Chapter VI: Part 6

Meanwhile a number of battalions, mostly English, but with some Scots—men who have done as well in this war since the early days of it as any troops who have fought in France—were attacking the line between Longueval and the two Bazentins. They, too, found the wire uncut in places, but they went through in a tearing hurry, hating the machine-gun fire and resolved to end it quickly. They stormed the German trenches and fought down them with bombs and bayonets. German soldiers came out of the dug-outs and begged for mercy. They came holding out their watches, their pocket-books, their helmets, anything that they thought would ransom their lives, and when they had been taken prisoners they made no trouble about carrying back the English wounded, but were glad to go. It was all in the darkness, except when shell-bursts lit the ground, and some of our battalions lost their sense of direction towards Bazentin Woods. Prisoners acted as guides to their own lines. Five or six of them unwillingly led the way back. A British officer of nineteen, a boy who had only been in France a month or two, led one of the companies forward because his brother officers had fallen.

“Come on, lads!” he shouted, “I’m only a kid, but I’ll show you the way all right.”

They liked those words, “only a kid,” and laughed at them.

“He’s a plucked ’un, he is,” said one of the men who followed him. They went after him into Bazentin Wood, and others followed on, into and through a heavy barrage of fire.

So it was on the left, where other battalions were at work pressing forward in waves to Contalmaison Villa and the ground beyond. The second German line had fallen before our men, and they were over it and away.

10

It was at about 6 o’clock in the evening that some British cavalry came into action. They were the men whom I had seen on my way up to the battlefield, a small detachment of the Dragoon Guards and also of the Deccan Horse. They worked forward with our infantry on a stretch of country between Bazentin Wood and Delville Wood, rising up to High Wood (Foureaux Wood), and then rode out alone in reconnaissance, in true cavalry formation, with the commander in the rear. Lord! Not one in a thousand would have believed it possible to see this again. When they passed, the infantry went a little mad, and cheered wildly and joyously, as though these men were riding on a road of triumph.

So they rode on into open country, skirting Delville Wood. Presently a machine-gun opened fire upon them. It was in a cornfield, with German infantry, and the officer in command gave the word to his men to ride through the enemy. The Dragoons put their lances down and rode straight into the wheat. They killed several men and then turned and rode back, and charged again, among scattered groups of German infantry. Some of them prepared to withstand the charge with fixed bayonets. Others were panic-stricken and ran forward crying “Pity! Pity!” and clung to the saddles and stirrup leathers of the Dragoon Guards. Though on a small scale, it was a cavalry action of the old style, the first on the Western front since October of the first year of the war.

With thirty-two prisoners our men rode on slowly still reconnoitring the open country on the skirt of Delville Wood, until they came again under machine-gun fire and drew back. As they did so an aeroplane came overhead, skimming very low, at no more than 300ft. above ground. The cavalry turned in their saddles to stare at it for a moment or two, believing that it was a hostile machine. But no bullets came their way, and in another moment it stooped over the German infantry concealed in the wheat and fired at them with a machine-gun. Four times it circled and stooped and fired, creating another panic among the enemy, and then it flew off, leaving the cavalry full of admiration for this daring feat. They could ride no further, owing to the nature of the ground, and that night they dug themselves in. German guns searched in vain for them, and the cavalry to-night is full of pride, believing with amazing optimism that their day may come again. [It was after all only a “fancy stunt” as soldiers call it, and it seems certain now that the cavalry is an obsolete arm of war on the Western front. The Tanks have taken their place.]

The scene all through the afternoon behind the battle-lines and down in little villages beyond the reach of guns will stay in my mind as historic pictures. Numbers of wounded men—with a very high proportion of lightly wounded among them—arrived at the casualty clearing stations and, while they waited their turn for the doctors and nurses, lay about the grass, fingering their souvenirs—watches, shell-fuses, helmets, pocket-books, German letters, and all manner of trophies—and telling their adventures in that wild battle of the night.

They seemed to have no sense of pain, and not one man groaned, in spite of broken arms and head wounds and bayonet thrusts. Every dialect of England and Scotland and Ireland could be heard among them. There were men from many battalions, and as they lay there talking or smoking or sleeping in the sunlight, other processions came down in straggling columns, limping and holding on to comrades, hobbling with sticks, peering through blood-stained rags, tired and worn and weak, but with a spirit in them that was marvellous.

XIV

THE WOODS OF DEATH

1

JULY 17

We are again in the difficult hours that inevitably follow a successful advance, when ground gained at the extreme limit of our progress has to be defended against counter-attacks from close quarters, when men in exposed positions have to suffer the savaging of the enemy’s artillery, and when our own gunners have to work cautiously because isolated patrols of men in khaki may be mistaken in bad light for grey-clad men in the same neighbourhood. This period is the test of good generalship and of good captains.

The weather was rather against us to-day. There was a thick haze over the countryside, causing what naval men call “low visibility,” and making artillery observation difficult. It was curious to stand on high ground and see only the dim shadow-forms of places like Mametz Wood and the other woodlands to its right and left, where invisible shells were bursting.

Our shells were passing overhead, and I listened to their high whistling, but could see nothing of their bursts, and for nearly an hour an intense bombardment made a great thunder in the air behind the thick veil of mist.

We were shelling High Wood, from which our men have had to retire for a time owing to the enemy’s heavy barrage of high explosives, and we were also pounding the enemy’s lines to the north of Bazentin-le-Grand and Longueval, where he is very close to our men. Hostile batteries were retaliating upon the woodlands which we have gained and held during the past three days.

2

This woodland fighting has been as bad as anything in this war—most frightful and bloody. Dead bodies lie strewn beneath the trees, and in the shell-holes are wounded men who have crawled there to die. There is hardly any cover in which men may get shelter from shell-fire.

The Germans had dug shallow trenches, but they were churned up by our heavies, and it is difficult to dig in again because of the roots of great trees, and the fallen timber, and the masses of twigs and foliage which have been brought down by British and German guns. When our troops went into Trones Wood under most damnable fire of 5·9’s they grubbed about for some kind of cover without much success.

But some of them had the luck to strike upon three German dug-outs which were exceptionally deep and good. Obviously they had been built some time ago for officers who, before we threatened their second line, may have thought Trones Wood a fine dwelling-place, and not too dangerous if they went underground. They went down forty feet, and panelled their rooms, and brought a piano down for musical evenings.

A young company commander found the piano and struck some chords upon it at a time when there was louder music overhead—the scream of great shells and the incessant crash of high explosives in the wood. Further on, at the edge of the wood, our men found a machine-gun emplacement built solidly of cement and proof against all shell splinters, and it was from this place that so many of our men were shot down before the enemy’s gunners could be bombed out.

3

One of the most extraordinary experiences of this woodland fighting was that of an English boy who now lies in a field-hospital smiling with very bright and sparkling eyes because the world seems to him like Paradise after an infernal dwelling-place. He went with the first rush of men into Mametz Wood, but was left behind in a dug-out when they retired before a violent counter-attack.

Some German soldiers passed this hole where the boy lay crouched, and flung a bomb down on the off-chance that an English soldier might be there. It burst on the lower steps and wounded the lonely boy in the dark corner.

He lay there a day listening to the crash of shells through the trees overhead—English shell-fire—not daring to come out. Then in the night he heard the voices of his own countrymen, and he shouted loudly.

But as the English soldiers passed they threw a bomb into the dug-out, and the boy was wounded again. He lay there another day, and the gun-fire began all over again, and lasted until the Germans came back. Another German soldier saw the old hole and threw a bomb down, as a safe thing to do, and the boy received his third wound.

He lay in the darkness one more day, not expecting to live, but still alive, still eager to live and to see the light again. If only the English would come again and rescue him!

He prayed for them to come. And when they came, capturing the wood completely and finally, one of them, seeing the entrance to the dug-out and thinking Germans might be hiding there, threw a bomb down—and the boy was wounded for the fourth time. This time his cries were heard, and the monotonous repetition of this ill-luck ended, and the victim of it lies in a white bed with wonderful shining eyes.

4

The German prisoners have stories like this to tell, for they suffered worst of all under the fury of our bombardment and the coming and going of our troops in the woodland fighting. I spoke with one of them to-day—one of a new batch of men, whose number I reckoned as 300, just brought down from Bazentin-le-Grand.

He was a linguist, having been an accountant in the North German Lloyd, and gave me a choice of conversation in French, Italian, Greek or English. I chose my own tongue, but let him do the talking, and standing there in a barbed wire entanglement, surrounded by hundreds of young Germans, unshaven, dusty, haggard and war-worn, but still strong and sturdy men, he described vividly the horrors of the woods up by the two Bazentins where he and these comrades of his had lain under our last bombardment.

They had but little cover except what they could scrape out beneath the roots of trees. And the trees crashed upon them, smashing the limbs of men, and shells burst and buried men in deep pits, and the wounded lay groaning under great branches which pinned them to the ground or in the open where other shells were bursting. From what I can make out some of the men here retreated across the country between Bazentin and Delville Woods, for they were the men who were captured by our cavalry.

“My comrades were afraid,” said this German sergeant. “They cried out to me that the Indians would kill their prisoners, and that we should die if we surrendered. But I said, ‘That is not true, comrades. It is only a tale. Let us go forward very quietly with our hands up.’ So in that way we went, and the Indian horsemen closed about us, and I spoke to one of them, asking for mercy for our men, and he was very kind, and a gentleman, and we surrendered to him safely.”

He was glad to be alive, this man who came from Wiesbaden. He showed me the portrait of his wife and boy, and cried a little, saying that the German people did not make the war, but had to fight for their country when told to fight, like other men. All his people had believed, he said, that the war would be over in August or September.

“Are they hungry?” I asked.

“They have enough to eat,” he said. “They are not starving.”

He waved his hand back to the woodlands, and remembered the terror of the place from which he had just come.

“Over there it was worse than death.”

5

Over there on the one small village of Bazentin-le-Grand our heavy howitzers flung an amazing quantity of shells on Friday morning. The place was swept almost flat, and little was left of its church and houses but reddish heaps of bricks and dust, and twisted iron, and the litter of destruction. Yet there were many Germans living here when the men of some famous regiments came through in the dawn with bayonets and bombs, Yorkshiremen and some of the Scottish all mixed together, as happens at such times. There was one great cellar underneath Bazentin-le-Grand large enough to hold 1500 men, and here, crouching in its archways and dark passages, were numbers of German soldiers.

They came to meet our men and surrendered to them. And here also lay many wounded, in their blood, and unbandaged—just as they had crawled down from the ground above where our shells were smashing everything.

If any man were to draw the picture of those things or to tell them more nakedly than I have told them, because now is not the time, nor this the place, no man or woman would dare to speak again of war’s “glory,” or of “the splendour of war,” or any of those old lying phrases which hide the dreadful truth.

XV

PRISONERS OF WAR

1

JULY 17

In spite of bad weather, which has hampered operations so that no great advance has been possible, we have made some progress to-day in the direction of Pozières.

Some of our troops stormed a double line of trenches from Bazentin-le-Petit to the south-east of Pozières, a distance of 1500 yards, strewn from one end to the other with German dead and wounded.

High Wood, or the Bois de Foureaux, as it is properly called, is to a great extent No Man’s Land, as lying over the crest of the hill our men could be shelled by the direct observation of the enemy’s artillery, over the heads of their own men in the lower edge of the wood.

Our line therefore has been drawn back from this salient and straightened out from Longueval to the long trench by Pozières, which is now approached on both sides.

Ovillers is ours, after a German post which had been bravely defended surrendered with two officers and about 140 men early this morning. There is no other news of importance to-day on the line of attack, but it is good enough, and the general position of our force is improved.

2

What is the German point of view about our attack and the prospects of the war?

That is the question I have always had in my head during the last fortnight, when I have seen batches of prisoners being led down from the battlefields, and the question I have put to some of them in bad German or fair English.

It is difficult to get any clear answer, or an answer of any real value. The men have just come out of dreadful places, many of them are still dazed under the shock of shell-fire, some of them are proud and sullen, others are ready to talk but ignorant of the battle-front in which they have been and of the situation outside the dug-outs in which they crouched.

Yet there is something to be learnt out of their very ignorance, and by putting together answers from separate groups of men and individual soldiers one does get a kind of hint of the general idea prevailing among these German troops against us.

Quite a number of them have told me that they and their people were sure that the war would be over in August or September. They have been promised that but could not give any reason for belief except the promise.

“Do you think you are winning?” I asked one man—of real intelligence.

“We thought so,” he answered.

“And now?”

He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

“The English are stronger than we believed.”

There seems to me no doubt that they were perfectly confident in the strength of their lines. They did not believe that such defences as those at Fricourt and Montauban could ever be broken.

The new power of our artillery has amazed them—they speak of it always with terror—and the officers especially admit that they did not imagine that “amateur gunners,” as they call our men, could achieve such results.

For the courage of our infantry they have always had a great respect, remembering the two battles of Ypres, but they count the strength of armies by the strength of guns, and until recent days knew they had the greater power.

The foundations of their belief are shaken, but only to the extent that they admit the possibility of their army having to retire to a new line of defence.

I have not found one man speak of defeat. They are still convinced that the German army will never be beaten to the point of surrender. As the German doctor whom I have previously quoted said to me a few days ago, “You are strong and we are strong. Neither side can crush the other. If the war goes on it will be the suicide of Europe.”

These German soldiers do not want it to go on. That idea in their heads is clear enough. They are weary of war, and have a great craving for peace. They want to see their wives and children again. One strain of thought creeps out in their talk. It is the suggestion that they fight not as free men desiring to fight, but as men compelled to fight by higher powers, against whom they cannot rebel.

“It is our discipline,” said one of them to-day. “We cannot help ourselves.”

I am told by one of the officers in charge of them that they talk of another inevitable war between Germany and England in ten years from now.

They have been taught to believe, he says, that we thrust this war upon them, that all through we have been the aggressors, and that Germany will seek her revenge.

3

Personally, I have not heard such words spoken, but rather from several of these prisoners, a frank hatred of war as the cause of horrors and suffering beyond the strength of man to bear. They talk as men under an evil spell put upon them by unknown powers beyond their reach.

As I have said, all this does not amount to anything of real value in trying to see into the spirit of the German people. They are the opinions of prisoners, who have escaped from the worst terrors of war, but are immediately cautious of any interrogation, and perhaps a little tempted to say pleasing things to their captors. They cannot conceal their ignorance, which is enormous, because all but victories have been hidden from them until their own defeat, but they conceal their knowledge.

I was interested, for instance, to hear them deny any great suffering from hunger in their own country.

“Our people have enough to eat,” said several of them when I questioned them. When I told them of the letters captured in their dug-outs, all full of pitiful tales about lack of food, they stared at me with grave eyes, and said again, stoutly:

“They have enough to eat. Bread enough, and meat enough.”

Their first desire upon coming from the battlefields is water, which they get at once, and their next is permission to write home to their people. All of them are anxious to be sent at once to England, where they expect greater comforts than in the fields with barbed-wire hedges, where they are kept on the way down until they can be entrained.

As I watched them to-day again I thought of our men who are prisoners, and of all the great sum of human misery which has been heaped up in this war. Fortunately, in our treatment of prisoners we teach our enemies a lesson in chivalry, for it is not, I think, in our race or history, with rare exceptions, to kick men when they are down.

XVI

THE LAST STAND IN OVILLERS

1

JULY 18

In all the fighting during the past fortnight the struggle for Ovillers stands out separately as a siege in which both attack and defence were of a most dogged and desperate kind.

The surrender of the remnants of its garrison last night ends an episode which will not be forgotten in history. These men were of the 3rd Prussian Guard, and our Commander-in-Chief, in his day’s despatch, has paid a tribute to their bravery which is echoed by officers and men who fought against them. It is a tribute to our own troops also, who by no less courage broke down a stubborn resistance and captured the garrison.

I have already described the earlier phases of the siege; the first attack on July 1, when our men broke through the outer network of trenches and advanced through sheets of machine-gun fire, suffering heavy casualties, the seizure of separated bits of broken trench-work by little bodies of gallant men fighting, independently, gaining ground by a yard or two at a time and attacking machine-gun posts and bombing posts by hand-to-hand fights; the underground struggle in great vaulted cellars beneath the ruined town; the surprise attack at night when a number of fresh troops sprang upon the defences to the western side of the town, and then, linking up with the men in the captured trenches and ruins, cut the place in half, took many prisoners, and isolated the enemy still holding out in the northern half of the position.

Many different battalions had taken a share in the fighting, all had suffered, and then given way to new men who knew the nature of this business, but set grimly to work to carry on the slow process of digging out the enemy from his last strongholds. It was almost literally a work of digging out.

2

The town of Ovillers does not exist. It was annihilated by the bombardments and made a rubbish heap of bricks and dust. When our men were separated from the enemy by only a yard or two or by only a barricade or two the artillery on both sides ceased fire upon Ovillers, lest the gunners should kill their own men.

They barraged intensely round about. Our shells fell incessantly upon the enemy’s communication trenches to the north and east so that the beleaguered garrison should not get supplies or reinforcements.

We made a wall of death about them. But though no shells now burst over the ground where many dead lay strewn, there was artillery of a lighter kind, not less deadly. It was the artillery of machine-guns and bombs. The Prussian Guard made full use of the vaulted cellars and of the ruined houses.

They had made a series of small keeps, which they defended almost entirely by machine-gun fire. As soon as we advanced the machine-guns were set to work, and played their hose of bullets across the ground which our men had to cover. One by one, by getting round about them, by working zig-zag ways through cellars and ruins, by sudden rushes of bombing parties, led by young officers of daring spirit, we knocked out these machine-gun emplacements and the gunners who served them, until, yesterday, there was only the last remnant of the garrison left in Ovillers.

These men of the 3rd Prussian Guard had long been in a hopeless position. They were starving because all supplies had been cut off by our never-ceasing barrage, and they had no water supply, so that they suffered all the torture of great thirst.

Human nature could make no longer resistance, and, at last, the officers raised a signal of surrender, and came over with nearly 140 men, who held their hands up.

The fighting had been savage. At close grips in the broken earthworks and deep cellars there had been no sentiment, but British soldiers and Germans had flung themselves upon each other with bombs and any kind of weapon.

But now, when all was ended, the last of the German garrison were received with the honours of war, and none of our soldiers denies them the respect due to great courage.

“They stuck it splendidly,” was the verdict of one of them to-day, and though there is no love lost between our army and the enemy’s, it is good at least that we should have none of that silly contempt for the foe which is sometimes expressed by people—never by British soldiers—who unconsciously discredit the valour of our men by underestimating the courage and tenacity of those who fight us.

XVII

THE SCOTS AT LONGUEVAL

1

JULY 20

The present stage of our advance is causing us very hard fighting for important positions on high ground which must be gained and held before new progress over open country is possible. The enemy is gathering up his reserves and flinging them against us to check the onward movement at all costs, and it seems to me that he has brought up new batteries of heavy guns, because his artillery fire is increasing.

His prisoners reveal the grave anxiety that reigns behind the German lines, where there is no attempt to minimise the greatness of our menace. The enemy is undoubtedly straining every nerve to organise a new and formidable resistance.

To-day, however, he has lost many men and valuable ground, not only in fighting with British troops, but with the French, who at Maurepas and other positions on our right have made a successful advance.

In the early hours of this morning, after a long bombardment which made the night very dreadful with noise, and the sky vivid with the light of bursting shells—such a night as I described at length a day or two ago—an attack was made by our troops on the high ground between Delville Wood and High Wood and to the west of these positions.

The enemy was in great strength, and maintained a strong defence, but he suffered severely, and was forced to retreat in disorder upon some parts of his line.

2

A good deal of the fighting fell to south-country boys who once followed the plough and still have the English sky in their eyes. But not far from them were some of the “Harry Lauder lads,” who used to man the battlements of Edinburgh Castle when Rouge Dragon knocked at the gate and asked admittance for the King.

They had a bad night—“the worst a man could dream of,” said one of them, who had known other bad nights of war. They lay under the cross-fire of great shells, British and German. Field batteries were pumping out shells in a great hurry before breakfast time, but these were as nothing compared with the work of the heavies.

We were firing “Grandmothers” and “Aunties,” those 15-inch and 12-inch shells which go roaring through the air and explode with vast earth-shaking crashes. And the enemy was replying with his coal-scuttles.

“They were the real Jack Johnsons,” said a Devonshire lad who had a piece of one of them in his right shoulder. “These brutes have not been seen, I’m told, since Ypres, except in ones or twos. But they came over as thick and fast as hand-grenades. You know the kind of hole they make? ’Tis forty feet across and deep enough to bury a whole platoon.”

“The din fairly made me quake,” said a tall lad with the straw-coloured hair one sees on market days in Ipswich, and he shivered a little at the remembrance of the night, though the sun was warm upon him then.

But they did not suffer much from all this gun-fire as they manned their trenches in the darkness. The shells passed over them, and few were hurt. The attack was made before the dawn up the rising slope of ground towards high roads which used to go across from the Bois de Foureaux, or High Wood, as we call it, to Delville Wood.

Now there are no roads, for our bombardment had torn up the earth into a series of deep craters. The Germans had a line of dug-outs here, built in great haste since the first of July, but well built.

As soon as our men were upon them, the German soldiers, who had been hiding below ground, came up like rabbits when the ferrets are at work. Most of them ran away, as hard as they could, stumbling and falling over the broken ground.

“They ran so hard,” said one of our men, “that I couldn’t catch up with ’em. It was a queer kind of race, us chasing ’em, and they running. The only Germans I came up with were dead ’uns.”

But some of the Germans did not run. They came forward through the half-darkness of this dawn with their hands raised. One Cornish boy I knew took five prisoners, who crowded round him crying “Kamerad!” so that he felt like the old woman in the shoe.

Up to that point our casualties were very slight, but later on, up the higher ground, the enemy’s machine-gun fire swept across the grass and the brown, bare earth of the old trenches, and above the high rims of the shell craters. But our men swept on.

Other troops were working round High Wood on the left, and in the centre men were advancing into the wood itself, and forcing forward over the fallen trees and branches and the bodies of German dead. The enemy’s shells crashed above them, but these regiments of ours were determined to get on and to hold on, and during the day they have organised strong points, and captured the western side and all the southern part of this position.

3

The situation at Longueval and Delville Wood, on the north-east of that village, has been very full of trouble for our men ever since these places were taken by some of our Highland regiments on July 14. The enemy made repeated counter-attacks from the upper end of the village, where he still held some machine-gun emplacements, and kept a way open through his trenches here on the north so that he could send up supports and supplies.

From the north also he concentrated heavy artillery fire on the southern part of Delville Wood, which was held by some of our South African troops, and maintained a violent barrage.

Nevertheless the Highlanders have held on for nearly a week with a dogged endurance that has frustrated all the efforts of the enemy to get back on to their old ground. The gallantry of these men who wear the tartans of the old Scottish clans would seem wonderful if it were not habitual with them.

Their first dash for Longueval was one of the finest exploits of the war. They were led forward by their pipers, who went with them not only towards the German lines but across them and into the thick of the battle.

It was to the tune of “The Campbells are Coming” that one regiment went forward and that music, which I heard last up the slopes of Stirling Castle, was heard with terror, beyond a doubt, by the German soldiers. Then the pipes screamed out the Charge, the most awful music to be heard by men who have the Highlanders against them, and with fixed bayonets and hand-grenades they stormed the German trenches.

Here there are many concealed machine-gun emplacements, and dug-outs so strong that no shell could smash them. Some of them were great vaults and concreted chambers of great depth, where many Germans could find cover. But the Highlanders went down into them with great recklessness, two or three men flinging themselves into the vaults where enemies were packed. They were scornful of all such dangers.

I am told by one of their colonels that in bombing down the communication trenches they threw all caution to the wind, and while some of the men went along the trenches others ran along on top under heavy fire, cheering their comrades on, and then leaping down upon the enemy.

The Germans defended themselves with most stubborn courage, and even now, or at least as late as last night, they still serve some machine-guns at one point, from which it has been found difficult to dislodge them. They are down in a concrete emplacement, from which they can send out a continual spatter of bullets down the ruined way of what once was a street.

The Highlanders dug trenches across the village, and had what they call in soldiers’ language, “a hell of a time,” which is a true way of putting it. The enemy barraged the village with progressive lines of heavy shells, yard by yard, but by the best of luck his lines stopped short of where some ranks of Highlanders were lying down in fours, using frightful words to keep their spirits up. There were hours of bad luck, too, and one was when some of the transport men and horses were knocked out by getting into a barrage. Casualties were heavy among other officers and men, but the Highlanders held on with a wonderful spirit.

4

It is a spirit which I saluted to-day with reverence when I met these men marching out of the fire-zone. They came marching across broken fields, where old wire still lies tangled and old trenches cut up the ground, and the noise of the guns was about them.

Some of our heavy batteries were firing with terrific shocks of sound, which made mule-teams plunge and tremble, and struck sharply across the thunder of masses of guns firing along the whole line of battle. There was a thick summer haze about, and on the ridges the black vapours of shell-bursts, and all the air was heavy with smoke. It was out of this that the Highlanders came marching. They brought their music with them, and the pipes of war were playing a Scottish love-song:

I lo’e nae laddie but ane,
An’ he lo’es nae lassie but me.

Their kilts were caked with mud and stained with blood and filth, but the men were beautiful, marching briskly, with a fine pride in their eyes. Officers and men of other regiments watched them pass and saluted them, as men who had fought with heroic courage, so that the dirtiest of them there and the humblest of these Jocks was a fine gentleman and worthy of knighthood.

Many of them wore German helmets and grinned beneath them. One brawny young Scot had the cap of a German staff officer cocked over his ear. One machine-gun section brought down two German machines besides their own. They were very tired, but they held their heads up, and the pipers who had been with them blew out their bags bravely, though hard up for wind.

And the Scottish love-song rang out across the fields. Whatever its words, it was, I think, a love-song for the dear dead they had left behind them.

XVIII

THE DEVIL’S WOOD

1

JULY 21

Delville Wood, to the right of Longueval, is a name marked on the war-maps, but some of our soldiers, who take liberties with all French place-names, giving a familiar and homely sound to words beyond the trick of their tongues, call this “The Devil’s Wood.”

It is a reasonable name for it. It is a devilish place, which has been a death-trap to both the German and British troops who have held it in turns, or parts of it. It is here, and in High Wood to the north-west of it, that the fighting continues hotly. Last night and to-day the northern end was under the fire of our guns, the southern end under German fire, and somewhere about the centre the opposing infantry is entrenched as far as it is possible to dig in such a place.

The German soldiers have the advantage in defence. They have placed their machine-guns behind barricades of great tree-trunks, hidden their sharpshooters up in the foliage of trees still standing above all the litter of branches smashed down by shrapnel and high explosives, and send a patter of bullets across to our men, who have dug holes for themselves below the tough roots.

There is no need for either side to do any wood-chopping for the building of their barricades. Great numbers of trees have fallen, cut clean in half by heavy shells, and lie across each other in the tangle of brushwood. Branches have been lopped off or torn off, and are piled up as though for a bonfire. The broken trunks stick up in a ghastly way, stripped of their bark, and enormous roots to which the earth still clings have been torn out of the ground as though by a hurricane, and stretch their tentacles out above deep pits.

The wood is strewn with dead, and wounded men are so caught in the jungle of fallen branches that they can hardly crawl through it. Even the unwounded have to crawl on their way forward to fight, over, or underneath, the great trunks which lie across the tracks.

The gallant South Africans who were here could not dig quickly enough to get cover from the shells which the enemy’s guns pumped into the wood as soon as our men had gained it, and found it very hard to dig at all, but now, I hope, our troops are more secure from shell-fire and the enemy is suffering severely from our bombardment. His machine-guns chatter through the day and night from one or two strong emplacements, and our men, lying behind their own stockades, effectively reply. In the twilight of “The Devil’s Wood” the struggle goes on, but gradually we are enclosing the place and the Germans in it are not there for long.

2

JULY 27

At about ten o’clock this morning our troops again took Delville Wood—all but a narrow strip on the north—and perhaps it is the last time that it will be necessary to send men to the assault of this evil position which has earned the nickname of “Devil’s Wood” from soldiers who have been through it and out of it.

As one of our officers said to me this morning, “I wish to goodness we could wipe the place off the map, or burn it off. A good forest fire there would cleanse the ground of this filthy wreckage of trees which has been a death-trap to so many good fellows.”

It is a queer thing that so many trees are still standing, and that it still looks like a wood as I saw it the other day when the enemy was barraging this side of it. In spite of all the trees that have been cut down by shells the foliage still looks dense at a distance and hides all the horror underneath.

To-day many more trees have been slashed off and hurled upon other fallen trunks. If the wood had been drier the forest fire would have blazed. I am told that our concentration of guns for this morning’s bombardment secured the most intense series of barrages upon one position since the battle of Picardy began twenty-seven days ago; twice as heavy as any similar artillery attack.

The bombardment began this early morning, and took line after line from south to north above the ground held by our men, in progressive blocks of fire. Our batteries over an area of several miles, from the long-range heavies to the 18-pounders far forward, flung every size of shell into this “Devil’s Wood,” and filled it with high explosives and shrapnel so that one great volume of smoke rose from it and covered it in a dense black pall.

It seems impossible that any Germans there could still be left alive, but it is too soon yet to know whether our men found any of them crouching in holes or lying under the shelter of great trunks and roots. Perhaps a few German soldiers may come out from this place of death having escaped by what seems like a miracle, except that every day men do escape in the strangest way from shells which burst above them and under them and around them.

But there will not be many who may tell the tale of this morning’s bombardment of the wood, for the enemy has not had time to make an elaborate system of dug-outs here, deep enough to protect them from 6-inch or 8-inch shells, but had no more cover than our own men who held the wood when it was the turn of the enemy’s artillery.

3

I was talking to some of these men this morning, and they all had the same tale to tell. “Devil’s Wood,” said one of them—a shock-headed Peter in shorts, who had not lost his sense of humour, though a good deal of blood, up there—“this Delville Wood, as it is called politely by fellows who don’t know the look of it or the smell of it, is easily the worst place on earth, as far as I can guess.”

“It’s just crowded with corpses, and to stay there is to join that company. The only cover one can get is to crawl under a log and hope for the best, or crawl into a shell-hole and expect the worst—which generally arrives. I had the devil’s own luck—a puncture of the left leg—so I can’t walk back there.”

He was amazed to have come out so easily, and because he still had life, and could see the sun shining through the flap of a tent, he was in high spirits, like all our men who have had the luck to get a “cushie wound,” which in this war is the best of luck to men in such places as “Devil’s Wood.”

The other men were eloquent about the German snipers who were hidden in the foliage of trees with rifles and machine-guns and waited very patiently until any of our men began to crawl through the tree trunks. That game is finished. Our bombardment this morning must have swept away all such men with whatever weapon they had.

Devil’s Wood has become more crowded with dead, and it is over these bodies that our men stumbled this morning when they went forward slowly and cautiously behind the great barrage of our guns which cleared the way for them. They advanced in waves, halting while another barrage was maintained for half an hour or more ahead. They had to cross Princes-street, which was a sunken road made into something like a trench by the South Africans, and afterwards by Scots from home, striking across the glades from west to east, and then they pushed northwards.

I have no details of the fighting, which is still in progress, but it is probable that the attack has succeeded without many casualties. It is in holding the ground that the worst time comes to the men who capture it.

4

Meanwhile another attack has been made this morning, advancing eastwards to Delville Wood from Longueval, which is partly in and partly out of the wood, with the object of clearing out the enemy from the northern part of the village and joining up with the men advancing into the wood from the south, as I have just described.

Here, again, not much more of the fighting is known, but we know the difficulties of the position, and it is not surprising that the hardest fighting has been happening here. The history of the fight that has gone on in this corner of ground since July 14 is one of the most wonderful things, for sheer stubborn courage, that has been done in all this great battle.

The Scottish troops who first took Longueval, as I have described in a previous despatch, held part of the village in spite of heavy counter-attacks and incessant bombardments while the South Africans were in the adjoining wood of devilish fame.

The home-grown Scots had a trench—a poor thing, but still called a trench—running from east to west at the south end of the village, and two parallel roads going out of this trench northwards through the ruins of the village.

There were barricades up these two roads held by the Scots with machine-guns, and on the other side of the barricade, the roads were No Man’s Land leading to the enemy, who were, and still remain, in bits of copse and ruined gardens and old orchards, with their own machine-guns protected by strong emplacements.

The Scots had a severe time, under almost continuous fire, and lost heavily. At night they were attacked from the orchard land by parties of German bombers, who advanced with desperate courage although swept back again and again by rifles and machine-guns and hand-grenades. Meanwhile the South Africans were being shelled to death in Delville Wood close by, and, as I have already told, the poor remnants of them were withdrawn.

The troops in Longueval were replaced by others, who succeeded in clearing the enemy out of part of the orchard and capturing some of his machine-guns, but not enough to “clean up” this position, which was still very dangerous. It was another battalion of Scottish troops, together with English boys of the New Army, who captured Waterlot Farm, running down south-eastwards from Delville Wood, and made two or three very gallant attempts to get as far as Guillemont, and on July 22 another part of Longueval was taken a third time by these fine men, whose general has trained them to attack and to go on attacking.

5

Delville Wood proved the stumbling block again. One young officer who was wounded here yesterday told me that he could get no kind of cover where he lay with his men at the edge of Delville Wood and on the outskirts of Longueval. All night long there was the swish of machine-gun bullets above him, varied with shrapnel and bits of high explosive.

He has only been out in France a fortnight, and two days ago came straight to the “Devil’s Wood,” into the heart of Inferno.

On his first day he was surprised to come face to face with a German soldier. The young officer had been given orders to push out a patrol down a sap or shallow trench to reconnoitre the position of the enemy. He had not gone many yards before he met the enemy—a tall fellow in a steel helmet, followed by forty others.

There was surprise on both sides and considerable alarm, but the English boy was first in with a revolver shot. He thinks now that he made a mistake because the Germans made no attack upon him and ran back into the wood, so that it is likely enough they had come forward to surrender, as a means of escape from our shell-fire.

Our lieutenant came back to report, dodging snipers who “potted” at him from several directions, and then lying in a ditch until a fragment of shell caught him.

“Longueval is the very devil,” says this subaltern with two days’ experience of war—and enough too. “With Delville Wood on its right it’s not a healthy neighbourhood. But of course Brother Boche is getting it in the neck all the time, so he can’t be pleased with his position.”

To-day there are other men attacking the same position, up against the same difficulties, subject to the same fire.

Those who went before them have gained the immortality of history—a poor reward, perhaps, for great struggles and great suffering, but theirs, whatever the value of it, for all time, when the secrets of the war are told.

The men who are now in are of the same breed, and will not fail for lack of courage, but as I write the guns are firing with a great tumult of noise over there, and new history is in the making so that it cannot yet be known.

6

JULY 29

I have already described in a previous despatch the great difficulties that have confronted our men in Longueval and Delville Wood, and I left off my last narrative at a time when our troops were making a strong attack upon both of those positions—the battalions on the left endeavouring to clear the enemy from the north of Longueval, where they had machine-gun redoubts, and those on the right working up from the south through Delville Wood.

The infantry advanced stage by stage behind our shell-fire—a very simple thing to write or read, but not at all a simple matter to troops walking under the hurricane of shells and depending for their lives upon the scientific accuracy of gunners calculating their range and their time-fuses a long way behind the lines, and unable to see the infantry advancing to attack.

“It was queer to see the shells bursting in front of one,” said a bright-eyed fellow, who had just come out of “Devil Wood” with a lucky wound. “The line of them was just about seventy-five yards ahead of us, flinging up the ground and smashing everything. It was wonderful how the gunners kept it just ahead of us.”

Our men did not go through Delville Wood in one of those fine cheering rushes which are drawn sometimes by imaginative artists, and sometimes, but not often, happen. They went in scattered groups, keeping touch, but in extended order and scrambling, stumbling, or crawling forward as best they could, in a place which had no clear track.

There were not two yards of ground without a shell hole. Fallen trees and brushwood made a tangled maze. Old barricades smashed by shell fire and shallow trenches scraped up by men who had been digging their own graves at the same time made obstacles and pit falls everywhere. Our men, heavily loaded with their fighting kits, with bombs slung about them, and with their bayonets fixed, could not go forward at a bound through this infernal wood.

This wood had been taken four times by four waves of British troops. It had been retaken four times by four waves of German troops. It had been the dumping place of the artillery’s most furious bombardments on both sides, so that these English boys of ours were advancing through a great graveyard of unburied dead.

The ghastliness of the place has left its mark upon the minds of many men who are not troubled much by the sights of battle. I notice that some of them wince at the name of Delville Wood, and others—the officers mostly—laugh in a way that is not good to hear, because it is the laughter of men who realise the great gulf of irony that lies between the decent things of life and all this devildom.

7

When our men advanced they were surprised to see men running away through the broken trees, and astonished, also, to see bits of white rag fluttering above some of the shell-holes. These white rags, tied to twigs, bobbed up and down or waved to and fro as signals. It was the white flag of surrender, held by German soldiers crouched at the bottom of the shell craters. From one of them a Red Cross flag waved in a frantic way.

Our men went forward with their bayonets, and shouted “Come out of it, there!” and from each shell-hole came a German soldier, holding his hands up, and crying “Pity! Pity!” which is a word they seem to have learnt in case of need.

“Some of them were so small and young,” said a man who was fighting in this part of the wood, “that their uniforms were much too big for them and their tunics came down to their knees.”

They were exceptional in youth and size, for all the prisoners I have seen since the beginning of our attack are tall, strapping fellows of the best fighting age; but it is possible that our men have come up against some of the 1916 class. When the English poked their bayonets at them, but not into them, they fell on their knees and cried for mercy.

It was mercy asked and given at a time when our soldiers were angry, for the enemy was firing a large number of gas-shells.