Chapter X: Part 10

There was nothing in the way of trenches to take. The Germans were holding lines of shell-craters. In these deep pits they had fixed their machine-guns, and were scattered all about in isolated groups, with little stores of bombs, and rifles kept dry, somehow. It was extraordinarily difficult to attack such a position because there was no definite line.

The Australians found themselves sniped by machine-guns—horrible little spasms of bullets—from unknown quarters, to the right and left, even behind them. By the time the line of Mouquet Farm was reached the battle was broken up into a number of separate encounters between small parties of Australians and small parties of Prussians.

There were bombing duels between one man and another over a shell-hole. Prussians sniped Australians and Australians Prussians at short range from the cover of craters.

But in spite of all this hugger-mugger fighting the Australians pushed forward, and advanced parties went into Mouquet Farm and 200 yards beyond it on the other side. Mouquet Farm—or “Moo-cow” and “Muckie” Farm, as it is variously called—only exists as a name. Of the farm buildings there is nothing left but some blackened beams no higher than one of the Australian boys.

The enemy, however, had his usual dug-outs here, tunnelled deep and strongly protected with timbers and cement. Into one of these went a group of Australians, ready for a fight, and surprised to find the place empty of human life. It was quiet there out of the shell-fire, and it was pleasant to be in the cool dark room, away from the battle. The men searched about and found cigars, which they lit and smoked.

“Good work!” said a boy.

As he spoke the words there was a scuttle of feet and dark figures appeared in the entrance way. They were Germans, and an officer among them said: “Surrender!” “Surrender be damned!” shouted the Australians. “Surrender yourselves.”

Bombs were flung on both sides, but other Australians came up, and it was the Germans who surrendered. I saw one of them to-day, sitting on the grass and smoking a pipe among some of his comrades, who lay wounded among the men who had helped to capture them.

Other dug-outs were being searched, and other prisoners were taken—how many is still uncertain. But what is quite certain is that the Australians have taken ground beyond Mouquet Farm to the east and defeated Germany’s best troops—the 1st regiment of the Prussian Guards reserve.

They were sturdy and fine-looking men, as I saw some of them to-day, and they did not hide their joy at being alive and well treated as wounded prisoners. One of them spoke quite freely, and answered all questions put to him, though with what truth it is difficult to judge.

I think he told the truth, according to the knowledge that had been given to him and the lessons taught him by his warlords. One of his most startling statements, which he made quite definitely, is that the German Emperor has issued a proclamation to his troops, declaring that there will be no winter campaign.

With regard to the coming in of Rumania, he said that it did not surprise them, as they had expected it for a long time. “It will make no difference to the real war,” he said. He disclaimed that there was any shortage of food in Germany, and, as for the soldiers, said: “At least the Prussian Guards feed well. I had two eggs for breakfast.”

“It is the same with all our men.” In the captured districts of France the French people, he says, live on good terms with the Prussian soldiers, but do not like the Bavarians, who are rude fellows. “They were glad to see us back from Russia,” he added.

They seem to have been brought back hurriedly from Russia to resist our offensive, and one man to whom I spoke a few words—a house painter in Berlin in days of peace—told me that he had only been here in France since the early days of July. He said that the war was far worse in France than in Russia, because of the intensity of artillery fire. “We are weary of it all,” he said. “Our people are weary of it. The world is weary of it.”

“And you are glad to be out of it?” I asked.

He smiled, and said, “It is good to be here.”

The Australians were giving their tobacco to these men, and there was no sign of hatred between them. It seems that the Prussian Guard behaved well to-day with regard to the wounded and the stretcher-bearers. After the battle the bearers went out all across No Man’s Land to rescue the wounded and we allowed the same privilege to the enemy, so that parties of Germans and British came close to each other in this work of rescue, and there was no sniping.

With regard to the Guillemont fighting, I can write very little as the battle there began only at mid-day, and I could not get in that direction. But I learn that in co-operation with the French, who were advancing magnificently from the south, and who had linked up with us near Angle Wood, our troops fought their way forward from Arrow Head Copse by way of a maze of little saps which had been dug all about here. They went straight through Guillemont, knocking out machine-gun posts and clearing out dug-outs, and established themselves on the Sunken Road from Ginchy. The Prussian Guard put up a big fight near Falfemont Farm, but suffered great losses. The other German regiments against us were the 73rd, 76th, and 164th.

Fighting still goes on, and the exact issue is uncertain, but at the end of this Sunday the advantage of the day lies with us, and the enemy has submitted to heavy blows.

XXVII

THE CAPTURE OF GUILLEMONT

1

SEPTEMBER 4

In my despatch yesterday describing the very heavy fighting at several parts of the line, I was unable to give sufficient prominence to the greatest success of the day, and one of the best achievements since the beginning of the Battle of the Somme.

That we hold Guillemont safely and surely I had the luck to see for myself to-day when from neighbouring trenches I looked into the ruin of the place—strangely quiet this afternoon apart from a few German “crumps”—and saw that our men were holding the Sunken Road 500 yards further on before they made an attack which has given us Wedge Wood and ground to the north of Falfemont Farm.

Yesterday’s attack at mid-day was wonderfully good. Our men went forward steadily in waves after a hurricane fire from a great mass of British guns. By some curious chance the enemy does not seem to have expected an attack at the exact hour it happened. They may have thought that they had baulked it by their own bombardment on our lines and behind them when they flung over 10,000 gas shells, whose poisonous vapour floated over the ground for hours. They know now to their cost that they did not thwart the advance of our troops.

The enemy’s machine-guns swept the ground with a rush of bullets, but our men took cover as much as possible in the dips and hollows of the earth—chaotic after long weeks of shelling—and came along quite quickly to the outskirts of the ruined village. A quarry there, in the centre of the western edge, had been entered and held for a day to two by British troops, but it was no longer in our hands, and had to be retaken. On the edge of the village also, on the western and southern sides, the Germans had built their best dug-outs, months ago, before our guns concentrated their fire here, so that they had plenty of time to build them deep and build them strong, to panel them, and roof them with concrete, and to furnish them comfortably, and to decorate them with pictures from German newspapers and postcards from home.

Our assaulting troops were in and about those dug-outs in the first wave, and halted here to see that no enemies should remain in hiding to attack them from the rear. Underground there was not much fighting. A few proud men refused to surrender, or did not surrender quickly enough. Most of them gave themselves up easily and gave no trouble in being marshalled back, so that something like 600 men belonging to the finest German troops are now behind our lines—out of it for good, and rejoicing in their luck of life.

Half an hour afterwards, joined by supporting troops, the British line advanced to the Sunken Road, where other German soldiers were captured, and found here a fine defensive position all ready for them, after a little work in reorganising the shelter.

From that point a number of men went forward again to an attack on Falfemont Farm, but this was too far for one day’s work, and they were held on the outskirts of the wood—poor wood of strafed trees!—by an immediate counter-attack from the Prussian Guard. For one of the rare times in this war the Germans faced British bayonets, and stood to their ground so stoutly that they were able to maintain their position.

So the battle ended yesterday with the capture of Guillemont, which was good enough, and our line strongly entrenched along the Sunken Road.

2

To-day I saw another attack upon Falfemont Farm and our capture of the Wedge Wood. Everywhere along the way which leads to the country between Hardecourt and Maurepas there is a great desolation.

The Sunken Road led down from Guillemont to Wedge Wood in the hollow. British soldiers held the Sunken Road, Germans were in Wedge Wood.

Striking up from that small solitary copse of naked sticks were two white chalky trenches in an obtuse angle with the apex nearest to Wedge Wood and the broad base up the sloping ground towards Leuze Wood on the ridge above. And half way down the slope to the right of the triangle-trenches, was Falfemont Farm, without a sign of a farm, but marked by a number of tree stems stuck up like telephone poles.

A little after three o’clock in the afternoon I saw our men in the open. They came up suddenly, as though by a spellword, along the line of the Sunken Road and southwards below Falfemont Farm, advancing northwards to that place.

The men advanced in waves. I saw the left waves surging down into Wedge Wood. Some of them wavered a little, then fell. Groups fell, not dead or wounded, but getting below the stream of bullets yard-high over the ground. The small copse was soon crowded with British soldiers. They seemed to be in a kind of scrimmage, and out of the middle of it came presently a compact little body of men.

“German prisoners, right enough—and well done!” said an officer by my side.

I followed the advance of the southern waves towards Falfemont Farm. They went on slowly and steadily, and had a long way to go. It seemed to me a frightful long way. But they crept up nearer and nearer to the edge of the bare poles which were once a wood. Then some of them fell, and disappeared, into shell-craters and broken trenches. New waves came up and disappeared also, as though lying, or dead, in the tall thistles. After a little while I saw that many of them had reappeared to the left. They were working up towards the German triangle-trenches on the slope of the spur, striking down from Leuze Wood.

In a few minutes two figures appeared black against the white chalk of the first trench, and presently they were lost in it. But not for long. Groups of them were up again, marshalling another group which seemed separated from them and then moved back towards Wedge Wood. I guessed they were more German prisoners, but could not see the difference between grey and khaki.

“Hullo, they’ve got the second trench!” said another man by my side.

It was some time after two, while I was watching the confused groups of men, that strange things began to happen in the German lines. From Leuze Wood parties of men came running down to Falfemont Farm.

“By the Lord!” said an officer. “A German counter-attack.... Get it over the telephone, quick. A good target for the guns.”

It was a wonderful target. The Prussian Guardsmen came forward, not in open order, but shoulder to shoulder. They made a serpentine line across the ground, advancing steadily and not slowly towards our troops. They looked very tall men, and their figures were quite black against the chalky earth. Then suddenly the right end of the line crumbled away. Gaps opened in the thick bar of men. Our machine-guns were raking them. I listened to the swish-swish of the fire, like a flame blown in the wind. Then, like a row of ninepins on uneven ground, the Prussian Guards all fell face forwards. The unwounded men had fallen with the wounded to escape our bullets.

“Counter-attack repulsed!” said a voice near the telephonist.

Twenty minutes later, if I remember accurately, another German counter-attack was organised in exactly the same way, by parties of men coming down from Leuze Wood. But this was also broken up by our machine-gun fire.

3

SEPTEMBER 5

My last despatch describing the capture of Wedge Wood and the attack on Falfemont Farm left off like a serial story at a moment of exciting uncertainty. It was impossible for me to tell whether our men had actually taken possession of the farm—that plantation of “strafed” trees to the south of Leuze Wood—and the meaning of all that coming and going of groups and individuals to the west and north of it, after the second German counter-attack had failed.

Now the tangled web of the plot—not spun by imagination but as real as death—is straightened out, and the end of another grim little chapter of the war is the capture of 1,000 yards of the enemy’s front, to the depth of 1,500 yards, in and around Falfemont Farm, which is now held by British troops.

It was great fighting which gained this ground, and the men were their own generals. These West Country lads were not moved like marionettes pulled by the strings from headquarters. It was after the first orders had been given a soldiers’ battle, and its success was due to young officers and N.C.O.’s, and men using their own initiative, finding another way round when one had failed, and arranging their own tactics in face of the enemy to suit the situation of the moment.

Such a thing has been done very rarely since the first days of trench warfare, except in raids over No Man’s Land and bombing fights in such places as Ovillers and Longueval. Here the individual craft of our men gained an important position. When the attack on Falfemont Farm was checked on the south by wicked machine-gun fire our troops worked their way westwards, and joining other bodies of men advancing from the Sunken Road beyond Guillemont, crept round the slope of the ground that goes up to Leuze Wood.

Half way up, on the outer edge of the spur, were the two V-shaped trenches which I saw taken by the first two waves, immediately after the capture of Wedge Wood, in the hollow at the bottom of the Sunken Road, and these trenches were used also as good cover for men inspired by a great idea.

It was the idea of making a surprise rush into Leuze Wood, from its western side, while the enemy’s attention was directed to the defence of Falfemont Farm, half-way down the slopes to the south.

It was this surprise movement which caused all the confusion which I saw yesterday among the enemy.

Splendid work was done by our men after dusk and during the night, in spite of a deluge of rain, when the enemy’s artillery fired most furiously. By dawn more troops had joined those who held the spur and pushed on to the north of Falfemont Farm, and others had got close to the farm on the south and west by way of Wedge Wood.

Between the black posts which were once high living trees about sixty Germans stayed on in their shell-craters and broken dug-outs. When the final British rush came from three sides they could do nothing but surrender or die. Some of them died, and others lay wounded and unconscious, but most of them put their hands up, and this afternoon I saw some of the wounded Germans from Falfemont lying side by side on stretchers with boys from the West Country who had been hit in attacking them.

From first to last it was the work of infantry rather than guns, and it was a great and terrible moment when the Germans came out in their first counter-attack, in close ranks, moving very steadily against our men, in a long, black undulating wave over the rise and fall of the ground, through the waist-high weeds; and then, again, after this first advance had been broken by our machine-gun fire and had fallen prone into the tall thistles so that no more of them was to be seen, when another body of big Germans came out, crouching for the last rush upon our lines, and our men fell back a little, and opened out, so that the machine-guns had a clear field upon which to play their hose of bullets.

For a little while at least it was fighting without the usual massacre of shell-fire from long-range guns which annihilate the human element as well as the bodies of men. Here at least, in spite of the machine-guns, men looked into each other’s eyes and were killed advancing in the sight of their enemies, which seems to me better and less frightful than when men go forward and see nothing and are swallowed up in a great explosion directed from machines six miles away.

The gun-fire was intense afterwards, and men, and masses of men, were swallowed up as usual by its high-explosives, but for a couple of hours it was more like old-fashioned fighting, damnable enough, God knows, but not so utterly inhuman.

4

It is not sufficiently realised, I believe, how very important has been the gain to us of the last two days of battle. The capture of Guillemont and of the ground beyond it has given us now the whole of the German second line, which we broke in parts on the great day of July 14.

Since then our men have had an uphill fight all the time, a long struggle upwards to seize the high ridge from Pozières eastwards, and to hold it. It has been difficult to take and difficult to hold. The cost has not been light. The heroism shown on those slopes, in those woods, in the assault on the high trenches, has been the most wonderful ever shown by British soldiers in continuous endeavour.

Now we have gained the crest of the ridge, and even if our offensive were brought to a dead halt to-day, which it will not be, the position of our men for the winter would be enormously superior over that of the enemy on the other side of the water-shed. Again, the taking of Guillemont and the ground by Ginchy has defended our right flank and straightened out an awkward salient.

With Ginchy in our hands on one side and Thiépval on the other, we should be well placed, and there would be a great gain for all the sacrifice our men have made in fighting forward so hard, and so far, and with such exalted courage.

5

SEPTEMBER 5

The taking of Guillemont, the quick progress to the Sunken Road beyond, the capture of Falfemont Farm, the thrust forward, by great daring, into Leuze Wood, the close assault on Ginchy, and the splendid advance of the French on our right, have given to this part of the battle-line an atmosphere of exultation, which our troops have not felt so strongly since that day of July 14 when we broke the second German line at Longueval. Men are fighting hereabouts with a sense of victory which is half the battle. They feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have the German on the run at last, and that by getting hard on to him, taking all risks, they will keep him running.

The rapid and far progress of the French is helping our own men, not only in a military way by “keeping the Boche busy,” as they put it, but as a moral tonic, showing that the German strength of resistance has begun to crack. The noise of the French guns is wonderful music to British soldiers going forward to their own part of the battlefields, and, by Jove! it is astounding in its uproar, as I heard it to-day again on our right, away down to the gates of Peronne in a great roll of drum-fire for miles. It is one ceaseless tattoo of “soizante-quinzes” and of heavier guns, like a titanic hammering of anvils in the smithies of the gods or devils.

“Hark at them! They seem to be getting on with it all right,” said an English officer to-day, and listening for a moment to the great sweep of the artillery battle—for our own guns were firing steadily and tremendously—he added that “the enemy is having a really thin time. We are getting on top at last.”

It is this sense of “getting on top” that is inspiring our men to fight to the last ounce of strength on this right wing of our attack, up to Ginchy and beyond Guillemont. It is literally as well as morally a desire to get on top, up the hill to the crest of the ridge, to the last vantage point of the enemy, and it is to push him off and over that high point that our men have been fighting uphill with a really passionate endeavour.

They got all round the place a few days ago after hard, bloody fighting. They held on under great shell-fire and machine-gun fire, and many men took the last hazard in trying to force their way into the stronghold where the enemy is entrenched and covered with well-placed machine-guns. Some of them went in, and stayed in. No message has come back from them, but it is quite likely that they are still there as a living wedge in the enemy’s gates.

One party, thirty strong, fought their way along a sap to the north of the village and established a bombing post which they held against all odds. Their rations gave out, but they would not go. They had no water, and suffered horribly from thirst, but not a man would go. Their ammunition was nearly spent, but they waited for new supplies, if they should have the luck to get them. A sergeant came back to the front trench with this tale of stubborn courage, and a request for food and water and bombs so that the thirty might still “carry on.” That is the spirit with which our men are fighting, and one marvels at them.

The enemy has suffered heavily against these assaults, and our shell-fire has massacred many of his troops. A German officer brought back from the outskirts of Ginchy yesterday was asked what casualties he had in his company. He said, “Oh, a few, not many.” He turned away and tried to destroy a scrap of paper in his hand, but was not quick enough. It was a message calling urgently for rescue and saying that his men were unable to hold out any longer, as there were only twenty of them left out of the full strength of his company.

To-day other British troops have forced their way into the stronghold, but as yet it is too soon to know whether they can maintain their position. The enemy is fighting bravely, but however long his resistance may be, I have no doubt that Ginchy will be added to the list of all those strongholds which have fallen one after another under our repeated assaults. For Ginchy must be ours to give us the end of the ridge and to link up the line with Leuze Wood, where at present our men are exposed to flanking attacks.

6

The difficulty of all this close and open fighting, where bodies of British troops press on to the very edge of the enemy’s ditches, and where bodies of Germans hold bits of roadway or bits of trench in isolated positions, is that the guns on both sides cannot concentrate a heavy barrage without killing their own men. In this kind of situation the German gunners are ruthless, but sometimes that method does not pay.

In spite of all their skill—for they are good gunners, these Germans—they were scared enough to withdraw their field batteries to a safer distance before our final attack on Guillemont last Sunday. Some of our officers fighting here told me that there were very few “whizz-bangs” about that day, and it was all shell fire from heavy long-range guns.

Before our attack they opened an intense bombardment upon Trones Wood. It smashed in steady lines of shells—the great “five-point-nines”—right through the wood, and was maintained mercilessly for many hours. Some of our men behind the front lines had escapes from death which seem like miracles. One young officer I know received an invitation to tea at a dug-out a few hundred yards, I reckon, from his own hole in the earth where he lay with two comrades. It was a pleasant and friendly idea, that cup of tea, but he decided against it when he heard the awful crash of shells outside.

Later a message came that he must go on a matter of business. It was his duty to go, and so he went as fast as possible. A moment or two after reaching the other dug-out there was the tinkle of a telephone bell, and he heard that both his comrades had been killed by the direct hit of a five-point-nine. He went back with a soldier to see if there was any hope for his friends—one of them might be wounded only—and as he went a shell exploded a yard or two away, the man by his side was killed, and his shoulder was splashed with the man’s blood, but he was left unscathed.

Our bombardment before the attack on Guillemont was more effective. There were not many Germans here or in the Sunken Road, or higher up in the trenches by Ginchy, who had miraculous escapes. They were killed in masses. A great number of dead were found by our men outside Guillemont in the Sunken Road, which was the German third line of defence there. They were a frightful sight, as many of them were quite naked, all their clothes having been stripped off by the blasting force of high explosives. Some men, untouched by fragments of shell, were killed by the enormous concussion of air or by heart shock, and there was one dead man kneeling, and still grasping his rifle with fixed bayonet.

The successful attack on Guillemont was due to the effect of our shell-fire on the garrison. When the infantry advanced they met with but little hostile machine-gun fire. Most of the Germans were dazed and done. They had no alertness left in them to bring up their weapons and resist the attack. Even many of the dug-outs were blown in. A sergeant of one of the companies who came up in support—one of those splendid N.C.O.’s to whom the steadiness of our troops is largely due—told me to-day that he went into one deep dug-out where forty men were lying. Only three were alive, and of those two were badly wounded. In other dug-outs there were many dead.

This was in the Sunken Road, where afterwards our men “organised” the bank, digging themselves in so as to get cover from the heavy barrage flung upon them by the German artillery after the capture of the position. A lance-corporal was killed here by the side of my sergeant friend, who buried him where he fell. And another shell killed six men in a heap just as these troops were relieved and went back for a little while into the support lines. They, too, were buried by another lance-corporal who volunteered to go back for the purpose, and went under heavy shell-fire to do this last service to good comrades.

Lord! how many stories of this kind I have told! The spirit of our men in these hideous places and in these frightful hours is always the same, indomitable and unbroken by the worst ordeals.

7

SEPTEMBER 9

The first mention that the Irish troops were fighting at Guillemont has been made officially, and it is now possible for me to write about them in more detail. Their charge through Guillemont last Sunday, with English battalions of riflemen on their right, was one of the most astonishing feats in the war, almost too fast in its impetuosity. They went forward with their pipes playing them on, in a wild and irresistible assault.

If there had been three times the number of enemy against them they would not have been checked until they had carried the northern part of the ruined waste that was once a village. The English troops who fought with them tell me that they have never seen anything like the way in which these Irishmen dashed ahead. “It was like a human avalanche,” said one of them.

The officers cheered their men on as they came alongside. One of their commanding officers, following the last across, picked up pieces of chalk and threw them after his men, shouting good luck to them. They stormed the first, second and third German lines through the upper part of the village, sweeping all resistance away, and not stopping to take breath. They were men uplifted, out of themselves, “fey,” as the Scots would call it.

Death had no terror for them, nor all the dead men who lay in their way. After months of dull and dogged fighting in the trenches, where they were restless in their ditches, they were excited at getting out into the open and meeting the enemy face to face. It was not good to be a German in their way.

The only fault with this fighting at Guillemont was the rapidity of pace, which gave them no time to safeguard the ground behind them. But that was a fault due to the splendour of their gallantry, and no harm came from it. The English riflemen who fought on their right had more solidity in their way of going about the business, but they were so inspired by the sight of the Irish dash and by the sound of the Irish pipes that those who were in support, under orders to stand and hold the first German line, could hardly be restrained from following on.

“I nearly blew my teeth out of my head, in whistling ’em back,” said an English sergeant. But discipline prevailed.

The whole attack from first to last was a model of efficiency, organisation and courage. All the qualities that go to the making of victory were here, fitting in with each other, balancing each other, making a terrific weapon driven by a high spirit. The artillery was in perfect union with the infantry—the most difficult thing in war—the brigadiers and the officers carried out the general plan to the letter, and the men—it is impossible to overpraise the men, who were wonderful in courage and wonderful in discipline.

8

As far as the English battalions were concerned they were recruited since the first phase of the war, but as one of their officers—once of the Guards—told me yesterday, there are no regular soldiers, no soldiers of any army in the world, who could have attacked in a finer and more disciplined way than these young riflemen, as cold as ice in self-control, but on fire with the resolve to win. The first rush of Irish on the left went over, as I have said, playing their pipes—old songs of victory which could be heard through the swish of machine-gun bullets and the crash of the German crumps.

The assaulting troops on the right went more quietly, and at the first short halt to wait for the barrage of our guns, which was smashing ahead of them, lit their cigarettes, and then went on again with their rifles slung, as though marching on a field day.

“Where’s that village we’ve got to take?” they shouted, staring at a choppy sea of shell-craters, where there was hardly a stick or a stone.

I have already described the assault on the first lines, where our men found many German dead. But strange things happened between the first and second lines. The Irish on the left, who had gone so quickly forward in their great “hooroosh,” had failed to clear up all the dug-outs as they went.

Some of the Germans there climbed out and began sniping in the rear. It was a dangerous menace, but with quick judgment the colonel of an English battalion on the right diverted five of his platoons to that direction, and they searched all the dug-outs and broke up the enemy’s attempt to rally.

One dug-out near the quarry at the central entrance of Guillemont was discovered by a young gunner officer, who had come down behind the advancing infantry “just to look round,” as he puts it, after he had done his work with some sixty pounder plum-pudding bombs from a neighbouring position. With him were his corporal and one or two other men of the trench-mortar battery.

In looking round he discovered a slit in the rock, which seemed to lead down into an underground chamber, and having explored it came down into a deep place where twenty German soldiers and one officer were hiding. It was a surprise, but he held his revolver ready and said “Hands up!” They surrendered quietly, clicking their heels together and saluting, after they had been searched for arms, and the officer, who was a polite fellow, offered the corporal a valuable gold watch as a souvenir of the occasion.

That was one little adventure on the edge of things. Further forward each man was in the middle of a great adventure, gruesome and full of peril. An enveloping movement was being made by English troops to the south-west of the village, on the choppy ground on which Guillemont once stood, and it was here that most opposition was encountered, between two sunken roads. In the second sunken road, where the enemy had a row of strong dug-outs, the ground was thick with huddled dead.

But from the dug-outs a large number of living men who climbed on to the parapet in front of them maintained a fusillade of rifle fire and bombs. In the ground between the two sunken roads men climbed half-way out of shell-craters and sniped our men as they came forward. At the same time machine-gun fire was coming down from Ginchy and up from Falfemont Farm. It was difficult ground to cover, but our riflemen ignored the bullets and the bombs and went straight forward, halting only to fire, and then going on again, and firing again, as though on manœuvres.

Some Lewis gunners ran forward and played a hose of bullets upon the enemy’s parapet, so that the men dropped. Some of our own men had fallen, too, but the wounded crawled into shell-holes to get out of the way, and shouted “Go on, boys!” or just crawled in silently and uncomplainingly, not asking for help however bad their wounds.

Then the Germans started running and our men went after them. One fellow flung off his pack and chased one of them until he had him by the neck. A German officer who surrendered threw up his hands and said, “If you run like that you’ll be in Berlin before we’re in England.” There were 150 dead in one part of the sunken road and the dug-outs were crowded. Into one of them a smoke bomb was thrown to tease the men out, but they would not come. Then a Mills bomb was flung in as a stronger argument, but before it exploded it was flung back again. After that the Germans retreated through a tunnel and ran out at another entrance, where they were taken prisoner. Twenty-five of them were put into a shell-crater under guard of one little rifleman, who strutted up and down in a German helmet with his bayonet high above his head and a pride twice as high as his bayonet.

In one dug-out, as I wrote in my first narrative, there were forty-one bodies, of whom only three were alive, and those were weeping. All the prisoners, of whom there were about 600, were in a pitiful condition, as our artillery fire had prevented them from getting any rations for three days. Their spirit was broken and they were trembling with fear.

9

In our dug-outs further back were three officers, one of whom, a young captain, was clearly in command of the whole garrison of Guillemont, and afterwards, when we passed the prisoners’ cage behind the lines, all the men sprang up and saluted him with profound respect. He was the only man who maintained a proud indifference at the moment of capture. He stood very straight and still, as though not caring whether he lived or died. The two officers with him clung about the necks of our own officers crying for mercy. In another place an officer fell down on his knees with his hands in an attitude of prayer and his head bowed, and one man pulled out a photograph of his wife and children, holding that out as his strongest plea for life. Our men had no thought to take their lives. As one of the sergeants said to me, “As soon as a man surrenders it’s an end of the fight, and I’m sorry for him.”

It was hard for some of our men to be sorry for the enemy in those wild moments about the dug-outs, for some of them flung bombs until the last yard had been covered by our troops, then disappeared into their holes and came up further away with an air of innocence and meekness. In one or two bad cases of fighting after a sign of surrender it was the authority of the British officers which saved the lives of German soldiers standing by.

But on the whole the prisoners were well behaved and very glad to get away from the horror of Guillemont, grateful for being given the chance of life. One sergeant of ours, hit in the hip by a piece of shell, captured four men without help, and then ordered them to carry him back on a stretcher to the dressing station, where he arrived, smoking a cigarette, with his prisoner stretcher-bearers.

Words can convey very little of all those scenes in Guillemont—the isolated fights, the storming of dug-outs, the searching of prisoners, the crowds of British soldiers moving forward to new lines behind our terrific curtain fire, the Lewis gunners rushing through with their machine-guns to take up positions at advanced points, the supporting and consolidating troops coming up behind the assaulting troops, starting to dig as soon as the ground had been gained, the stretcher-bearers rummaging about among the shell craters for stricken men, the walking wounded making their way back across the rough ground, dazed, and sometimes falling not to rise again, the cheers of men taking the last sunken road to the east of Guillemont, where they consolidated a defensive position for the night, the wild music of the Irish pipers, the crash of German shells, the high whine of German shrapnel, the long rush of our heavies passing overhead to “Lousy” Wood, and, in the midst of all this tumult, the quiet dead.

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In quiet heroism, of the suffering and not of the fighting kind, it seems to me that the finest thing was done by a wounded man. That at least is the opinion of a commanding officer who met him on his way. His face had been terribly smashed by a piece of shell, but he waved back the stretcher-bearers with a sign that others needed carrying more than he did. Then, a solitary and ghastly figure, he walked back to the dressing-station, and laid himself down.

Of the German garrison of 2,000 men hardly one, if any one, escaped. The figure has been accounted for in dead, wounded and prisoners. Two German battalions have thus been wiped out. Among them were men who wear the word “Gibraltar” on their shoulder straps, belonging to the famous Hanoverian regiment which fought side by side with us on the Rock in the eighteenth century.

It was after the battle that our men suffered most, for during the next forty-eight hours there were violent storms, which filled the shell-craters with water so that men were up to their shoulders in it. But they had dug magnificently before the rain came, under the inspiration of a splendid colonel, who cried “Dig, dig, for God’s sake! Dig, my lads!” knowing that he would save their lives by every foot of earth turned up by the German shovels they used for the work. In three hours they had dug an eight-foot trench in the village.

So Guillemont was taken and held, not only by great gun-fire but by men inspired with some spirit beyond their ordinary courage, and one day these troops will carry the name upon their colours, so that the world may remember.

XXVIII

THE IRISH AT GINCHY

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SEPTEMBER 10

The capture of Ginchy by the Irish Brigades should be told not in journalist’s prose but in heroic verse. Poor Ireland will weep tears over it, for many of her sons have fallen, but there will be pride also in the heart of the Irish people, because these men of Munster, Dublin, and Connaught, and of all parts of the west and the south, have done such splendid things in courage and endurance, adding a very noble episode to the history of the Celtic race.

When they came out of the battle this morning they were weary and spent, and they had left many good comrades behind them, but the spirit of the war sustained them, and they came marching steadily with their heads held high. It was one of the most moving things I have ever seen in this war.

A great painter would have found here a subject to thrill his soul, that long trail of Irish regiments, horribly reduced by their losses, and with but few officers to lead them, coming across a stretch of barren country strewn with the wreckage of two years’ bombardment, and crowded with the turmoil of the present fighting.

Behind them arose the black curtain of smoke across the battlefields through which there came the enormous noise of the unending gun-fire, and around them were some of our own batteries hard at work with great hammer-strokes as their shells went on their way to the enemy’s lines, but ahead of them walked one Irish piper playing them home to the harvest-fields of peace with a lament for those who will never come back.

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A brigadier came riding over the fields to meet them. It was the first time he had seen them together since the early dawn of to-day, when they were still fighting beyond the ruins of Ginchy, which they had won by a great assault.

He stood, a solitary figure by the side of the track down which his men came, and there was a great tenderness in the eyes of this brigadier as he watched them pass, and called out to them words of thanks, and words of good cheer, and turned to me now and then to say how splendid they had been.

“Eyes right!” shouted the officers or sergeants who were leading their companies, and the general said, “Carry on, there,” and “Well done—you did gloriously.” “Bravo, Dublins!... You did well, damned well, Munsters, my lads!”

The men’s eyes brightened at the sight of him; and they squared up, and grinned under German caps and German helmets.

“Hullo, Greene!” called out the brigadier to a very tall fellow tramping in the outside file. “Glad to see you’re all right. And a big target, too!”

The music of the Irish pipes went calling down to the valley, and I watched the men out of sight with something stirring at my heart. Earlier in the morning, before they had formed up, I had been among them and had heard many stories of great adventure and of great courage, told sometimes with an Irish humour that finds a whimsicality even in the most awful moments, and sometimes with the sadness of men who mourn for their friends, but wonderfully untouched by the fearful strain of it all and with a grim joy in their victory.

Some of them had been in Gallipoli, and one sergeant of the Munsters told me that the taking of Ginchy was the “hottest” thing he had seen since the landing on August 21 at Suvla Bay. There were two men in his regiment who had fought all through from Mons, and had escaped from the hell of the Dardanelles, but had fallen now, at last, on the way up from Guillemont. He and other men of the old Regulars spoke of the regiments of the New Army who had fought with them to-day.

“They were just great. The Irish Rifles went through like a whirlwind. There was no stopping them. When the Germans ran you couldn’t see them for dust.”

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The story of the Irish Brigades does not begin at Ginchy. It begins last Sunday, a week ago, at Guillemont, when one brigade, as I have already described in an earlier despatch, went through the northern part of that village in one fierce assault which would not be checked. After that (as well as before) they lay under heavy shell-fire, without sleep and without hot food or much water, until the new attack, when they were on the right of the assault.

The brigade on the left, which had the greatest triumph yesterday, was lying out in connected shell-craters (the old kind of trench, neatly revetted, with strong traverses and cosy dug-outs, does not exist in this part of the battle-line). For five days they held on stubbornly under ceaseless shell-fire. When the hour of “zero” came for the attack they were not broken in spirit, as weaker men would have been after all this trial, but eager to get out and get on—“to get some of their own back.”

The Germans in Ginchy would have had more terror in their hearts if they had known the character of the men who were about to storm their stronghold. They would have prayed to God to save them from the Irish. As it was, these German soldiers were not feeling safe. They were new men just sent up to the line, and conscious of a frightful menace about them. They belonged to the 185th Division, the 19th Bavarian Division, and the machine-gun company of the 88th Division. They crouched down in a network of dug-outs and tunnels under the ruins of the village expecting attack, and determined, as we know now, to sell their lives dearly. They were brave men.

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The attack began yesterday afternoon shortly before five o’clock after a heavy bombardment. The Irish sprang up and went forward cheering. They shouted “Go on, Munsters!” “Go on, Dublins!” and old Celtic cries. “Now then, Irish Rifles!” Our shell-fire crept up in front of them. They went from the south in four waves in open order, with about 50 yards between each wave, and on the left the troops reached their first halting place in the village, right across the first German trenches and dug-outs, in eight minutes after starting time—a distance of 600 yards, which is a wonderful record.

On the right the Irish were checked by three machine-guns well placed for very deadly work and sweeping the ground with waves of bullets. Many poor fellows dropped. Others fell deliberately with their faces to the earth so that the bullets might skim above their prone bodies. At the same time the Irish officers and men were being sniped by German marksmen who had crept out into shell-craters. It was a serious situation here unless the machine-guns could be “killed.”

A brilliant little piece of tactics was done by the troops on the left of the right wing, who swung round and attacked the machine-gun position from the west and north, in an encircling movement so that the German teams had to run out of the loop with their weapons to some broken trenches 300 yards away, where they again fired until knocked out by some trench mortars attached to one of the Irish battalions. This enabled the right wing to advance and join the left, and they then advanced together through the village, with the Irish Rifles remaining to hold the captured ground, and the Dublins charging ahead.

In the centre of the village among all the dug-outs and tunnels was the ruin of an old farm in which the enemy had another machine-gun which they served with bursts of fire. Again our trench mortar men saved the situation. They came on with the infantry, and ranged their little engines on to the farm, aiming with such skill that the hostile machine-gun was put out of action by a short storm of high explosives.

The men were still suffering from snipers and ordinary riflemen hidden in all kinds of places in the northern half of the village, where there were concreted and tunnelled chambers with loop-holes level with the ground, through which they shot. The Irish were reckless of all this and swept over the place fiercely, searching out their enemies. In shell-craters and bits of upheaved earth and down in the dug-outs there was hand-to-hand fighting of the grimmest kind. The Bavarians struggled savagely, using bombs and rifles, and fighting even with the bayonet until they were killed with the same weapon.

It was all very quick. Within ten minutes of reaching the line half-way through the village the leading Dublins had got to the northern end of it and sent out advanced parties 200 yards beyond. But there was one menace, which might have led to disaster but for quick wit and fighting genius.

The Irish had expected that their left flank would be supported by other troops attacking between Ginchy and Delville Wood, but owing to the difficulty of the ground in that neighbourhood and the rapidity of the Irish advance this had not been possible, and the victors of Ginchy found themselves with an exposed flank to the north-west of the village. A young sapper officer from Dublin realised the situation, and taking command of a body of men dug a defensive flank and established strong posts as a protection against a counter-attack. The situation on the extreme right was for some time equally perilous, as the troops engaged in an enterprise on that side had not yet made good their ground, and the splendid achievement of the Irish Brigade, from a military point of view, is their success—quite astoundingly good—of taking a hostile front of 900 yards to the depth of nearly a mile with no supporting troops on either flank.

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From a non-military, untechnical, human point of view the greatness of the capture of Ginchy is just in the valour of those Irish boys who were not cowed by that sight of death very close to them and all about them, and who went straight on to the winning-posts like Irish racehorses. The men who were ordered to stay in the village almost wept with rage because they could not join in the next assault.

“We would have gone on into the blue,” said one of them, “except for all this confounded diplomacy.” Diplomacy is a fine word for the simple law of safeguarding the captured ground; but you see the spirit which used it. It was the same spirit which caused the temporary desertion of three Irish servants on the Brigade Staff. One of them left a note yesterday morning on his master’s table: “As I could not be at Guillemont I am going to Ginchy. I hope to be back again, so please excuse.”

Fine and wonderful men! There was a Sinn Feiner among them, with all the passion of his political creed and “a splendid soldier,” said one of his officers, who is an Englishman. Nationalists and Catholics, Irish to the bone, with every tradition of their race in their blood and spirit, they fought yesterday and in the dawn of to-day without any thought of grievance or any memory of hatred, except against the enemy whom they call “jerry,” instead of Fritz.