In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened,
and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and
many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent
to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas
Haig's command. At that very time, also, after the bloody losses in
Flanders, the French government and General Headquarters brought severe
pressure upon the British War Council to take over a greater length of
line in France, in order to release some of the older classes of the
French army who had been under arms since 1914. We yielded to that
pressure and Sir Douglas Haig extended his lines north and south of
St.-Quentin, where the Fifth Army, under General Gough, was intrusted
with the defense.
I went over all that new ground of ours, out from Noyon to Chaulny and
Barisis and the floods of the Oise by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon
Forest and Francilly and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez
by St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Hargicourt and Jeancourt and La
Verguier. It was a pleasant country, with living trees and green fields
not annihilated by shell-fire, though with the naked eye I could see
the scarred walls of St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages near the
frontlines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead quiet there
for miles, except for short bursts of harassing fire now and then, and
odd shells here and there, and bursts of black shrapnel in the blue sky
of mild days.
“Paradise, after Flanders!” said our men, but I knew that there was a
great movement of troops westward from Russia, and wondered how long
this paradise would last.
I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and did not see them,
and wondered what our defense would be if the enemy attacked here in
great strength. Our army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There were few
men to be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was all strangely
quiet. Alarmingly quiet.
Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother commanding a battery
along the railway line south of St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we
had a picnic meal on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin
cathedral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. The
colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on his horse and called
out, “Fine morning, and a pretty spot!” The infantry divisions were
cheerful. “Like a rest-cure!” they said. They had sports almost within
sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an Irish battalion,
and while two fellows hammered each other I glanced away from them to
winding, wavy lines of chalk on the opposite hillsides, and wondered
what was happening behind them in that quietude.
“What do you think about this German offensive?” I asked the general of
a London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a wagon
and watching a tug-of--war. From that place also we could see the German
positions.
“G.H.Q. has got the wind-up,” he said. “It is all bluff.”
General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the
same opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking
the Germans would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the
Intelligence reports were full of evidence of immense movements of
troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions in back
areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery
positions. There was overwhelming evidence as to the enemy's intentions.
Intelligence officers took me on one side and said: “England ought to
know. The people ought to be prepared. All this is very serious. We
shall be 'up against it.'” G.H.Q. was convinced. On February 23d the war
correspondents published articles summarizing the evidence, pointing out
the gravity of the menace, and they were passed by the censorship. But
England was not scared. Dances were in full swing in London. Little
ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted. Flanders had made no difference
to national optimism, though the hospitals were crowded with blind and
maimed and shell-shocked.
“I am skeptical of the German offensive” said Mr. Bonar Law.
Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us,
though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts
of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors
and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our
liberty of the pen.
They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as
indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the
world--our world, as we knew it--with our liberties and power. For weeks
I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about
it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One
laughed, but the specter echoed one's laughter and said, “Wait!” The
mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one's spirit in
the woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a
little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.” But the
specter chilled one's blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-gray
men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored
to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little
Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war--D'Artagnan with a wooden peg,
most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard.
At the journey's end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English
mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed
at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes
and said between them, “Ah, les sacres Boches!.. . If only I could fight
again!”
I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little
restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with
their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe,
O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night
there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were
brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square
to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to
stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of
the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel
helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair.
We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I
brought my brother to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We
dined well, slept well.
“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give
me a lift.”
A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open
sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior
officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers
and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were
falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the
Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what
happened to the little family in the old hotel.
So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and
Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.
Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding
the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward
redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke
some words which froze my blood.
“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in
strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will
not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther
back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a
tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will,
of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be
tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that.”
“The crossings of the Somme... Amiens!”
Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had
suggested terrible possibilities.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form
with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and
measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were
attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back
fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy
to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from
Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and
Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned
to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which
had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres.
In this book I need not narrate all this history again.
They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with
masterly skill, according to the new method of “infiltration” which
had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at
Caporetto.
It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners
constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked
frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking
fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking
advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to
meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between
our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held
out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner
battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in masses at a great
pace with immense machine--gun strength and light artillery. On the
Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt
between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was
upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels.
Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down.
Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and
guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our
rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the
Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days
some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and
gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in
the mass, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought
for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost
surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold
any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their
heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own
retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted,
in exhaustion.
I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and
Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at
last on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic
fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in
Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to
the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That
meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a
chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence of
panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune's wheel by many
officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give
way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.
The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The
menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul
and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to
relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this
country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and
Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the
battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line
had slipped and they were caught by German shell-fire and German guns,
and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their homes like the
first fugitives. I saw old women coming down lanes where 5.9's were
bursting and where our gunners were getting into action. I saw young
mothers packing their babies and their bundles into perambulators while
shells came hurtling over the thatched roofs of their cottages. I stood
on the Mont des Chats looking down upon a wide sweep of battle, and
saw many little farmsteads on fire and Bailleul one torch of flame and
smoke.
There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the
midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse,
the Kaiser's cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our
troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched
over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and friends.
Then his body was borne down the hill at night and buried secretly by a
parish priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know
the whereabouts of his cousin's grave, the priest to whom his message
was conveyed said, “Tell the Kaiser he shall know when the German armies
have departed from Belgium and when reparation has been made for all
their evil deeds.” It was the prior who told me that story and who
described to me how the British cavalry had forged their way up the
hill. He showed me the scars of bullets on the walls and the windows
from which the monks looked out upon the battle.
“All that is a wonderful memory,” said the prior. “Thanks to the
English, we are safe and beyond the range of German shells.”
I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of
battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German
shells. An eight--inch shell had just smashed into the prior's parlor.
Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had fled
by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a sinking
ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The Ulster
gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did not stay
there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.
From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our
soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They
did not weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a
little family in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began to
fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in
her arms, and a mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a
wood some miles away. She was gay and smiling when she said, “Au revoir
et merci!” A few days later the cottage and the wood were behind the
German lines.
The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who
had been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of Cheshires,
Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and
others, who fought “with their backs to the wall,” as Sir Douglas Haig
demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were worn thin, was heroic
and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them
riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of their horses),
followed by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing
up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind our thin brown line.
Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve,
but had to hold them until other plans were developed--the Crown
Prince's plan against the French, and the attack on Arras.
The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions--the Iron Division and
the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and Guards
on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We had a
breathing--space while heavy blows fell against the French and against
three British divisions who had been sent to hold “a quiet sector” on
their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames, struck right
and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne again,
and threatened Paris.
Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the
last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of
his counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but
he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up
behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions went
with them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th English.
The flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles, was massed
behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American marines and
infantry were given their first big job to do. What happened all the
world knows. The Crown Prince's army was attacked on both flanks and in
the center, and was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.