I
The winter of 1915 was, I think, the worst of all. There was a settled
hopelessness in it which was heavy in the hearts of men--ours and the
enemy's. In 1914 there was the first battle of Ypres, when the bodies
of British soldiers lay strewn in the fields beyond this city and their
brown lines barred the way to Calais, but the war did not seem likely to
go on forever. Most men believed, even then, that it would end quickly,
and each side had faith in some miracle that might happen. In 1916-17
the winter was foul over the fields of the Somme after battles which had
cut all our divisions to pieces and staggered the soul of the world
by the immense martyrdom of boys--British, French, and German--on the
western front. But the German retreat from the Somme to the shelter of
their Hindenburg line gave some respite to our men, and theirs, from the
long-drawn fury of attack and counter-attack, and from the intensity of
gun-fire. There was at best the mirage of something like victory on
our side, a faint flickering up of the old faith that the Germans had
weakened and were nearly spent.
But for a time in those dark days of 1915 there was no hope ahead. No
mental dope by which our fighting-men could drug themselves into seeing
a vision of the war's end.
The battle of Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground
we had gained--the new horror of that new salient--had sapped into the
confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of
German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no
good some of those old gentlemen saying, “We've got 'em beat!” when
from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under
ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made
by the orders of a High Command which believed in small attacks,
without much plan or purpose, was only “asking for trouble” from German
counterattacks by mines, trench-mortars, bombing sorties, poison-gas,
flame-throwers, and other forms of frightfulness which made a dirty mess
of flesh and blood, without definite result on either side beyond piling
up the lists of death.
“It keeps up the fighting spirit of the men,” said the generals. “We
must maintain an aggressive policy.”
They searched their trench maps for good spots where another “small
operation” might be organized. There was a competition among the
corps and divisional generals as to the highest number of raids, mine
explosions, trench-grabbings undertaken by their men.
“My corps,” one old general told me over a cup of tea in his
headquarters mess, “beats the record for raids.” His casualties also
beat the record, and many of his officers and men called him, just
bluntly and simply, “Our old murderer.” They disliked the necessity of
dying so that he might add one more raid to his heroic competition with
the corps commander of the sector on the left. When they waited for the
explosion of a mine which afterward they had to “rush” in a race with
the German bombing-parties, some of them saw no sense in the proceeding,
but only the likelihood of having legs and arms torn off by German
stick-bombs or shells. “What's the good of it?” they asked, and could
find no answer except the satisfaction of an old man listening to the
distant roar of the new tumult by which he had “raised hell” again.