Ludendorff's great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of
the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into
the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its
gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of
the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again,
and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of
the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy's line beyond Amiens and
slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous losses.
For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit,
and made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners,
capturing batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many
actions.
“August 8th,” writes Ludendorff, “was the black day of the German army
in the history of this war.”
He describes from the German point of view what I and others have
described from the British point of view, and the general narrative
is the same--a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which
broke not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a
marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk across
the foul waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval,
assembled under the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their
skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength of the enemy,
stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and hurled the enemy back from
what he thought was an impregnable position, and followed him day by
day, taking thousands of prisoners and smashing his rear-guard defenses
one by one.
The most decisive battle of the British front in the “come-back,” after
our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American troops
of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands, the
46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along the
St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep cliffs
rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun redoubts and
tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis.
It seemed to me an impossible place to assault and capture. If the enemy
could not hold that line they could hold nothing. In a dense fog
on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men, with the Americans and
Australians in support, went down to the canal-bank, waded across where
the water was shallow, swam across in life-belts where it was deep,
or got across somehow and anyhow, under blasts of machine-gun fire, by
rafts and plank bridges. A few hours after the beginning of the battle
they were far out beyond the German side of the canal, with masses of
prisoners in their hands. The Americans on the left of the attack, where
the canal goes below ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they
forgot, however, to “mop up” behind them, so that the enemy came out of
his tunnels and the Australians had to cut their way through), and that
evening I met their escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had
helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy opposite the
British front, and after that our troops fought through open country on
the way to victory.
I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and
afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the
enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we
liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores
of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us so long,
and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable,
when old men and women and girls and boys and little children crowded
round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all
the horror had passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in
Bohain, and other villages, the enemy's shell-fire and poison-gas killed
and injured many of the people who had been under the German yoke so
long and now thought they were safe. Hospitals were filled with women
gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying
children. In Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there
on its day of capture, so that when shells began to fall the people
could not go down to shelter. Some of them did not try to go down. At an
open window sat an old veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and
with his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. He called
out, “Merci! Merci!” when English soldiers passed, and when I stopped a
moment clasped my hands through the window and could not speak for the
tears which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans
lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge on the day before the armistice
I saw the last dead German of the war in that part of the line. He
lay stretched outside the railway station into which many shells had
crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own comrades toward our
line before a bullet caught him.
Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how
his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments
gave themselves up to tanks. “Retiring troops,” he wrote, “greeted one
particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly
to the attack, with shouts of 'Blacklegs!' and 'War-prolongers!”' That
is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French
girls: “The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!” On a
day in September, when British troops broke the Drocourt-Queant line,
I saw the Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies,
and after they had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed
and clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as
prisoners. I thought then, “Something has broken in the German spirit.”
For the first time the end seemed very near.
Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places, especially
in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian
corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses
under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others
were badly cut up.
General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and
disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round
Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon
Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and went
into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was a
roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the
last Germans from their hiding-places.
The British army could not have gone on much farther after November
11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months
our troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly
garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire,
and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been
kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a
time we had reached that limit. There were not many divisions who could
have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. But they had
broken the German armies against them by a succession of hammer-strokes
astounding in their rapidity and in their continuity, which I need not
here describe in detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I
have narrated that history as I was a witness of it day by day.
Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady,
driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their
fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of
transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even
for a final gamble.
Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the
bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light
had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in
this “Great Swindle” against their race. It was defeat and agony which
enlightened them, as most people--even ourselves--are enlightened only
by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.
X
After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered
Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four
and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no
wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering
army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility
of this strife, smote at one's heart. What fools the Germans had been,
what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival
dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this
massacre! What had any one gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin.
Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.
The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us
courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the
Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty
tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully
shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff-officers
behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions
and the men were very different. It was a strange study in psychology to
watch them. Here they were among the “Huns.” The men they passed in the
streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in German uniforms a
few weeks before, or a few days. They were “the enemy,” the men they
had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They had actually
fought against them in the same places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard
a conversation between a young waiter and three of our cavalry officers.
They had been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near
Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched under machine-gun
fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the table-cloth. “I was just there.”
The three cavalry officers laughed. “Extraordinary! We were a few
yards away.” They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old
acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match.
They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison
in the soup.
That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had
served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the
folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in
general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its
brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse
for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in
a strident voice.
“Some English gentlemen are swine,” said the young waiter. “But all
German gentlemen are swine.”
Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or
across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the “Huns.”
But it was impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the house
brought them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed their boots
before the kitchen fire, said, “God be praised, the war is over.” For
English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence
of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed
their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.
“Kids are kids,” said a sergeant-major. “I don't want to cut their
throats! Queer, ain't it?”
Many of the “kids” looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and
biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see
British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of
grief at this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing--or a
profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a
sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted their
houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son. Some of
them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They had
paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in
blood.
In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them
playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was
going too far! I looked round the Cafe Bauer--a strange scene after
four and a half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with
Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their hats
to English “Tommies”; our men, Canadian and English, said “Cheerio!” to
German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English
people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of
the blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to
this German cafe before the signing of peace.
Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the
Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face,
British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a
mouth, in spite of being a “Hun.” As ecclesiastics would say when not
roused to patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.”
There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses.
Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English
officers. They were clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless even
than English homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they found water came
out of it. Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were
hard--working and dutiful. There was something, after all, in German
Kultur. At night the children said their prayer to the Christian God.
Most of them were Catholics, and very pious.
“They seem good people,” said English soldiers.
At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so good. Shameless
women, though daintily dressed and comely. British soldiers--English,
Scottish, and Canadian--grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered
into converse with them, found they could all speak English, went down
side-streets with them to narrow-fronted houses. There were squalid
scenes when the A.P.M. raided these houses and broke up an entente
cordiale that was flagrant and scandalous.
Astonishing climax to the drama of war! No general orders could stop
fraternization before peace was signed. Human nature asserted itself
against all artificial restrictions and false passion. Friends of mine
who had been violent in their hatred of all Germans became thoughtful,
and said: “Of course there are exceptions,” and, “The innocent must
not suffer for the guilty,” and, “We can afford to be a little generous
now.”
But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not
generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and
German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars,
and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did
Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the streets
of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged themselves
on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of ersatz flour
with ersatz cream, and not very healthy or nutritious, though very
expensive. But in the side-streets, among the working--women, there was,
as I found, the wolf of hunger standing with open jaws by every doorway.
It was not actual starvation, but what the Germans call unternahrung
(under-nourishment), producing rickety children, consumptive girls, and
men out of whom vitality had gone They stinted and scraped on miserable
substitutes, and never had enough to eat. Yet they were the people who
for two years at least had denounced the war, had sent up petitions
for peace, and had written to their men in the trenches about the Great
Swindle and the Gilded Ones. They were powerless, as some of them told
me, because of the secret police and martial law. What could they do
against the government, with all their men away at the front? They were
treated like pigs, like dirt. They could only suffer and pray. They had
a little hope that in the future, if France and England were not too
hard, they might pay back for the guilt of their war lords and see a new
Germany arise out of its ruin, freed from militarism and with greater
liberties. So humble people talked to us when I went among them with
a friend who spoke good German, better than my elementary knowledge. I
believed in their sincerity, which had come through suffering, though
I believed that newspaper editors, many people in the official
classes, and the old military caste were still implacable in hatred and
unrepentant.
The German people deserved punishment for their share in the guilt of
war. They had been punished by frightful losses of life, by a multitude
of cripples, by the ruin of their Empire. When they told me of their
hunger I could not forget the hungry wives and children of France and
Belgium, who had been captives in their own land behind German lines,
nor our prisoners who had been starved, until many of them died. When
I walked through German villages and pitied the women who yearned
for their men, still prisoners in our hands, nearly a year after the
armistice, and long after peace (a cruelty which shamed us, I think),
I remembered hundreds of French villages broken into dust by German
gun-fire, burned by incendiary shells, and that vast desert of the
battlefields in France and Belgium which never in our time will regain
its life as a place of human habitation. When Germans said, “Our
industry is ruined,” “Our trade is killed,” I thought of the factories
in Lille and many towns from which all machinery had been taken or in
which all machinery had been broken. I thought of the thousand crimes of
their war, the agony of millions of people upon whose liberties they had
trampled and upon whose necks they had imposed a brutal yoke. Yet even
with all those memories of tragic scenes which in this book are but
lightly sketched, I hoped that the peace we should impose would not be
one of vengeance, by which the innocent would pay for the sins of the
guilty, the children for their fathers' lust, the women for their
war lords, the soldiers who hated war for those who drove them to the
shambles; but that this peace should in justice and mercy lead the
working-people of Europe out of the misery in which all were plunged,
and by a policy no higher than common sense, but as high as that,
establish a new phase of civilization in which military force would be
reduced to the limits of safety for European peoples eager to end the
folly of war and get back to work.