I have told how, before “The Big Push,” as we called the beginning of
these battles, little towns of tents were built under the sign of the
Red Cross. For a time they were inhabited only by medical officers,
nurses, and orderlies, busily getting ready for a sudden invasion,
and spending their surplus energy, which seemed inexhaustible, on the
decoration of their camps by chalk-lined paths, red crosses painted on
canvas or built up in red and white chalk on leveled earth, and flowers
planted outside the tents--all very pretty and picturesque in the
sunshine and the breezes over the valley of the Somme.
On the morning of battle the doctors, nurses, and orderlies waited for
their patients and said, “Now we shan't be long!” They were merry and
bright with that wonderful cheerfulness which enabled them to face
the tragedy of mangled manhood without horror, and almost, it seemed,
without pity, because it was their work, and they were there to heal
what might be healed. It was with a rush that their first cases came,
and the M.O.'s whistled and said, “Ye gods! how many more?” Many more.
The tide did not slacken. It became a spate brought down by waves of
ambulances. Three thousand wounded came to Daours on the Somme, three
thousand to Corbie, thousands to Dernancourt, Heilly, Puchevillers,
Toutencourt, and many other “clearing stations.”
At Daours the tents were filled to overflowing, until there was no more
room. The wounded were laid down on the grass to wait their turn for
the surgeon's knife. Some of them crawled over to haycocks and covered
themselves with hay and went to sleep, as I saw them sleeping there,
like dead men. Here and there shell-shocked boys sat weeping or moaning,
and shaking with an ague. Most of the wounded were quiet and did not
give any groan or moan. The lightly wounded sat in groups, telling their
adventures, cursing the German machine-gunners. Young officers spoke in
a different way, and with that sporting spirit which they had learned in
public schools praised their enemy.
“The machine-gunners are wonderful fellows--topping. Fight until they're
killed. They gave us hell.”
Each man among those thousands of wounded had escaped death a dozen
times or more by the merest flukes of luck. It was this luck of theirs
which they hugged with a kind of laughing excitement.
“It's a marvel I'm here! That shell burst all round me. Killed six of
my pals. I've got through with a blighty wound. No bones broken... God!
What luck!”
The death of other men did not grieve them. They could not waste this
sense of luck in pity. The escape of their own individuality, this
possession of life, was a glorious thought. They were alive! What luck!
What luck!
We called the hospital at Corbie the “Butcher's Shop.” It was in a
pretty spot in that little town with a big church whose tall white
towers looked down a broad sweep of the Somme, so that for miles they
were a landmark behind the battlefields. Behind the lines during those
first battles, but later, in 1918, when the enemy came nearly to the
gates of Amiens, a stronghold of the Australians, who garrisoned it and
sniped pigeons for their pots off the top of the towers, and took no
great notice of “whizz-bangs” which broke through the roofs of cottages
and barns. It was a safe, snug place in July of '16, but that Butcher's
Shop at a corner of the square was not a pretty spot. After a visit
there I had to wipe cold sweat from my forehead, and found myself
trembling in a queer way. It was the medical officer--a colonel--who
called it that name. “This is our Butcher's Shop,” he said, cheerily.
“Come and have a look at my cases. They're the worst possible; stomach
wounds, compound fractures, and all that. We lop off limbs here all day
long, and all night. You've no idea!”
I had no idea, but I did not wish to see its reality. The M.O. could not
understand my reluctance to see his show. He put it down to my desire to
save his time--and explained that he was going the rounds and would take
it as a favor if I would walk with him. I yielded weakly, and cursed
myself for not taking to flight. Yet, I argued, what men are brave
enough to suffer I ought to have the courage to see... I saw and
sickened.
These were the victims of “Victory” and the red fruit of war's
harvest-fields. A new batch of “cases” had just arrived. More were
being brought in on stretchers. They were laid down in rows on the
floor-boards. The colonel bent down to some of them and drew their
blankets back, and now and then felt a man's pulse. Most of them were
unconscious, breathing with the hard snuffle of dying men. Their skin
was already darkening to the death-tint, which is not white. They were
all plastered with a gray clay and this mud on their faces was, in some
cases, mixed with thick clots of blood, making a hard incrustation from
scalp to chin.
“That fellow won't last long,” said the M. O., rising from a stretcher.
“Hardly a heart-beat left in him. Sure to die on the operating-table
if he gets as far as that... Step back against the wall a minute, will
you?”
We flattened ourselves against the passage wall while ambulance-men
brought in a line of stretchers. No sound came from most of those
bundles under the blankets, but from one came a long, agonizing wail,
the cry of an animal in torture.
“Come through the wards,” said the colonel. “They're pretty bright,
though we could do with more space and light.”
In one long, narrow room there were about thirty beds, and in each bed
lay a young British soldier, or part of a young British soldier. There
was not much left of one of them. Both his legs had been amputated to
the thigh, and both his arms to the shoulder-blades.
“Remarkable man, that,” said the colonel. “Simply refuses to die. His
vitality is so tremendous that it is putting up a terrific fight against
mortality... There's another case of the same kind; one leg gone and
the other going, and one arm. Deliberate refusal to give in. 'You're
not going to kill me, doctor,' he said. 'I'm going to stick it through.'
What spirit, eh?”
I spoke to that man. He was quite conscious, with bright eyes. His right
leg was uncovered, and supported on a board hung from the ceiling. Its
flesh was like that of a chicken badly carved-white, flabby, and in
tatters. He thought I was a surgeon, and spoke to me pleadingly:
“I guess you can save that leg, sir. It's doing fine. I should hate to
lose it.”
I murmured something about a chance for it, and the M. O. broke in
cheerfully.
“You won't lose it if I can help it. How's your pulse? Oh, not bad. Keep
cheerful and we'll pull you through.” The man smiled gallantly.
“Bound to come off,” said the doctor as we passed to another bed. “Gas
gangrene. That's the thing that does us down.”
In bed after bed I saw men of ours, very young men, who had been lopped
of limbs a few hours ago or a few minutes, some of them unconscious,
some of them strangely and terribly conscious, with a look in their eyes
as though staring at the death which sat near to them, and edged nearer.
“Yes,” said the M. O., “they look bad, some of 'em, but youth is on
their side. I dare say seventy-five per cent. will get through. If it
wasn't for gas gangrene--”
He jerked his head to a boy sitting up in bed, smiling at the nurse who
felt his pulse.
“Looks fairly fit after the knife, doesn't he? But we shall have to cut
higher up. The gas again. I'm afraid he'll be dead before to-morrow.
Come into the operating-theater. It's very well equipped.”
I refused that invitation. I walked stiffly out of the Butcher's Shop
of Corbie past the man who had lost both arms and both legs, that vital
trunk, past rows of men lying under blankets, past a stench of mud and
blood and anesthetics, to the fresh air of the gateway, where a column
of ambulances had just arrived with a new harvest from the fields of the
Somme.
“Come in again, any time!” shouted out the cheery colonel, waving his
hand.
I never went again, though I saw many other Butcher's Shops in the years
that followed, where there was a great carving of human flesh which
was of our boyhood, while the old men directed their sacrifice, and the
profiteers grew rich, and the fires of hate were stoked up at patriotic
banquets and in editorial chairs.
X
The failure on the left hardly balanced by the partial success on the
right caused a sudden pause in the operations, camouflaged by small
attacks on minor positions around and above Fricourt and Mametz. The
Lincolns and others went over to Fricourt Wood and routed out German
machine-gunners. The West Yorks attacked the sunken road at Fricourt.
The Dorsets, Manchesters, Highland Light Infantry, Lancashire Fusiliers,
and Borderers of the 32d Division were in possession of La Boisselle and
clearing out communication trenches to which the Germans were hanging
on with desperate valor. The 21st Division--Northumberland Fusiliers,
Durhams, Yorkshires-were making a flanking attack on Contalmaison,
but weakened after their heavy losses on the first day of battle. The
fighting for a time was local, in small copses--Lozenge Wood, Peak
Wood, Caterpillar Wood, Acid Drop Copse--where English and German troops
fought ferociously for yards of ground, hummocks of earth, ditches.
G. H. Q. had been shocked by the disaster on the left and the failure of
all the big hopes they had held for a break-through on both sides of
the German positions. Rumors came to us that the Commander-in-Chief had
decided to restrict future operations to minor actions for strengthening
the line and to abandon the great offensive. It was believed by officers
I met that Sir Henry Rawlinson was arguing, persuading, in favor of
continued assaults on the grand scale.
Whatever division of opinion existed in the High Command I do not know;
it was visible to all of us that for some days there were uncertainty
of direction, hesitation, conflicting orders. On July 7th the 17th
Division, under General Pilcher, attacked Contalmaison, and a whole
battalion of the Prussian Guard hurried up from Valenciennes and, thrown
on to the battlefield without maps or guidance, walked into the barrage
which covered the advance of our men and were almost annihilated. But
although some bodies of our men entered Contalmaison, in an attack which
I was able to see, they were smashed out of it again by storms of fire
followed by masses of men who poured out from Mametz Wood. The Welsh
were attacking Mametz Wood.
They were handled, as Marbot said of his men in a Napoleonic battle,
“like turnips.” Battalion commanders received orders in direct conflict
with one another. Bodies of Welshmen were advanced, and then retired,
and left to lie nakedly without cover, under dreadful fire. The 17th
Division, under General Pilcher, did not attack at the expected time.
There was no co-ordination of divisions; no knowledge among battalion
officers of the strategy or tactics of a battle in which their men were
involved.
“Goodness knows what's happening,” said an officer I met near Mametz. He
had been waiting all night and half a day with a body of troops who had
expected to go forward, and were still hanging about under harassing
fire.
On July 9th Contalmaison was taken. I saw that attack very clearly, so
clearly that I could almost count the bricks in the old chateau set in
a little wood, and saw the left-hand tower knocked off by the direct
hit of a fifteen-inch shell. At four o'clock in the afternoon our guns
concentrated on the village, and under the cover of that fire our men
advanced on three sides of it, hemmed it in, and captured it with the
garrison of the 122d Bavarian Regiment, who had suffered the agonies of
hell inside its ruins. Now our men stayed in the ruins, and this time
German shells smashed into the chateau and the cottages and left nothing
but rubbish heaps of brick through which a few days later I went walking
with the smell of death in my nostrils. Our men were now being shelled
in that place.
Beyond La Boisselle, on the left of the Albert-Bapaume road, there had
been a village called Ovillers. It was no longer there. Our guns has
removed every trace of it, except as it lay in heaps of pounded brick.
The Germans had a network of trenches about it, and in their ditches and
their dugouts they fought like wolves. Our 12th Division was ordered
to drive them out--a division of English county troops, including the
Sussex, Essex, Bedfords, and Middlesex--and those country boys of ours
fought their way among communication trenches, burrowed into tunnels,
crouched below hummocks of earth and brick, and with bombs and bayonets
and broken rifles, and boulders of stone, and German stick-bombs, and
any weapon that would kill, gained yard by yard over the dead bodies
of the enemy, or by the capture of small batches of cornered men,
until after seventeen days of this one hundred and forty men of the
3rd Prussian Guard, the last of their garrison, without food or water,
raised a signal of surrender, and came out with their hands up. Ovillers
was a shambles, in a fight of primitive earth-men like human beasts. Yet
our men were not beast-like. They came out from those places--if they
had the luck to come out--apparently unchanged, without any mark of
the beast on them, and when they cleansed themselves of mud and filth,
boiled the lice out of their shirts, and assembled in a village street
behind the lines, they whistled, laughed, gossiped, as though nothing
had happened to their souls--though something had really happened, as
now we know.
It was not until July 14th that our High Command ordered another general
attack after the local fighting which had been in progress since the
first day of battle. Our field-batteries, and some of our “heavies,” had
moved forward to places like Montauban and Contalmaison--where German
shells came searching for them all day long--and new divisions had been
brought up to relieve some of the men who had been fighting so hard and
so long. It was to be an attack on the second German line of defense on
the ridges by the village of Bazentin le Grand and Bazentin le Petit to
Longueval on the right and Delville Wood. I went up in the night to see
the bombardment and the beginning of the battle and the swirl of its
backwash, and I remember now the darkness of villages behind the
lines through which our cars crawled, until we reached the edge of the
battlefields and saw the sky rent by incessant flames of gun-fire, while
red tongues of flames leaped up from burning villages. Longueval was
on fire, and the two Bazentins, and another belt of land in France, so
beautiful to see, even as I had seen it first between the sand-bags of
our parapets, was being delivered to the charcoal-burners.
I have described that night scene elsewhere, in all its deviltry, but
one picture which I passed on the way to the battlefield could not then
be told. Yet it was significant of the mentality of our High Command, as
was afterward pointed out derisively by Sixte von Arnim. It proved the
strange unreasoning optimism which still lingered in the breasts of
old-fashioned generals in spite of what had happened on the left on the
first day of July, and their study of trench maps, and their knowledge
of German machine-guns. By an old mill-house called the Moulin Vivier,
outside the village of Meaulte, were masses of cavalry--Indian cavalry
and Dragoons--drawn up densely to leave a narrow passageway for
field-guns and horse-transport moving through the village, which was
in utter darkness. The Indians sat like statues on their horses,
motionless, dead silent. Now and again there was a jangle of bits. Here
and there a British soldier lit a cigarette and for a second the little
flame of his match revealed a bronzed face or glinted on steel helmets.
Cavalry!... So even now there was a serious purpose behind the joke of
English soldiers who had gone forward on the first day, shouting, “This
way to the gap!” and in the conversation of some of those who actually
did ride through Bazentin that day.
A troop or two made their way over the cratered ground and skirted
Delville Wood; the Dragoon Guards charged a machine-gun in a cornfield,
and killed the gunners. Germans rounded up by them clung to their
stirrup leathers crying: “Pity! Pity!” The Indians lowered their lances,
but took prisoners to show their chivalry. But it was nothing more than
a beau geste. It was as futile and absurd as Don Quixote's charge of the
windmill. They were brought to a dead halt by the nature of the ground
and machine-gun fire which killed their horses, and lay out that night
with German shells searching for their bodies.
One of the most disappointed men in the army was on General Haldane's
staff. He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old
school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited
by the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of
those who swore that if he had his chance he would “ride into the blue.”
It was the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by delicate
attentions to General Haldane. The general's bed was not so comfortable
as his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put a bunch of
flowers on the general's table in his dugout.
“You seem very attentive to me, major,” said the general, smelling a
rat.
Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round
Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give his
soul to do it.
“Get on with your job,” said General Haldane.
That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief
that they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and barbed
wire, but for a long time later they were kept moving backward and
forward between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the
great incumbrance of the roads, until they were “guyed” by the infantry,
and irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of mutiny. Their
irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches,
and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps,
this side of Thiepval, and cursing their spade-work.
In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that, fighting in
the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details
of each day's scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of
the Somme. There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which
I wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those
fields, except a summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our
men, and upon the Germans who were in the same “blood-bath,” as they
called it, and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of our
military machine.
Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in
the years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too
prodigal in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and that
the army corps and divisional staffs had not established an efficient
system of communication with the fighting units under their control. It
seemed to an outsider like myself that a number of separate battles were
being fought without reference to one another in different parts of
the field. It seemed as though our generals, after conferring with one
another over telephones, said, “All right, tell So-and-so to have a
go at Thiepval,” or, “To-day we will send such-and-such a division to
capture Delville Wood,” or, “We must get that line of trenches outside
Bazentin.” Orders were drawn up on the basis of that decision and passed
down to brigades, who read them as their sentence of death, and obeyed
with or without protest, and sent three or four battalions to assault
a place which was covered by German batteries round an arc of twenty
miles, ready to open out a tempest of fire directly a rocket rose from
their infantry, and to tear up the woods and earth in that neighborhood
if our men gained ground. If the whole battle-line moved forward the
German fire would have been dispersed, but in these separate attacks on
places like Trones Wood and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it
was a vast concentration of explosives which plowed up our men.
So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and
became “Devil's” Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of
massed gun-fire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious
brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by
another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil's caldron,
or to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had
followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen
trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their
dead to keep them company. In Delville Wood the South African Brigade
of the 9th Division was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come out
with few officers to lead them.
In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great
slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th
suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to
pieces before these South Africans. And after that came High Wood.. .
All that was left of High Wood in the autumn of 1916 was a thin row of
branchless trees, but in July and August there were still glades
under heavy foliage, until the branches were lopped off and the leaves
scattered by our incessant fire. It was an important position, vital for
the enemy's defense, and our attack on the right flank of the Pozieres
Ridge, above Bazentin and Delville Wood, giving on the reverse slope a
fine observation of the enemy's lines above Martinpuich and Courcellette
away to Bapaume. For that reason the Germans were ordered to hold it at
all costs, and many German batteries had registered on it to blast our
men out if they gained a foothold on our side of the slope or theirs.
So High Wood became another hell, on a day of great battle--September
14, 1916--when for the first time tanks were used, demoralizing the
enemy in certain places, though they were too few in number to strike
a paralyzing blow. The Londoners gained part of High Wood at frightful
cost and then were blown out of it. Other divisions followed them and
found the wood stuffed with machine-guns which they had to capture
through hurricanes of bullets before they crouched in craters amid dead
Germans and dead English, and then were blown out like the Londoners,
under shell-fire, in which no human life could stay for long.
The 7th Division was cut up there. The 33d Division lost six thousand
men in an advance against uncut wire in the wood, which they were told
was already captured.
Hundreds of men were vomiting from the effect of gas-shells, choking and
blinded. Behind, the transport wagons and horses were smashed to bits.
The divisional staffs were often ignorant of what was happening to
the fighting-men when the attack was launched. Light signals, rockets,
heliographing, were of small avail through the dust--and smoke-clouds.
Forward observing officers crouching behind parapets, as I often saw
them, and sometimes stood with them, watched fires burning, red rockets
and green, gusts of flame, and bursting shells, and were doubtful what
to make of it all. Telephone wires trailed across the ground for miles,
were cut into short lengths by shrapnel and high explosive. Accidents
happened as part of the inevitable blunders of war. It was all a vast
tangle and complexity of strife.
On July 17th I stood in a tent by a staff-officer who was directing a
group of heavy guns supporting the 3d Division. He was tired, as I
could see by the black lines under his eyes and tightly drawn lips. On a
camp-table in front of him, upon which he leaned his elbows, there was a
telephone apparatus, and the little bell kept ringing as we talked. Now
and then a shell burst in the field outside the tent, and he raised his
head and said: “They keep crumping about here. Hope they won't tear this
tent to ribbons....That sounds like a gas-shell.”
Then he turned to the telephone again and listened to some voice
speaking.
“Yes, I can hear you. Yes, go on. 'Our men seen leaving High Wood.' Yes.
'Shelled by our artillery.' Are you sure of that? I say, are you sure
they were our men? Another message. Well, carry on. 'Men digging on road
from High Wood southeast to Longueval.' Yes, I've got that. 'They are
our men and not Boches.' Oh, hell!... Get off the line. Get off the
line, can't you?... 'Our men and not Boches.' Yes, I have that. 'Heavily
shelled by our guns.'”
The staff-officer tapped on the table with a lead-pencil a tattoo, while
his forehead puckered. Then he spoke into the telephone again.
“Are you there, 'Heavies'?... Well, don't disturb those fellows for half
an hour. After that I will give you new orders. Try and confirm if they
are our men.”
He rang off and turned to me.
“That's the trouble. Looks as if we had been pounding our own men like
hell. Some damn fool reports 'Boches.' Gives the reference number. Asks
for the 'Heavies'. Then some other fellow says: 'Not Boches. For God's
sake cease fire!' How is one to tell?”
I could not answer that question, but I hated the idea of our men sent
forward to capture a road or a trench or a wood and then “pounded” by
our guns. They had enough pounding from the enemy's guns. There seemed a
missing link in the system somewhere. Probably it was quite inevitable.
Over and over again the wounded swore to God that they had been shelled
by our own guns. The Londoners said so from High Wood. The Australians
said so from Mouquet Farm. The Scots said so from Longueval! They said:
“Why the hell do we get murdered by British gunners? What's the good of
fighting if we're slaughtered by our own side?”
In some cases they were mistaken. It was enfilade fire from German
batteries. But often it happened according to the way of that telephone
conversation in the tent by Bronfay Farm.
The difference between British soldiers and German soldiers crawling
over shell-craters or crouching below the banks of a sunken road was no
more than the difference between two tribes of ants. Our flying scouts,
however low they flew, risking the Archies and machine-gun bullets,
often mistook khaki for field gray, and came back with false reports
which led to tragedy.