I
All that had gone before was but a preparation for what now was to come.
Until July 1 of 1916 the British armies were only getting ready for the
big battles which were being planned for them by something greater than
generalship--by the fate which decides the doom of men.
The first battles by the Old Contemptibles, down from Mons and up by
Ypres, were defensive actions of rear--guards holding the enemy back
by a thin wall of living flesh, while behind the New Armies of our race
were being raised.
The battles of Festubert, Neuve Chapelle, Loos, and all minor attacks
which led to little salients, were but experimental adventures in the
science of slaughter, badly bungled in our laboratories. They had no
meaning apart from providing those mistakes by which men learn; ghastly
mistakes, burning more than the fingers of life's children. They were
only diversions of impatience in the monotonous routine of trench
warfare by which our men strengthened the mud walls of their School
of Courage, so that the new boys already coming out might learn their
lessons without more grievous interruption than came from the daily
visits of that Intruder to whom the fees were paid. In those two years
it was France which fought the greatest battles, flinging her sons
against the enemy's ramparts in desperate, vain attempts to breach them.
At Verdun, in the months that followed the first month of '16, it was
France which sustained the full weight of the German offensive on the
western front and broke its human waves, until they were spent in a sea
of blood, above which the French poilus, the “hairy ones,” stood panting
and haggard, on their death-strewn rocks. The Germans had failed to
deal a fatal blow at the heart of France. France held her head up
still, bleeding from many wounds, but defiant still; and the German
High Command, aghast at their own losses--six hundred thousand
casualties--already conscious, icily, of a dwindling man-power which one
day would be cut off at its source, rearranged their order of battle and
shifted the balance of their weight eastward, to smash Russia. Somehow
or other they must smash a way out by sledge-hammer blows, left and
right, west and east, from that ring of nations which girdled them. On
the west they would stand now on the defensive, fairly sure of their
strength, but well aware that it would be tried to the utmost by that
enemy which, at the back of their brains (at the back of the narrow
brains of those bald-headed vultures on the German General Staff), they
most feared as their future peril--England. They had been fools to let
the British armies grow up and wax so strong. It was the folly of the
madness by which they had flung the gauntlet down to the souls of proud
peoples arrayed against them.
Our armies were now strong and trained and ready. We had about six
hundred thousand bayonet-men in France and Flanders and in England,
immense reserves to fill up the gaps that would be made in their ranks
before the summer foliage turned to russet tints.
Our power in artillery had grown amazingly since the beginning of the
year. Every month I had seen many new batteries arrive, with clean
harness and yellow straps, and young gunners who were quick to get
their targets. We were strong in “heavies,” twelve-inchers, 9.2's,
eight-inchers, 4.2's, mostly howitzers, with the long-muzzled
sixty-pounders terrible in their long range and destructiveness. Our
aircraft had grown fast, squadron upon squadron, and our aviators had
been trained in the school of General Trenchard, who sent them out over
the German lines to learn how to fight, and how to scout, and how to die
like little gentlemen.
For a time our flying-men had gone out on old-fashioned
“buses”--primitive machines which were an easy prey to the fast-flying
Fokkers who waited for them behind a screen of cloud and then “stooped”
on them like hawks sure of their prey. But to the airdrome near St.-Omer
came later models, out of date a few weeks after their delivery,
replaced by still more powerful types more perfectly equipped for
fighting. Our knights-errant of the air were challenging the German
champions on equal terms, and beating them back from the lines unless
they flew in clusters. There were times when our flying-men gained an
absolute supremacy by greater daring--there was nothing they did not
dare--and by equal skill. As a caution, not wasting their strength in
unequal contests. It was a sound policy, and enabled them to come back
again in force and hold the field for a time by powerful concentrations.
But in the battles of the Somme our airmen, at a heavy cost of life,
kept the enemy down a while and blinded his eyes.
The planting of new airdromes between Albert and Amiens, the long
trail down the roads of lorries packed with wings and the furniture of
aircraft factories, gave the hint, to those who had eyes to see, that in
this direction a merry hell was being prepared.
There were plain signs of massacre at hand all the way from the coast to
the lines. At Etaples and other places near Boulogne hospital huts and
tents were growing like mushrooms in the night. From casualty clearing
stations near the front the wounded--the human wreckage of routine
warfare--were being evacuated “in a hurry” to the base, and from the
base to England. They were to be cleared out of the way so that all the
wards might be empty for a new population of broken men, in enormous
numbers. I went down to see this clearance, this tidying up. There was a
sinister suggestion in the solitude that was being made for a multitude
that was coming.
“We shall be very busy,” said the doctors.
“We must get all the rest we can now,” said the nurses.
“In a little while every bed will be filled,” said the matrons.
Outside one hut, with the sun on their faces, were four wounded Germans,
Wurtemburgers and Bavarians, too ill to move just then. Each of them had
lost a leg under the surgeon's knife. They were eating strawberries, and
seemed at peace. I spoke to one of them.
“Wie befinden sie sich?”
“Ganz wohl; wir sind zufrieden mit unsere behandlung.”
I passed through the shell-shock wards and a yard where the
“shell-shocks” sat about, dumb, or making queer, foolish noises, or
staring with a look of animal fear in their eyes. From a padded room
came a sound of singing. Some idiot of war was singing between bursts of
laughter. It all seemed so funny to him, that war, so mad!
“We are clearing them out,” said the medical officer. “There will be
many more soon.”
How soon? That was a question nobody could answer. It was the only
secret, and even that was known in London, where little ladies in
society were naming the date, “in confidence,” to men who were directly
concerned with it--having, as they knew, only a few more weeks, or days,
of certain life. But I believe there were not many officers who would
have surrendered deliberately all share in “The Great Push.” In spite
of all the horror which these young officers knew it would involve,
they had to be “in it” and could not endure the thought that all their
friends and all their men should be there while they were “out of it.”
A decent excuse for the safer side of it--yes. A staff job, the
Intelligence branch, any post behind the actual shambles--and thank God
for the luck. But not an absolute shirk.
Tents were being pitched in many camps of the Somme, rows and rows of
bell tents and pavilions stained to a reddish brown. Small cities
of them were growing up on the right of the road between Amiens and
Albert--at Dernancourt and Daours and Vaux-sous-Corbie. I thought they
might be for troops in reserve until I saw large flags hoisted to tall
staffs and men of the R.A.M.C. busy painting signs on large sheets
stretched out on the grass. It was always the same sign--the Sign of the
Cross that was Red.
There was a vast traffic of lorries on the roads, and trains were
traveling on light railways day and night to railroads just beyond
shell-range. What was all the weight they carried? No need to ask.
The “dumps” were being filled, piled up, with row upon row of shells,
covered by tarpaulin or brushwood when they were all stacked. Enormous
shells, some of them, like gigantic pigs without legs. Those were for
the fifteen-inchers, or the 9.2's. There was enough high-explosive force
littered along those roads above the Somme to blow cities off the map.
“It does one good to see,” said a cheery fellow. “The people at home
have been putting their backs into it. Thousands of girls have been
packing those things. Well done, Munitions!”
I could take no joy in the sight, only a grim kind of satisfaction that
at least when our men attacked they would have a power of artillery
behind them. It might help them to smash through to a finish, if that
were the only way to end this long-drawn suicide of nations.
My friend was shocked when I said:
“Curse all munitions!”