The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early
days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground
and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for young
Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the Menin
road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a time
there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with excellent
stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade staffs, until one
of our generals was killed and others wounded by a shell, which broke up
their conference. Afterward there was no chateau, but only a rubble
of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with
stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying
pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green
metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the
surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that
way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a
few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags and burrowed in
the sides of the crater. Lice crawled over them in legions. Human flesh,
rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they
dug to get deeper cover their shovels went into the softness of dead
bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs,
blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy
trench-mortared their position or blew up a new mine-shaft.
I remember one young Irish officer who came down to bur quarters on a
brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome
fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound
melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile.
“Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?” he asked.
He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a
strong, fetid smell came from him.
“Hooge,” he said, in a thoughtful way, “is not a health resort.”
He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a leper.
He told one or two stories about the things that happened at Hooge,
and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he went back
again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before saying
good-by he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a moment or
two listened to birds twittering in the trees.
“Thanks very much,” he said. “I've enjoyed this visit a good deal.. .
Good-by.”
He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, and the mine-crater
where his Irish soldiers were lying in slime, in which vermin crawled.
Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our position, blowing a few
men to bits and scattering the sand-bags. Sometimes it was our men
who upheaved the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the new
crater.
It was in July of '15 that the devils of Hooge became merry and bright
with increased activity. The Germans had taken possession of one of the
mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin road,
with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was like the
spear-head of their position. They had fortified it with sand-bags and
crammed it with machine--guns which could sweep the ground on three
sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a suicidal enterprise. Our
trenches immediately faced this stronghold from the other side of a
road at right angles with the Menin road, and our men--the New Army
boys--were shelled day and night, so that many of them were torn to
pieces, and others buried alive, and others sent mad by shell-shock.
(They were learning their lessons in the school of courage.) It was
decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, to clear out this
hornets' nest, and the job was given to the sappers, who mined under
the roadway toward the redoubt, while our heavy artillery shelled the
enemy's position all around the neighborhood.
On July 22d the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low, horribly
afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by a gust of
flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human limbs and
bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon them.
“I thought I had been blown to bits,” one of them told me. “I was a
quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, 'Christ!...
Christ!'”
When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the enemy's
redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had been a
crisscross of trenches and sand-bag shelters for their machine-guns and
a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater, hollowed
deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps which had
blocked up the enemy's trenches on either side of the position, so that
they could not rush into the cavern and take possession. It was our men
who “rushed” the crater and lay there panting in its smoking soil.
Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt,
and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the
mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept up
a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in bursts of
gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and wounded many
men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the King's Royal
Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far advanced in
the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning of their
positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was the shell
screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into pulp like
those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved earthworks.
On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after a
heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K. R. R. raised their heads
above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked about.
There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were wailing.
The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some moisture
falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid.
“What in hell's name--?” said a subaltern.
One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin.
Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some
heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-pipes.
Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from some
blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken ground
where the King's Royal Rifles lay.
Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making
them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.
It was a new horror of war--the Flammenwerfer.
Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at
the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were
true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught
in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long
bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were
smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they
fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.
The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in
reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They moved
up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack. The
ground they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many fell, but
the others attacked again and again, regardless of their losses, and won
back part of the lost ground, leaving only a depth of five hundred yards
in the enemy's hands.
So the position remained until the morning of August 9th, when a new
attack was begun by the Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Midland
troops of the 6th Division, who had been long in the salient and had
proved the quality of northern “grit” in the foul places and the foul
weather of that region.
It was late on the night of August 8th that these battalions took up
their position, ready for the assault. These men, who came mostly from
mines and workshops, were hard and steady and did not show any outward
sign of nervousness, though they knew well enough that before the light
of another day came their numbers would have passed through the lottery
of this game of death. Each man's life depended on no more than a fluke
of luck by the throw of those dice which explode as they fall. They knew
what their job was. It was to cross five hundred yards of open ground
to capture and to hold a certain part of the German position near the
Chateau of Hooge.
They were at the apex of the triangle which made a German salient after
the ground was lost, on July 30th. On the left side of the triangle was
Zouave Wood, and Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to a strong fort
held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and every kind of bomb.
The base of the upturned triangle was made by the Menin road, to the
north, beyond which lay the crater, the chateau, and the stables.
The way that lay between the regiment and their goal was not an easy one
to pass. It was cut and crosscut by our old trenches, now held by the
enemy, who had made tangles of barbed wire in front of their parapets,
and had placed machine-guns at various points. The ground was littered
with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 30th, and pock-marked
by deep shell-holes. To cross five hundred yards of such ground in
the storm of the enemy's fire would be an ordeal greater than that of
rushing from one trench to another. It would have to be done in regular
attack formation, and with the best of luck would be a grim and costly
progress.
The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could only see one another
as shadows blacker than the night. They were very quiet; each man was
fighting down his fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves
hideously strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, “Steady,
lads.” were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants and sergeants.
The sounds of men whispering, a cough here and there, a word of command,
the clink of bayonets, the cracking of twigs under heavy boots, the
shuffle of troops getting into line, would not carry with any loudness
to German ears.
The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the preliminary
bombardment which would smash a way for them. The officers struck
matches now and then to glance at their wrist-watches, set very
carefully to those of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with
an enormous violence of shell-fire, so that the night was shattered with
the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber mingled their explosions,
and the long screech of the shells rushed through the air as though
thousands of engines were chasing one another madly through a vast
junction in that black vault.
The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns lengthened their fuses
the infantry advance would begin. Their nerves were getting jangled. It
was just the torture of human animals. There was an indrawing of breath
when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets, sending up flares which
made white waves of light. If they were seen! There would be a shambles.
But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a thick veil,
hiding those mining lads who stared toward the illuminations above the
black vapors and at the flashes which seemed to stab great rents in the
pall of smoke. “It was a jumpy moment,” said the colonel of the Durhams,
and the moment lengthened into minutes.
Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had been
given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the guns
lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Chateau of Hooge, beyond the
Menin road, six hundred yards away.
“Time!”
The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden clatter
from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men girdled with
hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and made their first
rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our shells, and the
trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn with broken wire
and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel.
It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this
quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and
hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them,
and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches
German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by
the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.
Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and
swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a
slaughter-house.
The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now,
and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly
from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoarsely, and
hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and
scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again,
until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of
hell.
While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts
already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and
with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit
of their line of assault and achieved the task which had been set them.
They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw red through
bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey--these decent Yorkshire lads.
Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted, until
not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on that
9th of August revealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent for words
to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had been a
panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that dreadful
screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of steel at
their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham and
Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few who do must
have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it haunts them.
The assaulting battalion had lost many men during the assault, but their
main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns belched
out a large quantity of heavy shells from the direction of Hill 60. They
raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the position they had
gained. But they would not go back or crawl away from their dead.
All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side
by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our battery
positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies
through the “crumped” trenches, the men held on and consolidated their
positions. One of the most astounding feats was done by the sappers, who
put up barbed wire beyond the line under a devilish cannonade.
A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed by a shell early
in the action, and worked his way back to get another. He succeeded
in reaching the advanced line again, but another shell knocked out his
second instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch with
the battalion headquarters by means of messengers, and again and again
officers and men made their way across the zone of fire or died in the
attempt. Messages reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his
front trenches had been blown away.
From other parts of the line reports came in that the enemy was
preparing a counter-attack. For several hours now the colonel of the
Durhams could not get into touch with his companies, isolated and hidden
beneath the smoke of the shell-bursts. Flag-wagging and heliographing
were out of the question. He could not tell even if a single man
remained alive out there beneath all those shells. No word came from
them now to let him know if the enemy were counter-attacking.
Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make his own
reconnaissance. The bombardment was still relentless, and it was only
possible to go part of the way in an old communication trench. The
ground about was littered with the dead, still being blown about by high
explosives.
The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt and with the knowledge
that most of the dead here were his own. When he told me this adventure
his only comment was the soldier's phrase, “It was not what might be
called a 'healthy' place.” He could see no sign of a counter-attack,
but, straining through the smoke-clouds, his eyes could detect no sign
of life where his men had been holding the captured lines. Were they all
dead out there?
On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be
relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent
through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back
with the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the
companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road.
In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them had
been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding shells
and had been buried in the scatter of earth.
“When at last my men came back--those of them who had received the
order,” said the colonel, “I knew the price of their achievement--its
cost in officers and men.” He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody
sacrifice.
There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of them
were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through the
next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of water and
suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield.
There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the
greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had had
his jaw broken by a piece of shell, but still led his men. Later in the
day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his command, and he
was still leading the survivors of his company when he came back on the
morning of Tuesday, August 10th.
Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under
the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the
stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During
the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several
messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask
for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, “Send
us more bombs.” It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday,
after thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away from
their rubbish heap in the lines of death.
So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men,
touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still
fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through
such hours without having on their faces more traces of their hell,
though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.
X
Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from
wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like
the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative
work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one
on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young
soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets.
A friend of mine--an ironical fellow--nudged me, and said,
“Sunday-school for young Christians!” and made a hideous face, very
comical.
It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and “O. C. Bayonets”--Col.
Ronald Campbell--was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously
interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature
in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly
awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier--boys. They made sudden
jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men
standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed
bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging
sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate
things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the
bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy
sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing
to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then
kicked the sack.
“That's what I like to see,” said an officer. “There's a fine
fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Germans before he's
done.”
Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He
curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack
to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes
bulge out of their heads, fired them with blood-lust, stoked up hatred
of Germans--all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of
latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories--one, famous in
the army, called “Where's 'Arry?”
It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of
Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood
his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, “Where's
'Arry?... 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet.”
'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's work, but he was called
up and given his man to kill. And after that 'Arry was like a man-eating
tiger in his desire for German blood.
He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. “You may meet a
German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten children.'... Kill him! He might
have ten more.”
At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to
human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see
every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of
death--machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later
on, tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the
British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived
longest were experts in divers branches of technical education.
Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his
genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to
the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn
men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the
man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When
men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken,
he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested
in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been
dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a
farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A
tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel
Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and
brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had
names for many of his pets--the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he
taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, and tend flowers,
and grow vegetables. Love, and not hate, was now his gospel. All his
training was done by games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading
up to elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He challenged the
whole army system of discipline imposed by authority by a new system
of self-discipline based upon interest and instinct. His results
were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected,
shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright,
cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes.
“It's a pity,” he said, “they have to go off again and be shot to
pieces. I cure them only to be killed--but that's not my fault. It's the
fault of war.”
It was Colonel Campbell who discovered “Willie Woodbine,” the fighting
parson and soldier's poet, who was the leading member of a traveling
troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to
tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two. They
fought one another with science (as old professionals) and challenged
any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin and drew the
soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another fight
Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war, and the weakness
of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those fellows in his
hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave
them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was
ahead of them when they went to the trenches again.