Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the
German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He
sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and
prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round
Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy
rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was
organizing a great offensive in the Champagne and desired the British
army to strike first and keep on striking in order to engage and exhaust
German divisions until he was ready to launch his own legions. The
“secret” of his preparations was known by every officer in the French
army and by Hindenburg and his staff, who prepared a new method
of defense to meet it. The French officers with whom I talked were
supremely confident of success. “We shall go through,” they said. “It
is certain. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a traitor who betrays his
country by the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will deal the death--blow.”
So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, and a friend in the
infantry of the line, over a cup of coffee in an estaminet crammed with
other French soldiers who were on their way to the Champagne front.
Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April 16th, seven days after
the British had captured the heights of Vimy and gone far to the east of
Arras. Hindenburg was ready. He adopted his “elastic system of defense,”
which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his troops beyond
the range of the French barrage fire, leaving only a few outposts to
camouflage the withdrawal and be sacrificed for the sake of the others
(those German outposts must have disliked their martyrdom under orders,
and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were exhilarated by the thought
of their heroic service). He also withdrew the full power of his
artillery beyond the range of French counter-battery work and to such
a distance that when it was the German turn to fire the French infantry
would be beyond the effective protection of their own guns. They were
to be allowed an easy walk through to their death-trap. That is what
happened. The French infantry, advancing with masses of black troops
in the Colonial Corps in the front-line of assault, all exultant and
inspired by a belief in victory, swept through the forward zone of the
German defenses, astonished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity
of Germans, until an annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and
smashed their human waves. From French officers and nurses I heard
appalling tales of this tragedy. The death--wail of the black troops
froze the blood of Frenchmen with horror. Their own losses were immense
in a bloody shambles. I was told by French officers that their losses on
the first day of battle were 150,000 casualties, and these figures
were generally believed. They were not so bad as that, though terrible.
Semi-official figures state that the operations which lasted from April
16th to April 25th cost France 28,000 killed on the field of battle,
5,000 who died of wounds in hospital, 4,000 prisoners, and 80,000
wounded. General Nivelle's offensive was called off, and French officers
who had said, “We shall break through... It is certain,” now said: “We
came up against a bec de gaz. As you English would say, we 'got it in
the neck.' It is a great misfortune.”
The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on
April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow.
From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment
when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German
lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old
Vauban's earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up
in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt,
through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was immense and
devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy was
overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the
Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right.
By the afternoon the entire living German population, more than seven
thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down below in the valley on our
side of the lines, and on the ridge were many of their dead as I saw
them afterward horribly mangled by shell-fire in the upheaved earth. The
Highland Division, commanded by General Harper--“Uncle Harper,” he was
called--had done as well as the Canadians, though they had less honor,
and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional sign as I saw it
stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. “Well, General,” said
a Scottish sergeant, “they don't call us Harper's Duds any more!”... On
the right English county troops of the 12th Division, 3d Division, and
others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had broken through,
deeply and widely, capturing many men and guns after hard fighting round
machine-gun redoubts. That night masses of German prisoners suffered
terribly from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras,
where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in other days of history.
They herded together with their bodies bent to the storm, each man
sheltering his fellow and giving a little human warmth. All night
through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head
bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: “It is cold! It is
cold!” And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on
the Vimy Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too,
in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled
earth about them.
Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.
“The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the
capital fighting during this year.
“April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach twelve
thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six thousand
yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without more ado.
It takes a good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and guns as
well as munitions that results from such a breach. It was the business
of the Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large scale. But in view
of the troops available, and of the war situation, it was simply not
possible to hold a second division in readiness behind each division
that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day like April 9th upset
all calculations. It was a matter of days before a new front could be
formed and consolidated. Even after the troops were ultimately in
line the issue of the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very
materially upon whether the enemy followed up his initial success with a
fresh attack and by fresh successes made it difficult for us to create
a firm front. In view of the weakening of the line that inevitably
resulted, such successes were only too easy to achieve.
“From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great
strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their
attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as Bullecourt.
On April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the night before the
12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23d and 28th, and also May 3d,
were again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between there was some
bitter local fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor
successful counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost ground slightly
at various points.”
I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that
followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city
itself, when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its
ruined streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into
the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked
like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their
pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of
the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels
beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the German lines, and I
went along them when one line of men was going into battle and another
was coming back, wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the
fumes of gas in their lungs--their steel hats clinking as they groped
past one another. In vaults each side of these passages men played cards
on barrels, to the light of candles stuck in bottles, or slept until
their turn to fight, with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the
Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long
queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons who were working
in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One day there were three
thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or
men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward to the dark
passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. On the grass outside lay
men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way past the station to
the Arras-Cambrai road was a death-trap for our transport and I saw the
bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick
on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern side of the city,
lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman on “point duty”
on the Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel helmet,
as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the
scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house
above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to
Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the road
beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way.
They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells
plowing holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one
morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep.
They were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of
labor in their sweat.
Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe.
I saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched
by fire, and afterward when there was no village. I was in the village
below Observatory Ridge on the morning of April 11th when cavalry
was massed on that ground, waiting for orders to go into action. The
headquarters of the cavalry division was in a ditch covered by planks,
and the cavalry generals and their staffs sat huddled together with maps
over their knees. “I am afraid the general is busy for the moment,” said
a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked about the fields
and said, “It's very unhealthy here.” I agreed with him. The bodies of
many young soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines (5.9's) were coming over
in a haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But some squadrons
of the 10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues were ordered to take
Monchy, and rode up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German
gunners and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in the
village or outside it, and the men suffered many casualties, including
their general--Bulkely Johnson--whose body I saw carried back on a
stretcher to the ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It is
an astonishing thing that two withered old French women stayed in the
village all through the fighting. When our troops rode in these women
came running forward, frightened and crying “Camarades!” as though in
fear of the enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy
and held up their scraggy old faces to be kissed by these troopers.
Afterward Monchy was filled with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers
crawled out from the ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be
attacked and captured again by our infantry of the 15th and 37th
Divisions, who were also badly hammered.
Heroic folly! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory Hill stood to
their horses, staring up at a German airplane which came overhead,
careless of our “Archies.” The eye of the German pilot must have widened
at the sight of that mass of men and horses. He carried back glad
tidings to the guns.
One of the cavalry officers spoke to me.
“You look ill.”
“No, I'm all right. Only cold.”
The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a night in the open.
“Do you think the Germans will get their range as far as this? I'm
nervous about the men and the horses. We've been here for hours, and it
seems no good.”
I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly the herald of
long-range shells. They came within a few minutes. Some men and horses
were killed. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a
ditch not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close,
scattering us with dirt.
“Let's strike away from the road,” said Major Schiach. “They always tape
it out.”
We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there... other men
had to stay.
The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of Monchy
and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of the
Scarpe, which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to
machine--gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after week,
for no object apparent to our battalion officers and men, who did not
know that they were doing team-work for the French. The Londoners of the
56th Division made a record advance through Neuville-Vitasse to Henin
and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the
little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on
May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come,
revealing the enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack
their way through if they could, There were many who could not, and even
divisional generals were embittered by these needless losses and by the
hard driving of their men, saying fierce things about our High Command.
Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young
officers. I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group
of three, all gunner officers who were looking about for better gun
positions not so clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little
woods--the Bois de Sart and Bois Vert--which stared down upon them like
green eyes. Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their horses
killed; some of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a shell
had crashed into a bath close to their hut, where men were washing
themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood and bits of flesh.
The younger officer stared at me under the tilt forward of his steel hat
and said, “Hullo, Gibbs!” I had played chess with him at Groom's Cafe in
Fleet Street in days before the war. I went back to his hut and had tea
with him, close to that bath, hoping that we should not be cut up with
the cake. There were noises “off,” as they say in stage directions,
which were enormously disconcerting to one's peace of mind, and not very
far off. I had heard before some hard words about our generalship and
staff-work, but never anything so passionate, so violent, as from that
gunner officer. His view of the business was summed up in the word
“murder.” He raged against the impossible orders sent down from
headquarters, against the brutality with which men were left in the line
week after week, and against the monstrous, abominable futility of all
our so-called strategy. His nerves were in rags, as I could see by the
way in which his hand shook when he lighted one cigarette after
another. His spirit was in a flame of revolt against the misery of his
sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of death. Every shell that
burst near Henin sent a shudder through him. I stayed an hour in his
hut, and then went away toward Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire
following along the way. I looked back many times to the valley, and to
the ridges where the enemy lived above it, invisible but deadly. The
sun was setting and there was a tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical
beauty over the landscape despite the desert that war had made there,
leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees where once there were
good villages with church spires rising out of sheltering woods. The
German gunners were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting
heavily again amid our gun positions.
Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme
unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg
line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and
Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the
ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places,
stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not
visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured
it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge
against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were
held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The
4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental
attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements
in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of death as they called it, and
Australian gunners made little slit trenches and scuttled into them when
the Germans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and
breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line,
stared straight down the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when
I went walking there with another war correspondent and an Australian
officer who at a great pace led us round about, amid 5.9's, and
debouched a little to see one of our ammunition-dumps exploding like a
Brock's Benefit, and chattered brightly under “woolly bears” which made
a rending tumult above our heads. I think he enjoyed his afternoon out
from staff-work in the headquarters huts. Afterward I was told that he
was mad, but I think he was only brave. I hated those hours, but put
on the mask that royalty wears when it takes an intelligent interest in
factory-work.
The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations
day by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers' Shops of war,
where busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men's wounds.
Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and
as at the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their
bodies were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of rest
behind the lines. In that early summer of '17 there was laughter in
Arras, lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed
pipers and brass bands, jolly comradeship in billets with paneled walls
upon which perhaps Robespierre's shadow had fallen in the candle-light
before the Revolution, when he was the good young man of Arras.
As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the
pipers who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel's chair
and mine, and played the martial music of Scotland, until something
seemed to break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a French
friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat next to the colonel,
and the eight pipers played behind his chair. He went pale, deadly
white, and presently swooned off his chair... and the Gordons thought it
the finest tribute to their pipes!
The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries,
Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and passion, though they were
tangled sometimes in the maze... many of them fell in the fields outside
or in the bogs of Flanders.
On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men,
and Surreys, Buffs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They played
cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the sunshine of the
day, and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one found no
trace of war's agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the quality of
their laughter.
My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an
old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out
to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street.
The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound
and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through
little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to
Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and
all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of
France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The tits twittered
fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain
at one's heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging
over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by
week, month by month.
“This makes for madness,” said a friend of mine, a musician surprised
to find himself a soldier. “In the morning we see boys with their heads
blown off”--that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had
passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them
with a silly smile and said, “They've copped it all right!” and went on
to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells
had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a
little sick in the stomach--“and in the afternoon we walk through this
garden where the birds are singing... There is no sense in it. It's just
midsummer madness!”
But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and
died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.