There was the illusion of victory on that first day of the Somme
battles, on the right of the line by Fricourt, and it was not until a
day or two later that certain awful rumors I had heard from wounded men
and officers who had attacked on the left up by Gommecourt, Thiepval,
and Serre were confirmed by certain knowledge of tragic disaster on that
side of the battle-line.
The illusion of victory, with all the price and pain of it, came to me
when I saw the German rockets rising beyond the villages of Mametz and
Montauban and our barrage fire lifting to a range beyond the first lines
of German trenches, and our support troops moving forward in masses to
captured ground. We had broken through! By the heroic assault of our
English and Scottish troops. West Yorks, Yorks and Lancs, Lincolns,
Durhams, Northumberland Fusiliers, Norfolks and Berkshires, Liverpools,
Manchesters, Gordons, and Royal Scots, all those splendid men I had
seen marching to their lines. We had smashed through the ramparts of the
German fortress, through that maze of earthworks and tunnels which had
appalled me when I saw them on the maps, and over which I had gazed
from time to time from our front-line trenches when those places seemed
impregnable. I saw crowds of prisoners coming back under escort, fifteen
hundred had been counted in the first day, and they had the look of a
defeated army. Our lightly wounded men, thousands of them, were shouting
and laughing as they came down behind the lines, wearing German caps and
helmets. From Amiens civilians straggled out along the roads as far as
they were allowed by military police, and waved hands and cheered those
boys of ours. “Vive l'Angleterre!” cried old men, raising their hats.
Old women wept at the sight of those gay wounded, the lightly touched,
glad of escape, rejoicing in their luck and in the glory of life which
was theirs still and cried out to them with shrill words of praise and
exultation.
“Nous les aurons les sales Boches! Ah, ils sont foutus, ces bandits!
C'est la victoire, grace a vous, petits soldats anglais!”
Victory! The spirit of victory in the hearts of fighting men, and of
women excited by the sight of those bandaged heads, those bare, brawny
arms splashed with blood, those laughing heroes.
It looked like victory, in those days, as war correspondents, we were
not so expert in balancing the profit and loss as afterward we became.
When I went into Fricourt on the third day of battle, after the last
Germans, who had clung on to its ruins, had been cleared out by the
Yorkshires and Lincolns of the 21st Division, that division which had
been so humiliated at Loos and now was wonderful in courage, and when
the Manchesters and Gordons of the 30th Division had captured Montauban
and repulsed fierce counter-attacks.
It looked like victory, because of the German dead that lay there in
their battered trenches and the filth and stench of death over all that
mangled ground, and the enormous destruction wrought by our guns, and
the fury of fire which we were still pouring over the enemy's lines from
batteries which had moved forward.
I went down flights of steps into German dugouts, astonished by their
depth and strength. Our men did not build like this. This German
industry was a rebuke to us, yet we had captured their work and the
dead bodies of their laborers lay in those dark caverns, killed by our
bombers, who had flung down handgrenades. I drew back from those fat
corpses. They looked monstrous, lying there crumpled up, amid a foul
litter of clothes, stickbombs, old boots, and bottles. Groups of dead
lay in ditches which had once been trenches, flung into chaos by that
bombardment I had seen. They had been bayoneted. I remember one man, an
elderly fellow sitting up with his back to a bit of earth with his hands
half raised. He was smiling a little, though he had been stabbed through
the belly and was stone dead. Victory! some of the German dead were
young boys, too young to be killed for old men's crimes, and others
might have been old or young. One could not tell, because they had no
faces, and were just masses of raw flesh in rags and uniforms. Legs and
arms lay separate, without any bodies thereabouts.
Outside Montauban there was a heap of our own dead. Young Gordons and
Manchesters of the 30th Division, they had been caught by blasts of
machinegun fire, but our dead seemed scarce in the places where I
walked.
Victory? Well, we had gained some ground, and many prisoners, and here
and there some guns. But as I stood by Montauban I saw that our line
was a sharp salient looped round Mametz village and then dipping sharply
southward to Fricourt. O God! had we only made another salient after all
that monstrous effort? To the left there was fury at La Boisselle, where
a few broken trees stood black on the skyline on a chalky ridge. Storms
of German shrapnel were bursting there, and machineguns were firing in
spasms. In Contalmaison, round a chateau which stood high above ruined
houses, shells were bursting with thunderclaps, our shells. German
gunners in invisible batteries were sweeping our lines with barrage
fire, it roamed up and down this side of Montauban Wood, just ahead
of me, and now and then shells smashed among the houses and barns of
Fricourt, and over Mametz there was suddenly a hurricane of “hate.” Our
men were working like ants in those muck heaps, a battalion moved up
toward Boisselle. From a ridge above Fricourt, where once I had seen a
tall crucifix between two trees, which our men called the “Poodles,” a
body of men came down and shrapnel burst among them and they fell
and disappeared in tall grass. Stretcher bearers came slowly through
Fricourt village with living burdens. Some of them were German soldiers
carrying our wounded and their own. Walking wounded hobbled slowly with
their arms round each other's shoulders, Germans and English together.
A boy in a steel hat stopped me and held up a bloody hand. “A bit of
luck!” he said. “I'm off, after eighteen months of it.”
German prisoners came down with a few English soldiers as their escort.
I saw distant groups of them, and a shell smashed into one group and
scattered it. The living ran, leaving their dead. Ambulances driven by
daring fellows drove to the far edge of Fricourt, not a healthy place,
and loaded up with wounded from a dressing station in a tunnel there.
It was a wonderful picture of war in all its filth and shambles. But was
it Victory? I knew then that it was only a breach in the German bastion,
and that on the left, Gommecourt way, there had been black tragedy.