The Hohenzollern redoubt, near Fosse 8, captured by the 9th Scottish
Division in the battle of Loos, could not be held then under
concentrated gun-fire from German batteries, and the Scots, and the
Guards who followed them, after heavy losses, could only cling on to
part of a communication trench (on the southeast side of the earthworks)
nicknamed “Big Willie,” near another trench called “Little Willie.” Our
enemies forced their way back into some of their old trenches in this
outpost beyond their main lines, and in spite of the chaos produced by
our shell-fire built up new parapets and sand-bag barricades, flung out
barbed wire, and dug themselves into this graveyard where their dead and
ours were strewn.
Perhaps there was some reason why our generals should covet possession
of the Hohenzollern redoubt, some good military reason beyond the spell
of a high-sounding name. I went up there one day when it was partly ours
and stared at its rigid waves of mine-craters and trench parapets and
upheaved chalk, dazzling white under a blue sky, and failed to see any
beauty in the spot, or any value in it--so close to the German lines
that one could not cough for fear of losing one's head. It seemed to me
a place not to gain and not to hold. If I had been a general (appalling
thought!) I should have said: “Let the enemy have that little hell of
his. Let men live there among half-buried bodies and crawling lice, and
the stench of rotting flesh. There is no good in it for us, and for him
will be an abomination, dreaded by his men.”
But our generals desired it. They hated to think that the enemy should
have crawled back to it after our men had been there. They decided to
“bite it off,” that blunt nose which was thrust forward to our line.
It was an operation that would be good to report in the official
communique. Its capture would, no doubt, increase the morale of our men
after their dead had been buried and their wounded patched up and their
losses forgotten.
It was to the 46th Midland Division that the order of assault was
given on October 13th, and into the trenches went the lace-makers of
Nottingham, and the potters of the Five Towns, and the boot-makers of
Leicester, North Staffordshires, and Robin Hoods and Sherwood Foresters,
on the night of the 12th.
On the following morning our artillery concentrated a tremendous fire
upon the redoubt, followed at 1 P.M. by volumes of smoke and gas. The
chief features on this part of the German line were, on the right, a
group of colliers' houses known as the Corons de Pekin, and a slag heap
known as the Dump, to the northeast of that bigger dump called Fosse
8, and on the left another group of cottages, and another black hillock
farther to the right of the Fosse. These positions were in advance of
the Hohenzollern redoubt which our troops were to attack.
It was not an easy task. It was hellish. Intense as our artillery
fire had been, it failed to destroy the enemy's barbed wire and front
trenches sufficiently to clear the way, and the Germans were still
working their machine-guns when the fuses were lengthened, the fire
lifted, and the gas-clouds rolled away.
I saw that bombardment on the morning of Wednesday, October 13th, and
the beginning of the attack from a slag heap close to some of our heavy
guns. It was a fine, clear day, and some of the French miners living
round the pit-heads on our side of the battle line climbed up iron
ladders and coal heaps, roused to a new interest in the spectacle of war
which had become a monotonous and familiar thing in their lives, because
the intensity of our gun-fire and the volumes of smoke-clouds, and a
certain strange, whitish vapor which was wafted from our lines toward
the enemy stirred their imagination, dulled by the daily din of guns, to
a sense of something beyond the usual flight of shells in their part of
the war zone.
“The English are attacking again!” was the message which brought
out these men still living among ruined cottages on the edge of
the slaughter-fields. They stared into the mist, where, beyond the
brightness of the autumn sun, men were about to fight and die. It was
the same scene that I had watched when I went up to the Loos redoubt in
the September battle--a flat, bare, black plain, crisscrossed with
the whitish earth of the trenches rising a little toward Loos and then
falling again so that in the village there only the Tower Bridge was
visible, with its steel girders glinting, high over the horizon line. To
the left the ruins of Hulluch fretted the low-lying clouds of smoke, and
beyond a huddle of broken houses far away was the town of Haisnes. Fosse
8 and the Hohenzollern redoubt were hummocks of earth faintly visible
through drifting clouds of thick, sluggish vapor.
On the edge of this battleground the fields were tawny under the golden
light of the autumn sun, and the broken towers of village churches, red
roofs shattered by shell-fire, trees stripped bare of all leaves before
the wind of autumn touched them, were painted in clear outlines against
the gray-blue of the sky.
Our guns had been invisible. Not one of all those batteries which were
massed over a wide stretch of country could be located before the battle
by a searching glass. But when the bombardment began it seemed as though
our shells came from every field and village for miles back, behind the
lines.
The glitter of those bursting shells stabbed through the smoke of
their explosion with little, twinkling flashes, like the sparkle of
innumerable mirrors heliographing messages of death. There was one
incessant roar rising and falling in waves of prodigious sound.
The whole line of battle was in a grayish murk, which obscured all
landmarks, so that even the Tower Bridge was but faintly visible.
Presently, when our artillery lifted, there were new clouds rising from
the ground and spreading upward in a great dense curtain of a fleecy
texture. They came from our smoke-shells, which were to mask our
infantry attack. Through them and beyond them rolled another wave of
cloud, a thinner, whiter vapor, which clung to the ground and then
curled forward to the enemy's lines.
“That's our gas!” said a voice on one of the slag heaps, amid a group of
observers--English and French officers.
“And the wind is dead right for it,” said another voice. “The Germans
will get a taste of it this time!”
Then there was silence, and some of those observers held their breath as
though that gas had caught their own throats and choked them a little.
They tried to pierce through that bar of cloud to see the drama behind
its curtain--men caught in those fumes, the terror-stricken flight
before its advance, the sudden cry of the enemy trapped in their
dugouts. Imagination leaped out, through invisibility, to the
realization of the things that were happening beyond.
From our place of observation there were brief glimpses of the human
element in this scene of impersonal powers and secret forces. Across
a stretch of flat ground beyond some of those zigzag lines of trenches
little black things were scurrying forward. They were not bunched
together in close groups, but scattered. Some of them seemed to
hesitate, and then to fall and lie where they fell, others hurrying on
until they disappeared in the drifting clouds.
It was the foremost line of our infantry attack, led by the bombers.
The Germans were firing tempests of shells. Some of them were curiously
colored, of a pinkish hue, or with orange-shaped puffs of vivid green.
They were poison-shells giving out noxious gases. All the chemistry of
death was poured out on both sides--and through it went the men of the
Midland Division.
The attack on the right was delivered by a brigade of Staffordshire men,
who advanced in four lines toward the Big Willie trench which formed the
southeast side of the Hohenzollern redoubt. The leading companies, who
were first over our own parapets, made a quick rush, half blinded by
the smoke and the gaseous vapors which filled the air, and were at once
received by a deadly fire from many machine-guns. It swept their ranks,
and men fell on all sides. Others ran on in little parties flung out in
extended order.
Young officers behaved with desperate gallantry, and as they fell
cheered their men on, while others ran forward shouting, followed by
numbers which dwindled at every yard, so that only a few reached the Big
Willie trench in the first assault.
A bombing-party of North Staffordshire men cleared thirty yards of the
trench by the rapidity with which they flung their hand-grenades at the
German bombers who endeavored to keep them out, and again and again they
kept at bay a tide of field-gray men, who swarmed up the communication
trenches, by a series of explosions which blew many of them to bits
as bomb after bomb was hurled into their mass. Other Germans followed,
flinging their own stick-bombs.
The Staffordshires did not yield until nearly every man was wounded and
many were killed. Even then they retreated yard by yard, still flinging
grenades almost with the rhythm of a sower who scatters his seed, each
motion of the hand and arm letting go one of those steel pomegranates
which burst with the noise of a high-explosive shell.
The survivors fell back to the other side of a barricade made in the Big
Willie trench by some of their men behind. Behind them again was another
barrier, in case the first should be rushed.
It seemed as if they might be rushed now, for the Germans were swarming
up Big Willie with strong bombing-parties, and would soon blast a way
through unless they were thrust beyond the range of hand-grenades. It
was a young lieutenant named Hawker, with some South Staffordshire men,
who went forward to meet this attack and kept the enemy back until four
o'clock in the afternoon, when only a few living men stood among the
dead and they had to fall back to the second barrier.
Darkness now crept over the battlefield and filled the trenches, and in
the darkness the wounded men were carried back to the rear, while those
who had escaped worked hard to strengthen their defenses by sand-bags
and earthworks, knowing that their only chance of life lay in fierce
industry.
Early next morning an attempt was made by other battalions to come to
the relief of those who held on behind those barriers in Big Willie
trench. They were Nottingham men--Robin Hoods and other Sherwood
lads--and they came across the open ground in two directions, attacking
the west as well as the east ends of the German communication trenches
which formed the face of the Hohenzollern redoubt.
They were supported by rifle grenade-fire, but their advance was met by
intense fire from artillery and machine-guns, so that many were blown
to bits or mangled or maimed, and none could reach their comrades in Big
Willie trench.
While one brigade of the Midland men had been fighting like this on
the right, another brigade had been engaged on the left. It contained
Sherwood, Leicester, and Lincoln men, who, on the afternoon of October
13th, went forward to the assault with very desperate endeavor.
Advancing in four lines, the leading companies were successful in
reaching the Hohenzollern redoubt, smashed through the barbed wire, part
of which was uncut, and reached the Fosse trench which forms the north
base of the salient.
Machine-gun fire cut down the first two lines severely and the two
remaining lines were heavily shelled by German artillery. It was an hour
in which the courage of those men was agonized. They were exposed on
naked ground swept by bullets, the atmosphere was heavy with gas and
smoke; all the abomination of battle--he moaning of the wounded, the
last cries of the dying, the death-crawl of stricken beings holding
their broken limbs and their entrails--was around them, and in front
a hidden enemy with unlimited supplies of ammunition and a better
position.
The Robin Hoods and the men of Lincoln and Leicestershire were sustained
in that shambles by the spirit that had come to them through the old
yeoman stock in which their traditions were rooted, and those who had
not fallen went forward, past their wounded comrades, past these poor,
bloody, moaning men, to the German trenches behind the redoubt.
At 2.15 P.M. some Monmouth men came up in support, and while their
bombers were at work some of the Lincolns pushed up with a machine-gun
to a point within sixty yards from the Fosse trench, where they stayed
till dark, and then were forced to fall back.
At this time parties of bombers were trying to force their way up
the Little Willie trench on the extreme left of the redoubt, and here
ghastly fighting took place. Some of the Leicesters made a dash three
hundred yards up the trench, but were beaten back by overpowering
numbers of German bombers and bayonet-men, and again and again other
Midland lads went up that alleyway of death, flinging their grenades
until they fell or until few comrades were left to support them as they
stood among their dead and dying.
Single men held on, throwing and throwing, until there was no strength
in their arms to hurl another bomb, or until death came to them. Yet
the business went on through the darkness of the afternoon, and into
the deeper darkness of the night, lit luridly at moments by the white
illumination of German flares and by the flash of bursting shells.
Isolated machine-guns in uncaptured parts of the redoubt still beat a
tattoo like the ruffle of war-drums, and from behind the barriers in
the Big Willie trench came the sharp crack of English rifles, and dull
explosions of other bombs flung by other Englishmen very hard pressed
that night.
In the outer trenches, at the nose of the salient, fresh companies of
Sherwood lads were feeling their way along, mixed up confusedly with
comrades from other companies, wounded or spent with fighting, but
determined to hold the ground they had won.
Some of the Robin Hoods up Little Willie trench were holding out
desperately and almost at the last gasp, when they were relieved by
other Sherwoods, and it was here that a young officer named Vickers was
found in the way that won him his V.C.
Charles Geoffrey Vickers stood there for hours against a horde of men
eager for his death, eager to get at the men behind him. But they could
not approach. He and his fellow-bombers kept twenty yards or more clear
before them, and any man who flung himself forward was the target of a
hand-grenade.
From front and from flank German bombs came whizzing, falling short
sometimes, with a blasting roar that tore down lumps of trench, and
sometimes falling very close--close enough to kill.
Vickers saw some of his best men fall, but he kept the barrier still
intact by bombing and bombing.
When many of his comrades were dead or wounded, he wondered how long the
barrier would last, and gave orders for another to be built behind him,
so that when the rush came it would be stopped behind him--and over him.
Men worked at that barricade, piling up sand-bags, and as it was built
that young lieutenant knew that his own retreat was being cut off and
that he was being coffined in that narrow space. Two other men were with
him--I never learned their names--and they were hardly enough to hand up
bombs as quickly as he wished to throw them.
Away there up the trench the Germans were waiting for a pounce. Though
wounded so that he felt faint and giddy, he called out for more bombs.
“More!” he said, “More!” and his hand was like a machine reaching out
and throwing.
Rescue came at last, and the wounded officer was hauled over the
barricade which he had ordered to be built behind him, closing up his
way of escape.
All through October 14th the Midland men of the 46th Division held on to
their ground, and some of the Sherwoods made a new attack, clearing the
enemy out of the east portion of the redoubt.
It was lucky that it coincided with a counter-attack made by the enemy
at a different point, because it relieved the pressure there. Bombing
duels continued hour after hour, and human nature could hardly have
endured so long a struggle without fatigue beyond the strength of men.
So it seems; yet when a brigade of Guards came up on the night of
October 15th the enemy attacked along the whole line of redoubts,
and the Midland men, who were just about to leave the trenches, found
themselves engaged in a new action. They had to fight again before they
could go, and they fought like demons or demigods for their right of way
and home, and bombed the enemy back to his holes in the ground.
So ended the assault on the Hohenzollern by the Midland men of England,
whose division, years later, helped to break the Hindenburg line along
the great canal south of St.-Quentin.
What good came of it mortal men cannot say, unless the generals who
planned it hold the secret. It cost a heavy price in life and agony. It
demonstrated the fighting spirit of many English boys who did the best
they could, with the rage, and fear, and madness of great courage,
before they died or fell, and it left some living men, and others who
relieved them in Big Willie and Little Willie trenches, so close to the
enemy that one could hear them cough, or swear in guttural whispers.
And through the winter of '15, and the years that followed, the
Hohenzollern redoubt became another Hooge, as horrible as Hooge, as
deadly, as damnable in its filthy perils, where men of English blood,
and Irish, and Scottish, took their turn, and hated it, and counted
themselves lucky if they escaped from its prison-house, whose walls
stank of new and ancient death.
* * *
Among those who took their turn in the hell of the Hohenzollern were
the men of the 12th Division, New Army men, and all of the old stock and
spirit of England, bred in the shires of Norfolk and Suffolk, Gloucester
and Bedford, and in Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Middlesex (which meant
London), as the names of their battalions told. In September they
relieved the Guards and cavalry at Loos; in December they moved on to
Givenchy, and in February they began a long spell at the Hohenzollern.
It was there the English battalions learned the worst things of war and
showed the quality of English courage.
A man of Kent, named Corporal Cotter, of the Buffs, was marvelous in
spirit, stronger than the flesh.
On the night of March 6th an attack was made by his company along an
enemy trench, but his own bombing--party was cut off, owing to heavy
casualties in the center of the attack. Things looked serious and Cotter
went back under heavy fire to report and bring up more bombs.
On the return journey his right leg was blown off close below the knee
and he was wounded in both arms. By a kind of miracle--the miracle of
human courage--he did not drop down and die in the mud of the trench,
mud so deep that unwounded men found it hard to walk--but made his way
along fifty yards of trench toward the crater where his comrades were
hard pressed. He came up to Lance-corporal Newman, who was bombing
with his sector to the right of the position. Cotter called to him and
directed him to bomb six feet toward where help was most needed, and
worked his way forward to the crater where the Germans had developed a
violent counter-attack.
Men fell rapidly under the enemy's bomb-fire, but Cotter, with only
one leg, and bleeding from both arms, steadied his comrades, who were
beginning to have the wind-up, as they say, issued orders, controlled
the fire, and then altered dispositions to meet the attack. It was
repulsed after two hours' fighting, and only then did Cotter allow
his wounds to be bandaged. From the dug--out where he lay while the
bombardment still continued he called out cheery words to the men, until
he was carried down, fourteen hours later. He received the V. C., but
died of his wounds.
Officers and men vied with one another, yet not for honor or reward,
round these craters of the Hohenzollern, and in the mud, and the fumes
of shells, and rain-swept darkness, and all the black horror of such a
time and place, sometimes in groups and sometimes quite alone, did acts
of supreme valor. When all the men in one of these infernal craters were
dead or wounded Lieut. Lea Smith, of the Buffs, ran forward with a Lewis
gun, helped by Private Bradley, and served it during a fierce attack by
German bombers until it jammed.
Then he left the gun and took to bombing, and that single figure of his,
flinging grenades like an overarm bowler, kept the enemy at bay until
reinforcements reached him.
Another officer of the Buff's--by name Smeltzer--withdrew his platoon
under heavy fire, and, although he was wounded, fought his way back
slowly to prevent the enemy from following up. The men were proud of
his gallantry, but when he was asked what he had done he could think of
nothing except that “when the Boches began shelling I got into a dugout,
and when they stopped I came out again.”
There were many men like that who did amazing things and, in the English
way, said nothing of them. Of that modesty was Capt. Augrere Dawson, of
the West Kents, who did not bother much about a bullet he met on his way
to a crater, though it traveled through his chest to his shoulder-blade.
He had it dressed, and then went back to lead his men, and remained with
them until the German night attack was repulsed. He was again wounded,
this time in the thigh, but did not trouble the stretcher-men (they
had a lot to do on the night of March 18th and 19th), and trudged back
alone.
It was valor that was paid for by flesh and blood. The honors gained by
the 12th Division in a few months of trench warfare--one V. C.,
sixteen D. S. C.'s, forty-five Military Crosses, thirty-four Military
Medals--were won by the loss in casualties of more than fourteen
thousand men. That is to say, the losses of their division in that time,
made up by new drafts, was 100 per cent.; and the Hohenzollern took the
highest toll of life and limbs.
V
I heard no carols in the trenches on Christmas Eve in 1915, but
afterward, when I sat with a pint of water in each of my top-boots,
among a company of men who were wet to the knees and slathered with
moist mud, a friend of mine raised his hand and said, “Listen!”
Through the open door came the music of a mouth--organ, and it was
playing an old tune:
God rest ye, merry gentlemen. Let nothing you dismay, For Jesus Christ,
our Saviour, Was born on Christmas Day.
Outside the wind was howling across Flanders with a doleful whine,
rising now and then into a savage violence which rattled the
window-panes, and beyond the booming of its lower notes was the faint,
dull rumble of distant guns.
“Christmas Eve!” said an officer. “Nineteen hundred and fifteen years
ago... and now--this!”
He sighed heavily, and a few moments later told a funny story, which was
followed by loud laughter. And so it was, I think, in every billet in
Flanders and in every dugout that Christmas Eve, where men thought of
the meaning of the day, with its message of peace and goodwill, and
contrasted it with the great, grim horror of the war, and spoke a few
words of perplexity; and then, after that quick sigh (how many comrades
had gone since last Christmas Day!), caught at a jest, and had the
courage of laughter. It was queer to find the spirit of Christmas, the
little tendernesses of the old tradition, the toys and trinkets of its
feast-day, in places where Death had been busy--and where the spirit of
evil lay in ambush!
So it was when I went through Armentieres within easy range of
the enemy's guns. Already six hundred civilians--mostly women and
children--had been killed there. But, still, other women were chatting
together through broken window-panes, and children were staring into
little shops (only a few yards away from broken roofs and shell-broken
walls) where Christmas toys were on sale.
A wizened boy, in a pair of soldier's boots--a French Hop o' My Thumb in
the giant's boots--was gazing wistfully at some tin soldiers, and inside
the shop a real soldier, not a bit like the tin one, was buying some
Christmas cards worked by a French artist in colored wools for the
benefit of English Tommies, with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers
read their legends and laughed at them: “My heart is to you.” “Good
luck.” “To the success!” “Remind France.”
The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked
up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was
spending it.
“The people at home will be glad of 'em,” he said. “I s'pose one can't
forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain't the same thing out here.”
Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and
found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their
batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains
of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars
lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-slipping in a
wild way through boggy tracks, supply--columns churning up deep ruts.
And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come
that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with
his white beard must have lifted his red gown high--waist-high--when he
waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and
he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in
sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet
of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags
to save a headlong plunge into icy water.
And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of
youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open
spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid
those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a
row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy's
lines.
But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a
hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.
There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery
of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I
felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, “It's
best to get a move on here,” and, “This road is swept by machine--gun
fire,” and, “I don't like this corner; it's quite unhealthy.”
But that absurd idea--of Santa Claus in the trenches--came into my
head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a
whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if they caught the
glint of his red cloak.
Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small
group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.
“Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?” asked a lad, grinning
down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.
“Likely, ain't it?” said the other boy. “Father Christmas would be a
bloody fool to come out here... They'd be full of water in the morning.”
“You'll get some presents,” I said. “They haven't forgotten you at
home.”
At that word “home” the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes
for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he
was a girlish-looking fellow--perhaps that was why his comrades were
chaffing him--and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back
to some village in Yorkshire.
Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas
with contemptuous irony.
“A happy Christmas!” said one of them, with a laugh. “Plenty of crackers
about this year! Tom Smith ain't in it.”
“And I hope we're going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,”
said another. “They deserve it, I don't think!”
“No truce this year?” I asked.
“A truce?... We're not going to allow any monkey--tricks on the
parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We've got to
get on with the war. That's my motto.”
Other men said: “We wouldn't mind a holiday. We're fed up to the neck
with all this muck.”
The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol
I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both
sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the
keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit
of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were
bursting, and behind the lines our “heavies” were busily at work firing
at long range.
“On earth peace, good-will toward men.”
The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that
long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines,
and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells
which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of
great guns.
Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and
the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the
splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.