The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th
there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army
revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning
of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through
Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the
Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack
with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at
the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to
the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions,
followed by an attack “in depth,” divisions passing through each other,
or “leap-frogging,” as it was called, to the final objectives against an
enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the explosions.
For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60
and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one
another's workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies'
galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided
by the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers, had beaten
the enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and they had
abandoned it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as they found
to their cost.
I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I
had gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking
my steel hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams
overhead, coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk
at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines, the
murmur of men's voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men sleeping
on bunks in the gloom of caverns close beneath the German lines, and
listening through a queer little instrument called a microphone, by
which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German galleries a thousand
yards away, the dropping of a pick or shovel, the knocking out of German
pipes against charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument,
more perfect than the enemy's, that we had beaten him, and by the grim
determination of those underground men of ours, whose skin was the color
of the chalk in which they worked, who coughed in the dampness of the
caves, and who packed high explosives at the shaft-heads--hundreds of
tons of it--for the moment when a button should be touched far away, and
an electric current would pass down a wire, and the enemy and his works
would be blown into dust.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the
Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June
7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had
fired in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of
gas-shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill.
I saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as
though the fires of hell had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of men
against their fellow--creatures... It was the signal for seven hundred
and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field--guns to open
fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting shells English, Irish, and
New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves. It was almost
a “walk-over.” Only here and there groups of Germans served their
machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their
dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts.
I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great
gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there. The
following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the
Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way
when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses
and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had
often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing
was left but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were
comparatively small, though some brave men had died, including Major
Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in
Ireland.
Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:
“The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering... The 7th of
June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the
price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the
front was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage;
apparently it only intended to improve its position for the launching
of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between
the old Arras battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. The
object of the enemy was to wear us down and distract our attention from
Ypres.”
That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I
saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the
enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining
villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun
fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered
in clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was
the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army,
and it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in
Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to
escape.
All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its
ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was
getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the
strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The
failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were
disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent
up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the
enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked him
when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was
now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the
tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it
seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.
I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret
preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun
emplacements at Malo-les--Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged
in sand--dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes.
Our artillery positions were mapped out.
“Three shots to one, sir,” said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, “that's
the stuff to give them!”
But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the
strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division,
cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a
fury of fire.
At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new
poison-gas--mustard gas--which raised blisters and burned men's bodies
where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for
a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw
hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station
on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast
Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a
burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward
vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which
at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to “put the
wind up.” Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in
its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.
V
The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater
intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in
this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle
two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was
strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to
enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his position
along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand outstretched through
Flanders, with streams or “beeks,” as they are called, flowing in the
valleys which ran between the fingers of that clawlike range, were
strengthened by chains of little concrete forts or “pill-boxes,” as our
soldiers called them, so arranged that they could defend one another
by enfilade machine-gun fire. These were held by garrisons of
machine--gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was to break up our
waves of attack until, even if successful in gaining ground, only small
bodies of survivors would be in a position to resist the counter-attacks
launched by German divisions farther back. The strength of the
pill--boxes made of concrete two inches thick resisted everything but
the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were not easy targets at long
range. The garrisons within them fought often with the utmost courage,
even when surrounded, and again and again this method of defense proved
terribly effective against the desperate heroic assaults of British
infantry.
What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what they
were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I have
attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders. There
was nothing missing in the list of war's abominations. A few days after
the battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for four months.
Night after night the skies opened and let down steady torrents, which
turned all that country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers
or “beeks,” which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range
of ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad
swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured
upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep
shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which the rains and
floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was by “duck-boards,”
tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by
day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men
must march in single file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his
fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled
at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up
to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. If he were
wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to
God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of
Lancashire men--the 66th--took eleven hours in making three miles or
so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in
spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after
month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army
at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond,
capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were
stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and
Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that
Belgian coast attack was never launched.
Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six
months' horror were “exaggerated.” As a man who knows something of the
value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and
went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek
Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and
Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his
dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks that
had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gun-fire
(thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and
where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy
shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is more than the
pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or
brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many
of our men perished.
They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up
to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly
for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells
which burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men
advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-gun
bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to
the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for
walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who
could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to
annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50
per cent of their strength after a few days in action, before they were
“relieved.” Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no body of
men could lose more than 25 per cent of their fighting strength in an
action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost double that, and
more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost
their hope.
The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of
pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the
Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,049. Those
were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day's fighting in
Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand casualties,
and they were considered “light” by the Higher Command in relation to
the objects achieved.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his
opinion the official communiques and the war correspondents' articles
gave only one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their
optimism. (I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being
black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) “We tell the public,” he said,
“that an enemy division has been 'shattered.' That is true. But so is
mine. One of my brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand
men since the spring.” He protested that there was not enough liaison
between the fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and could not
blame them for their hatred of “the Staff.”
The story of the two Irish divisions--the 36th Ulster; and 16th
(Nationalist)--in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy.
They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were
shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every
day groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody and
the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores of
wounded crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to
crawl. Before the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost
nearly two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand more,
and over one hundred officers. The 16th Division lost as many men before
the attack and more officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in
holding the line. On the night before the battle hundreds of men were
gassed. Then their comrades attacked and lost over two thousand more,
and one hundred and sixty--two officers. All the ground below two knolls
of earth called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which were defended by German
pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli, Beck House and Borry
Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite of their dreadful losses
the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward to the assault
with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th, surrounded the
pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun fire, and toward
the end of the day small bodies of these men had gained a footing on the
objectives which they had been asked to capture, but were then too weak
to resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers
had been almost exterminated in their efforts to dislodge the enemy from
Hill 37. They lost seventeen officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent
of their men. One company of four officers and one hundred men, ordered
to capture the concrete fort known as Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four
officers and seventy men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of
seventeen, and 66 per cent of their men.
The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers called
it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for
having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy
shelling, and after the battle they complained that they were cast aside
like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of the men who had
survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and bring them down,
but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the
16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or
baths, straight into the line again, down south.
I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish
Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the
victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I
saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion.
Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers,
were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of
intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air
of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their
own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward
north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was
extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of
duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for many tragic
happenings, he was badly served by some of his subordinates; and
battalion officers and divisional staffs raged against the whole of
the Fifth Army organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme
passion of speech.
“You must be glad to leave Flanders,” I said to a group of officers
trekking toward the Cambrai salient.
One of them answered, violently: “God be thanked we are leaving the
Fifth Army area!”
In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to the
Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of staff.
There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to detail, a care
for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second Army staff
which did at least inspire the troops with the belief that whatever they
did in the fighting-lines had been prepared, and would be supported,
with every possible help that organization could provide. That belief
was founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but by strenuous work,
a driving zeal, and the fine intelligence of a chief of staff whose
brain was like a high-power engine.
I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at
Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned,
when Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert
Plumer, and he, as General Plumer's chief of staff, had been ordered to
Italy--in the middle of a battle--to report on the situation which had
become so grave there. He expressed his regret that he should have
to leave Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad that
Passchendaele had been captured before his going.
In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to
Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: “I often
used to think how much of that range we should get this year. Now it
is nearly all ours.” He thanked the war correspondents for all their
articles, which had been very helpful to the army, and said how glad he
had been to have our co-operation.
“It was my ambition,” he said, speaking with some emotion, “to make
cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get
rid of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against
the staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers
that the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff
work, and has inspired them with confidence in the preparations and
organization behind the lines.”
Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my
memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the
Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent,
that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have
been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask
masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's chance
of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.
Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength
in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our
three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff
has described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls
“terrific,” inflicting “enormous loss” upon his armies and increasing
his anxiety at the “reduction of our fighting strength.”
“Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before
the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking
out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in
slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field
before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out
of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but
continually, and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by
the hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely
men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and
machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and--only too
often--it was the mass that won.
“What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered
during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a
brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!
“The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we
occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its
many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of
them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a
hero's death.
“And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted
as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.
“October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of
pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull
against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base.
He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it against
Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at
very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge
down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed through its
foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to receive
were extremely grave. Tactically everything had been done; the fore
field was good. Our artillery practice had materially improved. Behind
nearly every fighting--division there stood a second, as rear wave. In
the third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that the wear
and tear of the enemy's forces was high. But we also knew that the enemy
was extraordinarily strong and, what was equally important, possessed
extraordinary will-power.”
That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war
from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an
unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling
the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:
“If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day
and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot
and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these
hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen
men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood
the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot
imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few
hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades,
and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of
the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at
any moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless
human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies.
Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death.”
To British and to Germans it meant the same.