From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917
by Philip Gibbs · English · Gutenberg #35403 · 904,534 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917
Author: Philip Gibbs
Release date: March 2, 2011 [eBook #35403]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE, 1917 ***
Produced by Moti Ben-Ari and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
FROM BAPAUME TO
PASSCHENDAELE
FROM BAPAUME TO
PASSCHENDAELE
1917
BY
PHILIP GIBBS
AUTHOR OF
"THE BATTLES OF THE SOMME," "THE SOUL
OF THE WAR," ETC.
_WITH MAPS_
TORONTO
WILLIAM BRIGGS
1918
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY THE COMPLETE PRESS
WEST NORWOOD ENGLAND
CONTENTS
CHAP Page
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I
RETREAT FROM THE SOMME
I. A NEW YEAR OF WAR 23
II. AN ATTACK NEAR LE TRANSLOY 28
III. THE ABANDONMENT OF GRANDCOURT 31
IV. THE GORDONS IN THE BUTTE DE WARLENCOURT 33
V. THE BATTLE OF BOOM RAVINE 36
VI. THE ENEMY WITHDRAWS 38
VII. OUR ENTRY INTO GOMMECOURT 39
VIII. WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW 44
IX. THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME 49
X. THE RESCUE OF PERONNE 55
PART II
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY
I. THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND 60
II. THE LETTER OF THE LAW 63
III. THE ABANDONED COUNTRY 66
IV. THE CURE OF VOYENNES 70
V. THE CHATEAU OF LIANCOURT 73
VI. THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT 77
VII. THE AGONY OF WAR 79
VIII. CAVALRY IN ACTION 83
PART III
THE BATTLE OF ARRAS
I. ARRAS AND THE VIMY RIDGE 87
II. LONDONERS THROUGH THE GERMAN LINES 96
III. THE STRUGGLE ROUND MONCHY 99
IV. THE OTHER SIDE OF VIMY 108
V. THE WAY TO LENS 113
VI. THE SLAUGHTER AT LAGNICOURT 124
VII. THE TERRORS OF THE SCARPE 125
VIII. THE BACKGROUND OF BATTLE 133
IX. HOW THE SCOTS TOOK GUEMAPPE 137
X. THE OPPY LINE 139
XI. THE BATTLE OF MAY 3 142
XII. FIELDS OF GOLD 148
PART IV
THE BATTLE OF MESSINES
I. WYTSCHAETE AND MESSINES 152
II. THE SPIRIT OF VICTORY 159
III. AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE 164
IV. THE EFFECT OF THE BLOW 172
V. LOOKING BACKWARD 176
VI. THE AUSTRALIANS AT MESSINES 180
VII. A BATTLE IN A THUNDER-STORM 183
VIII. THE TRAGEDY AT LOMBARTZYDE 186
IX. THE STRUGGLE FOR HELL WOOD 190
PART V
THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS
AND THE CANADIANS AT LENS
I. BREAKING THE SALIENT 195
II. FROM PILKEM RIDGE TO HOLLEBEKE 201
III. THE BEGINNING OF THE RAINS 206
IV. PILL-BOXES AND MACHINE-GUNS 211
V. THE SONG OF THE COCKCHAFERS 221
VI. WOODS OF ILL-FAME 226
VII. THE BATTLE OF LANGEMARCK 230
VIII. CAPTURE OF HILL SEVENTY 234
IX. LONDONERS IN GLENCORSE WOOD 242
X. SOMERSETS AT LANGEMARCK 246
XI. THE IRISH IN THE SWAMPS 251
XII. THE WAY THROUGH GLENCORSE WOOD 255
XIII. THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS 261
XIV. THE AGONY OF ARMENTIERES 269
XV. THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD 274
XVI. THE WAY TO PASSCHENDAELE 294
XVII. THE BATTLE OF POLYGON WOOD 298
XVIII. ABRAHAM HEIGHTS AND BEYOND 308
XIX. SCENES OF BATTLE 321
XX. THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND 329
XXI. THE ASSAULTS ON PASSCHENDAELE 339
XXII. ROUND POELCAPPELLE 343
XXIII. THE CANADIANS COME NORTH 356
XXIV. LONDON MEN AND ARTISTS 372
XXV. THE CAPTURE OF PASSCHENDAELE 376
FROM BAPAUME TO PASSCHENDAELE
INTRODUCTION
1917.... I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that
date as one of the world's black years flinging its shadow forward to
the future until gradually new generations escape from its dark spell.
To us now, only a few months away from that year, above all to those of
us who have seen something of the fighting which crowded every month of
it except the last, the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a
river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great
carnage of men. It was a year of unending battle on the Western Front,
which matters most to us because of all our youth there. It was a year
of monstrous and desperate conflict. Looking back upon it, remembering
all its days of attack and counter-attack, all the roads of war crowded
with troops and transport, all the battlefields upon which our armies
moved under fire, the coming back of the prisoners by hundreds and
thousands, the long trails of the wounded, the activity, the traffic,
the roar and welter and fury of the year, one has a curious physical
sensation of breathlessness and heart-beat because of the burden of so
many memories. The heroism of men, the suffering of individuals, their
personal adventures, their deaths or escape from death, are swallowed up
in this wild drama of battle so that at times it seems impersonal and
inhuman like some cosmic struggle in which man is but an atom of the
world's convulsion. To me, and perhaps to others like me, who look on at
all this from the outside edge of it, going into its fire and fury at
times only to look again, closer, into the heart of it, staring at its
scenes not as men who belong to them but as witnesses to give evidence
at the bar of history--for if we are not that we are nothing--and to
chronicle the things that have happened on those fields, this sense of
impersonal forces is strong. We see all this in the mass. We see its
movement as a tide watched from the bank and not from the point of view
of a swimmer breasting each wave or going down in it. Regimental
officers and men know more of the ground in which they live for a while
before they go forward over the shell-craters to some barren slope where
machine-guns are hidden below the clods of soil, or a line of concrete
blockhouses heaped up with timber and sand-bags on one of the ridges.
They know with a particular intimacy the smallest landmarks there--the
forked branch among some riven trees that are called a "wood," a dead
body that lies outside their wire, the muzzle of a broken gun that pokes
out of the slime, a hummock of earth that is a German strong point. They
know the stench of these places. They know the filth of them, in their
dug-outs and in their trenches, in their senses and in their souls. I
and a few others have a view less intimate, and on a wider scale. We go
to see how our men live in these places, but do not stay with them. We
go from one battle to another as doctors from one case to another,
feeling the pulse of it, watching its symptoms, diagnosing the prospects
of life or death, recording its history, as observers and not as the
patients of war, though we take a few of its risks, and its tragedy
darkens our spirit sometimes, and the sight of all this struggle of men,
the thought of all this slaughter and sacrifice of youth, becomes at
times intolerable and agonizing. This broad view of war is almost as
wearing to the spirit, though without the physical strain, as the closer
view which soldiers have. The wounded man who comes down to the
dressing-station after his fight sees only the men around him at the
time, and it is a personal adventure of pain limited to his own
suffering, and relieved by the joy of his escape. But we see the many
wounded who stream down month after month from the battlefields--for
three and a half years I have watched the tide of wounded flowing back,
so many blind men, so many cripples, so many gassed and stricken
men--and there is something staggering in the actual sight of the
vastness and the unceasing drift of this wreckage of war. So we have
seen the fighting in the year 1917 in the whole sweep of its bloody
pageant; and the rapidity with which one battle followed another after
an April day in Arras, the continued fury of gun-fire and infantry
assaults, and the long heroic effort of our men to smash the enemy's
strength before the year should end, left us, as chroniclers of this
twelve months' strife, overwhelmed by the number of its historic
episodes and by its human sacrifice.
The year began with the German retreat from the Somme battlefields. It
was a withdrawal for strategical reasons--the shortening of the enemy's
line and the saving of his man-power--but also a retreat because it was
forced upon the enemy by the greatness of his losses in the Somme
fighting. He would not have left the Bapaume Ridge and all his elaborate
defences down to Peronne and Roye unless we had so smashed his divisions
by incessant gun-fire and infantry assaults that he was bound to
economize his power for adventures elsewhere. On the ground from which
he drew back, more hurriedly than he desired because we followed quickly
on his heels to Bapaume, he left some of his dead. Many of his dead.
Below Loupart Wood I saw hundreds of them, strewn about their broken
batteries, and lying in heaps of obscene flesh in the wild chaos of
earth which had been their trenches. On one plot of earth a few hundred
yards in length there were 800 dead, and over all this battlefield one
had to pick one's way to avoid treading on the bits and bodies of men.
From the mud, arms stretched out like those of men who had been drowned
in bogs. Boots and legs were uncovered in the muck-heaps, and faces with
eyeless sockets on which flies settled, clay-coloured faces with broken
jaws, or without noses or scalps, stared up at the sky or lay half
buried in the mud. I fell once and clutched a bit of earth and found
that I had grasped a German hand. It belonged to a body in field-grey
stuck into the side of a bank on the edge of all this filthy
shambles.... In the retreat the enemy laid waste the country behind him.
I have described in this book the completeness of that destruction and
its uncanny effect upon our senses as we travelled over the old No Man's
Land through hedges of barbed wire and across the enemy's trenches into
his abandoned strongholds like Gommecourt and Serre, and then into open
country where German troops had lived beyond our gun-fire in French
villages still inhabited by civilians. It was like wandering through a
plague-stricken land abandoned after some fiendish orgy, of men drunk
with the spirit of destruction. Every cottage in villages for miles
around had been gutted by explosion. Every church in those villages had
been blown up. The orchards had been cut down and some of the graves
ransacked for their lead. There had been no mercy for historic little
towns like Bapaume and Peronne, and in Bapaume the one building that
stood when we entered--the square tower of the Town Hall--was hurled up
a week later when a slow fuse burnt to its end, and only a hole in the
ground shows where it had been. The enemy left these slow-working fuses
in many places, and "booby-traps" to blow a man to bits or blind him for
life if he touched a harmless-looking stick or opened the lid of a box,
or stumbled over an old boot. One of the dirty tricks of war.
We followed the enemy quickly to Bapaume northwards towards Queant, but
with only small patrols farther east, where he retired in easy stages
with rear-guards of machine-gunners to his Hindenburg line behind St.
Quentin. The absence of large numbers of British soldiers in this
abandoned country scared one. Supposing the enemy were to come back in
force? It was difficult to know his whereabouts. We were afraid of
running our cars into his outposts. "Can you tell me where our front
line is," asked a friend of mine to a sergeant leaning against a ruined
wall and chatting to a private who stood next to him. The sergeant
removed his cigarette from his mouth and with just the glint of a smile
in his eyes said, "Well, sir, I am the front line." It was almost like
that for a week or two. I went down roads where there was no sign of a
trench or a patrol and knew that the enemy was very close. One felt
lonely. Sir Douglas Haig did not waste his men in a futile pursuit of
the enemy. He wanted them elsewhere, and decided that the Germans would
not return over the roads they had destroyed by mine-craters to the
villages they had laid waste. He was concentrating masses of men round
Arras for the battles which had been planned in the autumn of '16.
The Commander-in-Chief has explained in one of his dispatches how the
general plan of campaign for the spring offensive was modified because
of the German retreat which relieved us of another battle of the Ancre.
It was readjusted also, as he has written, in order to meet the wishes
of the French Command, so that the attack on the Messines Ridge, to be
followed by operations against the Flanders ridges towards the coast,
had to be made secondary to the actions around Arras and the Scarpe.
They were intended to hold a number of German divisions while the French
undertook their own great offensive in the Champagne under the supreme
command of General Nivelle. In the Arras battles our troops were to do
the "team work" for the French, and if the combined operations did not
produce decisive results the British Armies might then be transferred to
Flanders, according to the original plan. It was a handicap to our own
strategical ideas, and was certain to weaken our divisions without
increasing our prestige before they could be sent to Flanders for the
most important assaults on our length of front. In loyalty to our Allies
it was decided to subordinate our own plan to theirs, and this agreement
was carried out utterly. By bad luck the Italians were not ready to
strike at the same time, and the Russian revolution had already begun to
relieve the enemy of his Eastern menace, so that the Anglo-French
offensive did not have the prospect of decisive victory which might have
come if the German armies had been pressed on all fronts.
Our regimental officers and men knew nothing of all this high strategy,
nothing of the international difficulties which confronted our High
Command. They knew only that they had to attack strong and difficult
positions and that the immediate success depended upon their own
leadership and the courage and training of their men. They were sure of
that and hoped for a victory which would break the German spirit. They
devoted themselves to the technical details of their work, and only in
subconscious thought pondered over the powers that lie behind the
preparations of battle and decide the fate of fighting men. The scenes
in Arras and on the roads that lead to Arras are not to be forgotten by
men who lived through them. Below ground as well as above ground
thousands of soldiers worked night and day for weeks before the hour of
attack. Above ground they were getting many guns into position, making
roads, laying cables, building huts and camps, hurrying up vast stores
of material. Below ground they were boring tunnels and making them
habitable for many battalions, with ventilation shafts and electric
light. All the city of Arras has an underground system of vaults and
passages dug out in the time of the Spanish Netherlands when the houses
of the citizens were built of stone quarried from the ground on which
they stood. These subterranean passages were deepened and lengthened
until they went a mile or more beyond Arras to the edge of the German
front lines. The old vaults where the merchants kept their stores were
propped up and cleaned out, and in this underground world thousands of
our men lived for several days before the battle waiting for "zero" hour
on April 9, when they would come up into the light and see the
shell-fire which was now exploding above them, unloosing boulders of
chalky rock about them and shaking the bowels of the earth. The enemy
knew of our preparations and of this life in Arras, and during the week
before the battle he flung many shells into the city, smashing houses
already stricken, "strafing" the station and the barracks, the squares
and courtyards, and the roads that led in and out. During the progress
of the battle I went many times into the broken heart of Arras while the
bodies of men and horses lay about where transport columns had gone
galloping by under fire and while the shrill whine of high velocities
was followed by the crash of shells among the ruins. In the town and
below it there were always crowds of men during the weeks of fighting
outside. I went through the tunnels when long columns of soldiers in
single file moved slowly forward to another day's battle in the fields
beyond, and when another column came back, wounded and bloody after
their morning's fight.
The wounded and the unwounded passed each other in these dimly lighted
corridors. Their steel hats clinked together. Their bodies touched.
Wafts of stale air laden with a sickly stench came out of the vaults.
Faint whiffs of poison-gas filtered through the soil above and made men
vomit. For the most time the men were silent as they passed each other,
but now and then a wounded man would say, "Oh, Christ!" or "Mind my arm,
mate," and an unwounded man would pass some remark to the man ahead. In
vaults dug into the sides of the passages were groups of tunnellers and
other men half screened by blanket curtains. Their rifles were propped
against the quarried rocks. They sat on ammunition boxes and played
cards to the light of candles stuck in bottles, which made their shadows
flicker fantastically on the walls. They took no interest in the
procession beyond their blankets--the walking wounded and the troops
going up. Some of them slept on the stone floors with their heads
covered by their overcoats and made pillows of their gas-masks. Under
some old houses of Arras were women and children--about 700 of
them--among our soldiers. They were the people who had lived underground
since the beginning of the war and would not leave. Only four of them
went away when they were told of the coming battle and its dangers. "We
will stay," they said with a certain pride because they had seen so much
war. A few women were wounded and one or two killed. Later, after the
first day's battle, in spite of some high velocities from long-range
guns, the streets and squares were filled with soldiers, and Arras was
tumultuous with the movement of men and horses and mules and wagons. The
streets seethed with Scottish soldiers muddy as they came straight out
of battle, bloody as they walked in wounded. Many battalions of Jocks
came into the squares, and their pipers came to play to them. I watched
the Gordons' pipers march up and down in stately ritual, and their
colonel, who stood next to me, looked at them with a proud light in his
eyes as the tune of "Highland Laddie" swelled up to the gables and
filled the open frontages of the gutted houses. Snowflakes fell lightly
on the steel hats of the Scots in the square, and mud was splashed to
the khaki aprons over their kilts--no browner than their hard lean
faces--as a battery rumbled across the cobbled place and the drivers
turned in their saddles to grin at the fine swagger of the pipers and
the triumph of the big drumsticks. An old woman danced a jig to the
pipes, holding her skirt above her skinny legs. She tripped up to a
group of Scottish officers and spoke quick shrill words to them. "What
does the old witch say," asked a laughing Gordon. She had something
particular to say. In 1870 she had heard the pipes in Arras. They were
played by prisoners from South Germany, and as a young girl she had
danced to them.... There was a casualty clearing-station in Arras, in a
deep high vault like the crypt of a cathedral. The way into it was down
a long tunnelled passage, and during the battle thousands of men came
here to have their wounds dressed. They formed up in queues waiting
their turn and moved slowly down the tunnelled way, weary, silent,
patient. Outside lay some of the bad cases until the stretcher-bearers
carried them down, and others sat on the side of the road or lay at full
length there, dog-weary after their long walk from the battlefields.
Blind boys were led forward by their comrades, and men with all their
heads and faces swathed about. They were not out of danger even yet, for
the enemy hated to leave Arras as a health resort, but it was sanctuary
for men who had been in hell fire up by Monchy.
The first day of the Arras battle was our victory. We struck the enemy a
heavy blow, and the capture of the Vimy Ridge by the Canadians and the
Highland Division was as wonderful as the great thrust by English and
Scottish battalions along the valley of the Scarpe across the
Arras-Cambrai road. By April 14 we had captured 13,000 prisoners and
over 200 guns. But it was hard fighting after the first few hours of the
9th, and the operations that followed on both sides of the Scarpe were
costly to us. The London men of the 56th Division, and the old county
troops of the 3rd and 12th and 37th, and the Scots of the 15th suffered
in heroic fighting against strong and fresh reserves of the enemy who
were massed rapidly to check them and made fierce, repeated
counter-attacks against the village of Roeux and its chemical works,
north of the Scarpe, and against Monchy-le-Preux and Guemappe, south of
the river. Again and again these counter-attacks were beaten back with
most bloody losses to the enemy, but our own men suffered each time
until they were weary beyond words. I saw the cavalry ride forward
towards Monchy, where they came under great fire, and I saw the body of
their General carried back to Tilloy. It was a day of tragic memory.
At this time, as Sir Douglas Haig has recorded, the battle of Arras
might have ended. But the French offensive was about to begin, and it
was important that the full pressure of the British attacks should be
maintained in order to assist our Allies. A renewal of the assault was
therefore ordered, and after a week's postponement to gather together
new supplies, to change the divisions, and complete the artillery
dispositions, fighting was resumed on a big scale on April 23. It was on
a front of about nine miles, from Croisilles to Gavrelle. Important
ground was taken west of Cherisy and east of Monchy, where our troops
seized Infantry Hill, but the violent counter-attacks of the enemy in
great strength prevented the gain of all our objectives on that day, and
once more put our troops to a severe ordeal. Roeux and Gavrelle on the
north of the Scarpe, Guemappe on the south, were the focal points of
this struggle and the scene of the bitterest fighting in and out of the
villages. On April 23 and 24 the enemy made eight separate
counter-attacks against Gavrelle, and each was shattered by our
artillery and machine-gun fire. On April 28 there was another great day
of battle when the Canadians had fierce hand-to-hand fighting in the
village of Arleux, and English troops made progress towards Oppy over
Greenland Hill and beyond Monchy. Gavrelle was attacked seven times more
by the enemy, who fell again in large numbers. The night attack of May 3
was unlucky in many of its episodes because some of our men lost their
way in the darkness and had the enemy behind them as well as in front of
them, and suffered under heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. It was
"team work" for the French, and many of our sons fell that day not
knowing that their blood was the price of loyalty to our Allies and part
payment of the debt we owe to France for all her valour in this war. On
May 3 the battle front was extended on a line of sixteen miles, and
while the 3rd and 1st Armies attacked from Fontaine-lez-Croisilles to
Fresnoy, the 5th Army stormed the Hindenburg line near Bullecourt. The
Australians carried a stretch of this Hindenburg line. Cherisy fell into
the hands of East county battalions, Roeux was entered again by
English troops, and in Fresnoy, north of Oppy, the Canadians fought
masses of Germans assembled for counter-attack and swept them out of the
village. Heavy counter-attacks developed later, so that our men had to
fall back from Cherisy and Roeux--Fresnoy was abandoned later--but the
rest of the ground was held. During this month's fighting twenty-three
German divisions had been withdrawn exhausted from the line, and we had
captured 19,500 prisoners, 257 guns including 98 heavies, 464
machine-guns, 227 trench mortars, and a great quantity of war material.
We advanced our line five miles on a front of over twenty miles,
including the Vimy Ridge, which had always menaced our positions. Above
all, we had drawn upon the enemy's strength so that the French armies
were relieved of that amount of resistance to their offensive against
the Chemin des Dames. That was the idea behind it all, and it succeeded,
though the cost was not light. The battle of Arras petered out into
small engagements and nagging fighting when on June 7 the battle of
Messines began.
It was a model battle, and the whole operation was astonishing in the
thoroughness of its preparations through every detail of organization,
in the training of its method of attack, in generalship and staff work,
and in its Intelligence department. The 2nd Army had long held this
part of the Ypres salient, and knew the enemy's country as well as its
own. The observers on Kemmel Hill, which looked across to Wytschaete
Ridge, had watched every movement in the enemy's lines, and every sign
of new defensive work. Aeroplane photographs, stacks of them, revealed
many secrets of the enemy's life on this high ground which gave him
observation of all our roads and villages in the flat country between
Dickebusch and Ypres. A relief map on a big scale was built up in a
field behind our lines, and the assault troops and their officers walked
round it and studied in miniature the woods and slopes, strong points
and trenches, which they would have to attack. For eighteen months past
Australian and Canadian miners had been at work below ground boring deep
under the enemy's positions and laying charges for the explosion of
twenty-four mines. All that time the enemy, aware of his danger, had
been counter-mining, and at Hill 60 there was constant underground
fighting for more than ten months when men met each other in the
converging galleries and fought in their darkness. As Sir Douglas Haig
has written, at the time of our offensive the enemy was known to be
driving a gallery which would have broken into the tunnel leading into
the Hill 60 mines. By careful listening it was judged that if our attack
took place on the date arranged, the enemy's gallery would just fail to
reach us. So he was allowed to proceed. Eight thousand yards of gallery
had been bored, and there were nineteen mines ready charged with over a
million pounds of explosives. I saw those nineteen mines go up. The
earth rocked with a great shudder, and the sky was filled with flame. It
was the signal of our bombardment to break out in a deafening tumult of
guns after a quietude in which I heard only the snarl of enemy
gas-shells and the shunting and whistling of our railway engines down
below there in the darkness as though this battlefield were Clapham
Junction. Round about the salient a network of railways had been built
with great speed under the very eyes of the enemy, and though he had
shelled our tracks and engines he could never stop the work of those
engineers who laboured with fine courage and industry so that the guns
might not lack for shells nor the men for supplies on the day of attack.
The battle of Wytschaete and Messines was a fine victory for us,
breaking the evil spell of the Ypres salient in which our men had sat
down so long under direct observation of the enemy on that ridge above
them. Kemmel Hill, which had been under fire in our lines for three
years, became a health resort for Australian boys whose turn to fight
had not yet come, and they sat on top of the old observation-post where
men had hidden below ground to watch through a slit in the earth,
staring through field-glasses at the sweep of fire from Oostaverne to
Pilkem, and eating sweets, and putting wild flowers in their slouch
hats. Dickebusch lost its horror. The road to Vierstraat was no longer
bracketed by German shells, and there was no further need of camouflage
screens along other roads where notice-boards said: _Drive slowly--dust
draws fire_. On the morning of battle after the capture of the ridge an
Irish brigadier sat outside his dug-out on a kitchen chair before a deal
table, where his maps were spread. "It's good to take the fresh air," he
said. "Yesterday I had to keep below ground." All that made a difference
on the right of the salient, but Ypres was still "a hot shop," as the
men say, and the roads out of Ypres--the Lille road and the Menin
road--were as abominable as ever, and worse than ever when at the end of
July the battles of Flanders began.
The Wytschaete-Messines Ridge is the eastern spur of that long range of
"abrupt isolated hills," to use the words of Sir Douglas Haig, which
divides the valleys of the Lys and the Yser, and links up with the
ridges stretching north-eastwards to the Ypres-Menin road, and then
northwards to Passchendaele and Staden. One of the objects of our
campaign in 1917 was to gain the high ground to Passchendaele and
beyond. A mere glance at a relief map is enough to show the formidable
nature of the positions held by the enemy on those slopes which
dominated our low ground. When one went across the Yser Canal along the
Menin road, or towards the Pilkem Ridge, those slopes seemed like a wall
of cliffs barring the way of our armies, however strongly our tide of
men might dash against them. The plan to take them by assault needed
enormous courage and high faith in the mind of any man who bore the
burden of command, and his faith and courage depended utterly on the
valour of the men who were to carry out his plan against those frowning
hills. The men did not fail our High Command, and for three and a half
months those troops of ours fought with a heroic resolution never
surpassed by any soldiers in the world, and hardly equalled, perhaps,
in all the history of war, against terrible gun-fire and innumerable
machine-guns, in storms and swamps, in bodily misery because of the mud
and wet, in mental suffering because of the long strain on their nerve
and strength, with severe casualties because of the enemy's fierce
resistance, but with such passionate and self-sacrificing courage that
the greatest obstacles were overcome, and the enemy was beaten back from
one line of defence to another with large captures of prisoners and guns
until, in the middle of November, the crest of Passchendaele was gained.
Before the first day of the battle the 5th Army, with the 1st French
Army on its left, below the flooded ground of St.-Jansbeek, crossed the
Yser Canal and seized 3000 yards of the enemy's trench system. During
that night the pioneer battalion of the Guards, working under fierce
fire, built seventeen bridges across the canal for the passage of our
troops on the day of assault. On that day, July 31, at 3.50 in the
morning, battle was engaged on a front of fifteen miles from Boesinghe
to the River Lys, where the 2nd Army was making a holding attack on our
right wing. The German front-line system of defence was taken
everywhere. Our troops captured the Pilkem Ridge on the left,
Velorenhoek, the Frezenberg Redoubt, the Pommern Redoubt, and St.-Julien
north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, and were fighting forward against
fierce resistance on both sides of the Ypres-Menin road. They stormed
through Sanctuary Wood and captured Stirling Castle, Hooge, and the
Bellewaerde Ridge, and by the end of the day had gained the crest of
Westhoek Ridge. On the 2nd Army front the New-Zealanders carried the
village of La Basseville after close fighting, which lasted fifty
minutes, and English troops on their left captured Hollebeke and
difficult ground north of the Ypres-Comines Canal. Over 6000 prisoners,
including 133 officers, surrendered to us that day.
It was in the afternoon of the first day that the luck of the weather
was decided against us and there began those heavy rain-storms which
drenched the battlefields in August and made them dreadful for men and
beasts. All this part of Flanders is intersected by small streams or
"beeks" filtering through the valleys between the ridges, and our
artillery-fire had already caused them to form ponds and swamps by
destroying their channels so that they slopped over the low-lying
ground. The rains enlarged this area of flood, and so saturated the
clayey soil that it became a vast bog with deep overbrimming pits where
thousands of shell-craters had pierced the earth. Tracks made of wooden
slabs fastened together were the only roads by which men and pack-mules
could cross this quagmire, and each of these ways became taped out by
the enemy's artillery, and very perilous. They were slippery under moist
mud, and men and mules fell into the bogs on either side, and sometimes
drowned in them. At night in the darkness and the storms it was hard to
find the tracks and difficult to keep to them, and long columns of
troops staggered and stumbled forward with mud up to their knees if they
lost direction, and mud up to their necks if they fell into the
shell-holes. It was over such ground as this, in such intolerable
conditions, that our men fought and won their way across the chain of
ridges which led to Passchendaele. I saw some of the haunting scenes of
this struggle and went over the ground across the Pilkem Ridge, and
along the Ypres-Menin road to Westhoek Ridge, and up past Hooge to the
bogs of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and beyond the Yser Canal to
St.-Jean and Wieltje, where every day for months our gunners went on
firing, and every day the enemy "answered back" with scattered and
destructive fire, searching for our batteries and for the bodies of our
men. The broken skeleton of Ypres was always in the foreground or the
background of this scene of war, and every day it changed in different
atmospheric phases and different hours of light so that it was never the
same in its tragic beauty. Sometimes it was filled with gloom and
shadows, and the tattered masonry of the Cloth Hall, lopped off at the
top, stood black as granite above its desolate boulder-strewn square.
Sometimes when storm-clouds were blown wildly across the sky and the
sunlight struck through them, Ypres would be all white and glamorous,
like a ghost city in a vision of the world's end. At times there was a
warm glow upon its rain-washed walls, and they shone like burnished
metal. Or they were wrapped about with a thick mist stabbed through by
flashes of red fire from heavy guns, revealing in a moment's glare the
sharp edges of the fallen stonework, the red ruins of the prison and
asylum, the huddle of shell-pierced roofs, and that broken tower which
stands as a memorial of what once was the splendour of Ypres. A
military policeman standing outside the city gave an order to all going
in: "Gasmasks and steel hats to be worn," and at that moment when one
fumbled at the string of one's gas-bag and fastened the strap of a steel
hat beneath one's chin, the menace of war crept close and the evil of it
touched one's senses. It was very evil beyond the Lille gate and the
Menin gate, where new shell-holes mingled with old ones, and men walked
along the way of death. The spirit of that evil lurked about the banks
of the Yser Canal with its long fringe of blasted trees, white and
livid, with a leprous look when the sunlight touched their stumps. The
water of the canal was but a foul slime stained with gobs of colour. The
wreckage of bridges and barges lay in it. In its banks were unexploded
shells and deep gashes where the bursts had torn the earth down, and
innumerable craters. The Yser Canal holds in a ghostly way the horror of
this war. Yet it is worse beyond. Out through the Menin gate the view of
the salient widens, and every yard of the way is bleeding with the
memory of British soldiers who walked and fought and died here since the
autumn of '14. How many of them we can hardly guess or know. The white
crosses of their graves are scattered about the shell-churned fields and
the rubbish-heaps of brick, though many were never buried, and many were
taken back by stretcher-bearers who risked their lives to bring in these
bodies. There is no house where the White Chateau used to be. There is
no grange by the Moated Grange where men crept out at night, crawling on
their stomachs when the flares went up. Hundreds of thousands of men
have gone up to Hell-fire Corner, some of them with a cold sweat in the
palms of their hands and brave faces and an act of sacrifice in their
hearts. It was the way to Hooge. It was a corner of the hell that was
here always under German guns and German eyes from the ridge beyond.
They had high ground all around us, as the country goes up from
Observatory Ridge and Sanctuary Wood and Bellewaerde to the Westhoek
Ridge and the high plateau of Polygon Wood. No men of ours could move in
the daylight without being seen. The Menin road was always under fire.
Every bit of broken barn, every dug-out and trench, was a mark for the
enemy's artillery. During the Flanders fighting all this ground was
still in the danger zone, though the enemy lost much of his direct
observation after our first advance. But he was still trying to find the
old places and hurled over big shells in a wild scattered way. They
flung up black fountains of earth with frightful violence. Everywhere
there were shell-holes so deep that a cart and horse would find room in
them. One looked into these gulfs with beastly sensations--with a kind
of animal fear at the thought of what would happen to a man if he stood
in the way of such an explosion. There was a sense of old black brooding
evil about all this country, and worst of all in remembrance were the
mine-craters of Hooge. I stared into those pits all piled with stinking
sand-bags on which fungus grew, and thought of friends of mine who once
lived here, with the enemy a few yards away from them, with mines and
saps creeping close to them before another upheaval of the earth, with
corpses and bits of bodies rotting half buried where they sat, always
wet, always lousy, in continual danger of death. The mines went up and
men fought for new craters over new dead. The sand-bags silted down
after rain, and machine-gun bullets swept through the gaps, and men sank
deeper into this filth and corruption. The place is abandoned now, but
the foulness of it stayed, with a lake of slime in which bodies floated,
and the same old stench rose from its caverns and craters. Bellewaerde
Lake, to the north of Hooge, is not what it used to be when gentlemen of
Ypres came out here to shoot wild-fowl or walk through Chateau Wood
around the White Chateau of Hooge with a dog and a gun. There are still
stumps of trees, shot and mangled by three years of fire, but no more
wood than that, and the lake is a cesspool into which the corruption of
death has flowed. Its water is stained with patches of red and yellow
and green slime, and shapeless things float in it. Beyond is the open
ground which goes up to Westhoek Ridge above Nonne Boschen and Glencorse
Wood, for which our men fought on the first day of battle and afterwards
in many weeks of desperate struggle. The Australians took possession of
this country for a time and had to stay and hold it after the excitement
of advance. They came winding along the tracks in single file through
this newly captured ground, carrying their lengths of duck-board and
ammunition boxes with just a grim glance towards places where shells
burst with monstrous whoofs. "A hot spot," said one of these boys,
crouching with his mates in a bit of battered trench outside a German
pill-box surrounded by dead bodies. Our guns were firing from many
batteries, and flights of shells rushed through the air from the heavies
a long way back and from the field-guns forward. It was the field-guns
which hurt one's ears most with their sharp hammer-strokes. Now and
again a little procession passed to which all other men gave way. It was
a stretcher-party carrying a wounded man shoulder high. There is
something noble and stately about these bearers, and when I see them I
always think of Greek heroes carried back on their shields. There was a
vapour of poison gas about these fields, not strong enough to kill, but
making one's eyes and skin smart. The Australians did not seem to notice
it. Perhaps the stench of dead horses overwhelmed their nostrils. It was
strong and foul. The carcasses of these poor beasts lay about as they
had been hit by shrapnel or shell splinters, and down one track came a
living horse less lucky than these, bleeding badly from its wounds and
ambling slowly with drooping head and glazed eyes. Worse smells than of
dead horse crept up from the battered trenches and dug-outs, where
Glencorse Wood goes down to Inverness Copse. It was the dreadful odour
of dead men. It rose in gusts and waves and eddies over all this ground,
for the battlefield was strewn with dead. I saw many German bodies in
the fields of the Somme, and on the way out from Arras, and on the Vimy
Ridge, but never in such groups as lay about the pill-boxes and the
shell-craters of the salient. Everywhere they lay half buried in the
turmoil of earth, or stark above ground without any cover to hide them.
They lay with their heads flung back into water-filled craters or with
their legs dangling in deep pools. They were blown into shapeless masses
of raw flesh by our artillery. Heads and legs and arms all coated in
clay lay without bodies far from where the men of whom they had been
part were killed. God knows what agonies were suffered before death by
men shut up in those German blockhouses, like Fitzclarence Farm, and
Herenthage Chateau, and Clapham Junction, which I passed on the way up.
Some of the garrisons had not stayed in the blockhouses until our troops
had reached them. Perhaps the concussion of our drum-fire was worse
inside those concrete walls than outside. Perhaps the men had rushed out
hoping to surrender before our troops were on them, or with despairing
courage had brought their machine-guns into the open to kill our first
waves before their own death. Whatever their motive had been, many of
these men had come out, and they lay in heaps, mangled by shell-fire
that came across the fields to them in a deep belt of high explosives.
Here under the sky they lay, a frightful witness against modern
civilization, a bloody challenge to any gospel of love which men profess
to believe. Over Nonne Boschen and Inverness Copse, and Polygon Wood
beyond, and the long claw-like hook of the Passchendaele Ridge, the sky
was clear at times and the water-pools reflected its light. But these
places had no touch of loveliness because of the light. Once in history
meek-eyed women walked in Nonne Boschen, which was Nun's Wood, and in
Inverness Copse, as we call it, maids went with their mates in the
glades. Now they are places haunted by ghastly memories, and there rises
from them a miasma which sickens one's soul. Yet bright above the evil
of them and clean above their filth there is the memory of that youth of
ours who came here through fire and flame and fell here, so that the
soil is sacred as their field of honour.
In the first phase of the battle of Flanders the new system of German
defence was formidable. It was that "elastic system" by which Hindenburg
hoped to relieve his men from the destructive fire of our artillery by
holding his front line thinly in concrete blockhouses and organized
shell-craters with enfilade positions for machine-gun fire, keeping his
local reserves at quick striking distance for counter-attack. Our first
waves of men flowed past and between these blockhouses in their struggle
to attain their objectives, and were swept by cross-fire as they went
forward, so that they were thinned out by the time they had reached the
line of their advance. The succeeding waves were sometimes checked by
German machine-gunners still holding out in undamaged shelters, and our
troops in the new front line, weak and exhausted after hours of
fighting, found themselves exposed to fierce counter-attacks in front
while groups of the enemy were still behind them. For several weeks
there were episodes of this kind, when our men had to give ground,
though the line of advance seldom ebbed back to its starting line, and
some progress was made however great the difficulties. Still the
"pill-box" trouble was a serious menace, costly in life, and new methods
of attack had to be devised during the progress of fighting when the
area of the 2nd Army was extended on our left so that the 5th Army was
relieved of some of its broad battle front. Our heavy howitzers
concentrated on every blockhouse that could be located by aeroplane
photographs or direct observation, with such storms of explosive that if
they were not destroyed the garrisons of machine-gunners inside were
killed or stupefied by concussion. Our method of attack in depth, as at
Wytschaete and Messines--battalions advancing in close support of each
other, so that the final objective was held by fresh troops to meet the
inevitable counter-attacks--succeeded in a most striking way, in spite
of the fearful condition of the ground. The enemy changed his new method
of defence to meet this new method of attack. He went back to strongly
held lines with support troops close forward, and had to pay the penalty
by heavier losses under our artillery. The abominable weather and state
of ground were his best lines of defence, and in August and October he
had astounding luck.
Through all these battles our men were magnificent--not demi-gods, nor
saints with a passion for martyrdom, nor heroes of melodrama facing
death with breezy nonchalance while they read sweet letters from
blue-eyed girls, but grim in attack and stubborn in defence, getting on
with the job--a damned ugly job--as far as the spirit could pull the
body and control the nerves. They were industrious as ants on this great
muck-heap of the battlefield. Transport drivers, engineers, signallers,
and pioneers laboured for victory as hard as infantry and gunners, and
worked, for the most part, in evil places where there was always a
chance of being torn to rags. The gunners, with their wheels sunk to the
axles, served their batteries until they were haggard and worn, and they
had little sleep and less comfort, and no hour of safety from infernal
fire. They were wet from one week to another. They stood to the tags of
their boots in mud. They had many of their guns smashed to spokes and
splinters. They were lucky if lightly wounded. But their barrage-fire
rolled ahead of the infantry at every attack and they shattered the
enemy's divisions. The stretcher-bearers seemed to give no thought to
their own lives in the rescue of the wounded; and down behind the
lines--not always beyond range of gun-fire--doctors and hospital
orderlies and nurses worked in the dressing-stations with the same
dogged industry and courage as men who carried up duck-boards to the
line, drove teams of pack-mules up tracks under fire, or unloaded
shells from trains that went puffing to the edge of the battlefields. It
was all part of the business of war. Wounded men who came back from
battle were dealt with as so many cases of damaged goods, to be packed
off speedily to make way for others. There was no time for
sentiment--and no need of it. I used to go sometimes to an old
mill-house on days of battle. During the Flanders fighting thousands of
wounded men came to this place as a first stage on their journey to base
hospitals. The lightly wounded used to sit in a long low tent beside the
mill, round red-hot braziers, waiting in turn to have their wounds
dressed. These crowds of men were of many battalions and of all types of
English, Scottish, and Irish troops, with smaller bodies of Australians,
New-Zealanders, Canadians, South-Africans, Newfoundlanders. They were
clotted with mud and blood, and numb and stiff until the warmth of the
braziers unfroze them. They sat silent as a rule, with their steel hats
tilted forward, but there was hardly a groan from them, and never a
whimper, nor any curse against the fate that had hit them. If I
questioned them they answered with a stark simplicity of truth about the
things they had seen and done, with often a queer glint of humour--grim
enough, God knows, but humour still--in their tale of escape from death.
Always after a talk with them I came away with a deep belief that the
courage, honesty, and humanity of these boys were a world higher than
the philosophy of their intellectual leaders, and I hated the thought
that we have been brought to such a pass by the infamy of an enemy
caste, and by the low ideals of Europe which have been our own law of
life, that all this splendid youth, thinking straight, seeing straight,
acting straight, without selfish motives, with clean hearts and fine
bodies, should be flung into the furnace of war and scorched by its
fires, and maimed, and blinded, and smashed. Only by the dire need of
defence against the enemies of the world's liberty can such a sacrifice
be justified, and that is our plea before the great Judge of Truth. Such
thoughts haunt one if one has any conscience, but when I went among the
troops on the roads or in their camps, and heard their laughter after
battle or before it, and saw the courage of men refusing to be beaten
down by the vilest conditions or heavy losses, and was a witness of
their pride in the achievements of their own battalions, I wondered
sometimes whether the sufferings of these men were not so pitiful as I
had thought. Their vitality helps them through many hardships. Their
interest in life is so great that until death comes close it does not
touch them--not many of them--with its coldness. In their comradeship
they find a compensation for discomfort, and their keenness to win the
rewards of skill and pluck is so high that they take great risks
sometimes as a kind of sport, as Arctic explorers or big game hunters
will face danger and endure great bodily suffering for their own sake.
Those men are natural soldiers, though all our men are not like that.
There are some even who like war, though very few. But most of them
would jeer at any kind of pity for them, because they do not pity
themselves, except in most dreadful moments which they put away from
their minds if they escape. They scorn pity, yet they hate worse still,
with a most deadly hatred, all the talk about "our cheerful men." For
they know that however cheerful they may be it is not because of a jolly
life or lack of fear. They loathe shell-fire and machine-gun fire. They
know what it is "to have the wind up." They have seen what a battlefield
looks like before it has been cleared of its dead. It is not for
non-combatants to call them "cheerful." Because non-combatants do not
understand and never will, not from now until the ending of the world.
"Not so much of your cheerfulness," they say, and "Cut it out about the
brave boys in the trenches." So it is difficult to describe them, or to
give any idea of what goes on in their minds, for they belong to another
world than the world of peace that we knew, and there is no code which
can decipher their secret, nor any means of self-expression on their
lips.
In this book the messages which I wrote from day to day are reprinted
with only one alteration--though some are left out. For reasons of space
(there is a limit to the length of a book) I have not included any
narrative of the Cambrai battles, and thought it best to end this book
with the gain of Passchendaele. The alteration is one which makes me
very glad. I have been allowed to give the names of the battalions,
which I could not do during the progress of the fighting because the
enemy wanted to know our Order of Battle. For the first time, therefore,
the world will know the regiments who fought without fame in the dismal
anonymity of this war, with such Spartan courage, up to that high crest
of Passchendaele which was their goal, beyond the bogs and the beeks
where masses of men struggled and fell. There is no criticism in this
book, no judgment of actions or men, no detailed summing up of success
and failure. That is not within my liberty or duty as a correspondent
with the Armies in the Field. The Commander-in-Chief himself has
summarized the definite gains of the campaign in Flanders:
"Notwithstanding the many difficulties, much has been achieved. Our
captures in Flanders since the commencement of operations at the
end of July amount to 20,065 prisoners, 74 guns, 941 machine-guns,
and 131 trench-mortars. It is certain that the enemy's losses
greatly exceeded ours. Most important of all, our new and hastily
trained armies have shown once again that they are capable of
meeting and beating the enemy's best troops, even under conditions
which required the greatest endurance, determination, and heroism
to overcome. The total number of prisoners taken in 1917, between
the opening of the spring offensive on April 9 and the conclusion
of the Flanders offensive, not including those captured in the
battle of Cambrai, was 57,696, including 1290 officers. During the
same period we captured also 109 heavy guns, 560 trench-mortars and
1976 machine-guns."
These are great gains in men and material, and the capture of the ridges
has given us strong defensive positions which should be of high value to
us in the new year of warfare calling to our men, unless the world's
agony is healed by the coming of Peace.
* * * * *
[_I am indebted to Mr. Robert Donald, editor of the_ Daily Chronicle_,
for permission to republish the articles which I have written for that
newspaper as a war correspondent with the British Army in the Field. My
letters from the Front also appeared in the_ Daily Telegraph _and a
number of Provincial, American, and Colonial papers, and I am grateful
for the honour of serving the great public of their readers._]
PART I
RETREAT FROM THE SOMME
I
A NEW YEAR OF WAR
NEW YEAR'S EVE, 1916
Last New Year's Eve--the end of a year which had been full of menace for
our fighting men, because, at the beginning, our lines had no great
power of guns behind them, and full of hopes that had been unfilled, in
spite of all their courage and all their sacrifice--an artillery officer
up in the Ypres salient waited for the tick of midnight by his
wrist-watch (it gave a glow-worm light in the darkness), and then
shouted the word "Fire!" ... One gun spoke, and then for a few seconds
there was silence. Over in the German line the flares went up and down,
and it was very quiet in the enemy trenches, where, perhaps, the
sentries wondered at that solitary gun. Then the artillery officer gave
the word of command again. This time the battery fired nine rounds. A
little while there was silence again, followed by another solitary shot,
and then by six rounds. So did the artillery in the Ypres salient salute
the birth of the New Year, born in war, coming to our soldiers and our
race with many days of battle, with new and stern demands for the lives
and blood of men.
To-night it is another New Year's Eve, and the year is coming to us with
the same demands and the same promises, and the only difference between
our hopes upon this night and that of a year ago is that by the struggle
and endeavour of those past twelve months the ending is nearer in sight
and the promise very near--very near as we hope and believe--its
fulfilment. The guns will speak again to-night, saluting by the same
kind of sullen salvo the first day of the last year of war. The last
year, if we have luck. It is raining now, a soft rain swept gustily
across the fields by a wind so mild after all our wild weather that it
seems to have the breath of spring in it. For a little while yesterday
this mildness, and the sunlight lying over the battlefields, and a
strange, rare inactivity of artillery, gave one just for one second of a
day-dream a sense that Peace had already come and that the victory had
been won. It was queer. I stood looking upon Neuville-St.-Vaast and the
Vimy Ridge. Our trenches and the enemy's wound along the slopes in wavy
lines of white chalk. There to my right was the Labyrinth and in a
hollow the ruins of Souchez. When I had first come to these battlefields
they were strewn with dead--French dead--after fighting frightful and
ferocious in intensity. Unexploded shells lay everywhere, and the litter
of great ruin, and storms of shells were bursting upon the Vimy Ridge.
The last time I went to these battlefields the high ridge of Vimy was
still aflame, and British troops were attacking the mine-craters there.
Yesterday all the scene was quiet, and bright sunlight gleamed upon the
broken roofs of Neuville, and the white trenches seemed abandoned. The
wet earth and leaves about me in a ruined farmyard had the moist scent
of early spring. A man was wandering up a road where six months ago he
would have been killed before he had gone a hundred yards. Lord! It
looked like peace again! ... It was only a false mirage. There was no
peace. Presently a battery began to fire. I saw the shells bursting over
the enemy's position. Now and again there was the sullen crump of a
German "heavy." And though the trenches seemed deserted on either side
they were held as usual by men waiting and watching with machine-guns
and hand-grenades and trench-mortars. There is no peace!
* * * * *
It was enormously quiet at times in Arras. The footsteps of my companion
were startling as they clumped over the broken pavement of the square,
and voices--women's voices--coming up from some hole in the earth
sounded high and clear, carrying far, in an unearthly way, in this great
awful loneliness of empty houses, broken churches, ruined banks and
shops and restaurants, and mansions cloistered once in flower gardens
behind high white walls. I went towards the women's voices as men in
darkness go towards any glimmer of light, for warmth of soul as well as
of body.
A woman came up a flight of stone steps from a vaulted cellar and stared
at me, and said, "Good day. Do you look for anything?"
I said, "I look only into your cellar. It is strange to find you living
here. All alone--perhaps."
"It is no longer strange to me. I have been here, as you say, alone, all
through the war, since the day of the first bombardment. That was on
October 6, 1914. Before then I was not alone. I was married. But my
husband was killed over there--you see the place where the shell fell.
Since then I am alone."
For two years and two months she and other women of Arras--one came now
to stand by her side and nod at her tale--have lived below ground,
coming up for light and air when there is a spell of such silence as I
had listened to, and going down to the dark vaults when a German "crump"
smashes through another roof, or when German gas steals through the
streets with the foul breath of death.
I asked her about the Kaiser's offer of peace. What did she think of
that? I wondered what her answer would be--this woman imprisoned in
darkness, hiding under daily bombardments, alone in the abomination of
desolation. It was strange how quickly she was caught on fire by a
sudden passion. All the tranquillity of her face changed, and there were
burning sparks in her eyes. She was like a woman of the Revolution, and
her laughter, for she began her answer with a laugh, was shrill and
fierce.
"Peace! William offers peace, you say? Bah! It is nothing but humbug [la
blague]. It is a trap which he sets at our feet to catch us. It is a
lie."
She grasped my arm, and with her other hand pointed to the ruins over
the way, to the chaos of old houses, once very stately and noble, where
her friends lived before the fires of hell came.
"The Germans did that to us. They are doing it now. But it is not
enough. What they have done to Arras they want to do to France--to smash
the nation to the dust, to break the spirit of our race as they have
broken all things here. They wish to deceive us to our further ruin.
There will be no peace until Germany herself is laid in ashes, and her
cities destroyed like Arras is destroyed, and her women left alone, with
only the ghosts of their dead husbands, as I live here alone in my
cellar. Peace! Je m'en fiche de ca!"
There was a queer light in her eyes for a moment, in the eyes of this
woman of Arras who saw down a vista of two years and two months all the
fire and death that had been hurled into this city around her, and the
bodies of little children in the streets, and her dead husband lying
there on the cobble-stones, where now there was a great hole in the
roadway piercing through to the vaults.
* * * * *
I met other women of Arras. Two of them were young, daintily dressed as
though for the boulevards of Paris, and they walked, swinging little
handbags, down a street where at any moment a shell might come to tear
them to pieces and make rags of them. Another was a buxom woman with a
boy and girl holding her hands. The boy had been born to the sound of
shell-fire. The girl was eight years old, but she now learns the history
of France, not only out of school books, but out of this life in the
midst of war.
"They are frightened--the little ones?" I asked. A solitary gun boomed
and shook the loose stones of a ruined house.
The woman smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
"They are used to it all. Peace will seem strange to them."
"Will there ever be peace?" I asked.
The woman of Arras looked for a moment like the one I had spoken to on
the steps of the cellar. Then she smiled, in a way that made me feel
cold, for it was the smile of a woman who sees a vengeance for the
wreckage of her life.
"There is no peace at Verdun," she said. "Our soldiers have done well
there."
I said good day to her and went through the ruins again and out of the
city, and stood watching an artillery duel up towards Souchez. The stabs
of flame from our batteries were like red sparks in the deepening mist.
They were like the fire in the eyes of the women who lived in cellars
away back there in Arras, with a smouldering passion in the gloom and
coldness of their lives.
* * * * *
In many French villages the pipes are playing the New Year in, and their
notes are full of triumph, but with a cry in them for those who have
gone away with the old year, lying asleep on the battlefields--so many
brave Scots--like "the flowers o' the forest" and last year's leaves. I
heard the pipes to-day in one old barn, where a feast was on, not far
from where the guns were shooting through the mist with a round or two
at odd moments, and though I had had one good meal, I had to eat
another, even to the Christmas plum pudding, just to show there was no
ill-feeling.
It was the pudding that threatened to do me down.
But it was good to sit among these splendid Seaforths and their feast,
all packed together shoulder to shoulder, and back to back, under high
old beams that grew in French forests five centuries ago. They were the
transport men, who get the risks but not the glory. Every man here had
ridden, night after night, up to the lines of death, under shell-fire
and machine-gun fire, up by Longueval and Bazentin, carrying food for
men and guns at their own risk of life. Every night now they go up again
with more food for men and guns through places where there are now
shell-craters in the roads, and the reek of poison gas.
The young transport officer by my side (who once went scouting in
Delville Wood when the devil had it all his own way there) raised his
glass of beer (the jug from which it had been poured stood a yard high
in front of me) and wished "Good luck" to his men in the New Year of
war, and bade them "wire in" to the feast before them. So in other
Scottish billets the first of the New Year was kept, and to-night there
is sword-dancing by kilted men as nimble as Nijinski, in their
stockinged feet, and old songs of Scotland which are blown down the wind
of France, in this strange nightmare of a war where men from all the
Empire are crowded along the fighting-lines waiting for the bloody
battles that will come, as sure as fate, while the New Year is still
young.
* * * * *
The queerest music I have heard in this war zone was three days ago,
when I was walking down a city street. The city was dead, killed by
storms of high explosives. The street was of shuttered houses, scarred
by shell-fire, deserted by all their people, who had fled two years ago.
I walked down this desolation, so quiet, so dead, where there was no
sound of guns, that it was like walking in Pompeii when the lava was
cooled. Suddenly there was the sound of a voice singing loud and clear
with birdlike trills, as triumphant as a lark's song to the dawn. It was
a woman's voice singing behind the shutters of a shelled city! ...
Some English officer was there with his gramophone.
II
AN ATTACK NEAR LE TRANSLOY
JANUARY 28, 1917
The "show" (as our men call it) near Le Transloy yesterday was more than
a raid--those daily in-and-out dashes which are doing most deadly work
along our line. It was an attack for the definite purpose of gaining an
important bit of ground on the slope which goes down to the ruined
village and of driving the enemy out of some strong points. The interest
of it, involving the capture of six officers and 352 men of picked
regiments, is the way in which we caught the enemy utterly by surprise
and the rapid, easy way in which the whole operation was done. A touch
which seems fantastic came at the end of the adventure when these young
Germans, still breathless with the amazement of their capture, were
bundled into omnibuses which had been brought up near the lines to wait
for them--the old London omnibuses which used to go "all the way to the
Bank--Bank--Bank!" in the days before the world began to crack--and
taken to their camp on our side of the battlefields.
It was a grim, cold morning--piercingly cold, with a wind cutting like a
knife across the snowfields. Not a morning when men might be expected to
go out into the nakedness of No Man's Land. It was a morning when these
German officers and men of the 119th and 121st Regiments, the
Wuertembergers of Koenigin Olga, were glad to stay down in the warmth of
their dug-outs, cooking coffee on the little stove with which each man
of these favoured troops was provided, to the great envy of Bavarians on
their right, who go on shorter rations and fewer comforts. They had some
good dug-outs in and near the Sunken Road--which runs up from Morval to
Le Transloy, and strikes through a little salient in front of our
lines--till yesterday morning. The trenches on either side of the Sunken
Road were not happy places for Wuertembergers. For months past our guns
had been pounding them so that they were mostly battered down, and only
held here and there by little groups of men who dug themselves in. There
was no wire in front of them, and here during the wet weather, and now
during the great frost, the German troops (as we know from the prisoners
to-day) suffered badly from trench-feet and stomach troubles, and in
spite of their moral (they were all stout-hearted men) from what the
French call the "cafard," and we call the "hump."
[Illustration: Map of the Bapaume Sector]
Yesterday morning one or two shivering wretches stood sentry in the
German line trying to gain shelter from the knife-blade of the wind. All
others were below ground round the "fug" of their braziers. They
believed the British over the way were just as quiet in the good work of
keeping warm. That was their mistake. In our trenches the men were
quiet, but busy, and above ground instead of below. They were waiting
for a signal from the guns, and had their bayonets fixed and bombs slung
about them, and iron rations hung to their belts. A rum ration was
served round, and the men drank it, and felt the glow of it, so that the
white waste of No Man's Land did not look so cold and menacing. They
were men of the Border Regiment and the Inniskillings of the 29th
Division. Suddenly, at about half-past five, there was a terrific crash
of guns, and at the same moment the men scrambled up into the open and
with their bayonets low went out into No Man's Land, each man's
footsteps making a trail in the snow. I think it took about four
minutes, that passage of the lonely ground which was a hundred yards or
so between the lines, all pock-marked with shell-holes, and hard as iron
after the freezing of the quagmire. There was no preliminary
bombardment. As soon as the guns went off the men went, with the line of
shells not far in front of them. They found no men above ground when
they pierced the German line. It was curious and uncanny--the utter
lifelessness of the place they came to capture. Good, too, for men
attacking, for men who always listen for the quick rush of bullets,
which is the ugliest sound in war. Not a single machine-gun spat at
them. They knew quickly that they had surprised the enemy utterly. They
found the dug-outs and called down the challenge and heard it answered.
The Wuertembergers came up dazed with the effect of the capture, hardly
believing it, as men in a dream. One of the officers explained: "We
thought it was just a morning strafe. We kept down in the dug-outs till
it was over. We had no idea of an attack. How did you get here so
quickly?"
They were abashed. They said they would have put up a fight if they had
had any kind of chance. But they were trapped. They could do nothing but
surrender with the best grace possible. On the right, from two isolated
bits of trench, there came a burst of rifle-fire. A few Germans there
had time to recover from the stunning blow of the first surprise and
fought pluckily till overpowered. The Borders and the Inniskillings went
on farther than the objective given to them, to a point 500 yards away
from the German first line, and established themselves there. From
neighbouring ground, through the white haze over the snowfields, red
lights went up with the SOS signal, and presently the German gunners got
busy. But the prisoners were bundled back to the omnibuses, and the men
took possession of the dug-outs. Proper organization was difficult above
ground. It was too hard to dig. From the farthest point, later in the
day, the men were withdrawn to the ground given to them for their
objectives and German attempts to organize counter-attacks were smashed
by our artillery, because we have absolute observation of their
movements from the higher ground won by great fighting in the Somme
battles. To-day there was much gunning in all the neighbourhood of the
fight, and the roar of guns rolled over the desolate fields of snow, the
wide lonely waste which makes one's soul shiver to look at it as I
stared at the scene of war, to-day and yesterday, in the teeth of the
wind.
III
THE ABANDONMENT OF GRANDCOURT
FEBRUARY 8
That the troops of our Naval Division (the 63rd) should have been able
to walk into Grandcourt yesterday and take the place after its
abandonment by the enemy (except for a few men left behind to keep up
appearances as long as possible, poor wretches) is a proof that the
German High Command prefers, at this point of the struggle, to save
casualties rather than to hold bad ground at any cost. It is a new
phase, worthy of notice. A year ago he would not let his pride do this.
Less than a year ago, when we took ground from him by a sudden assault,
he would come back with a frightful counter-blow, and there would be a
long and bloody struggle, as at the Bluff and St.-Eloi, over trenches
taken and retaken. Combles was the first place from which he crept away
without a fight. Grandcourt is the second place, abandoned for the same
reason--because it was caught in the pincers of our forward movements.
It lies low on the south side of the Ancre, below Miraumont, and it
became a place of misery to German troops after the capture of Beaucourt
and Beaumont-Hamel, on the other side of the river--still worse when on
Sunday last our men advanced north of Beaucourt, capturing a couple of
hundred prisoners and consolidating on a line of ground dominating
Grandcourt, on the north-west. It was probably then that the enemy
decided to withdraw to a stronger and higher position south of Miraumont
and Pys, which he has been digging and defending with rapid industry in
spite of the hard frost, which double the labour of the spade. Fear,
which is a great General makes him a hard digger, and he will burrow
underground while our men are scraping the snow away on our side of the
line. A few men, as I have said, were left behind to make a show. They
were seen moving about in the neighbourhood of a German trench barring
the way to Grandcourt on the south-west. It was some time before our
patrols, creeping out over the snow, saw that this half-mile of line was
empty of men, and that the enemy had gone back to some place unknown. On
Tuesday our troops moved into this position, watched by those few men,
left as scarecrows, who are now our prisoners, and who saw the English
soldiers get up out of their ditches and shell-craters and cross the
snowfield in open order with a steady trudge, their bayonets glittering,
and then drop down into the battered trench in which there was nothing
but the litter of former habitation and some dead bodies. Yesterday it
was decided to push on to Grandcourt. Observing officers could see the
snow on the broken roofs and ruined walls of that village, where bits of
brick and woodwork still stand after heavy bombardment. They could not
see whether the place was still held. Only actual contact would show
whether those quiet ruins would be noisy with the chatter of machine-gun
fire if our men went in. A sinister spot--with an evil-sounding name to
soldiers of the Somme, because here for many months the enemy had massed
his guns which fired down to Contalmaison and flung high explosives over
the country below the Pozieres Ridge.
It was in the afternoon that the entry was made beneath a great barrage
of our shells advancing beyond the infantry and through a heavy fire
from the enemy's guns, which did not check the advance of our men. A few
German soldiers were taken in rear-guard posts. They came out of
shell-craters with their hands up, and were sent back to our lines.
There was no fighting in the ruins of the village. Grandcourt was ours,
with its deep dug-outs littered with German clothes and stored with
rations of German soldiers, which our own men enjoyed as a change of
diet, while they took cover from the enemy's shell-fire over his old
home.
Last night in the light of a full moon, curiously red so that the snow
was faintly flushed, two more attacks were made and two more positions
taken, north and south-east of Grandcourt. On the north side of the
Ancre Baillescourt Farm was seized, and in its neighbourhood eighty
soldiers and one officer were made prisoner. They belonged to the same
corps as those I saw last Sunday, and were recruited from the
Hamburg-Altona district; all stout fellows, well nourished and well
clothed. They had not expected the attack, not so soon, anyhow, and were
caught in dug-outs by the ruined farmhouse, which some months ago was a
good landmark with its white walls and barns still standing. Now it is
but a litter of beams and broken plaster, like all houses along the line
of battle.
IV
THE GORDONS IN THE BUTTE DE WARLENCOURT
FEBRUARY 9
The frost lasts. Even in times of peace I suppose it would be remembered
years hence because of its intensity of cold and continuance. Here on
the Western Front it will be remembered by men who live, now very young,
and then with hair as white as the snow which now lies in No Man's Land,
because of its unforgettable pictures in sunlight and moonlight, its
fantastic cruelties of coldness and discomfort, and its grim effect upon
the adventures of war when the patrols go out by night and British
soldiers crawl across snow-filled shell-holes.
There was a queer episode of Canadian history--only a few days
old--which began when a sprightly young Dados (he's the fellow that gets
all the chaff from the Divisional Follies) startled a respectable old
lady behind the counter of a milliner's shop in a French village by
demanding 100 ladies' "nighties" ("chemises de nuit" he called them) of
the largest size. The village heard the story of this shopping
expedition, listened to the old lady's shrill cackle of laughter, and
wondered what joke was on among the Canadian troops. It was one of those
jokes which belong to the humours of this war, mixed with blood and
death. Up in the Canadian trenches there were shouts of hoarse laughter,
as over their khaki a hundred brawny young Canadians put on the
night-dresses. They had been tied up with blue ribbon. The old moon, so
watchful there in the steel-blue sky, had never looked down upon a
stranger scene than these white-robed soldiers who went out into No
Man's Land, with rifles and bombs. Some of the night-dresses, so clean
and dainty as they had come out of the milliner's shop, were stained red
before the end of the adventure. And Germans in their dug-outs caught a
glimpse of these fantastic figures before death came quickly, or a shout
of surrender. The Pierrots went back with some prisoners in the
moonlight, and Canadian staff officers chuckled with laughter along
telephone wires when the tale was told.
Some of the prisoners who are taken do nothing but weep for the first
few days after capture. "The prisoners are young," reports the
Intelligence officer about the latest batch, "and have wept copiously
since their capture." The men I have seen myself during the past few
days had a look of misery in their eyes. They hate these midnight raids
of ours, coming suddenly upon them night after night through the white
glimmer of the snowfields. They have taken dogs into the trenches now to
give a quicker and surer warning than young sentries, who are afraid to
cry out when they see white figures moving, because they think they see
them always, when shadows stir in the moonlight across the snow. Our men
during recent nights have heard these dogs giving short, sharp barks.
One of them came out into No Man's Land and sniffed about some black
things lying quiet under the cover of snow. No alarm was given when some
friends of mine went out to make an attack some nights ago, and it was
lucky for them, for if they had been discovered too soon all their plans
would have been spoilt, and white smocks would not have saved them.
They were the 8/10th Gordons of the 15th Division. Some of my readers
will remember the crowd, for I have described my meetings with them up
and down the roads of war. It is they who arranged the details of the
night's adventure, and because it is typical of the things that
happen--of the Terror that comes in the night--it is worth telling. The
Highlanders, when they took up their attacking line, were dressed in
white smocks covering their kilts, and in steel helmets painted white.
Their black arms and feet were like the smudges on the snow. They lay
very quiet, visible on the left, from the Butte de Warlencourt, that old
high mound in the Somme battlefields which was once the burial-place of
a prehistoric man and is now the tomb of young soldiers in the Durham
Light Infantry who fought and died there. The moon was bright on the
snow about them, but a misty vapour was on the ground. Each man had been
warned not to cough or sneeze. Their rifles were loaded, and with
bayonets fixed, so that there should be no rattle of arms or clicks of
bolts. They were in two parties, and their orders were to overthrow the
advanced German posts which were known to be in front of the Butte, and
to form a ring of posts round the position attacked while its dug-outs
were being dealt with. A heavy barrage was fired suddenly up and down
the German lines, so as to bewilder the enemy as to the point of attack,
and the Gordons in their white smocks rose up and advanced. Two shots
rang out from one of the German posts. No more than that. The two waves
of men went on. Those on the right flank had trouble in crossing the
ground. Several of them fell into deep shell-craters frozen hard. A
machine-gun was fired on the left, but was then silenced by our
shell-fire. The men inclined a little to the left, and came round on the
west side of the position, where there was a small quarry. On their way
they surprised an enemy post and took six prisoners.
[Illustration: THE RETREAT FROM THE SOMME
London: W^m. Heinemann _Stanford's Geog^l. Estab^t., London_]
A little way farther on they came across a trench-mortar, a dug-out, and
two terror-stricken men. An officer put a Stokes bomb down the mortar
and blew it up. The men were taken, and the dug-out was destroyed. Then
the Gordons went on to the Butte de Warlencourt. Underneath it were the
dug-outs of a German company, snow-capped and hidden. The Scots went
round like wolves hunting for the way down. There were four ways down,
and three of them were found low down about four yards apart. Men were
talking down there excitedly. Their German speech was loud and there was
the note of terror in it.
"Come out!" shouted the Gordons several times; but at one entrance only
one man came out, and at another only one, and at the third twelve men,
who were taken prisoners. The others would not surrender. Some bombs and
a Stokes shell were thrown down the doorways, and suddenly this nest of
dug-outs was seen to collapse, and black smoke came up from the pit,
melting the edges of the snow. Down below the voices went on, rising to
high cries of terror. Then flames appeared, shedding a red glare over No
Man's Land.
On the left the Gordons had been held up by machine-gun fire and
rifle-fire, which came across to them from a trench to which they were
advancing. At the west side of the trench, in a wired enclosure, the
machine-gun was troublesome. Some of the white smocks fell. An attempt
was made to rush it, but failed. Afterwards the gun and the team were
knocked out by a shell. A group of Germans came out of the trench and
started bombing, until a Stokes bomb scattered them. Then the Gordons
went down and brought out some prisoners, and blew up a dug-out.
It was time to go back, for the German barrage had begun; but the
Gordons were able to get home without many casualties. Nearly two hours
afterwards a loud explosion was heard across the way, as though a bomb
store had blown up. The sky was red over there by the flare of a
fire.... In the dug-outs of the Butte de Warlencourt a whole company of
Germans was being burnt alive.
V
THE BATTLE OF BOOM RAVINE
FEBRUARY 15
On the way to Miraumont there was a deep gully called Boom Ravine, and
here on February 17 there was fierce fighting by the Royal Fusiliers,
the Northamptons, and the Middlesex men of the 29th Division.
In difficulty, in grim human courage, in all its drama of fog, and
darkness, and shell-fire, and death, it seems to me to hold most of what
this war means to individual men--all that can be asked of them in such
hours.
The thaw had just set in and the ground was soppy, which was bad luck.
In spite of the thaw, it was horribly, damply cold, but the men had been
given a good meal before forming up for the attack, and officers brought
up the rum ration in bottles, so that the men could attack with some
warmth in them. In the utter darkness, unable to make any glimmer of
light lest the enemy should see, the brigades tried to get into line.
Two companies lost themselves, and were lost, but got into touch again
in time. It was all black and beastly. A great fire of high explosives
burst over our assembly lines. The darkness was lit up by the red
flashes of these bursting shells. Men fell, wounded and dead. The Royal
Fusiliers were specially tried, and their brigadier wondered whether
they would have the spirit to get up and attack when the hour arrived.
But when the moment came the survivors rose and went forward, and fought
through to the last goal. They were the first to get to Grandcourt
Trench, which lay between them and the Boom Ravine. The wire was not
cut, and there was a hammering of machine-guns and the swish of
machine-gun bullets. This battalion had already lost all its officers,
who had gone forward gallantly, leading their men and meeting the
bullets first. A sergeant-major took command, shouted to his men to keep
steady, and found a gap through the wire. They forced their way through,
passed Grandcourt Trench, and, with other men, dropped into Boom Ravine.
That place is a sunken road, almost parallel with Grandcourt Trench, and
with South Miraumont Trench beyond. Before war came--even last summer,
indeed--it was like a Devonshire lane, with steep shelving banks, thirty
to forty feet high, and trees growing on either side, with overhanging
roots. It was not like a Devonshire lane when our men scrambled and fell
down its banks. It was a ravine of death. Our shell-fire had smashed
down all the trees, and their tall trunks lay at the bottom of the
gulley, and their branches were flung about. The banks had been opened
out by shell-craters, and several of the German dug-outs built into the
sides of them were upheaved or choked. Dead bodies or human fragments
lay among the branches and broken woodwork. A shell of ours had entered
one dug-out and blown six dead men out of its doorway. They sprawled
there at the entrance. Inside were six other dead. From dug-outs not
blown up or choked came groups of German soldiers, pallid and
nerve-broken, who gave themselves up quickly enough. One man was
talkative. He said in perfect English that he had been coachman to an
English earl, and he cursed our artillery, and said that if he could get
at our blinking gunners he would wring their blighted necks--or words to
that effect.
But the battle was not over yet. While Boom Ravine was being cleared of
its living inhabitants by the Royal Fusiliers other waves were coming
up; or, rather, not waves, but odd groups of men, dodging over the
shell-craters, and hunting as they went for German snipers, who lay in
their holes firing until they were pinned by bayonet-points. Their
bodies lie there now, curled up. Some of them pretended to be dead when
our men came near. One of them lay still, with his face in the moist
earth. "See that that man is properly dead," said an officer, and a
soldier with him pricked the man. He sprang up with a scream, and ran
hard away--to our lines. Six prisoners came trudging back from the
Ravine, with a slightly wounded man as an escort. On the way back they
found themselves very lonely with him, and passed some rifles lying in
their way. They seized the rifles and became fighting men again, until a
little Welsh officer of the South Wales Borderers met them, and killed
every one of them with a revolver.
VI
THE ENEMY WITHDRAWS
FEBRUARY 18
The enemy is steadily withdrawing his troops from many positions between
Hebuterne and the ground south-west of Bapaume, and our patrols are
pushing forward into abandoned country, which they have penetrated in
some places for nearly three miles beyond our former line. They are
already north-west of Serre, south of Irles, above Miraumont,
Petit-Miraumont and Pys, which are now in our hands without a battle. We
have gained a number of German strongholds which we expected to win only
by heavy fighting, and the enemy has yielded to our pressure, the
ceaseless pressure of men and guns, by escaping to a new line of defence
along the Bapaume Ridge. This is the most notable movement which has
taken place in the war since the autumn of the first year. The German
retirement in the battle of the Marne was forced upon them only by
actual defeat on the ground. This is a strategical retreat, revealing a
new phase of weakness in their defensive conditions. It has not come to
our Generals as a surprise. After the battle of Boom Ravine, there were
several signs that the enemy contemplated a withdrawal from the two
Miraumonts, and our recent capture of Baillescourt Farm and the ground
on the north of the Ancre seriously menaced Serre. Yesterday morning,
through a heavy grey mist, fires were seen burning along the German
front line. For several days the enemy's field-batteries had been firing
an abnormal amount of ammunition, and it seemed likely that they were
getting rid of their supplies in the forward dumps before withdrawing
their guns. Patrols sent out had a queer, uncanny experience. It was
very quiet in the mist, almost alarmingly quiet. They pushed in after
the enemy. Not a sound, not a shot came from Serre.... These reports
were sent back, and more patrols were sent forward in various
directions. They pushed on, picking up a few prisoners here and there
who were sniping from shell-holes and serving solitary machine-guns.
These men confessed that they had been left behind with orders to keep
firing and to make a show so that we might believe the ground was still
strongly held. Farther on the right the same thing was happening.
Patrols went out and sent back messages saying that no enemy was ahead.
They went into Miraumont, and in the centre of the main road a mine blew
up with a loud explosion; but by great good luck none of our men were
hurt. At the end of the street six Germans were seen among the ruins.
They were fired at and disappeared. Miraumont was taken without another
shot than this, and with it Little Miraumont, next door.
Last night our troops advanced towards Warlencourt and south of Irles,
and they took possession of the famous Butte, that high mound above the
bones of some prehistoric man, for which there had been so much bloody
fighting in the autumn and the first month of this year. From the
direction of Bapaume the noise of heavy explosions was heard, as though
ammunition dumps were being blown up, and for the first time perhaps
since the German retreat from the Marne the enemy was destroying his own
material of war on his way back.
VII
OUR ENTRY INTO GOMMECOURT
FEBRUARY 28
Last night the German troops abandoned Gommecourt and Pusieux and our
men followed the first patrols, who had felt forward and took possession
of the salient which keeps to the line of the park surrounding the
famous old chateau.
This entry into Gommecourt without a fight was most sensational. It was
here on July 1 of 1916 that waves of London men of the 56th Division
assaulted an almost impregnable position, and by the highest valour and
sacrifice broke and held its lines until forced back by massed gun-fire
which threatened them with annihilation. Many of our dead lay there, and
the place will be haunted for ever by the memory of their loss and great
endurance. At last the gates were open. The enemy's troops had stolen
away in the dusk, leaving nothing behind but the refuse of trench life
and the litter of trench tools. In order to keep the way open for their
withdrawal, strong posts of Germans with machine-guns held out in a
wedge just south of Rossignol Wood and in Biez Wood, which is west of
Bucquoy. These rear-guard posts, numbering an officer or two and
anything between thirty to sixty men with machine-guns, and telephones
keeping them in touch with the main army, were chosen for their tried
courage and intelligence, and stayed behind with orders to hold on to
the last possible moment.
All the tricks of war are being used to check and kill our patrols. In
addition to trip-wires attached to explosives, German helmets have been
left about with bombs concealed in them so as to explode on being
touched, and there are other devices of this kind which are ingenious
and devilish. The enemy's snipers and machine-gunners give our men
greater trouble, but are being routed out from their hiding-places.
There were a lot of them in the ruins of Pusieux, but last night, after
sharp fighting and a grim man-hunt among the broken brickwork, the enemy
was destroyed in this village, and our line now runs well beyond it to
Gommecourt, on the left and down to Irles on the right. The enemy has
destroyed Irles church tower, as he has destroyed the church of
Achiet-le-Petit, and the famous clock tower of Bapaume, on which we
tried to read the time from the high ground westward during the battles
of the Somme. This is to get rid of observation which might be useful to
us in our advance.
Heavy shell-fire has been concentrated by enemy batteries on the village
of Irles, and he is also barraging with high explosives upon Serre,
Miraumont, Grandcourt, and other places from which he has withdrawn. It
is probable that he is using up his reserves of ammunition in the dumps
along the line of his retirement. Many of his heavy guns still remain
on railway mountings behind Bapaume--we are now less than a mile from
that town--and they are doing double duty by quick firing. The latest
village to fall into our hands is Thilloy, north of Ligny-Thilloy, and
just south of Bapaume, and the enemy is now retiring to Loupart Wood,
Achiet-le-Petit, and Bucquoy, strongly defended for the time being by a
thick belt of wire.
It is enormously interesting to speculate upon this new plan of the
German High Command. It is a plan forced upon him by steady pressure of
our attacks, which thrust him into bad ground, where the condition of
his troops was hideous, but, beyond all, by the fear that our fighting
power in the spring might break his armies if they stayed on their old
line. Now he is executing with skill, aided by great luck--for the foggy
weather is his luck--a manoeuvre designed to shorten his line, thereby
increasing his offensive and defensive man-power, and to withdraw in the
way that he intends to make it difficult for pursuit, and so to gain
time to fall back upon new and stronger lines of defence.
* * * * *
It is difficult to describe the feelings of our men who go forward to
these villages and capture them, and settle down in them for a day or
two, unless you have gazed at those places for months through narrow
slits in underground chambers, and know that it would be easier to go
from life to eternity than cross over the enemy's wire into those
strongholds while they are inhabited by men with machine-guns.
You cannot imagine the thrill of walking one day into Gommecourt, or
Miraumont, or Irles, without resistance, and seeing in close detail the
way of life led by the men who have been doing their best to kill you.
There is something uncanny in handling the things they handled, in
sitting at the tables where they took their meals, in walking about the
ruins which our guns made above them. I had this thrill when I walked
through Gommecourt--Gommecourt the terrible, and the graveyard of so
many brave London boys who fell here on July 1--and up through
Gommecourt Park, with its rows of riven trees, to a point beyond, and to
a far outpost where a group of soldiers attached to the Sherwood
Foresters of the 46th Division, full of spirit and gaiety, in spite of
the deadly menace about them, had dragged up a heavy trench-mortar and
its monstrous winged shells, which they were firing into a copse 500
yards away where Fritz was holding out. So through the snow I went into
Gommecourt down a road pitted with recent shell-holes, and with a young
Sherwood Forester who said, "It's best to be quick along this track. It
ain't a health resort."
It was not a pretty place at all, and there were nasty noises about it,
as shells went singing overhead, but there was a sinister sense of
romance, a look of white and naked tragedy in snow-covered Gommecourt.
Our guns had played hell with the place, though we could not capture it
on July 1. Thousands of shells, even millions, had flung it into
ruin--the famous chateau, the church, the great barns, the school-house,
and all the buildings here. Not a tree in what had once been a noble
park remained unmutilated. On the day before the Germans left a Stokes
mortar battery of ours fired 1100 shells into Gommecourt in a quarter of
an hour.
"No wonder old Fritz left in a hurry," said the young officer who had
achieved this record. He chuckled at the thought of it, and as he went
through Gommecourt with me pointed out with pride the "top-hole" effect
of all our gun-fire. To him, as a gunner, all this destruction was a
good sight. He stopped in front of a hole big enough to bury a country
cottage, and said, "That was done by old Charley's 9.45 trench-mortar.
Some hole, what?"
"Looks as if some German officer had had to walk home," said the
trench-mortar officer, who was a humorous fellow, as he glanced at a
shattered motor-car.
So many of the young officers of ours are humorous fellows, and I am
bound to say that I never met a merrier party than a little lot I found
at a spot called Pigeon Wood, far beyond Gommecourt, where the enemy
flings shells most of the day and night, so that it is a litter of
broken twigs and branches.
A sergeant-major took me up there and introduced me to his officers.
"This is the real Street of Adventure," he said, "though it's a long way
from Fleet Street"--which I thought was pretty good for a sergeant-major
met in a casual way on a field of battle. It appeared that there was to
be a trench-mortar "stunt" in half an hour or so, and he wanted me to
see "the fun." Through the driving snow we went into the bit of wood,
trampling over the broken twigs and stepping aside from shell-holes, and
because of the nasty noises about--I hear no music in the song of the
shell--I was glad when the sergeant-major went down the entrance of a
dug-out and called out for the officer.
It was one of the deep German dug-outs thirty or forty feet down, and
very dark on the way. In the room below, nicely panelled, were the merry
grigs I had come to meet, and in less than a minute they had made me
welcome, and in less than five I was sitting on a German chair at a
German table, drinking German soda-water out of German glasses, with a
party of English boys 500 yards from the German outposts over the way.
They told me how they had brought their trench-mortar up. It was an
absolute record, and they were as proud and pleased as schoolboys who
have won a game. They roared with laughter at the story of the senior
officer chased by two Boches, and roared again when the captain sent
round to the "chemist's shop" next door for some more soda-water and a
bottle of whisky. They had found thousands of bottles of soda-water, and
thousands of bombs and other things left behind in a hurry, including a
complete change of woman's clothing, now being worn by one of our
Tommies badly in need of clean linen.
"This dug-out is all right," said one of the younger officers, "but you
come and see mine. It's absolutely priceless."
It was one of the best specimens of German architecture I have ever seen
on a battlefield. It was not only panelled but papered. It was furnished
elegantly with a washhand-stand and a gilded mirror and German coloured
prints--and not all our shells could touch it, because of its depth
below the ground. ... I saw the trench-mortar "stunt," which flung up
volcanoes in the German ground by Kite Copse, and stood out in the snow
with a party of men who had nothing between them and the enemy but a
narrow stretch of shell-broken earth, and went away from the wood just
as the enemy began shelling it again, and sat down under the bank with
one of the officers when the enemy "bracketed" the road back with
whiz-bangs, and stopped on the way to take a cup of tea in another
dug-out, and to make friends with other men who were following up the
enemy, and moving into German apartments for a night or so, before they
go farther on, with that keen and spirited courage which is the only
good thing in this war. They are mostly boys--I am a Rip Van Winkle to
them--and with the heart of boyhood they take deadly risks lightly and
make a good joke of a bad business, and are very frightened sometimes
and make a joke of that, and are great soldiers though they were never
meant for the trade. The enemy is falling back still, but these boys of
ours are catching him up, and are quick in pursuit, in spite of the foul
ground and the foul weather and the barrage of his guns.
VIII
WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW
MARCH 3
The weather is still favourable to the enemy in his plan of withdrawal.
Yesterday there was over all the battlefields such a solid fog, after a
night of frost which condensed the earth's moisture, that one could not
see fifty yards ahead. Our airmen, if they had thought it worth while
mounting, would have stared down into this white mist and seen nothing
else. Our gunners had to fire "off the map" at a time when direct
observation would have been most valuable. I do not remember to have
seen anything so uncanny on this front as the effect of our men moving
in this heavy wet darkness like legions of shadows looming up in a grey
way, and then blotted out. The fog clung to them, dripped from the rims
of their steel helmets, made their breath like steam. The shaggy coats
of horses and mules plastered with heavy streaks of mud were all damp
with little beads of moisture as white as hoar-frost.
Nothing so far in this German movement has been sensational except the
fact itself. Fantastic stories about gas-shells, battles, and great
slaughter in the capture of the enemy's positions are merely conjured up
by people who know nothing of the truth.
The truth is simple and stark. The enemy decided to withdraw, and made
his plans to withdraw with careful thought for detail in order to
frustrate any preparations we might have made to deal him the famous
knock-out blow and in order to save his man-power, not only by escaping
this great slaughter which was drawing near upon him as the weeks
passed, but by shortening his line and so liberating a number of
divisions for offensive and defensive purposes. He timed this
strategical withdrawal well. He made use of the hard frost for the
movement of men and guns and material, and withdrew the last men from
his strongholds on the old line just as the thaw set in, so that the
ground lapsed into quagmire more fearful than before the days of the
long frost, and pursuit for our men and our guns and our material was
doubly difficult. He destroyed what he could not take away, and left
very little behind. He fired many of his dug-outs, and left only a few
snipers and a few machine-gunners in shell-holes and strong posts to
hold up our patrols while the next body of rear-guard outposts fell back
behind the barbed wire in front of the series of diagonal trench lines
which defend the way to Bapaume. In Gommecourt our troops found only one
living man, and he was half dead and quite blind. He had been wounded
twenty-four hours previously by a bomb from one of our scouts and had
crawled back into a dug-out. It is astounding, but, I believe, quite
true, that he knew nothing about the abandonment of Gommecourt, even
when it had been achieved. He would not believe it when our men told
him. He had lain in his earth-hole wondering at the silence, believing
himself deaf as well as blind, except that he could hear the crash of
shells. He was frightened because he could hear no movement of his
fellow-soldiers.
The German scheme is undoubtedly to delay our advance as much as
possible and at the cheapest price to himself, so that much time may
have elapsed (while his submarines are still at work, and his diplomats,
and his propaganda) before we come up to him with all our weight of men
and metal upon the real lines to which he is falling back. By belts of
barbed wire between the lines of retirement, down past Loupart Wood, and
then past Grevillers and Achiet, and outside Bapaume, as well as by
strong bodies of picked troops holding on to these positions until the
last moment before death or capture or escape, and by massing guns
eastward of Bapaume in order to impede our pursuit by long-range fire
from his "heavies," and to hold the pivot while his troops swing back in
this slow and gradual way, he hopes to make things easy for himself and
damnably difficult for us.
* * * * *
MARCH 12
Loupart Wood, a high belt of trees, thick and black against the sky, is
the storm-centre of the battle line on this part of the front. Our guns
were busy with it, flinging shells into its network of naked branches.
The shell-bursts were white against its blackness, and the chalky soil
in front of it was tossed up in spraying fountains. From the enemy's
side high explosives were dropping over Miraumont, and Irles was being
heavily bombarded. It was like a day in the first battles of the Somme,
and brought back to me old memories of frightfulness. Behind me were the
Somme battlefields, one vast landscape of the abomination of desolation
strewn still with the litter of great conflict, with thousands of
unexploded shells lying squat in mud, and hideously tormented out of all
semblance of earth's sweet beauty by millions of shell-holes and the
yawning chasms of mine-craters, and the chaos of innumerable trenches
dug deep and then smashed by the fury of heavy guns. That is an old
picture which I have described, or failed to describe, a score of times
when over this mangled earth, yard by yard, from one ruin to another,
from one copse of broken woodland to another group of black gallows
which were trees, our men went fighting, so that here is the graveyard
of gallant youth, and the Field of Honour which is sacred to the soul of
our race. It was the old picture, but into it came to-day as yesterday
new men of ours who are carrying on the tale to whatever ending it may
have. They came through mud and in mud and with mud. The heavy horses of
the gunners and transport men were all whitened with the wet chalk to
the ears. Mules were ridiculous, like amphibious creatures who had come
up out of the slime to stare with wicked eyes at what men are doing with
the earth's surface. Eight-inch guns were wallowing in bogs from which
their shiny snouts thrust up, belching forth flame. Over the wide,
white, barren stretch of hell which we call the battlefield their
monstrous shells went howling after the full-throated roars which
clouted one's ear-drums like blows from a hammer. And between the guns,
and in front of the guns, and past the guns went our marching men, our
mud men, with wet steel helmets, with gobs of mud on their faces, with
clods of mud growing monstrously upon their boots at every step.
A grim old war, fantastic in its contrasts and in its stage properties!
Once when I heard the chimes of midnight in Covent Garden and stood
drinking at a coffee-stall by Paul's Church I never guessed I should
find such a place of wayside refreshment, such a house on wheels, in
the middle of Armageddon. But there it was to-day, a coffee-stall bang
in the middle of the battlefield, and there, asking for a "mug o'
thick," stood a crowd of English soldiers, worse scarecrows than the
night birds of the London slums and more in need of warmth for body and
soul. Not far away, well under shell-fire, was a London omnibus, and as
a mate in evil days, a Tank.
The rain came down in a thick drizzle. Loupart Wood disappeared like a
ghost picture. Irles was blotted out. Our eight-inch shells went howling
out of a cotton-wool mist. Our men went marching with their steel hats
down against the beat of the rain. It was a wintry scene again--but on
the moist air there was a faint scent not of winter--a smell of wet
earth sweeter than the acrid stench of the battlefields. It was the
breath of spring coming with its promise of life. And with its promise
of death.
* * * * *
The enemy is still holding out in Achiet-le-Petit and Bucquoy, though I
believe his residence there is not for long. From what I saw to-day
watching our bombardment of the line to which he has retreated, it seems
certain that he will be compelled to leave in a hurry, just as he left
Loupart Wood the night before last.
As I went over the battlefields to-day it was made visible to me that
the enemy has suffered most devilish torments in the ground from which
he is now retreating. All north of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys,
and below Loupart Wood, this wild chaos--all so upturned by shell-fire
that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling of our
mother earth--is strewn with bodies of dead German soldiers. They lie
grey wet lumps of death over a great stretch of ground, many of them
half buried by their comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are
stark above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. I stood to-day
in a ravine to which the Regina Trench leads between Pys and Miraumont,
and not any morbid vision of an absinthe-maddened dream of hell could be
more fearful than what I stared at standing there, with the rain beating
on me across the battlefield, and the roar of guns on every side, and
the long rushing whistles of heavy shells in flight over Loupart Wood.
The place was a shambles of German troops. They had had machine-gun
emplacements here, and deep dug-outs under cover of earth-banks. But our
guns had found them out and poured fire upon them. All this garrison had
been killed and cut to pieces before or after death. Their bodies or
their fragments lay in every shape and shapelessness of death, in
puddles of broken trenches or on the edge of deep ponds in
shell-craters. The water was vivid green about them, or red as blood,
with the colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like faces, with holes for
eyes, seemed to stare back at me as I stared at them, not with any
curiosity in this sight of death--for it is not new to me--but counting
their numbers and reckoning the sum of all these things who a little
time ago were living men. Some of our dead lay among them, but out of
850 lying hereabouts, 700 were German soldiers.
Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves nothing alive or
whole when it is concentrated on a place like this, deliberate in
smashing it. Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made
rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of
rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs,
littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing.
Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is
all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly clustered.
For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and
leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity,
killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. Over it
to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was not a soldier, though he
had a steel hat on his head and a khaki uniform. He was a padre who,
with a fellow-officer and a few men, is following up the fighting men,
burying those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their
identity discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has done this, and,
though he is sickened, he goes on with a grim zeal, searching out the
new dead, directing the digging of new graves, covering up Germans who
lie so thick. He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, and
I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good courage in the
abomination of desolation which is our battle-ground.
The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. To save
themselves from another such shambles they are falling back to new
lines, where they hope to be safer from our massed artillery. But as I
saw to-day our gun-fire is following them closely and forcing them back
at a harder pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is
still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, though
that may be long, O Lord! from now.
IX
THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME
MARCH 17
To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops entered Bapaume.
Achiet-le-Petit and Biefvillers also fell into our hands and the enemy
is in retreat across the plains below the Bapaume Ridge.
I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this morning, and the luck
to come out again, and now, sitting down to tell the history of this
day--one of the great days in this war--I feel something of the old
thrill that came to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Marne
and retreated to the Aisne.
Bapaume is ours after a short, sharp fight with its last rear-guard
post. I don't know how much this will mean to people at home, to whom
the town is just a name, familiar only because of its repetition in
dispatches. To us out here it means enormous things--above all, the
completion or result of a great series of battles, in which many of our
best gave their lives so that our troops could attain the ridge across
which they went to-day, and hold the town which is the gateway to the
plains beyond. For this the Canadians fought through Courcelette, where
many of their poor bodies lie even now in the broken ground. For this
the Australians struggled with most grim heroism on the high plateau of
Pozieres, which bears upon every yard of its soil the signs of the most
frightful strife that mankind has known in all the history of warfare.
For another stage on the road to Bapaume London regiments went up to
Eaucourt-l'Abbaye, and the Gordons stormed the white mound of the Butte
de Warlencourt. For the capture of Bapaume our patrols with machine-guns
and trench-mortars, and our gunners with their batteries, have pushed on
through the day and night during recent weeks, gaining La Barque and
Ligny and Thilloy, not sleeping night after night, not resting, so that
beards have grown on young chins, and the eyes of these men look glazed
and dead except for the fire that lights up in them when there is
another bit of work to do. For this, thousands of British soldiers have
laboured like ants--it is all like a monstrous ant-heap in
commotion--carrying up material of war, building roads over quagmires,
laying down railroads under shell-fire, plugging up shell-craters with
bricks and stone so that the horse transport can follow, and the guns
get forward and the way be made smooth for the fall of Bapaume.... So
Bapaume is ours. Years ago, and months ago, and weeks ago, I have
travelled the road towards Bapaume from Amiens to Albert, from that city
of the Falling Virgin, past the vast mine-crater of La Boisselle to
Pozieres and beyond, and always I and comrades of mine have glanced
sideways and smiled grimly at the milestones which said so many
kilometres to Bapaume--and yet a world of strife to go. Now those stones
will not stare up at us with irony. There is no longer a point on the
road where one has to halt lest one should die. To-day I walked past the
milestones--ten, seven, four, three, one--and then into Bapaume, and did
not die, though to tell the truth death missed me only a yard or two. I
have had many strange and memorable walks in war, but none more
wonderful than this, for really it was a strange way this road to
Bapaume, with all the tragedy and all the courage of this warfare, and
all the ugly spirit of it on every side. I walked through the highway of
our greatest battles up from Pozieres, past Courcelette, with
Martinpuich to the right, past the ruins of Destremont Farm, and into
the ruins of Le Sars. Thence the road struck straight towards Bapaume,
with the grey pyramid of the Butte de Warlencourt on one side and the
frightful turmoil of Warlencourt village on the other. I did not walk
alone along this way through the litter of many battles, through its
muck and stench and corruption under a fair blue sky, with wisps of
white cloud above and the glitter of spring sunshine over all the white
leprous landscape of these fields. Australian soldiers were going the
same way--towards Bapaume. Some of them wore sprigs of shamrock in their
buttonholes, and I remembered it was St. Patrick's Day. Some of them
were gunners, and some were pioneers, and some were Generals and high
officers, and they had the look of victory upon them and were talking
cheerily about the great news of the day. It was in the neighbourhood of
a haunted-looking place called "La Coupe-gueule," which means
Cut-throat, once I imagine a farmstead or estaminet, that the road
became the scene of very recent warfare--a few hours old or a few
minutes. One is very quick to read how old the signs are by the look of
the earth, by smells and sounds, by little, sure, alarming signs. Dead
horses lay about--newly dead. Shell-craters with clean sides pock-marked
the earth ten feet deep. Aeroplanes had crashed down, one of them a few
minutes ago. A car came along and I saw a young pilot lying back
wounded, with another officer smoking a cigarette, grave-eyed and
pallid. Pools of red mud were on either side of the road, or in the
middle of it. Everywhere in neighbouring ground hidden batteries were
firing ceaselessly, the long sixty-pounders making sharp reports that
stunned one's ears, the field-guns firing rapidly with sharp knocks. Up
in the blue sky there was other gunning. Flights of our aeroplanes were
up singing with a loud, deep, humming music as of monstrous bees. Our
"Archies" were strafing a German plane, venturesome over our country.
High up in the blue was the rattle of machine-gun fire. Down from
Bapaume came a procession of stretcher-bearers with wounded comrades
shoulder high, borne like heroes, slowly and with unconscious dignity,
by these tall men in steel helmets. The enemy had ruined the road in
several places with enormous craters, to stop our progress. They were
twenty yards across, and very deep, and fearful pitfalls in the dark.
Past the ruins of La Barque, past the ruins of Ligny-Thilloy and
Thilloy, went the road to Bapaume. Behind me now on the left was Loupart
Wood, the storm-centre of strife when I went up to it a few days ago,
and Grevillers beside it, smashed to death, and then presently and quite
suddenly I came into sight of Bapaume. It was only a few hundred yards
away, and I could see every detail of its streets and houses. A street
along the Bapaume road went straight into the town, and then went
sharply at right angles, so that all the length of Bapaume lay in front
of me. The sun was upon it, shining very bright and clear upon its
houses. It was a sun-picture of destruction. Bapaume was still standing,
but broken and burnt.
[Illustration: Map of the front from Arras to Soissons]
In the middle of Bapaume stood the remnant of the old clock-tower, a
tower of brown brick, like the houses about it, but broken off at the
top, only two-thirds of its former height, and without the clock which
used to tell us the time miles away when we gazed through telescopes
from distant observation-posts, when we still had miles to go on the way
to Bapaume. On the right of the old tower the town was burning, not in
flames when I entered, but with volumes of white smoke issuing slowly
from a row of red villas already gutted by fires lighted before the
Germans left.
A Colonel came riding out of Bapaume. He was carrying a big German
beer-jug, and showed me his trophy, leaning down over his saddle to let
me read the words:
Zum Feldgrauen Hilfe
"Is it pretty easy to get into Bapaume?" I asked.
"Barring the heavy stuff," he said. "They're putting over shells at the
rate of two or three a minute."
They were, and it was not pleasant, this walk into Bapaume, though very
interesting.
It was when I came to an old farmhouse and inn--the shell of a place--on
the left of the road (Duhamel-Equarriseur, Telephone No. 30) that I knew
the full menace of this hour was above and about. The enemy was firing a
great number of shells into Bapaume. They came towards us with that
rushing, howling noise which gives one a great fear of instant death,
and burst with crashes among the neighbouring houses. They were high
explosives, but shrapnel was bursting high, with thunderclaps, which
left behind greenish clouds and scattered bullets down. I went through
the outer defences of Bapaume, walking with a General who was on his way
to the town, and who pointed out the strength of the place. Lord! It was
still horribly strong, and would have cost us many lives to take by
assault. Three belts of wire, very thick, stood solid and strong, in a
wide curve all round the town. The enemy had dug trenches quite
recently, so that the earth was fresh and brown, and dug them well and
perfectly. Only here and there had they been broken by our shell-fire,
though some of the dug-outs had been blown in.
Just outside Bapaume, on the south-east side, is an old citadel built
centuries ago and now overgrown with fir-trees which would have given a
great field of fire to German machine-gunners, and I went afterwards
into snipers' posts, and stood at the entrance of tunnels and
bomb-proof shelters, not going down or touching any of the litter about
because of the danger lurking there in dark entries and in
innocent-looking wires and implements. There was a great litter
everywhere, for the German soldiers had left behind large numbers of
long-handled bombs and thousands of cartridges, and many tools and
implements.
Before getting into Bapaume I crossed the railway line from Arras,
through Biefvillers, which was now on fire. They had torn up the rails
here, but there was still the track, and the signal-boxes and signs in
German.
Im Bahnhof
Nur 10 Km.
That is to say, the speed of trains was to be only 10 kilometres an hour
into the station.
Another signboard directed the way for "Vieh" and "Pferde" (cattle and
horses), and everywhere there were notice-boards to trenches and
dug-outs:
Nach 1 Stellung
Fuer zwei Offizieren
As I entered Bapaume I noticed first, if my memory serves, the Hotel de
Commerce, with "garage" painted on a shell-broken wall, and immediately
facing me an old wooden house with a shoot for flour. Many of the houses
had collapsed as though built of cards, with all their roofs level with
the ground. Others were cut in half, showing all their rooms and
landings, and others were gutted in ways familiar to English people
after Zeppelin raids. Higher up on the right, as I have said, rows of
red-brick villas were burnt out, and smoke was rising in steady volumes
from this quarter of the town. The church, a white stone building, was
also smouldering. There were no Germans in the town, unless men are
still hiding there. The only living inhabitant was a little kitten which
ran across the square and was captured by our patrols, who now have it
as a pet.
There were other men living early in the morning, but they are now dead.
It was a company of German machine-gunners who held out as the last
rear-guard. They fired heavily at our men, but were quickly overpowered.
The first message that came back from the entering troops was laconic:
"While entering Bapaume we came across a party the whole of which
was accounted for. The mopping-up of Bapaume is now complete."
I did not stay very long in the town. It was not a health resort. High
explosives were crumping every part of the town, and the buildings were
falling. Pip-squeaks were flung about horribly, and when I came out with
the General and another officer a flush of them came yelling at us and
burst very close, flinging up the ground only a few yards away. The
roadway of "pave" had been hurled up in huge chumps of stone, and
shrapnel was again breaking to the right of us. I struck across country
eastwards to see the promised land, and on the way to the near ridge
turned and stared back at Bapaume in the glow of the sunset. Ours at
last!
The fires were still burning in the other villages, and it was such a
scene of war as I saw first when Dixmude was a flaming torch and Pervyse
was alight in the beginning of the world-conflict.... At about half-past
nine that night the enemy fired several quick rounds from his
field-batteries. Then there was a strange silence, unbroken by any
shell-fire. The Germans had fired their last shot in the battles of the
Somme.
X
THE RESCUE OF PERONNE
MARCH 18
To-day at 7 A.M. a battalion of the Royal Warwicks of the 48th Division
entered Peronne.
Standing alone that statement would be sensational enough. The French
fought for Peronne desperately through more than two years of war, and
now it is the luck of the British troops to enter it, as yesterday we
entered Bapaume, after a short action with the enemy's rear-guards. But
the news does not stand alone. The whole of the old German line south of
Arras, strong as one vast fortress, built by the labour of millions of
men, dug and tunnelled and cemented and timbered, with thousands of
machine-gun redoubts, with an immense maze of trenches, protected by
forests of barbed wire, had slipped away as though by a landslide, and
the enemy is in rapid retreat to new lines some miles away. As he goes
he is laying fire and waste to the countryside. North-east of Bapaume,
into which I went yesterday with our troops, and west of Peronne, scores
of villages are burning. One of them, larger than a village, the town of
Athies, is a flaming torch visible for miles around. Others are
smouldering ruins, from which volumes of smoke are rolling up into the
clear blue sky. Of all this great tract of France, which the enemy has
been forced to abandon to avoid the menace of combined attack, there is
no beauty left, and no homesteads, nor farms, but only black ruins and
devastation everywhere. The enemy is adopting the full cruelty of war's
malignancy. He has fouled the wells in his wake, so that if our
soldiers' horses should drink there they will die. Over the water-ways
he has burnt his bridges. Cross-roads have been mined, opening up
enormous craters like those I saw yesterday outside Bapaume.
High-explosive traps have been placed in the way of our patrols, to
scatter them in fragments if they lack caution.
It is impossible to give our exact line at the present moment. We have
no exact line. Village after village has fallen into our hands since
midday yesterday. Our cavalry patrols are over the hills and far away.
Our infantry patrols are pushing forward unto new territory, so that
only aeroplanes know the exact whereabouts. As one aviator has reported:
"Our men are lighting fires and taking their dinners at places off
the map. They are going into pubs which have been burnt out to find
beer which is not there."
North and east of Bapaume our patrols have gone beyond the villages of
Rocquenes, Bancourt, Favreuil, and Sapignies. Intelligence officers
riding out on bicycles to these places were scared to find themselves so
lonely, and believed that the enemy must be close at hand. But the enemy
was still farther off. Our cavalry, working up past Logeast Wood,
penetrated east of Acheit-le-Grand and turned the German line of
Behagnies-Ytres.
Much farther south, in the neighbourhood of Nesle, French and British
cavalry patrols came into touch to-day, and one of our aviators reports
that he saw French civilians waving flags and cheering them.
The Germans have a cavalry screen behind their rear-guards. They were
seen yesterday north of Bapaume and southwards beyond Roye. And some of
them were chased by a British airman at a place called Ennemain. He
swooped low like an albatross, and brought a man off his horse by a
machine-gun bullet. Others stampeded from this terrible bird.
This morning our troops were through Eterpigny beyond Barleux, and found
the villages of Misery and Marchelepot. There was some fighting last
night and this morning in the neighbourhood of Peronne. The enemy had
snipers and machine-gunners about, and kept some of their batteries back
until the last possible moment, flinging 5.9's and smaller shells over
our side of the lines, and firing heavily until about ten o'clock. Then
the gun-fire ceased, and there was not a shot. His guns were going back
along the dark roads, his rear-guards moved away, leaving behind them
their great defensive works of the Bapaume Ridge, and burning villages.
* * * * *
MARCH 19
Refusing to give battle, the enemy has retired still farther over open
country east of Bapaume, and our cavalry patrols are in touch with his
mounted rear-guards. The exact location is vague, as the movement
continues, and our cavalry is in small units, moving cautiously between
a large number of burning villages, which are everywhere alight. Small
parties of the enemy were encountered last night in the open near Ytres
and Berthincourt, and some snipers in an omnibus opened fire upon a
cavalry patrol, and were scattered by an aeroplane which swooped low,
sweeping them with machine-gun bullets.
South of the Somme our cavalry got in touch with German cavalry at Rouy
and with German cyclists at Potte. All the bridges have been destroyed
to cover the enemy's retreat, as at Rouy and Breuil, and all the wells
have been filled with filth and rubbish.
It is a most extraordinary experience to follow up through this
abandoned country from which the enemy has fled, as I have found to-day
in tramping through the district of Peronne and into that deserted and
destroyed town. A few weeks ago I went a journey to the new lines we had
taken over from the French south of the Somme. Then it was under the
full blast of shell-fire, and not a day passed without the enemy
flinging high explosives into the ruined villages of Herbecourt,
Estrees, Flaucourt, and Biaches. From Mont-St.-Quentin, on the flank of
Peronne, he had the observation of all our ground, so that it was
horrible to see that hill staring down on one, and by daylight in the
open country one moved always under the menace of death. To-day that
menace had gone. The evil spell had lifted, and we moved freely in the
sight of Mont-St.-Quentin, unafraid and with a strange sense of safety.
He had gone from there yesterday morning, and, at the same time, had
crept away from the trenches at Biaches, and across his wooden bridges
to Peronne, and out of this town to the open country, hurrying through
the night to escape from our pursuit.
I went down into Biaches, a wild chaos of trenches and dug-outs and
ruin, and passed through the front line held by our troops until about
6.30 yesterday morning, and went with difficulty through the German
barbed wire still uncut, so that we were tangled and caught in it. Then
I passed into the old German lines, and went across the wooden causeway
built by them over the marshes down to the bank of the Somme. On the
other side of the river loop I saw for the first time Peronne, taken by
the enemy in the autumn of 1914, and fought for furiously by the French,
who regained it for a while and lost it again. It was dead quiet over
there. No shell burst over it, but a little smoke rolled above its
houses. From that distance, the broad river's width, it did not look
much destroyed. It was only afterwards that I saw how much. Several
wooden bridges spanned the Somme, and I tried two of these to get
across, but there were great gaps which I could not jump. Before leaving
the enemy had broken them and tried to hide the damage from the view of
our airmen by putting up straw screens. All the trees in the marshes had
been slashed by our shell-fire. Empty barrels floated in the water with
broken boats, and the old barge, called Notre Dame d'Amiens, was blown
in half. Snipers' posts had been built, outfacing our lines, and German
ammunition and bombs and coiled wire and a great litter of timber lay
about.
I managed at last to get into Peronne by a wide curve through the
Faubourg de Paris, over the piled stones of a broken bridge with planks
across the gaps put there by our soldiers so that the enemy could be
followed in pursuit. He had been careful to check us as long as
possible, though it was not very long, for an hour after his going the
Royal Warwicks and some Londoners marched unto the Grande Place. Down
the Faubourg de Paris all the trees had been cut down, so that they had
crashed across the street, making a great barricade. Before going,
firebrands had been at work, setting alight all the houses not already
smashed by shell-fire. They were burning, when I passed them, so
fiercely that the hot breath of the flames was upon my face. Even now it
was possible to see that Peronne had once been a little town of
old-world dignity and charm. Frontages of some of these gutted houses
were richly carved in Renaissance style, among them being the ruins of
the Palais de Justice and the Hotel de Ville and the Maison Municipale.
Here and there along the Rue St.-Fursy and in the Grande Place was an
old French mansion built before the Revolution, now just a skeleton of
broken brickwork and timber. Though many houses were still standing
enough to see they were houses, there was hardly one that had escaped
the wrath of war. It was pitiful to see here and there old signs,
showing the life of the town in peace, such as the "Librairie Nouvelle,"
the "Teinturerie Parisienne" belonging to Mme. Poitevineau, the Notary's
house, full of legal books and papers scattered on a charred floor
beneath a gaping roof, a shop for "articles de chasse" kept by one
Monsieur Bourdin. Those signboards, reminding one of Peronne before the
war, were side by side with other signboards showing the way of German
life until 6.30 yesterday morning. At the entrance to the town is a
notice: "Durchgang bei Tage streng Verboten."
Most houses are labelled, "Keller fuer 60 Mann." At the entrance to a
dug-out below the town hall is the notice, "Verwundete und Kranke" (For
wounded and sick). The only inhabitants of the Grande Place were a big
black cat, looking sick and sorry for itself, and a dummy figure dressed
as a French Zouave, sprawling below the pedestal of a statue to
Catherine de Poix, heroine of the siege of 1870. The statue had been
taken away, like that of Faidherbe in the square of Bapaume. On top of
the pedestal had been laid the dummy figure in French uniform, but our
soldiers removed it. Peronne was a dead town, like Ypres, like Bapaume,
like all those villages in the wake of the German retreat. Over its old
fortifications, built by Vauban, and over its marshes wild duck are
flying.
PART II
ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY
I
THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND
MARCH 21
For several days now I have been going with our advancing troops into
towns, villages, and country abandoned by the enemy in his retreat. It
has been a strange adventure, fantastic as a dream, yet with the tragedy
of reality. The fantasy is in crossing over No Man's Land into the
German lines, getting through his wire, and passing through trenches
inhabited by his soldiers until a day or two ago, travelling over roads
and fields down which his guns and transport went, and going into
streets and houses in which there are signs of his recent occupation. He
has ruined all his roads, opening vast craters in them, and broken all
his bridges, but our men have been wonderfully quick in making a way
over these gaps, and this morning I motored over the German trenches at
Roye, zigzagging over this maze of ditches and dug-outs by bridges of
planks before getting to the roads behind his line.
After passing the area of shell-fire on our side and his, the field of
shell-craters, the smashed barns and houses and churches, the tattered
tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed wire, one comes to country where
grass grows again, and where the fields are smooth and rolling, and
where the woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to the
world again--country strange and beautiful to a man like myself, who has
been wandering through all the filth and frightfulness of the Somme
battlefields. German sentry-boxes still stand at the cross-roads. German
notice-boards stare at one from cottage walls, or where the villages
begin. Thousands of coils of barbed wire lie about in heaps, for the
enemy relied a great deal upon this means of defence, and in many places
are piles of shells which he has not removed. Gun-pits and machine-gun
emplacements, screens to hide his roads from view, observation-posts
built in tall trees, remain as signs of his military life a mile or two
back from his front lines, but behind the trenches are the towns and
villages in which he had his rest billets, and it is in these places
that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom we are fighting. The
enemy has spared nothing on the way of his retreat. He has destroyed
every village in his abandonment with a systematic and detailed
destruction. Not only in Bapaume and in Peronne has he blown up, or
burnt, all the houses which were untouched by shell-fire, but in scores
of villages he has laid waste the cottages of the peasants, and all
their farms and all their orchards. At Rethonvillers this morning, to
name only one village out of many, I saw how each house was marked with
a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was
used to mark the work of the Devil.
In Bapaume and Peronne, in Roye and Nesle and Liancourt, and all these
places over a wide area, German soldiers not only blew out the fronts of
houses, but with picks and axes smashed mirrors and furniture and
picture-frames. As a friend of mine said, a cheap-jack would not give
fourpence for anything left in Peronne, and that is true, also, of
Bapaume. There is nothing but filth in those two towns; family portraits
have been kicked into the gutters. I saw a picture of three children in
Bapaume, and it was smeared with filth in the writing of a dirty word.
The black bonnets of old women who once lived in those houses lie about
the rubbish-heaps, and by some strange, pitiful freak are almost the
only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here before the Germans
wrecked their houses. The enemy has left nothing that would be good for
dwelling or for food. Into the wells he has pitched filth so that the
people may not drink.
But that is not the greatest tragedy I have seen. The ruins of houses
are bad to see when done deliberately, even when shell-fire has spared
them in the war zone. But worse than that is the ruin of women and
children and living flesh. I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Nesle. I
was at first rejoiced to see how the first inhabitants were liberated
after being so long in hostile lines. I approached them with a queer
sense of excitement, eager to speak with them, but instantly when I saw
those women and children in the streets, and staring at me out of
windows, I was struck with a chill of horror. The women's faces were
dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great
agonies. The children were white and thin--so thin that their
cheek-bones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.
The Mayor of Nesle told me that after the first entry of the Germans on
August 29, 1914, and after the first brutalities, the soldiers had
behaved well, generally speaking. They were well disciplined, and lived
on good terms with the people, as far as possible. Probably he tells the
truth fairly, and I believe him. But the women with whom I spoke were
passionate and hysterical, and told me other stories. I believe them
too. Because these women, who are French, had to live with the men who
were killing their husbands and brothers, and that is a great horror.
They had to submit to the daily moods of men who were sometimes sulky
and sometimes drunk. The officers were often drunk. They had to see
their children go hungry, for though the Germans gave them potatoes,
sometimes they took away the hens, so that there were no eggs, and the
cows, so that there was no milk, and the children suffered and were
thin. On October 5, 1914, the Kaiser came to Nesle with an escort of
five motor-cars, and the soldiers lined the square and cheered him; but
the women and children stared and were silent, and hated those
white-haired men with the spiked hats. During the battles of the Somme
many wounded passed through the town, and others came with awful stories
of slaughter and fierce words against the English. Once twenty men of
the 173rd Regiment came in. They were half mad, weeping and cursing, and
said they were the sole survivors of their regiment.
Then, quite recently, there came the rumour of a German retreat. On
Thursday, March 15, the German commandant sent for the Mayor and
announced the news. He gave orders for all the inhabitants to leave
their houses at 6.30, and to assemble in the streets, while certain
houses and streets indicated were to be destroyed. The German
commandant, whose name was Herwaardt, said he greatly regretted this
necessity. The work was to be carried out by his Oberleutnant Baarth.
The people wept at the destruction of their homes, though the houses in
the centre of Nesle were spared. But they were comforted by the promise
of liberation. For a week previously the enemy had been withdrawing his
stores. The garrison consisted of about 800 to 1000 men of the 38th
Regiment of Chasseurs and Cyclists. The gunners were the last to leave,
and went away at midnight with the rear-guard of infantry. By half-past
seven in the morning there was not a German soldier left in Nesle, and
at half-past nine a British patrol entered, and the women and children
surrounded our men, laughing and weeping. To-day they were being fed by
British soldiers, and were waiting round the field-kitchens with wistful
eyes.
II
THE LETTER OF THE LAW
MARCH 23
On both sides cavalry patrols are scouting in the woods and villages,
and for a few days at least the situation has been extraordinarily like
those early days of the war in October of 1914, when our cavalry was
operating in Flanders, feeling forward cautiously to test the enemy's
strength. For the first time since those days German Uhlans have again
been seen on the Western Front. They have been seen moving about the
woods and on the skyline.
Little parties of them are in hiding behind the broken walls of villages
destroyed in the German retreat. Now and again they bump into our
advanced posts and then bolt away, not seeking a fight. These are the
manoeuvres of open warfare not seen on our Front since the trenches
closed us in. Our cavalry patrols are working in the same way. Yesterday
one of them encountered some of the enemy on the road to St.-Quentin and
very close to that town, where fires are still burning. Our mounted men
were suddenly called to a halt by a sharp fusillade of rifle and
machine-gun bullets. The enemy this time was unmounted and entrenched,
and after reconnoitring this position our patrol galloped back.
It is difficult to know always the exact whereabouts of the enemy's
advanced posts, as they were scattered about the countryside without any
definite trench line, so that officers of corps and divisional staffs
who are going out to examine the lie of the land, with a secret hope of
finding an adventure on the way, are taking out revolvers, which have
long been idle. I found a young staff officer to-day fastening his
holster to his belt before starting out on his morning's expedition, and
he slapped it and laughed, and said, "I haven't done this for over two
years. It is quite like old times." It brings back reminiscences to me
also of old days, when with two comrades I moved about the roads of war
ignorant of the enemy's position and narrowly escaping his
advance-guards. But, after all, it is no joke, and I should hate to get
into the middle of an enemy patrol somewhere in this country of burnt
and abandoned villages, through which I have been wandering with tired
eyes in the sight of all this destruction, so wanton, so brutal, and so
ruthless.
For the enemy has adopted the letter of the law in that code of cruelty
which governs war, and I can think of nothing more damnable than the
horror which came to some hundreds of poor souls, mostly women and
children and old stricken men in the village of Rouy-le-Petit above the
Somme.
Many of them had been driven into this hamlet from neighbouring
villages, which the Germans set on fire. Huddled in the streets of Rouy,
they saw the smoke and flames rising from their homesteads, and they
were terrorized and crushed. Presently the last German rear-guard went
out from Rouy, not cheering and singing as they came in August of 1914,
but silent and grim, conscience-stricken also, it seemed, so the French
people have told me, because of the law which made them do the things
they had done. They had been friendly with the villagers before they
smashed their houses, and had been good to the children before breaking
their bedsteads and making them homeless. They said again and again in
self-excuse, "It is war; it is the order of our high officers! We are
bound to do it."
The German guns rumbled through the street of Rouy, and went away with
gunners and cyclists and infantry. Night came, and all the noise of
distant artillery died down, and there was hardly the sound of a shot
over all the country where for nearly three years there has been the
ceaseless fire of artillery. Early next morning a British patrol entered
the village, and the people crowded round, clasping the soldiers' hands
and thanking God for deliverance, and telling of their hunger, which was
near starving-point. Then the worst happened. Suddenly shells began to
fall over the village, crashing through the roofs and flinging up the
ground in the roadway. They were German shells fired by the German
gunners who had left only a few hours before. They were not meant to
kill the civilians who had been gathered at Rouy, all the women and
children and old, weak men. They were meant to kill the British patrols,
and so were lawful as an act of war. But one could not be done without
the other, and there were civilians who were wounded in Rouy-le-Petit
that day. Weeping and wailing, they rushed down into the cellars and
took refuge there, while flights of shells followed and tore holes in
rooms and walls, and filled the village with smoke and splinters. And
that is the lawfulness of war and the horror of war.
When the enemy left he blew up all the cross-roads and made many
mine-craters along the way of his retreat. They have scarcely checked us
at all, and a tribute of praise is due to our infantry and our labour
battalions, who have been repairing those roads with quick, untiring
industry. To-day I have met with much traffic of war, French as well as
British traffic, the men in blue marching by the men in brown through
country where both armies meet. The French soldiers were marching with
their bands and colours through the ruined villages, and I never saw
more splendid men even in the early days of the war, when the great
armies of France went forward with a kind of religious passion and flung
back the Germans from the Marne. Our own men had no bands and no
colours. There was not the same sense of drama as they passed, but these
clean-shaven boys of ours, hardened by foul weather, by frost, and
rain-storms, and blizzard, go forward into the great waste, which the
enemy had left behind him, in their usual matter-of-fact way, whistling
a tune or two, passing a whimsical word along the line, settling down to
any old job that comes in a day's work, and finding as much comfort as
they can at the end of a long day's march on the lee side of a
shell-broken wall.
III
THE ABANDONED COUNTRY
MARCH 24
After long days of tiring adventure in the wake of the German
rear-guards, following through places only just evacuated, and tramping
through the great ruin they have left behind them, I have tried to give
some idea of the tragic drama of it all, the uncanny quietude of the
abandoned country, the frightful wreckage of towns and villages
destroyed, not by shell-fire, but by picks and axes and firebrands, the
deep mine-craters blown under roads, the broken bridges across the
Somme, the crowds of starved civilians surrounding our patrols in market
squares where they had been herded while their homes were in flames
around them, the little bodies of British troops advancing through
barbed-wire entanglements into fortress positions like Bapaume and
Peronne, and our cavalry patrols feeling their way forward into unknown
country where the enemy's rear-guards are in hiding.
That, in a few lines, is the historical picture of this strange new
phase of warfare in which we have been pushing forward during the past
two weeks. But through it all, to me, an onlooker of these things, there
has been one special theme of interest. It is the revelation of the
German way of life behind his lines--these abundant lines--his military
methods of defence and observation and organization, and the domestic
arrangements by which he has tried to make himself comfortable in the
field of war. Along every step of the way by which he has retreated
there are relics which show us exactly how our enemies lived and fought
when they were hidden from us across No Man's Land, and their philosophy
of life in war. All that is worth a little study.
Everywhere--outside Bapaume and Peronne and Chaulnes, and all those
deserted places near the front lines--one ugly thing stares one in the
face: German barbed wire. It is heavier, stronger stuff than ours or the
French, with great cross-pieces of iron, and he has used amazing
quantities of it in deep wide belts in three lines of defence before his
trench systems, and in all sorts of odd places, by bridges and roads and
villages even far behind the trenches, to prevent any sudden rush of
hostile infantry or to tear our cavalry to pieces should we break his
lines and get through. His trenches were deeply dug, and along the whole
line from which he has now retreated they are provided with great
concreted and timbered dug-outs leading into an elaborate system of
tunnelled galleries perfectly proof from shell-fire, and similar to
those which I have described often enough in the Somme battlefields. As
a builder of dug-outs the German soldier has no equal. But in addition
to these trench systems he made behind his lines a series of strong
posts cunningly concealed and commanding a wide field of fire with
dominating observation over our side of the country.
I found such a place quite by accident yesterday. My car broke down by a
little wood near Roye looking across to Damery and Bouchoir, and the
woody, wired fields which till a week ago were No Man's Land. When I
strolled into the wood I suddenly looked down an enormous sand-pit
covering an acre or so, and saw that it was a concealed fortress of
extraordinary strength and organization--an underground citadel for a
garrison of at least 3000 men perfectly screened by the wood above. Into
the sand-banks on every side of the vast pit were built hundreds of
chambers leading deeper down into a maze of tunnels which ran right
round the central arena. Before leaving the enemy had busied himself
with an elaborate packing up, and had taken away most of his movable
property, but the "fixtures" still remained, and a litter of mattresses
stuffed with shavings, empty wine-bottles, candles which had burnt down
on the last night in the old home, old socks and old boots and old
clothes no longer good for active service, and just the usual relics
which people leave behind when they change houses.
The officers' quarters were all timbered and panelled and papered, with
glass windows and fancy curtains. They were furnished with bedsteads
looted from French houses, and with mirrors, cabinets, washhand-stands,
marble-top tables, and easy chairs. The cross-beams of the roofs were
painted with allegorical devices and with legends such as "Gott mitt
uns," "Furchtlos und treu," "In Treue fest."
Each room had an enamelled or iron stove, so that the place must have
been snug and warm, and I noticed in several of them empty cages from
which singing birds had flown when German officers opened the doors
before their own flitting.
The men's quarters were hardly less comfortable, and the whole place was
organized as a self-contained garrison, with carpenters' shops and
blacksmiths' sheds, and a quartermaster's stores still crowded with
bombs and aerial torpedoes--thousands of them, which the enemy had left
behind in his hurry--and kitchens with great stoves and boilers, and a
Red Cross establishment for first aid, and concrete bath-houses with
shower-baths and cigar-racks for officers, who smoke before and after
bathing. Outside the artillery officers' headquarters was a board
painted in white letters, with the following couplet:
Schnell und gut ist unser Schuss
Deutscher Artilleristen Gruss.
(Quick and good is our shooting
Of the German gunners' greeting.)
Shell-craters in the open arena showed the French gunners had returned
the greeting, and that the garrison of this citadel had done well to
arrange their life mainly as a subterranean existence. But at times when
the French guns were quiet and when the French sun was shining they had
built alfresco corners with garden seats and tables, round which
enormous stacks of wine-bottles were littered, showing, as I have seen
in all these abandoned places, the enormous quantity of drink consumed
by German officers in their lighter moments.
This citadel in the wood is only one out of similar strong points all
along the lines now abandoned by the enemy. Peronne, with
Mont-St.-Quentin on its flank, and with the Somme winding around it, and
with forests of barbed wire in the marshes below it, could be called
impregnable if any place may defy great armies. It was wonderfully
fortified with great industry and great skill for over two years, and
walking into these places now, marvelling at their strength, I can only
ask one question, which certainly the enemy will find it hard to answer.
Why has he abandoned such formidable strongholds? It seems to me that
there is only one answer. It is because they had to go and not because
they wanted to go. It was because they have no longer the strength to
hold their old line against the growing gun-power and the growing
man-power of the British Armies, and have been compelled to attempt a
new strategy which will save their reserves and shorten their line.
Behind the lines the German officers and men lived comfortably in French
billets, and organized amusements for battalions in rest. At Bapaume
they had a little theatre with painted scenery. Two of the wings were
among the few things left in the rubbish-heaps of that poor destroyed
town, burnt and sacked by the Germans before they left, and when I went
in there with our troops some Australian soldiers propped them up
against the walls of a gutted house and inscribed upon them in white
chalk the name "Maison de la Co-ee," inviting their comrades to walk up
and see the finest show on earth. In Nesle the Germans turned the Cafe
de Commerce into their casino, and played military bands, whose music
did not cheer the hearts of wan women whose children were starving.
Strange fellows! Who knows what to make of them? The French people just
liberated from their rule, which was a reign of terror in the severity
of its official regulations, contradict themselves in expressing their
white-hot hatred of the German character and their liking for the
individual soldiers who were quartered on them.
"They were kind to the children ... but they burnt our
houses."--"Karl was a nice boy. He cried when he went away.... But
he helped to smash up the neighbours' furniture with an axe."--"The
lieutenant was a good fellow ... but he carried out the orders of
destruction."
A woman told me, with a quivering rage in her voice, that a German
officer rode his horse into her room one day. Another woman showed me
the cut down her hand and arm which she had received from a German
soldier who tried to force his way into her house at night. Other
stories have been told me by women white with passion.... Yet it is
clear that, on the whole, the Germans behaved in a kindly, disciplined
way until those last nights, when they laid waste so many villages and
all that was in them.
IV
THE CURE OF VOYENNES
MARCH 25
In the village of Voyennes, not far from Ham, and one of the few hamlets
not utterly destroyed, because the people of the district were herded
here while their own houses were being burnt, I went into the ruins of
the church. It was easy to see how the flames had licked about its old
stones, scorching them red, and how the high oak roof had come blazing
down before the walls and pillars had given way. Everything had been
licked down by flame except one figure on an encalcined fragment of
wall. Only one hand of the Christ there had been burned, and the body
hanging on the Cross was unscathed, like so many of those Calvaries
which I have seen in shell-fired places.
But this place had not been touched by shell-fire, for it had been far
beyond the range of French or British guns; it had been destroyed
wilfully. The village around had been spared because of the large number
of people driven into it from the neighbouring countryside, and when I
called upon the priest who lives opposite the ruin of the church, where
he served God and the people of his little parish, I heard the story of
its burning.
It was a queer thing to me to sit to-day in that room of the French
presbytery talking to the old Cure. Just a week before, on Sunday, at
the very hour of my visit, which was at midday, that old church outside
the window had become a blazing torch, and this priest, who loved it,
had wept tears as hot as its flames, and in his heart was the fire of a
great agony. He sat before me, a tall old man of the aristocratic type,
with a finely chiselled face, but thin and gaunt, and as sallow as
though he had been raised from the dead. If I could put down his words
as he spoke them to me with passion in his clear, vivid French, with
gestures of those transparent hands which gave a deeper meaning to his
words, it would be a great story, revealing the agony of the French
people behind the German lines. For the story of this village of
Voyennes is just that of all the villages on the enemy's side of the
barbed wire.
Here in a few little streets about an old church were the bodily
suffering, the spiritual torture, the patient courage, the fight against
despair, the brooding but hidden fears, which have been the life over a
great tract of France since August 1914. "For a year," said M. le Cure
Caron, "my people here have had not a morsel of meat and not a drop of
wine, and only bad water in which the Germans put their filth. They gave
us bread which was disgusting, and bad haricots and potatoes, and
potatoes and haricots, and not enough even, so that the children became
wan and the women weak. The American people sent us some food-stuffs,
but the Germans took the best of them, and in any case we were always
hungry. But those things do not matter, those physical things. It was
the suffering of the spirit that mattered, and, monsieur, we suffered
mentally so much that it almost destroyed our intelligence, it almost
made us silly, so that even now we can hardly think or reason, for you
will understand what it meant to us French people. We were slaves after
the Germans came in and settled down upon us, and said, 'We are at home;
all here is ours.' They ordered our men to work, and punished them with
prison for any slight fault. They were the masters of our women, they
put our young girls among their soldiers, they set themselves out
deliberately at first to crush our spirit, to beat us by terror, to
subdue us to their will by an iron rule. They failed, and they were
astonished. 'We cannot understand you people,' they said; 'you are so
proud, your women are so proud.' And that was true, sir. Some women, not
worthy of the name of French women, were weak--it was inevitable,
alas!--but for the most part they raised their heads and said, 'We are
French, we will never give in to you, not after one year, nor two years,
nor three years, nor four years.'
"The Germans asked constantly, 'When do you think the war will
end?' We answered, 'Perhaps in five years, but in the end we will
smash you,' and this made them very angry, so our people went about
with their heads up, scornful, refusing to complain against any
severity or any hardship.
"Secretly among ourselves it was different. We could get no news
for months except lies. We knew nothing of what was happening.
Starvation crept closer upon us. We were surrounded by the fires of
hell. As you see, we are in the outer section of the great Somme
battle line, and very close to it. For fifty hours at a time the
roar of guns swept round us week after week, and month after month,
and the sky blazed around us. We were afraid of the temper of the
German officers after the defeat on the Marne, and after the
battles of the Somme Germany was like a wounded tiger, fierce,
desperate, cruel. Secretly, though our people kept brave faces,
they feared what would happen if the Germans were forced to
retreat. At last that happened, and after all we had endured the
days of terror were hard to bear. From all the villages around, one
by one, people were driven out, young women and men as old as sixty
were taken away to work for Germany, and an orderly destruction
began, which ended with the cutting down of our orchards and ruin
everywhere. The Commandant before that was a good man and a
gentleman, afraid of God and his conscience. He said, 'I do not
approve of these things. The world will have a right to call us
barbarians.' He asked for forgiveness because he had to obey
orders, and I gave it him. An order came to take away all the bells
of the churches and all the metalwork. I had already put my church
bells in a loft, and I showed them to him, and said, 'There they
are.' He was very sorry. This man was the only good German officer
I have met, and it was because he had been fifteen years in America
and had married an American wife and escaped from the spell of his
country's philosophy. Then he went away. Last Sunday, a week ago,
at this very hour when the people were all in their houses under
strict orders, and already the country was on fire with burning
villages, a group of soldiers came outside there with cans of
petroleum, which they put into the church. Then they set fire to
it, and watched my church burn in a great bonfire. At this very
hour a week ago I watched it burn.... That night the Germans went
away through Voyennes, and early in the morning, up in my attic,
looking through a pair of glasses I saw four horsemen ride in. They
were English soldiers, and our people rushed out to them. Soon
afterwards came some Chasseurs d'Afrique, and the Colonel gave me
the news of the outer world to which we now belong after our years
of isolation and misery. Our agony had ended.... The Germans know
they were beaten, monsieur; a Commandant of Ham said, 'We are
lost.' After the battles of the Somme the men groaned and wept when
they were sent off to the Front. 'God,' they cried, 'the horror of
the French and English gun-fire; O Christ, save us!' During the
battles of the Somme the wounded poured back, a thousand or more a
day, and Ham was one great hospital of bleeding flesh. The German
soldiers have bad food and not enough of it, and their people are
starving as we starved. The German officers behaved to their men
with their usual brutality. I have seen them beat the soldiers
about the head while those men stood at attention, not daring to
say a word, but as soon as the officers are out of the way, the men
say, 'We will cut those fellows' throats after the war. We have
been deceived! After the war we will make them pay.'"
So the Cure talked to me, and I have only given a few of his words, but
what I have given is enough.
V
THE CHATEAU OF LIANCOURT
MARCH 28
Day by day our soldiers push farther forward across the country which
the Germans have laid waste, so that even when peace comes there will be
no dwelling-places where there were once fine chateaux of France, and
thriving little towns and hamlets clustering about old farmsteads, and
great barns; nor any orchards, where for miles there was white blossom
in the Aprils of many centuries, and ruddy fruit in all the autumns of
the past.
These men of ours take all this desolation in a matter-of-fact way, as
they take everything in this war, and pass almost without thought scenes
more than usually fantastic in piled ruins, and it is only by some such
phrase or two as "Did you ever see the like?" or "They've made a pretty
mess of that!" that they express their astonishment in this wide belt of
death which the enemy has left along his tracks. Secretly I think some
of them are stirred with a sense of the sinister drama of it all, and
are a little staggered by a ruthlessness of war beyond even their own
earlier experience, which covers the battle of the Somme. All this is
something new, something which seems unnecessary, something more
devilish, and our men go poking about among the burnt houses and into
the German underground defences searching among the rubbish and
examining the relics of the old life there, as though to discover the
secret of the men who have gone away, the secret of "Old Fritz" their
enemy.
Sometimes they find messages written to them by the enemy in good
English, but with dark meanings. In one German dug-out the other day an
officer of ours found a note scribbled on the table.
"We are going away, Tommy dear, and leave some empty bottles of
Rhein wine. It is the best wine in the world. Take care it is not
the best for you."
"When are they coming?" was another note. "Enlist at once, Tommy my
boy."
But those things do not explain. It is difficult to find any clue to the
character of these German soldiers, who have left behind them proofs of
wonderful labour and skill, and proofs of great sentiment and religious
piety, and proofs of an ordered cruelty worse than anything seen in
France since barbarous days. How can one explain?
Yesterday I went to a village called Liancourt. There is a big chateau
there. Even now at a little distance it seems a place of old romance,
with a strong, round tower and high peaked roofs, and great wings of
dark old brick. In such a place Henri IV lived. It was centuries old
when the Revolution made its heraldic shields meaningless, but until a
year or two ago its walls were still hung with tapestries, and its halls
were filled with Empire furniture, and its great vaulted cellars with
wine. When the Germans came they made it a hospital for their
wounded--their Red Cross is still painted on one of the sloping
roofs--and though it was far behind their lines, surrounded it with
barbed wire which is now red with rust, and built enormous dug-outs in
its grounds in case French guns should ever come near. When the Germans
went a few days ago they left but an empty shell. They stripped the
walls of panelling and tapestry, they took all the clocks and pictures
and furniture and carpets, and I wandered yesterday through scores of
rooms empty of everything so that my footsteps echoed in them. The
Chateau of Liancourt had been looted from attic to cellar. But quite
close to the chateau the Germans have left the bodies of many of their
soldiers, as all over this country, by roadsides and in fields, there
are the graves of German dead. Here there was one of their cemeteries,
strongly walled with heavy blocks of stone, each grave with its big
wooden headpiece, with a stone chapel built for the burial service, and
with a "Denkmal," or monument, in the centre of all these dead. It was a
memorial put up by Hessian troops in July 1915 to the honour of men
taken on the field of honour.
In this graveyard one sees the deep respect paid by the Germans to the
dead--French dead as well as German dead.... But just a hundred yards
away is another graveyard. It is the cemetery of the little church in
the grounds of the chateau, and is full of vaults and tombs where lay
the dust of French citizens, men, women, and children, who died before
the horror of this war.
The vaults had been opened by pickaxes. The tombstones were split across
and graves exposed. Into these little houses of the dead--a young girl
had lain in one of them--rubbish had been flung. From one vault the
coffin had been taken away.... The church had been a little gem, with a
tall, pointed spire. Not by shell-fire, but by an explosive charge
placed there the day before the Germans went away the spire had been
flung down and one end of the church blown clean away. The face of its
clock lay upon the rubbish-heap. The sanctuary had been opened and the
reliquaries smashed. The statues of the saints had been overturned, and
the vestments of the priest trampled and torn.
* * * * *
I went into the village of Cremery not far away. Here also the graves
had been opened in the churchyard, and in the church the relics of
saints had been looted--a queer kind of loot for German homes--and in
the sacristy fine old books of prayer and music lay tattered on the
floor.
* * * * *
I went again yesterday to the great area of destroyed villages which the
enemy left behind him on his retreat to St.-Quentin, and from Holnon
Wood, which our cavalry were the first to enter a few weeks ago, looked
across the open country between our outposts and that old city whose
cathedral rises as a grey mass above the last ridge, so near and so
clear when the sunlight falls upon it that our men can see the tracery
of the windows. It still stands unbroken and beautiful, though houses
have been destroyed around it to clear the enemy's field of fire.
German officers use its towers as observation-posts, and can see every
movement of our men in the fields below.
"They snipe us with five-point-nines," said a young officer,
smoking a cigarette, with his back to a broken wall in a heap of
ruins. "They scatter 'em about on the off-chance of hitting some
one, and you never can tell where they are likely to drop."
Some of them came whirring across to the Holnon Wood and down into the
village of Francilly as I stood looking across to Savy Wood, but not
close enough to hurt any one. It is the queerest thing to be in this
part of our Front. Go a little too far down a road, mistake one village
for another--and it is quite easy, for they all look alike in ruin--and
if you are an absent-minded man you can get into the enemy's lines
without realizing your danger. Yesterday only occasional shell-bursts
and short spasms of machine-gun fire from the edge of Savy Wood came to
prove that here masses of men are watching out to kill each other.
Pigeons cooed in the woods. The ground at my feet was spangled with
anemones, and the sunlight chased shadows across the fields of spring
below the city, where soon the streets may be noisy with battle. Our
men, living amidst ruin this side of St.-Quentin, have settled down to
this life of open warfare as though they had known nothing else. Whether
the tragedy of it all sinks into them I do not know, but they whistle
music-hall tunes in the vast rubbish-heaps which were once old chateaux
of France, and sleep and stack their rifles in ancient crypts among the
coffins of French aristocrats who died before, or just a little after,
the French Revolution, and find shelter from wind and rain in poor
little sacristies filled with statues of saints adjoining churches
wrecked by explosive charges before the German soldiers went their way.
One sees the strangest contrasts of life and death in all this
countryside, as when yesterday I came across a Highlander playing his
pipes in a wild and merry way on an avalanche of old red bricks which
once formed part of the mansion of Caulaincourt, with many terraces
lined with white statues of Greek goddesses now lying maimed and
mutilated among the great rubbish-heaps.
By the roadside on my way I saw some English soldiers resting, and close
to them was a marble tablet stuck up in a heap of earth. I read the
words carved on the stone, and it told me that here was the heart of
Anne-Josephine Barandier, Marquise de Caulaincourt, who died in Paris on
January 17, 1830.
Poor dead heart of Madame la Marquise! In a vault near by all the
tablets of her family had been smashed, and the coffins laid bare, but
there was no little niche to show where the lady's heart had been.
Outside in the churchyard there was a great tomb to the memory of the
French soldiers who fell in 1871, and next to them the graves of German
soldiers killed in this war, and a wooden cross to Second Lieutenant
Nixon, of the Royal Flying Corps, killed here behind the German lines on
July 19, 1915.
VI
THE OLD WOMEN OF TINCOURT
MARCH 29
One scene on the roadside of war will remain sharp in my memory among
all these scenes in the wilderness which the Germans have made behind
them, through which I have been passing. It is because of the courage of
old women who sat there on the way.
It was beyond Peronne, and through the open country where our cavalry
patrols are working, and in the village of Tincourt. Up beyond
Lagnicourt the guns yesterday were firing heavily, and sharp gusts of
wind blew forward the noise of a greater and farther bombardment, deep
and low. Quite close, the village of Roisel, taken by our troops the day
before, was still smouldering, and all around for miles was the long
black trail of war with hundreds of villages and farmsteads laid low by
fire and dynamite before the Germans left them in retreat. But in
Tincourt only the outer streets and the neighbouring, separate buildings
had been destroyed. The main part of the village was still standing,
though the enemy had shelled it a little the day before. When I came
into it I saw that it was one of the few places left by the Germans,
because it was a concentration camp of civilians driven in from other
villages while they were being smashed.
The people were gathered about the roadway, about two hundred of them,
sitting or standing among piles of bundles, like refugees in the old
days of the war. There were many old, old women among them in black
dresses and bonnets, and a group of young girls, of fifteen or so, and
small boys and children in arms. They were looking down the road
anxiously, and I found that they were waiting for British lorries and
ambulances to take them away to safer country, beyond the reach of
German shell-fire. They were people who had just been liberated from
hostile rule. The grey tide of the German army had swept back from them,
and they found themselves once again free people of France, with news of
France, and of the world on the other side of the trenches and the wire
which for two years and a half had shut them in with the enemy.
I spoke with the old women, these brave old grandmothers who were
sitting homeless and houseless on their bundles in the midst of a ruined
countryside, within reach of the guns. They were not weeping but
smiling. They were not afraid but scornful of the perils through which
they had passed.
They were thin because they had stinted for their grandchildren, and
they had suffered great misery, but they held their old grey heads high,
and said, "For our sons' sake we endured all things."
They are the grandmothers of the babes who know nothing of all this war,
and one day will be told, and the mothers of men who have fought and
died, and who fight and die with supreme self-sacrifice in the shambles
of this war. They are women worthy of hero sons, themselves heroic. They
were not passionate against the enemy, only contemptuous of him, and of
his rule of them. They liked some of the German soldiers and made no
accusations of individual brutality, but cursed the spirit which had
laid waste their villages, and destroyed their houses and orchards, and
taken away their young girls and all men to the age of fifty. They spoke
with the dispassionate eloquence of people who have been in earthquakes
and shipwrecks and tornadoes. German cruelty was natural, inevitable,
and unarguable, and the soldiers who had done these things were the
slaves of the fate which ordained their acts.
"I was taken to Roisel from my own village farther back," said one
old lady. "They burnt my house and my neighbours' houses and drove
us forward. Roisel was all in flames when we passed through. The
fires came out of the houses, and the heat of them scorched us.
Then we came to Tincourt, and yesterday they shelled us. The little
ones were afraid. Our young girls were weeping and full of terror.
"You will understand that it is hard to see one's village
destroyed, and to see one's sisters taken away, and not to know
what is to happen next. For us old women it was not so bad. We are
too old to weep, having wept too much. We thought of our sons who
have died for France. We showed our scorn for the enemy by hiding
our fear."
"They know they are beaten," said the old ladies. "They ask always
for peace. They are afraid of the punishment which God holds in
store for them for all this wickedness."
"Yes," said one of the old women, "they will be punished. What we
have suffered they will suffer. All this"--she thrust up a skinny
hand towards the ruined land behind her--"must be paid for."
"It is William who will pay," said another old woman, "with his
head."
It was like the talk of the Greek Fates, the three old women who held
the thread and spun the thread and snipped the thread--this talk of the
old women of Tincourt, so passionless, so hard, so fair, so certain. But
I marvelled at their courage, sitting there on their bundles, after
tramping away from their blazing homesteads, waiting for British lorries
to take them away from a place which, even then, was registered by
German guns, with the young girls, and the babies who were born under
hostile rule.
VII
THE AGONY OF WAR
MARCH 31
I am moved to write again of the old men and women and of the young
women and children who have been liberated by our advance, because I
have just been among these people again, seeing their tears, hearing
their pitiful tales, touched by hands which plucked my sleeve so that I
should listen to another story of outrage and misery.
All they told me, and all I have seen, builds up into a great tragedy.
These young girls, who wept before me, shaken by the terror of their
remembrance, these old brave men, who cried like children, these old
women who did not weep but spoke with strange, smiling eyes as to life's
great ironies, revealed to me in a fuller way the enormous agony of life
behind the German lines now shifted back a little so that these people
have escaped. It is an agony which includes the German soldiers,
themselves enslaved, wretched, disillusionized men, under the great doom
which has killed so many of their brothers, ordered to do the things
many of them loathe to do, brutal by order even when they have gentle
instincts, doing kind things by stealth, afraid of punishment for
charity, stricken both by fear and hunger.
"Why do you go?" they were asked by one of the women who have been
speaking to me.
"Because we hope to escape the new British attacks," they answered.
"The English gun-fire smashed us to death on the Somme. The
officers know we cannot stand that horror a second time."
They spoke as men horribly afraid.
"I was the bailiff of Mme. la Marquise de Caulaincourt," said an
elderly man, taking off his peaked cap to show me a coronet on the
badge. "When the Germans came first to our village they seized all
the tools, and all the farm-carts, and all the harvesting, and then
they forced us all to work for them, the men at three sous an hour,
the women at two sous an hour, and prison for any who refused to
work. From the chateau they sent back the tapestries, the pictures,
and anything which pleased this Commandant or that, until there was
nothing left. Then in the last days they burnt the chateau to the
ground and all the village and all the orchards."
"It was the same always," said a woman. "There were processions of
carts covered with linen, and underneath the linen was the
furniture stolen from good houses."
"Fourteen days ago," said an old man who had tears in his eyes as
he spoke, "I passed the night in the cemetery of Vraignes. There
were one thousand and fifteen of us people from neighbouring
villages, some in the church and some in the cemetery. They
searched us there and took all our money. Some of the women were
stripped and searched. In the cemetery it was a cold night and
dark, but all around the sky was flaming with the fire of our
villages--Poeuilly, Bouvincourt, Marteville, Trefcon, Monchy,
Bernes, Hancourt, and many more. The people with me wept and cried
out loud to see their dear places burning and all this hell.
Terrible explosions came to our ears. There were mines everywhere
under the roads. Then Vraignes was set on fire and burnt around us,
and we were stricken with a great terror. Next day the English came
when the last Uhlans had left. 'The English!' we shouted, and ran
forward to meet them, stumbling, with outstretched hands. Soon
shells began to fall in Vraignes. The enemy was firing upon us, and
some of the shells fell very close to a barn quite full of women
and children. 'Come away,' said your English soldiers, and we fled
farther."
Russian prisoners were brought to work behind the lines, and some French
prisoners. They were so badly fed that they were too weak to work.
"Poor devils!" said a young Frenchwoman. "It made my heart ache to see
them."
She watched a French prisoner one day through her window. He was so
faint that he staggered and dropped his pick. A German sentry knocked
him down with a violent blow on the ear. The young Frenchwoman opened
the window, and the blood rushed to her head.
"Sale bete!" she cried to the German sentry.
He spoke French and understood, and came under the window.
"'Sale bete'? ... For those words you shall go to prison, madame."
She repeated the words, and called him a monster, and at last the man
spoke in a shamed way and said:
"Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre. C'est cruelle, la guerre!"
This man had kinder comrades. Pitying the Russian prisoners, they gave
them stealthily a little brandy and cigarettes, and some who were caught
did two hours' extra drill each day for a fortnight.
"My three sisters were taken away when the Germans left," said a young
girl. She spoke her sisters' names, Yvonne, Juliette, and Madeleine,
and said they were eighteen and twenty-two and twenty-seven, and then,
turning away from me, wept very bitterly.
"They are my daughters," said a middle-aged woman. "When they were taken
away I went a little mad. My pretty girls! And all our neighbours'
daughters have gone, up from sixteen years of age, and all the men-folk
up to fifty. They have gone to slavery, and for the girls it is a great
peril. How can they escape?"
How can one write of these things? For the women it was always worst.
Many of them had surpassing courage, but some were weak and some were
bad. The bad women preyed on the others in a way so vile that it seems
incredible. There was no distinction of class or sex in the forced
labour of the harvest-fields, and delicate women of good families were
forced to labour on the soil with girls strong and used to this toil.
There were many who died of weakness and pneumonia and under-feeding.
"Are you not afraid of being called barbarians for ever?" asked a woman
of a German officer who had not been brutal, but, like others, had tried
to soften the hardships of the people.
"Madame," he said very gravely, "we act under the orders of people
greater than ourselves, and we are bound to obey, because otherwise we
should be shot. But we hate the cruelty of war, and we hate those who
have made it. One day we will make them pay for the vile things we have
had to do."
What strange little dramas, what tragic stories I have heard in these
recent days! I have told the tale of one old priest. Here is the tale of
another, as he told it to me in the midst of ruin.
He is the Abbe Barbe, of Muille, near Ham. In the neighbourhood was an
enemy, too, a Frenchman, who was once a Christian brother, and now,
unfrocked, a drunkard and a debauchee. He accused the abbe of having a
telephone in his cellar from which he sent messages to Paris about
German military secrets. One night there came a bang at the door of the
abbe's study. Five soldiers entered with fixed bayonets and arrested the
old priest. He was taken to the fortress of Ham and put into a dark cell
with one small iron grating and a plank bed. Here he was interrogated by
a German officer, who told him of the grave accusation against him.
"Search my cellars," said the abbe. "If there is a telephone there,
shoot me as a spy. If not, set me free, after your court martial."
There was no court martial. After four days in the darkness the abbe was
taken away by German soldiers and set down, not at Muille, but at
Voyennes, ten kilometres or so away, and forbidden to go back to his
village or his church. He went back a few days ago, when the Germans
left. When he went into his house he found that it had been sacked. All
the rare old books in his library had been burnt. There was nothing left
to him.
"Sir," said a sister of charity, "these people whom you see here were
brave but tortured in spirit and in body. Beyond the German lines they
have lived in continual fear and servitude. The tales which they have
told us must make the good God weep at the wickedness of his creatures.
There will be a special place in hell, perhaps, for the Emperor William
and his gang of bandits."
She spoke the words as a pious aspiration, this little pale woman with
meek and kindly eyes, in her nun's dress.
VIII
CAVALRY IN ACTION
APRIL 2
Our troops have advanced since yesterday on to a line of high ground
overlooking St.-Quentin and sweeping in a curve round the wood of
Holnon, which is the last strong point between us and the trenches
immediately before the cathedral city. This morning our outposts were in
Bihucourt and Villecholles, and advancing to Maissemy, thereby holding
all the roads except one on the western side of the Hindenburg-Siegfried
line between Peronne and St.-Quentin. Our enemy is shelling the villages
from which he has lately retired with long-range guns, and we are now
drawing very close to his new line of trenches and fixed positions.
Northwards of Peronne and east of Bapaume our troops have taken
Doignies, above the forest of Havrincourt, and hold Neuville and
Ruyaulcourt to the south of it, so that this great wood is encircled
like that of Holnon; and the enemy must escape quickly from the shelter
of the trees or be trapped there.
Northwards again, above Bapaume, we have made to-day a heavy and
successful attack south-east of Croisilles, where a few days ago there
was sharp fighting and several German counter-attacks, because the
position threatens that sector of the Hindenburg line which is
immediately behind the village striking down at an angle south-eastwards
in front of Queant, from which we are three miles distant. Two small
villages below Croisilles, named Longatte and Ecoust-St.-Mien, have also
fallen to us.
Our attack to-day was preceded by great gun-fire, and the enemy has
defended himself with desperate courage, acting upon Hindenburg's orders
that the position must be held at all costs. We have brought back over a
hundred prisoners, and have inflicted great losses upon the garrison.
One of the most interesting and extraordinary features in all the
fighting east of Bapaume has been the work of our cavalry squadrons in
reconnaissance and attack. I confess that, after two and a half years of
trench warfare, I was utterly sceptical of the value of mounted troops,
in spite of the little stunt (as they called it) south of High Wood,
after we took the Bazentins and Longueval in July of last year, when the
Royal Dragoons and Deccan Horse rode out and brought back prisoners.
Conditions have changed since then by a great transformation scene,
owing to the enemy's abandonment of his old fortress positions on the
Somme under our frightful onslaught of gun-fire. The country into which
we have now gone is beyond the great wide belt of shell-craters, which
made the battlefields of the Somme a wild quagmire of deep pits and
ponds. The roads between the ruined villages are wonderfully smooth and
good where they have not been mined, and the fields are as nature and
French husbandry left them after last year's harvest. Then there has
been a glorious absence of heavy shell-fire while the enemy has been
drawing back his guns to emplacements behind the Hindenburg line; and
this to cavalry, as well as to infantry, makes all the difference
between heaven and hell. So the cavalry has had its chance again after
the old far-off days when they rode up the Mont des Cats and chased
Uhlans through Meteren, and scouted along the Messines Ridge in the
autumn of 1914.
There have been no great sensational episodes, no shock of lance against
lance in dense masses, no cutting up of rear-guards nor slashing into a
routed army, but there has been a great deal of good scouting work
during the past three weeks. Eight villages have been taken by the
Canadian cavalry under General Seely, and they have captured a number of
prisoners and machine-guns. They have liked their hunting. I have seen
the Indian cavalry riding across the fields with their lances high, and
it was a great sight, and as strange as an Arabian Nights tale in this
land of France, to see those streams of brown-bearded men, as handsome
as fairy-book princes, with the wind blowing their khaki turbans.
Night after night our cavalry have gone out in patrols, the leader ahead
and alone; two men following; behind them a small body keeping in touch.
They ride silently like shadows, with no clatter of stirrup or chink of
bit. They find the gaps in the enemy's wire, creep close to his infantry
outposts, ride very deftly into the charred ruins of abandoned villages,
and come back with their news of the enemy's whereabouts. A week ago one
of their patrols went into the Forest of Holnon, which is still held by
the enemy, and listened to Germans talking. Our men were undiscovered.
They took the villages by sweeping round on both sides in a great
gallop, with their lances down, and the enemy fled at the first sight of
them.
When the cavalry charged at Equancourt, a body of British infantry, who
had come on to the ground six hours earlier than they need have done, in
order (as they said) not to miss the show, cheered them on with the
wildest enthusiasm.
"Look at those beggars," shouted one man as the cavalry swept past;
"that's the way to take a village. No blighted bombs for them, and hell
for leather all the way!"
It was a difficult operation, this taking of Equancourt, and was carried
out in the best cavalry style according to the old traditions. The
village and a little wood in the front of it were held by Germans with
machine-guns, and another village to the right named Sorel was defended
in the same way, and commanded the field of fire before Equancourt. The
cavalry had two spurs of ground in front of them divided by two narrow
gullies, or re-entrants. One gully ran straight to the village of
Equancourt, but was directly in front of the German machine-gun
emplacements. The other gully was to the right, and it was through this
that the cavalry rode, sweeping round in a curve to Equancourt. Before
their charge of two parties, a third party was posted on the left on
rising ground, and swept the wood below Equancourt with machine-gun
fire, and a smaller body of cavalry to the right occupied the attention
of the enemy in Sorel in the same way. Then the two attacking parties
were launched, and rode hard at a pace of twenty-three miles an hour.
The enemy did not stand. After a few bursts of machine-gun fire, which
only hit a few of our mounted men, they fled behind the shelter of a
railway embankment beyond the village, and most of them escaped.
All this is an interlude between greater and grimmer things. We have not
yet come to the period of real open warfare, but have only passed over a
wide belt of No Man's Land: and the fantasy of cavalry skirmishes and
wandering Germans and civilians greeting us with outstretched hands from
ruined villages will soon be closed by the wire and walls of the
Hindenburg line, where once again the old fortress and siege warfare
will begin, unless we have the luck to turn it or break through before
the Siegfried divisions have finished their fortifications.
PART III
THE BATTLE OF ARRAS
I
ARRAS AND THE VIMY RIDGE
APRIL 9
To-day at dawn our armies began a battle which, if Fate has any kindness
for the world, may be the beginning of the last great battles of the
war. Our troops attacked on a wide front including the Vimy Ridge--that
grim hill which dominates the plain of Douai and the coalfields of
Lens--and the German positions around Arras. In spite of bad fortune in
the weather at the beginning of the day, so bad that there was no
visibility for the airmen, and our men had to struggle forward in a
heavy rain-storm, the first attacks have been successful, and the enemy
has lost much ground, falling back in retreat to strong rear-guard lines
where he is now fighting desperately.
The line of our attack covers a front of some twelve miles southwards
from Givenchy-en-Gohelle, and is a sledge-hammer blow threatening to
break the northern end of the Hindenburg line, already menaced round
St.-Quentin. As soon as the enemy was forced to retreat from the country
east of Bapaume and Peronne, in order to escape a decisive blow on that
line, he hurried up divisions and guns northwards to counter our attack
there, while he prepared a new line of defence known as the Wotan line,
as the southern part of the Hindenburg line, which joins it, is known as
the Siegfried position, after two great heroes of old German mythology.
He hoped to escape there before our new attack was ready, but we have
been too quick for him, and his own plans were frustrated. So to-day
began another titanic conflict which the world will hold its breath to
watch, because of all that hangs upon it.
I have seen the fury of this beginning, and all the sky on fire with it,
the most tragic and frightful sight that men have ever seen, with an
infernal splendour beyond words to tell. The bombardment which went
before the infantry assault lasted for several days, and reached a great
height yesterday, when coming from the south I saw it for the first
time. I went up in darkness long before light broke to-day to watch the
opening of the battle. It was very cold, with a sharp wind blowing from
the south-east and rain-squalls. The roads were quiet until I drew near
to Arras, and then onwards there was the traffic of marching men going
up to the fighting-lines, and of their transport columns, and of many
ambulances. In darkness there were hundreds of little red lights, the
glow of cigarette ends. Every now and then one of the men would strike a
match, holding it in the hollow of his hands and bending his head to it,
so that his face was illumined--one of our English faces, clear-cut and
strong. The wind blew sparks from cigarette ends like fireflies. Outside
one camp a battalion was marching away, a regiment of shadow-forms, and
on the bank above them the band was playing them out with fifes and
drums, such a merry little tune, so whimsical and yet so sad also in the
heart of it, as it came trilling out of darkness. On each side of me as
I passed by men were deeply massed, and they were whistling and singing
and calling out to each other. Away before them were the fires of death,
to which they were going very steadily, with a tune on their lips,
carrying their rifles and shovels and iron rations, while the rain
played a tattoo on their steel hats.
I went to a place a little outside Arras on the west side. It was not
quite dark, because there was a kind of suffused light from the hidden
moon, so that I could see the black mass of the cathedral city, the
storm-centre of this battle, and away behind me to the left the tall,
broken towers of Mont-St.-Eloi, white and ghostly looking, across to the
Vimy Ridge. The bombardment was now in full blast. It was a beautiful
and devilish thing, and the beauty of it and not the evil of it put a
spell upon one's senses. All our batteries, too many to count, were
firing, and thousands of gun-flashes were winking and blinking from the
hollows and hiding-places, and all their shells were rushing through
the sky as though flocks of great birds were in flight, and all were
bursting over German positions, with long flames which rent the darkness
and waved sword-blades of quivering light along the ridges. The earth
opened, and pools of red fire gushed out. Star-shells burst
magnificently, pouring down golden rain. Mines exploded east and west of
Arras, and in a wide sweep from Vimy Ridge to Blangy southwards, and
voluminous clouds, all bright with a glory of infernal fire, rolled up
to the sky. The wind blew strongly across, beating back the noise of
guns, but the air was all filled with the deep roar and the slamming
knocks of single heavies and the drum-fire of field-guns.
The first attack was at 5.30. Officers were looking at their
wrist-wa
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