_Sunday, April 14._--The Commander in Chief's order of the day should
reveal to the British people and to the world what is happening out here
in France--the enemy's object to seize the Channel ports and destroy the
British Army, and the frightful forces he has brought against it to
achieve that plan, and the call that has come to the troops to hold
every position to the last man. "Many among us now are tired. * * * With
our back to the wall each one of us must fight to the end."
Yes, the men are tired, so tired after weeks of fighting, after these
last days and nights, that they can hardly stagger up to resist another
attack, yet they do so because their spirit wakes again above their
bodily fatigue; so tired that they go on fighting like sleep-walkers,
and in any respite lie in ditches and under hedges and in open fields
under fire in deep slumber until the shouts of their Sergeants stir them
again. Some of these men have been fighting since March 21 with only a
few days' rest.
To people living in the villages of Flanders, from which one can see the
whole sweep of the battleline, Friday night was full of terror, and from
the windows they watched the burning of places from which they had
escaped and the bonfires of their homes, and these refugees while
sleeping with children at their breast wept.
Yesterday it was a drama of noise, beating against one's ears and
against one's heart, and it was a strange, terrible thing to stand
there, blind, as it were, listening to the infernal tumult of gunfire
south of Bailleul, with knockings and sledgehammer strokes, loud and
shocking, above the incessant drumfire of field artillery.
The German shells came howling over into fields and villages beyond
Bailleul, bursting with gruff coughs, and there was an evil snarl of
shrapnel in the mist. It was the noise of the greatest battle in
history.