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* * * * *
THE
OLD FRONT LINE
BY
JOHN MASEFIELD
Author of "Gallipoli," etc.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1918
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917
By JOHN MASEFIELD
Set up and electrotyped. Published, December, 1917.
Reprinted January, 1918.
TO
NEVILLE LYTTON
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
PAGE
The Road up the Ancre Valley 16
Artillery Transport in Bapaume Road 28
Troops Moving to the Front 38
An Artillery Team 40
View in Hamel 42
The Ancre River 44
The Ancre Opposite Hamel 48
The Leipzig Salient 58
Dugouts in La Boisselle 66
La Boisselle 70
Fricourt 74
Fricourt 76
Sandbags at Fricourt 78
Mametz 82
Sleighs for the Wounded 88
The Attack on La Boisselle 94
THE OLD FRONT LINE
This description of the old front line, as it was when the Battle of
the Somme began, may some day be of use. All wars end; even this war
will some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of
death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be
forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone
over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer
with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and
then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began,
will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps. It is said that even now
in some places the wire has been removed, the explosive salved, the
trenches filled, and the ground ploughed with tractors. In a few
years' time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking
for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench,
Munster Alley, and these other paths to glory will be deep under the
corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.
It is hoped that this description of the line will be followed by an
account of our people's share in the battle. The old front line was
the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting-place.
The thing began there. It was the biggest battle in which our people
were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any
battle of this war since the Battle of the Marne. It caused a great
falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France,
seventy miles long, by from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first
gave the enemy the knowledge that he was beaten.
Very many of our people never lived to know the result of even the
first day's fighting. For then the old front line was the battlefield,
and the No Man's Land the prize of the battle. They never heard the
cheer of victory nor looked into an enemy trench. Some among them
never even saw the No Man's Land, but died in the summer morning from
some shell in the trench in the old front line here described.
* * * * *
It is a difficult thing to describe without monotony, for it varies so
little. It is like describing the course of the Thames from Oxford to
Reading, or of the Severn from Deerhurst to Lydney, or of the Hudson
from New York to Tarrytown. Whatever country the rivers pass they
remain water, bordered by shore. So our front-line trenches, wherever
they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a
greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes, which is fenced
with thicker, blacker, but more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind
this further wire is the parapet of the enemy front-line trench, which
swerves to take in a hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope,
but remains roughly parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred
yards from it, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. All the
advantages of position and observation were in the enemy's hands, not
in ours. They took up their lines when they were strong and our side
weak, and in no place in all the old Somme position is our line better
sited than theirs, though in one or two places the sites are nearly
equal. Almost in every part of this old front our men had to go up
hill to attack.
If the description of this old line be dull to read, it should be
remembered that it was dull to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts,
with the fine views over France, and the sense of domination. Our men
were down below with no view of anything but of stronghold after
stronghold, just up above, being made stronger daily. And if the
enemy had strength of position he had also strength of equipment, of
men, of guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had all the advantages
for nearly two years of war, and in all that time our old front line,
whether held by the French or by ourselves, was nothing but a post to
be endured, day in day out, in all weathers and under all fires, in
doubt, difficulty, and danger, with bluff and makeshift and
improvisation, till the tide could be turned. If it be dull to read
about and to see, it was, at least, the old line which kept back the
tide and stood the siege. It was the line from which, after all those
months of war, the tide turned and the besieged became the attackers.
* * * * *
To most of the British soldiers who took part in the Battle of the
Somme, the town of Albert must be a central point in a reckoning of
distances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the middle of the line of
that battle. It is a knot of roads, so that supports and supplies
could and did move from it to all parts of the line during the battle.
It is on the main road, and on the direct railway line from Amiens. It
is by much the most important town within an easy march of the
battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the centre from which, in
time to come, travellers will start to see the battlefield where such
deeds were done by men of our race.
It is not now (after three years of war and many bombardments) an
attractive town; probably it never was. It is a small straggling town
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the
swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so
channeled that it can be used for power. Before the war it contained a
few small factories, including one for the making of sewing-machines.
Its most important building was a big church built a few years ago,
through the energy of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert,
a small, probably not very old image, about which strange stories are
told. Before the war it was thought that this church would become a
northern rival to Lourdes for the working of miraculous cures during
the September pilgrimage. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child
stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the church tower. During a
bombardment of the town at a little after three o'clock in the
afternoon of Friday, January 15, 1915, a shell so bent the stalk that
the statue bent down over the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of
our soldiers will remember Albert for anything except this diving
Virgin. Perhaps half of the men engaged in the Battle of the Somme
passed underneath her as they marched up to the line, and, glancing
up, hoped that she might not come down till they were past. From some
one, French or English, a word has gone about that when she does fall
the war will end. Others have said that French engineers have so fixed
her with wire ropes that she cannot fall.
* * * * *
From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield of the Somme:
1. In a north-westerly direction to Auchonvillers and Hébuterne.
2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and Hamel.
3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozières.
4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and Maricourt.
Between the second and the third of these the little river Ancre runs
down its broad, flat, well-wooded valley, much of which is a marsh
through which the river (and man) have forced more than one channel.
This river, which is a swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep
and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the battlefield into two
nearly equal portions.
Following the first of the four roads, one passes the wooded village
of Martinsart, to the village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a
clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. The road dips here, but
soon rises again, and so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of
Hébuterne. Most of this road, with the exception of one little stretch
near Auchonvillers, is hidden by high ground from every part of the
battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the field.
Hébuterne, although close to the line and shelled daily and nightly
for more than two years, was never the object of an attack in force,
so that much of it remains. Many of its walls and parts of some of its
roofs still stand, the church tower is in fair order, and no one
walking in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. Before the
war it was a prosperous village; then, for more than two years, it
rang with the roar of battle and with the business of an army.
Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from it and left it deserted,
so that one may walk in it now, from end to end, without seeing a
human being. It is as though the place had been smitten by the plague.
Villages during the Black Death must have looked thus. One walks in
the village expecting at every turn to meet a survivor, but there is
none; the village is dead; the grass is growing in the street; the
bells are silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the ghosts
from the church. Stealing about among the ruins and the gardens are
the cats of the village, who have eaten too much man to fear him, but
are now too wild to come to him. They creep about and eye him from
cover and look like evil spirits.
The second of the four roads passes out of Albert, crosses the railway
at a sharp turn, over a bridge called Marmont Bridge, and runs
northward along the valley of the Ancre within sight of the railway.
Just beyond the Marmont Bridge there is a sort of lake or reservoir or
catchment of the Ancre overflows, a little to the right of the road.
By looking across this lake as he walks northward, the traveller can
see some rolls of gentle chalk hill, just beyond which the English
front line ran at the beginning of the battle.
A little further on, at the top of a rise, the road passes the village
of Aveluy, where there is a bridge or causeway over the Ancre valley.
Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half of enemy gun positions
for nearly two years of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless and
windowless. A cross-road leading to the causeway across the valley
once gave the place some little importance.
[Illustration: The Road up the Ancre Valley through Aveluy Wood]
Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs for more than a mile
through the Wood of Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of trees
and shrubs. This wood hides the marsh of the river from the traveller.
Tracks from the road lead down to the marsh and across it by military
causeways.
On emerging from the wood, the road runs within hail of the railway,
under a steep and high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub.
Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it passes through the skeleton
of the village of Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick
standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north of this village,
crossing the road, the railway, and the river-valley, is the old
English front line.
The third of the four roads is one of the main roads of France. It is
the state highway, laid on the line of a Roman road, from Albert to
Bapaume. It is by far the most used and the most important of the
roads crossing the battlefield. As it leads directly to Bapaume, which
was one of the prizes of the victory, and points like a sword through
the heart of the enemy positions it will stay in the memories of our
soldiers as the main avenue of the battle.
The road leaves Albert in a street of dingy and rather broken
red-brick houses. After passing a corner crucifix it shakes itself
free of the houses and rises slowly up a ridge of chalk hill about
three hundred feet high. On the left of the road, this ridge, which is
much withered and trodden by troops and horses, is called Usna Hill.
On the right, where the grass is green and the chalk of the old
communication trenches still white and clean, it is called Tara Hill.
Far away on the left, along the line of the Usna Hill, one can see the
Aveluy Wood.
Looking northward from the top of the Usna-Tara Hill to the dip below
it and along the road for a few yards up the opposite slope, one sees
where the old English front line crossed the road at right angles. The
enemy front line faced it at a few yards' distance, just about two
miles from Albert town.
The fourth of the four roads runs for about a mile eastwards from
Albert, and then slopes down into a kind of gully or shallow valley,
through which a brook once ran and now dribbles. The road crosses the
brook-course, and runs parallel with it for a little while to a place
where the ground on the left comes down in a slanting tongue and on
the right rises steeply into a big hill. The ground of the tongue
bears traces of human habitation on it, all much smashed and
discoloured. This is the once pretty village of Fricourt. The hill on
the right front at this point is the Fricourt Salient. The lines run
round the salient and the road cuts across them.
Beyond Fricourt, the road leaves another slanting tongue at some
distance to its left. On this second tongue the village of Mametz once
stood. Near here the road, having now cut across the salient, again
crosses both sets of lines, and begins a long, slow ascent to a ridge
or crest. From this point, for a couple of miles, the road is planted
on each side with well-grown plane-trees, in some of which magpies
have built their nests ever since the war began. At the top of the
rise the road runs along the plateau top (under trees which show more
and more plainly the marks of war) to a village so planted that it
seems to stand in a wood. The village is built of red brick, and is
rather badly broken by enemy shell fire, though some of the houses in
it are still habitable. This is the village of Maricourt. Three or
four hundred yards beyond Maricourt the road reaches the old English
front line, at the eastern extremity of the English sector, as it was
at the beginning of the battle.
These four roads which lead to the centre and the wings of the
battlefield were all, throughout the battle and for the months of war
which preceded it, dangerous by daylight. All could be shelled by the
map, and all, even the first, which was by much the best hidden of the
four, could be seen, in places, from the enemy position. On some of
the trees or tree stumps by the sides of the roads one may still see
the "camouflage" by which these exposed places were screened from the
enemy observers. The four roads were not greatly used in the months of
war which preceded the battle. In those months, the front was too near
to them, and other lines of supply and approach were more direct and
safer. But there was always some traffic upon them of men going into
the line or coming out, of ration parties, munition and water
carriers, and ambulances. On all four roads many men of our race were
killed. All, at some time, or many times, rang and flashed with
explosions. Danger, death, shocking escape and firm resolve, went up
and down those roads daily and nightly. Our men slept and ate and
sweated and dug and died along them after all hardships and in all
weathers. On parts of them, no traffic moved, even at night, so that
the grass grew high upon them. Presently, they will be quiet country
roads again, and tourists will walk at ease, where brave men once ran
and dodged and cursed their luck, when the Battle of the Somme was
raging.
Then, indeed, those roads were used. Then the grass that had grown on
some of them was trodden and crushed under. The trees and banks by the
waysides were used to hide batteries, which roared all day and all
night. At all hours and in all weathers the convoys of horses slipped
and stamped along those roads with more shells for the ever-greedy
cannon. At night, from every part of those roads, one saw a twilight
of summer lightning winking over the high ground from the
never-ceasing flashes of guns and shells. Then there was no quiet, but
a roaring, a crashing, and a screaming from guns, from shells bursting
and from shells passing in the air. Then, too, on the two roads to the
east of the Ancre River, the troops for the battle moved up to the
line. The battalions were played by their bands through Albert, and up
the slope of Usna Hill to Pozières and beyond, or past Fricourt and
the wreck of Mametz to Montauban and the bloody woodland near it.
Those roads then were indeed paths of glory leading to the grave.
During the months which preceded the Battle of the Somme, other roads
behind our front lines were more used than these. Little villages, out
of shell fire, some miles from the lines, were then of more use to us
than Albert. Long after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tourists,
wandering in Picardy, will see names scratched in a barn, some mark or
notice on a door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, or hear,
on the lips of a native, some slang phrase of English, learned long
before in the wartime, in childhood, when the English were there. All
the villages behind our front were thronged with our people. There
they rested after being in the line and there they established their
hospitals and magazines. It may be said, that men of our race died in
our cause in every village within five miles of the front. Wherever
the traveller comes upon a little company of our graves, he will know
that he is near the site of some old hospital or clearing station,
where our men were brought in from the line.
* * * * *
So much for the roads by which our men marched to this battlefield.
Near the lines they had to leave the roads for the shelter of some
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, revetted at the sides
with wire to hinder it from collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow
roads, only broad enough for marching in single file, our men passed
to "the front," to the line itself. Here and there, in recesses in the
trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they
passed the offices and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion
headquarters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights,
machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars, and cases. Many men, passing these
things as they went "in" for the first time, felt with a sinking of
the heart, that they were leaving all ordered and arranged things,
perhaps forever, and that the men in charge of these stores enjoyed,
by comparison, a life like a life at home.
Much of the relief and munitioning of the fighting lines was done at
night. Men going into the lines saw little of where they were going.
They entered the gash of the communication trench, following the load
on the back of the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing but the
shape in front, the black walls of the trench, and now and then some
gleam of a star in the water under foot. Sometimes as they marched
they would see the starshells, going up and bursting like rockets, and
coming down With a wavering slow settling motion, as white and bright
as burning magnesium wire, shedding a kind of dust of light upon the
trench and making the blackness intense when they went out. These
lights, the glimmer in the sky from the enemy's guns, and now and then
the flash of a shell, were the things seen by most of our men on their
first going in.
In the fire trench they saw little more than the parapet. If work were
being done in the No Man's Land, they still saw little save by these
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and from ourselves. They
could see only an array of stakes tangled with wire, and something
distant and dark which might be similar stakes, or bushes, or men, in
front of what could only be the enemy line. When the night passed, and
those working outside the trench had to take shelter, they could see
nothing, even at a loophole or periscope, but the greenish strip of
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with wire, running up to
the enemy line. There was little else for them to see, looking to the
front, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale.
The soldiers who held this old front line of ours saw this grass and
wire day after day, perhaps, for many months. It was the limit of
their world, the horizon of their landscape, the boundary. What
interest there was in their life was the speculation, what lay beyond
that wire, and what the enemy was doing there. They seldom saw an
enemy. They heard his songs and they were stricken by his missiles,
but seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly moving cap at a gap in
the broken parapet, or a grey figure flitting from the light of a
starshell. Aeroplanes brought back photographs of those unseen lines.
Sometimes, in raids in the night, our men visited them and brought
back prisoners; but they remained mysteries and unknown.
In the early morning of the 1st of July, 1916, our men looked at them
as they showed among the bursts of our shells. Those familiar heaps,
the lines, were then in a smoke of dust full of flying clods and
shards and gleams of fire. Our men felt that now, in a few minutes,
they would see the enemy and know what lay beyond those parapets and
probe the heart of that mystery. So, for the last half-hour, they
watched and held themselves ready, while the screaming of the shells
grew wilder and the roar of the bursts quickened into a drumming. Then
as the time drew near, they looked a last look at that unknown
country, now almost blotted in the fog of War, and saw the flash of
our shells, breaking a little further off as the gunners "lifted," and
knew that the moment had come. Then for one wild confused moment they
knew that they were running towards that unknown land, which they
could still see in the dust ahead. For a moment, they saw the parapet
with the wire in front of it, and began, as they ran, to pick out in
their minds a path through that wire. Then, too often, to many of
them, the grass that they were crossing flew up in shards and sods and
gleams of fire from the enemy shells, and those runners never reached
the wire, but saw, perhaps, a flash, and the earth rushing nearer, and
grasses against the sky, and then saw nothing more at all, for ever
and for ever and for ever.
* * * * *
It may be some years before those whose fathers, husbands and brothers
were killed in this great battle, may be able to visit the battlefield
where their dead are buried. Perhaps many of them, from brooding on
the map, and from dreams and visions in the night, have in their minds
an image or picture of that place. The following pages may help some
few others, who have not already formed that image, to see the scene
as it appears to-day. What it was like on the day of battle cannot be
imagined by those who were not there.
It was a day of an intense blue summer beauty, full of roaring,
violence, and confusion of death, agony, and triumph, from dawn till
dark. All through that day, little rushes of the men of our race went
towards that No Man's Land from the bloody shelter of our trenches.
Some hardly left our trenches, many never crossed the green space,
many died in the enemy wire, many had to fall back. Others won across
and went further, and drove the enemy from his fort, and then back
from line to line and from one hasty trenching to another, till the
Battle of the Somme ended in the falling back of the enemy army.
* * * * *
Those of our men who were in the line at Hébuterne, at the extreme
northern end of the battlefield of the Somme, were opposite the enemy
salient of Gommecourt. This was one of those projecting fortresses or
flankers, like the Leipzig, Ovillers, and Fricourt, with which the
enemy studded and strengthened his front line. It is doubtful if any
point in the line in France was stronger than this point of
Gommecourt. Those who visit it in future times may be surprised that
such a place was so strong.
All the country there is gentler and less decided than in the southern
parts of the battlefield. Hébuterne stands on a plateau-top; to the
east of it there is a gentle dip down to a shallow hollow or valley;
to the east of this again there is a gentle rise to higher ground, on
which the village of Gommecourt stood. The church of Gommecourt is
almost exactly one mile northeast and by north from the church at
Hébuterne; both churches being at the hearts of their villages.
Seen from our front line at Hébuterne, Gommecourt is little more than
a few red-brick buildings, standing in woodland on a rise of ground.
Wood hides the village to the north, the west, and the southwest. A
big spur of woodland, known as Gommecourt Park, thrusts out boldly
from the village towards the plateau on which the English lines stood.
This spur, strongly fortified by the enemy, made the greater part of
the salient in the enemy line. The landscape away from the wood is not
in any way remarkable, except that it is open, and gentle, and on a
generous scale. Looking north from our position at Hébuterne there is
the snout of the woodland salient; looking south there is the green
shallow shelving hollow or valley which made the No Man's Land for
rather more than a mile. It is just such a gentle waterless hollow,
like a dried-up river-bed, as one may see in several places in chalk
country in England, but it is unenclosed land, and therefore more open
and seemingly on a bigger scale than such a landscape would be in
England, where most fields are small and fenced. Our old front line
runs where the ground shelves or glides down into the valley; the
enemy front line runs along the gentle rise up from the valley. The
lines face each other across the slopes. To the south, the slope on
which the enemy line stands is very slight.
[Illustration: Artillery Transport crossing a Trench Bridge into
the Bapaume Road]
The impression given by this tract of land once held by the enemy is
one of graceful gentleness. The wood on the little spur, even now, has
something green about it. The village, once almost within the wood,
wrecked to shatters as it is, has still a charm of situation. In the
distance behind Gommecourt there is some ill-defined rising ground
forming gullies and ravines. On these rises are some dark clumps of
woodland, one of them called after the nightingales, which perhaps
sing there this year, in what is left of their home. There is nothing
now to show that this quiet landscape was one of the tragical places
of this war.
The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and downland, like similar
formations in England. It has about it, in every part of it, certain
features well known to every one who has ever travelled in a chalk
country. These features occur even in the gentle, rolling, and not
strongly marked sector near Hébuterne. Two are very noticeable, the
formation almost everywhere of those steep, regular banks or terraces,
which the French call remblais and our own farmers lynchets, and the
presence, in nearly all parts of the field, of roads sunken between
two such banks into a kind of narrow gully or ravine. It is said, that
these remblais or lynchets, which may be seen in English chalk
countries, as in the Dunstable Downs, in the Chiltern Hills, and in
many parts of Berkshire and Wiltshire, are made in each instance, in a
short time, by the ploughing away from the top and bottom of any
difficult slope. Where two slopes adjoin, such ploughing steepens the
valley between them into a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a
track through the crops when they are up. Sometimes, though less
frequently, the farmer ploughs away from a used track on quite flat
land, and by doing this on both sides of the track, he makes the track
a causeway or ridge-way, slightly raised above the adjoining fields.
This type of raised road or track can be seen in one or two parts of
the battlefield (just above Hamel and near Pozières for instance), but
the hollow or sunken road and the steep remblai or lynchet are
everywhere. One may say that no quarter of a mile of the whole field
is without one or other of them. The sunken roads are sometimes very
deep. Many of our soldiers, on seeing them, have thought that they
were cuttings made, with great labour, through the chalk, and that the
remblais or lynchets were piled up and smoothed for some unknown
purpose by primitive man. Probably it will be found, that in every
case they are natural slopes made sharper by cultivation. Two or three
of these lynchets and sunken roads cross the shallow valley of the No
Man's Land near Hébuterne. By the side of one of them, a line of
Sixteen Poplars, now ruined, made a landmark between the lines.
The line continues (with some slight eastward trendings, but without a
change in its gentle quiet) southwards from this point for about a
mile to a slight jut, or salient in the enemy line. This jut was known
by our men as the Point, and a very spiky point it was to handle. From
near the Point on our side of No Man's Land, a bank or lynchet, topped
along its edge with trees, runs southwards for about a mile. In four
places, the trees about this lynchet grow in clumps or copses, which
our men called after the four Evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, and
Matthew. This bank marks the old English front line between the Point
and the Serre Road a mile to the south of it. Behind this English
line are several small copses, on ground which very gently rises
towards the crest of the plateau a mile to the west. In front of most
of this part of our line, the ground rises towards the enemy trenches,
so that one can see little to the front, but the slope up. The No
Man's Land here is not green, but as full of shell-holes and the ruin
of battle as any piece of the field. Directly between Serre and the
Matthew Copse, where the lines cross a rough lump of ground, the enemy
parapet is whitish from the chalk. The whitish parapet makes the
skyline to observers in the English line. Over that parapet, some
English battalions made one of the most splendid charges of the
battle, in the heroic attack on Serre four hundred yards beyond.
To the right of our front at Matthew Copse the ground slopes southward
a little, past what may once have been a pond or quarry, but is now a
pit in the mud, to the Serre road. Here one can look up the muddy road
to the hamlet of Serre, where the wrecks of some brick buildings stand
in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right down a God-forgotten kind of
glen, blasted by fire to the look of a moor in hell. A few rampikes of
trees standing on one side of this glen give the place its name of Ten
Tree Alley. Immediately to the south of the Serre road, the ground
rises into one of the many big chalk spurs, which thrust from the main
Hébuterne plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur at this point
runs east and west, and the lines cross it from north and south. They
go up it side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, with a
greenish No Man's Land between them. The No Man's Land, as usual, is
the only part of all this chalk spur that is not burnt, gouged,
pocked, and pitted with shell fire. It is, however, enough marked by
the war to be bad going. When they are well up the spur, the lines
draw nearer, and at the highest point of the spur they converge in one
of the terrible places of the battlefield.
For months before the battle began, it was a question here, which side
should hold the highest point of the spur. Right at the top of the
spur there is one patch of ground, measuring, it may be, two hundred
yards each way, from which one can see a long way in every direction.
From this patch, the ground droops a little towards the English side
and stretches away fairly flat towards the enemy side, but one can see
far either way, and to have this power of seeing, both sides fought
desperately.
Until the beginning of the war, this spur of ground was corn-land,
like most of the battlefield. Unfenced country roads crossed it. It
was a quiet, lonely, prosperous ploughland, stretching for miles, up
and down, in great sweeping rolls and folds, like our own chalk
downlands. It had one feature common to all chalk countries; it was a
land of smooth expanses. Before the war, all this spur was a smooth
expanse, which passed in a sweep from the slope to the plateau, over
this crown of summit.
To-day, the whole of the summit (which is called the Redan Ridge), for
all its two hundred yards, is blown into pits and craters from twenty
to fifty feet deep, and sometimes fifty yards long. These pits and
ponds in rainy weather fill up with water, which pours from one pond
into another, so that the hill-top is loud with the noise of the
brooks. For many weeks, the armies fought for this patch of hill. It
was all mined, counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each explosion the
crater was fought for and lost and won. It cannot be said that either
side won that summit till the enemy was finally beaten from all that
field, for both sides conquered enough to see from. On the enemy side,
a fortification of heaped earth was made; on our side, castles were
built of sandbags filled with flint. These strongholds gave both
sides enough observation. The works face each other across the ponds.
The sandbags of the English works have now rotted, and flag about like
the rags of uniform or like withered grass. The flint and chalk laid
bare by their rotting look like the grey of weathered stone, so that,
at a little distance, the English works look old and noble, as though
they were the foundations of some castle long since fallen under Time.
To the right, that is to the southward, from these English castles
there is a slope of six hundred yards into a valley or gully. The
slope is not in any way remarkable or seems not to be, except that the
ruin of a road, now barely to be distinguished from the field, runs
across it. The opposing lines of trenches go down the slope, much as
usual, with the enemy line above on a slight natural glacis. Behind
this enemy line is the bulk of the spur, which is partly white from
up-blown chalk, partly burnt from months of fire, and partly faintly
green from recovering grass. A little to the right or south, on this
bulk of spur, there are the stumps of trees and no grass at all,
nothing but upturned chalk and burnt earth. On the battlefield of the
Somme, these are the marks of a famous place.
The valley into which the slope descends is a broadish gentle opening
in the chalk hills, with a road running at right angles to the lines
of trenches at the bottom of it. As the road descends, the valley
tightens in, and just where the enemy line crosses it, it becomes a
narrow deep glen or gash, between high and steep banks of chalk. Well
within the enemy position and fully seven hundred yards from our line,
another such glen or gash runs into this glen, at right angles. At
this meeting place of the glens is or was the village of Beaumont
Hamel, which the enemy said could never be taken.
For the moment it need not be described; for it was not seen by many
of our men in the early stages of the battle. In fact our old line was
at least five hundred yards outside it. But all our line in the valley
here was opposed to the village defences, and the fighting at this
point was fierce and terrible, and there are some features in the No
Man's Land just outside the village which must be described. These
features run parallel with our line right down to the road in the
valley, and though they are not features of great tactical importance,
like the patch of summit above, where the craters are, or like the
windmill at Pozières, they were the last things seen by many brave
Irish and Englishmen, and cannot be passed lightly by.
The features are a lane, fifty or sixty yards in front of our front
trench, and a remblai or lynchet fifty or sixty yards in front of the
lane.
The lane is a farmer's track leading from the road in the valley to
the road on the spur. It runs almost north and south, like the lines
of trenches, and is about five hundred yards long. From its start in
the valley-road to a point about two hundred yards up the spur it is
sunken below the level of the field on each side of it. At first the
sinking is slight, but it swiftly deepens as it goes up hill. For more
than a hundred yards it lies between banks twelve or fifteen feet
deep. After this part the banks die down into insignificance, so that
the road is nearly open. The deep part, which is like a very deep,
broad, natural trench, was known to our men as the Sunken Road. The
banks of this sunken part are perpendicular. Until recently, they were
grown over with a scrub of dwarf beech, ash, and sturdy saplings, now
mostly razed by fire. In the road itself our men built up walls of
sandbags to limit the effects of enemy shell fire. From these defences
steps cut in the chalk of the bank lead to the field above, where
there were machine-gun pits.
The field in front of the lane (where these pits were) is a fairly
smooth slope for about fifty yards. Then there is the lynchet or
remblai, like a steep cliff, from three to twelve feet high, hardly to
be noticed from above until the traveller is upon it. Below this
lynchet is a fairly smooth slope, so tilted that it slopes down to the
right towards the valley road, and slopes up to the front towards the
enemy line. Looking straight to the front from the Sunken Road our men
saw no sudden dip down at the lynchet, but a continuous grassy field,
at first flat, then slowly rising towards the enemy parapet. The line
of the lynchet-top merges into the slope behind it, so that it is not
seen. The enemy line thrusts out in a little salient here, so as to
make the most of a little bulge of ground which was once wooded and
still has stumps. The bulge is now a heap and ruin of burnt and
tumbled mud and chalk. To reach it our men had to run across the flat
from the Sunken Road, slide down the bank of the lynchet, and then run
up the glacis to the parapet.
The Sunken Road was only held by our men as an advanced post and
"jumping off" (or attacking) point. Our line lay behind it on a higher
part of the spur, which does not decline gradually into the valley
road, but breaks off in a steep bank cut by our soldiers into a flight
of chalk steps. These steps gave to all this part of the line the
name of Jacob's Ladder. From the top of Jacob's Ladder there is a good
view of the valley road running down into Beaumont Hamel. To the right
there is a big steep knoll of green hill bulking up to the south of
the valley, and very well fenced with enemy wire. All the land to the
right or south of Jacob's Ladder is this big green hill, which is very
steep, irregular, and broken with banks, and so ill-adapted for
trenching that we were forced to make our line further from the enemy
than is usual on the front. The front trenches here are nearly five
hundred yards apart. As far as the hill-top the enemy line has a great
advantage of position. To reach it our men had to cross the open and
ascend a slope which gave neither dead ground nor cover to front or
flank. Low down the hill, running parallel with the road, is a little
lynchet, topped by a few old hawthorn bushes. All this bit of the old
front line was the scene of a most gallant attack by our men on the
1st of July. Those who care may see it in the official cinematograph
films of the Battle of the Somme.
[Illustration: Troops moving to the Front in the Dust of the
Summer Fighting]
Right at the top of the hill there is a dark enclosure of wood,
orchard, and plantation, with several fairly well preserved red-brick
buildings in it. This is the plateau-village of Auchonvillers. On the
slopes below it, a couple of hundred yards behind Jacob's Ladder,
there is a little round clump of trees. Both village and clump make
conspicuous landmarks. The clump was once the famous English
machine-gun post of the Bowery, from which our men could shoot down
the valley into Beaumont Hamel.
The English line goes up the big green hill, in trenches and saps of
reddish clay, to the plateau or tableland at the top. Right up on the
top, well behind our front line and close to one of our communication
trenches, there is a good big hawthorn bush, in which a magpie has
built her nest. This bush, which is strangely beautiful in the spring,
has given to the plateau the name of the Hawthorn Ridge.
Just where the opposing lines reach the top of the Ridge they both
bend from their main north and south direction towards the southeast,
and continue in that course for several miles. At the point or salient
of the bending, in the old enemy position, there is a crater of a mine
which the English sprang in the early morning of the 1st of July. This
is the crater of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until recently it was
supposed to be the biggest crater ever blown by one explosion. It is
not the deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are deeper, but
none on the Somme field comes near it in bigness and squalor. It is
like the crater of a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one
hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards across, and
twenty-five yards deep. It is crusted and scabbed with yellowish
tetter, like sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside has rather
the look of meat, for it is reddish and all streaked and scabbed with
this pox and with discoloured chalk. A lot of it trickles and oozes
like sores discharging pus, and this liquid gathers in holes near the
bottom, and is greenish and foul and has the look of dead eyes staring
upwards.
[Illustration: An Artillery Team taking the Bank]
All that can be seen of it from the English line is a disarrangement
of the enemy wire and parapet. It is a hole in the ground which cannot
be seen except from quite close at hand. At first sight, on looking
into it, it is difficult to believe that it was the work of man; it
looks so like nature in her evil mood. It is hard to imagine that only
three years ago that hill was cornfield, and the site of the chasm
grew bread. After that happy time, the enemy bent his line there and
made the salient a stronghold, and dug deep shelters for his men in
the walls of his trenches; the marks of the dugouts are still plain in
the sides of the pit. Then, on the 1st of July, when the explosion
was to be a signal for the attack, and our men waited in the trenches
for the spring, the belly of the chalk was heaved, and chalk, clay,
dugouts, gear, and enemy, went up in a dome of blackness full of
pieces, and spread aloft like a toadstool, and floated, and fell down.
From the top of the Hawthorn Ridge, our soldiers could see a great
expanse of chalk downland, though the falling of the hill kept them
from seeing the enemy's position. That lay on the slope of the ridge,
somewhere behind the wire, quite out of sight from our lines. Looking
out from our front line at this salient, our men saw the enemy wire
almost as a skyline. Beyond this line, the ground dipped towards
Beaumont Hamel (which was quite out of sight in the valley) and rose
again sharply in the steep bulk of Beaucourt spur. Beyond this lonely
spur, the hills ranked and ran, like the masses of a moor, first the
high ground above Miraumont, and beyond that the high ground of the
Loupart Wood, and away to the east the bulk that makes the left bank
of the Ancre River. What trees there are in this moorland were not
then all blasted. Even in Beaumont Hamel some of the trees were green.
The trees in the Ancre River Valley made all that marshy meadow like
a forest. Looking out on all this, the first thought of the soldier
was that here he could really see something of the enemy's ground.
[Illustration: A View in Hamel]
It is true, that from this hill-top much land, then held by the enemy,
could be seen, but very little that was vital to the enemy could be
observed. His lines of supply and support ran in ravines which we
could not see; his batteries lay beyond crests, his men were in hiding
places. Just below us on the lower slopes of this Hawthorn Ridge he
had one vast hiding place which gave us a great deal of trouble. This
was a gully or ravine, about five hundred yards long, well within his
position, running (roughly speaking) at right angles with his front
line. Probably it was a steep and deep natural fold made steeper and
deeper by years of cultivation. It is from thirty to forty feet deep,
and about as much across at the top; it has abrupt sides, and thrusts
out two forks to its southern side. These forks give it the look of a
letter +Y+ upon the maps, for which reason both the French and
ourselves called the place the "Ravin en Y" or "Y Ravine." Part of the
southernmost fork was slightly open to observation from our lines; the
main bulk of the gully was invisible to us, except from the air.
Whenever the enemy has had a bank of any kind, at all screened from
fire, he has dug into it for shelter. In the Y Ravine, which provided
these great expanses of banks, he dug himself shelters of unusual
strength and size. He sank shafts into the banks, tunnelled long
living rooms, both above and below the gully-bottom, linked the rooms
together with galleries, and cut hatchways and bolting holes to lead
to the surface as well as to the gully. All this work was securely
done, with balks of seasoned wood, iron girders, and concreting. Much
of it was destroyed by shell fire during the battle, but much not hit
by shells is in good condition to-day even after the autumn rains and
the spring thaw. The galleries which lead upwards and outwards from
this underground barracks to the observation posts and machine-gun
emplacements in the open air, are cunningly planned and solidly made.
The posts and emplacements to which they led are now, however, (nearly
all) utterly destroyed by our shell fire.
In this gully barracks, and in similar shelters cut in the chalk of
the steeper banks near Beaumont Hamel, the enemy could hold ready
large numbers of men to repel an attack or to make a counter-attack.
They lived in these dugouts in comparative safety and in moderate
comfort. When our attacks came during the early months of the battle,
they were able to pass rapidly and safely by these underground
galleries from one part of the position to another, bringing their
machine guns with them. However, the Ravine was presently taken and
the galleries and underground shelters were cleared. In one
underground room in that barracks, nearly fifty of the enemy were
found lying dead in their bunks, all unwounded, and as though asleep.
They had been killed by the concussion of the air following on the
burst of a big shell at the entrance.
[Illustration: The Ancre River]
One other thing may be mentioned about this Hawthorn Ridge. It runs
parallel with the next spur (the Beaucourt spur) immediately to the
north of it, then in the enemy's hands. Just over the crest of this
spur, out of sight from our lines, is a country road, well banked and
screened, leading from Beaucourt to Serre. This road was known by our
men as Artillery Lane, because it was used as a battery position by
the enemy. The wrecks of several of his guns lie in the mud there
still. From the crest in front of this road there is a view to the
westward, so wonderful that those who see it realize at once that the
enemy position on the Ridge, which, at a first glance, seems badly
sited for observation, is, really, well placed. From this crest, the
Ridge-top, all our old front line, and nearly all the No Man's Land
upon it, is exposed, and plainly to be seen. On a reasonably clear
day, no man could leave our old line unseen from this crest. No
artillery officer, correcting the fire of a battery, could ask for a
better place from which to watch the bursts of his shells. This crest,
in front of the lane of enemy guns, made it possible for the enemy
batteries to drop shells upon our front line trenches before all the
men were out of them at the instant of the great attack.
The old English line runs along the Hawthorn Ridge-top for some
hundreds of yards, and then crosses a dip or valley, which is the
broad, fanshaped, southern end of a fork of Y Ravine. A road runs, or
ran, down this dip into the Y Ravine. It is not now recognisable as a
road, but the steep banks at each side of it, and some bluish
metalling in the shell holes, show that one once ran there. These
banks are covered with hawthorn bushes. A remblai, also topped with
hawthorn, lies a little to the north of this road.