebourg St. Vaast. But our way lay north, not south,
through a district that seemed strangely familiar to me, though in
fact I had only passed forty-eight hours in it, in 1916. Forty-eight
hours, however, in the war-zone, at a time of active fighting, and
that long before any other person of my sex had been allowed to
approach the actual firing-line on the British front, were not like
other hours; and, perhaps, from much thinking of them, the Salient and
the approaches to it, as I saw them in 1916 from the Scherpenberg
hill, had become a constant image in the mind. Only, instead of seeing
Ypres from the shelter of the Scherpenberg Windmill, as a distant
phantom in the horizon mists, beyond the shell-bursts in the
battle-field below us, we were now to go through Ypres itself, then
wholly forbidden ground, and out beyond it into some of the
ever-famous battle-fields that lie north and south of the Ypres-Menin
road.
One hears much talk in Paris of the multitudes who will come to see
the great scenes of the war, as soon as peace is signed, when the
railways are in a better state, and the food problems less, if not
solved. The multitudes indeed have every right to come, for it is
nations, not standing armies, that have won this war. But, personally,
one may be glad to have seen these sacred places again, during this
intermediate period of utter solitude and desolation, when their very
loneliness "makes deep silence in the heart--for thought to do its
part." The roads in January were clear, and the Army gone. The only
visitors were a few military cars, and men of the salvage corps,
directing German prisoners in the gathering up of live shells and
hand-grenades, of tons of barbed wire and trip wire, and all the other
_débris_ of battle that still lie thick upon the ground. In a few
months perhaps there will be official guides conducting parties
through the ruins, and in a year or two, the ruins of Ypres themselves
may have given place to the rising streets of a new city. As they now
are, a strange and sinister majesty surrounds them. At the entrance to
the town there still hangs the notice: "Troops are not to enter Ypres
except on special duty"; and the grass-grown heaps of masonry are
labelled: "It is dangerous to dig among these ruins." But there was no
one digging when we were there--no one moving, except ourselves. Ypres
seemed to me beyond recovery as a town, just as Lens is; but whereas
Lens is just a shapeless ugliness which men will clear away rejoicing
as soon as their energies are free for rebuilding, Ypres in ruin has
still beauty enough and dignity enough to serve--with the citadel at
Verdun--as the twin symbol of the war. There was a cloud of jackdaws
circling round the great gashed tower where the inner handiwork of the
fifteenth-century builders lay open to sky and sun. I watched them
against the blue, gathering in, also, the few details of lovely work
that still remain here and there on the face of what was once the
splendid Cloth Hall, the glory of these border lands. And one tried to
imagine how men and women would stand there a hundred years hence,
amid what developments of this strange new world that the war has
brought upon us, and with what thoughts.
Beyond, we were in the wide, shell-pocked waste of the huge
battle-field, with many signs on its scarred face of the latest
fighting of all, the flooding back of the German tide in last April
over these places which it had cost us our best lives to gain, and of
the final victorious advance of King Albert and the British Second
Army which sent the Germans flying back through Limburg to their own
land. Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which,
at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the
fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled
in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge
stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and
another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt. In
the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this
is _the Menin Road_. How it haunted the war news for months and years,
like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out
Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west
a faint line with a few trees on it--_Passchendaele_!
Passchendaele!--name of sorrow and of glory. What were the British
losses, in that three months' fighting from June to November, 1917,
which has been called the "Third Battle of Ypres," which began with
the victory of the Messines ridge and culminated in the Canadian
capture of Passchendaele?[4] Outside the inner circle of those who
know, there are many figures given. They are alike only in this that
they seem to grow perpetually. Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the
old hostile forces of earth and water--black earth and creeping water
and strangling mud! We won the ridge and we held it till the German
advance in April last forced our temporary withdrawal; we had pushed
the Germans off the high ground into the marsh lands beyond; but we
failed, as everyone knows, in the real strategic objects of the
attack, and the losses in the autumn advance on Passchendaele were an
important and untoward factor in the spring fighting of 1918.
[4] Mr. Bonar Law has stated in the House of Commons since these
lines were written that the losses in the third battle of Ypres,
from Messines to Passchendaele, July--October, 1917, were 228,000.
How deeply this Ypres salient enters into the war-consciousness of
Britain and the Empire! As I stand looking over the black stretches of
riddled earth, at the half-demolished pill-boxes in front, at the
muddy pools in the shell-holes under a now darkening sky; at the flat
stretches between us and Kemmel where lie Zillebeke and St. Eloi, and
a score of other names which will be in the mouth of history hundreds
of years hence, no less certainly than the names of those little
villages north and south of Thermopylae, which saw the advance of the
Persians and the vigil of the Greeks--a confusion of things read and
heard, rush through one's mind, taking new form and vividness from
this actual scene in which they happened. There, at those cross roads,
broke the charge of the Worcesters, on that most critical day of all
in the First Battle of Ypres, when the fate of the Allies hung on a
thread, and this "homely English regiment," with its famous record in
the Peninsula and elsewhere, drove back the German advance and saved
the line. I turn a little to the south and I am looking towards Klein
Zillebeke where the Household Cavalry charged, and Major Hugh Dawnay
at their head "saved the British position," and lost his own gallant
life. Straight ahead of us, down the Menin road towards Gheluvelt,
came the Prussian Guards, the Emperor's own troops with their master's
eye on them, on November 11th, when the First Division in General
Haig's First Corps, checked them, enfiladed them, mowed them down,
till the flower of the Imperial troops fell back in defeat, never
knowing by how small a fraction they had missed victory, how thin a
line had held them, how little stood between them and the ports that
fed the British Army. Here on these flats to my right were Lord
Cavan's Guards, and on either side of him General Allenby's cavalry,
and General Byng's; while, if one turns to the north towards the
distance which hides Sonnebeke and Bixschoote, one is looking over the
ground so magnificently held on our extreme left by General Dubois and
his 9th French Corps.
Guards, Yorkshires, Lancashires, London Scottish, Worcesters, Royal
Scots Fusiliers, Highlanders, Gordons, Leicesters--all the familiar
names of the old Army are likend with this great story. It was an
English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Islands, won before
the "rally of the Empire" had time to develop, before a single
Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.
But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter
in this bloodstained book. Memory runs on nearly six months, and we
come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under
the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on
through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful
casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh
troops had come up. It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the
Canadians had for the first time, while not called on to take much
active part themselves, seen the realities of European battle; and the
cheers of the British troops at Ypres as the exhausted Dominion troops
came back from the trenches will live in history.
Messines, and the victory of June, 1917--Passchendaele, and the losses
of that grim winter--all the points indeed of this dim horizon from
north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great
Britain and the Dominions. For quite apart from the main actions which
stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.
Then, as the great Army of the gallant dead seemed to gather round one
on this famous road, and over these shell-torn flats, a sudden
recollection of a letter which I received in August, 1918, brought a
tightening of the throat. A Canadian lady, writing from an American
camp in the east of France, appealed to myself and other writers to do
something to bring home to the popular mind of America a truer
knowledge of what the British Armies had done in the war. "I see
here," says the writer, "hundreds of the finest remaining white men on
earth every week. They are wonderful military material, and very
attractive and lovable boys. But it discourages all one's hope for the
future unity and friendship between us all to realise as I have done
the last few months that the majority of these men are entering the
fight, firmly believing that 'England has not done her share--that
France had done it all--the Colonials have done all the hard fighting,
etc.'" And she proceeds to attribute the state of things to the
"belittling reports" of England's share in the war given in the
newspapers which reach these "splendid men" from home.
A similar statement has come to me within the last few days, in
another letter from an English lady in an American camp near Verdun,
who speaks of the tragic ignorance--for tragic it is when one thinks
of all that depends on Anglo-American understanding in the
future!--shown by the young Americans in the camp where she is at
work, of the share of Great Britain in the war.
Alack! How can we bring our two nations closer together in this vital
matter? Of course there is no belittlement of the British part in the
war among those Americans who have been brought into any close contact
with it. And in my small efforts to meet the state of things described
in the letters I have quoted, some of the warmest and most practical
sympathy shown has come from Americans. But in the vast population of
the United States with its mixed elements, some of them inevitably
hostile to this country, how easy for the currents of information and
opinion to go astray over large tracts of country at any rate, and at
the suggestion of an anti-British press!
The only effective remedy, it seems to me, would be the remedy of eyes
and ears! Would it not be well, before the whole of the great American
Army goes home, that as many as possible of those still in
France--groups, say, of non-commissioned officers from various
American divisions, representing both the older and the newer levies,
and drawn from different local areas--should be given the opportunity
of seeing and studying the older scenes of the war on the British
front?--and that our own men, also, should be able to see for
themselves, not only the scenes of the American fighting of last year,
but the vast preparations of all kinds that America was building up in
France for the further war that might have been; preparations which,
as no one doubts, changed the whole atmosphere of the struggle?
"_England has not done her share!_"
How many thousands of British dead--men from every county in England
and Scotland, from loyal Ireland, from every British dominion and
colony--lie within the circuit of these blood-stained hills of Ypres?
How many more in the Somme graveyards?--round Lens and Arras and
Vimy?--about Bourlon Wood and Cambrai?--or in the final track of our
victorious Armies breaking through the Hindenburg line on their way to
Mons? Gloriously indeed have the Dominions played their part in this
war; but of all the casualties suffered by the Armies of the Empire,
80 _per cent_ of them fell on the population of these islands. America
was in the great struggle for a year and a half, and in the real
fightingline for about six months. She has lost some 54,000 of her
gallant sons; and we sorrow for them with her.
But through four long years scarcely a family in Great Britain and the
Dominions that possessed men on the fighting fronts--and none were
finally exempt except on medical or industrial grounds--but was either
in mourning for, or in constant fear of death for one or more of its
male members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness
the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less
injured for life. The total American casualties are 264,000. The total
British casualties--among them from 700,000 to 800,000 dead--are
2,228,000 out of a total white population for the Empire of not much
more than two-thirds of the population of the United States. There is
small room for "belittling" here. A silent clasp of the hands between
our two nations would seem to be the natural gesture in face of such
facts as these.
II.
Such thoughts, however, belong to the emotional or tragic elements in
the British war-consciousness. Let me turn to others of a different
kind--the intellectual and reflective elements--and the changing
estimates which they bring about.
Take for instance what we have been accustomed to call the "March
retreat" of last year. The dispatch of Sir Douglas Haig describing the
actions of March and April last year was so headed in the _Times_,
though nothing of the kind appears in the official publication. And we
can all remember in England the gnawing anxiety of every day and every
hour from March 21st up to the end of April, when the German offensive
had beaten itself out, on the British front at least, and the rushing
over of the British reinforcements, together with the rapid incoming
of the Americans, had given the British Army the breathing space of
which three months later it made the use we know.
"But why," asks one of the men best qualified to speak in our
Army--"why use the words 'retreat' and 'disaster' at all?" They were
indeed commonly used at the time both in England and abroad, and have
been often used since about the fighting of the British Army last
March and April. Strictly speaking, my interlocutor suggests, neither
word is applicable. The British Army indeed fell back some thirty-five
miles on its southern front, till the German attack was finally stayed
before Amiens. The British centre stood firm from Arras to Béthune.
But in the north we had to yield almost all the ground gained in the
Salient the year before, and some that had never yet been in German
hands. We lost heavily in men and guns, and a shudder of alarm ran
through all the Allied countries.
Nevertheless what Europe was then witnessing--I am of course quoting
not any opinion of my own, to which I have no right, but what I have
gathered from those responsible men who were in the forefront of the
fighting--was in truth _a great defensive battle_, long and anxiously
foreseen, in which the German forces were double the British forces
opposed to them (64 to 32 divisions--73 to 32--and so on), while none
the less all that was vitally necessary to the Allied cause was
finally achieved by the British Army, against these huge odds.
Germany, in fact, made her last desperate effort a year ago to break
through the beleaguering British, forces, and failed. On our side
there was no real surprise, though our withdrawal was deeper and our
losses greater than had been foreseen. The troops themselves may have
been confident; it is the habit of gallant men. But the British
command knew well what it had to face, and had considered carefully
weeks beforehand where ground could be given--as in all probability it
would have to be given--with the least disadvantage. Some accidents,
if one may call them so, indeed there were--the thick white fog, for
instance, which "on the morning of March 21st enveloped our outpost
line, and made it impossible to see more than fifty yards in any
direction, so that the machine guns and forward field-guns which had
been disposed so as to cover this zone with their fire were robbed
almost entirely of their effect--and the masses of German infantry
advanced comparatively unharassed, so closely supporting each other
that loss of direction was impossible." Hence the rapidity of the
German advance through the front lines on March 21st, and the alarming
break-through south of St. Quentin, where our recently extended line
was weakest and newest. A second accident was the drying up of the
Oise Marshes at a time when in a normal year they might have been
reckoned on to stop the enemy's advance. A third piece of ill-luck was
the fact that in the newest section of the British line, where the
enemy attack broke at its hottest, there had been no time, since it
had been given over to us by the French--who had held it lightly, as a
quiet sector, during the winter--to strengthen its defences, and to do
the endless digging, the railway construction, and the repair of
roads, which might have made a very great difference. And, finally,
there was the most dangerous accident of all--the break through of
the Portuguese line at Richebourg St. Vaast, just as the tired
division holding it was about to be relieved. Of that accident, as we
all remember, the enemy, hungry for the Channel ports, made his very
worst and most; till the French and British fought him to a final
stand before Hazebrouck and Ypres.
[Illustration: _British Official Photograph_
The St. Quentin Canal which was crossed by the 46th in life-belts.]
Meanwhile, the strategic insight of Marshal Foch, who assumed complete
control of the Allied Armies in France and Belgium on March 26th,
combined with the experienced and cool-headed leadership of the
British Commander-in-Chief, refused to dissipate the French reserves,
so important to the future course of the war, in any small or
piecemeal reinforcement of the British lines. The risks of the great
moment had to be taken, and both the French and British Commanders had
complete faith in the capacity of the British Army to meet them. And
when all is said, when our grave losses in casualties, prisoners, and
guns are fully admitted, what was the general result? The Germans had
failed to gain either of their real objectives:--either the Channel
ports, or the division of the British Armies from the French. They
wore themselves out against a line which recoiled indeed but never
broke, and was all the time filling up and strengthening from behind.
The losses inflicted on their immense reserves reacted on all the
subsequent fighting of the year, both on the Aisne and the Marne. And
when the British Armies had brought the huge attack to a
standstill--which for the centre and south of our line had been
already attained ten days after the storm broke--and knew the worst
that had happened or could happen to them; when the Australians had
recaptured Villers-Bretonneux; when the weeks passed and the offensive
ceased; when all gaps in our ranks were filled by the rush of
reinforcements from home, and the American Army poured steadily across
the Atlantic, the tension and peril of the spring passed steadily into
the confident strength and--expectation of the summer. The British
Army had held against an attack which could never be repeated, and the
future was with the Allies.
Let us remember that at no time in our fighting withdrawal, either on
the Somme or on the Lys, was there "anything approaching a break-down
of command, or a failure in morale." So the Field Marshal. On the
other hand, all over the vast battle-field--in every part of the hard
"waiting game" which for a time the British Armies were called to
play, men did the most impossible and heroic things. Gun detachments
held their posts till every man was killed or wounded; infantry who
had neither rest nor sleep for days together, fought "back to back in
the trenches, shooting both to front and rear." Occasional confusion,
even local panic, occasional loss of communication and misunderstanding
of orders, occasional incompetence and stupidity there must be in such
a vast backward sweep of battle, but skill, purpose, superb bravery
were never lacking in any portion of the field; and the German
_communiqués_ exultantly announcing the "total defeat of the British
Armies" may be compared, _mutatis mutandis_, with the reports from
German Headquarters just before the first battle of the Marne.
"The defeat of the English is complete," said the German High Command
in the latter days of August, 1914. "The English Army is retreating in
the most complete disorder.... The British have been completely
defeated to the north of St. Quentin"--and so on. And yet a week
later, as General Maurice, with much fresh evidence, has lately shown,
the Army thus disposed of on paper had rejoicingly turned upon von
Kluck, and was playing a vital part in the great victory of the Marne.
So last spring, the losses and withdrawals of a vaster defensive
action, coupled with the stubborn and tenacious hold of the British
Army, last March and April, were the inevitable and heroic prelude to
the victorious recoil of August, and the final battles of the war.
Inevitable, because no forethought or exertion on the British side
could have averted the German onslaught, determined as it was by the
breakdown of the whole Eastern front of the war, and the letting loose
upon the Western front of immense forces previously held by the
Russian armies. These forces, after the Russian _débâcle_, were
released against us, week by week, till in March the balance of
numbers, which was almost even in January, had risen on the German
side to a superiority of 150,000 bayonets! The dispatch of divisions
to Italy; the recall of men to the shipyards and the mines to meet the
submarine danger; the heavy fighting in the Salient and at Cambrai in
the latter half of 1917; the lack of time for training new levies,
owing to our depleted line and reserves:--all these causes contributed
to sharpen the peril in which England stood.[5] But it is in such
straits as these that our race shows its quality.
[5] See the Chart at end of Book.
And in this fighting, for the first time in British history, and in
the history of Europe, Americans stood side by side in battle with
British and French. "In the battle of March and April," says Sir
Douglas Haig, "American and British troops have fought shoulder to
shoulder in the same trenches, and have shared together in the
satisfaction of beating off German attacks. All ranks of the British
Army look forward to the day when the rapidly growing strength of the
American Army will allow American and British soldiers _to co-operate
in offensive action_."
That day came without much delay. It carried the British Army to Mons,
and the young American Army to Sedan.
* * * * *
Looking out from the Vimy Ridge six weeks ago, and driving thence
through Arras across the Drocourt-Quéant line to Douai and
Valenciennes, I was in the very heart of that triumphant stand of the
Third and First Armies round Arras which really determined the fate of
the German attack.
The Vimy Ridge from the west is a stiffish climb. On the east also it
drops steeply above Petit Vimy and Vimy, while on the south and
south-east it rises so imperceptibly from the Arras road that the
legend which describes the Commander-in-Chief, approaching it from
that side, as asking of the officers assembled to meet him after the
victory--"And where is this ridge that you say you have taken?" seems
almost a reasonable tale. But to east and west there is no doubt about
it. One climbs up the side overlooking Ablain St. Nazaire through
shell-holes and blurred trenches, over snags of wire, and round the
edges of craters, till on the top one takes breath on the wide plateau
where stands the Canadian monument to those who fell in the glorious
fight of April 9th, 1917, and whence the eye sweeps that wide northern
and eastern plain, towards Lille on the one side and Douai on the
other, which to our war-beaten and weary soldiers, looking out upon it
when the ridge at last was theirs, was almost as new and strange a
world as the Pacific was to its first European beholders.
Westwards across the valley whence our troops stormed the hill, rises
the Bouvigny Wood, and the long, blood-stained ridge of Notre Dame de
Lorette, where I stood just before the battle, in 1917. To the north
we are looking through the horizon shadows to La Bassée, Bailleul, and
the Salient. Immediately below the hill, in the same direction, lie
the ruin heaps of Lens, and of the mining towns surrounding it; while
behind us the ground slopes south and south-east to Arras and the
Scarpe.
It is a tremendous position. That even the merest outsider can see. In
old days the hill must have been a pleasant rambling ground for the
tired workers of the coal-mining districts. Then the war-blast at its
fiercest passed over it. To-day in its renewed solitude, its sacred
peace, it represents one of the master points of the war, bought and
held by a sacrifice of life and youth, the thought of which holds one's
heart in grip, as one stands there, trying to gather in the meaning of
the scene. Not one short year ago it was in the very centre of the
struggle. If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave
indeed. Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third
Army, "our main lateral communications--Amiens--Doullens--St. Pol--St.
Omer--would have been seriously threatened if not cut." The Germans
were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a
desperate courage. Three assault divisions were to have carried the
Vimy Ridge, while other divisions were to have captured Arras and the
line of the Scarpe. The attack was carried out with the greatest
fierceness, men marching shoulder to shoulder into the furnace of
battle. But this time there was no fog to shield them, or to blind the
British guns. The enemy losses were appalling, and after one day's
fighting, in spite of the more northerly attacks on our line still to
come, the German hopes of _victory_ were in the dust, and--as we now
know--for ever.
That is what Vimy means--what Arras means--in the fighting of last
year. We ponder it as we drive through the wrecked beauty of Arras and
out on to the Douai road on our way to Valenciennes. We passed slowly
along the road to the east of Arras, honeycombed still with dug-outs,
and gun emplacements, and past trenches and wire fields, till suddenly
a mere sign-board, nothing more--"Gavrelle!"--shows us that we are
approaching the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch of the Hindenburg line,
which the Canadians and the 17th British Corps, under Sir Henry Horne,
stormed and took in September of last year. Presently, on either side
of the road as we drive slowly eastward, a wilderness of trenches runs
north and south. With what confident hope the Germans dug and
fortified and elaborated them years ago!--with what contempt of death
and danger our men carried them not six months since! And now not a
sign of life anywhere--nothing but groups of white crosses here and
there, emerging from the falling dusk, and the _débris_ of battle
along the road.
A weary way to Douai, over the worst road we have struck yet, and a
weary way beyond it to Denain and Valenciennes. Darkness falls and
hides the monotonous scene of ruin, which indeed begins to change as
we approach Valenciennes, the Headquarters of the First Army. And at
last, a bright fire in an old room piled with books and papers, a kind
welcoming from the officer reigning over it, and the pleasant careworn
face of an elderly lady with whom we are billeted.
Best of all, a message from the Army Commander, Sir Henry Horne, with
whom we had made friends in 1917, just before the capture of the Vimy
Ridge, in which the First Army played so brilliant a part.
We hastily change our travel gear, a car comes for us, and soon we
find ourselves at the General's table in the midst of an easy flow of
pleasant talk.
What is it that makes the special charm of the distinguished soldier,
as compared with other distinguished men?
Simplicity, I suppose, and truth. The realities of war leave small
room for any kind of pose. A high degree, also, of personal stoicism
easily felt but not obtruded; and towards weak and small things--women
and children--a natural softness and tenderness of feeling, as though
a man who has upon him such stern responsibilities of life and death
must needs grasp at their opposites, when and how he can; keen
intelligence, _bien entendu_, modesty, courtesy; a habit of brevity; a
boy's love of fun: with some such list of characteristics I find
myself trying to answer my own question. They are at least conspicuous
in many leaders of the Allied Armies.
"Why don't you _boom_ your Generals?" said an American diplomatist to
me some eight months ago. "Your public at home knows far too little
about them individually. But the personal popularity of the military
leader in such a national war as this is a military asset."
I believe I entirely agree with the speaker! But it is not the British
military way, and the unwritten laws of the Service stand firm. So let
me only remind you that General Horne led the artillery at Mons; that
he has commanded the First Army since September, 1916; that, in
conjunction with Sir Julian Byng, he carried the Vimy Ridge in 1917,
and held the left at Arras in 1918; and, finally, that he was the
northernmost of the three Army Commanders who stormed the Hindenburg
line last September.
It was in his study and listening to the explanations he gave me, so
clearly and kindly, of the Staff maps that lay before us, that I first
realised with anything like sufficient sharpness the meaning of those
words we have all repeated so often without understanding them--"_the
capture of the Hindenburg line_."
What was the Hindenburg line?