Chapter VII: Part 7

Early in the afternoon a good deal of the ground to the north of Longueval had been captured by very fierce fighting at close quarters in and about the orchard, where the enemy had machine-gun emplacements and a strong redoubt called Machine-gun House. Here they defended themselves stubbornly behind barricades of broken bricks and fallen tree trunks and barbed wire, serving their guns in a deadly way.

Several of our officers behaved with the utmost gallantry and led forward many bombing parties to the attack of the machine-gun emplacements, from which there came a continual swish of bullets. Our men were quite reckless in taking all risks, and made repeated attacks on this position left of Delville Wood until they captured or knocked out several of the machine-guns which had given most trouble.

8

In the meantime the troops on the right were gradually pushing their way up to the top of the wood, past Princes-street (an old trench dug by the Scots, and now battered out of shape by the morning’s bombardment), and across a line of dug-outs made by the enemy—and very well made in the time. They are master diggers, the Germans, and they have the industry of ants. It is sometimes an industry inspired by fear; but, after all, fear is often the wisdom of defence, and in this case they fought longer because by night and day they had toiled to get shell-proof cover into which death could not enter easily.

Some men of ours who were first to go into those dug-outs tell me that they were as deep as those they had seen in parts of the line where Germans have had months for their work. They had plenty of head cover, of timber balks and sandbags and earth, and inside them was room for twenty men or more.

When our men came through the trees to them there were two officers sitting outside as though at a cottage doorway, and they seemed quite calm, except for their extreme pallor.

They were both wounded, but not badly, and it is our men’s idea that they had come to sit in the open in case they should be buried alive in the dug-outs by direct hits from our heavy shells. They rose, and showed their wounds, and surrendered.

Some of our men went into the mouths of the dug-outs, and cautiously, with their bombs handy, down the dark steps. There were forms huddled up in that narrow stairway, and they groaned at the touch of boots. They were badly wounded men, who had staggered down to get shelter and medical aid. Down below, in rooms about ten feet square and almost dark, were other wounded men lying about in their own blood.

A lantern hanging on a nail in one of these places gave a dim flicker of light to the scene, and showed the white, unshaven faces of the men who, as our young soldiers came tramping and stumbling down, raised their heads, but had no strength to stand up. Two or three men, unwounded, or only slightly wounded, came forward with their hands held up a little, and bowed their heads as they muttered something which meant surrender.

Early in the afternoon the enemy made a counter-attack upon the left of the wood and to the north of Longueval village. At the same time their artillery had received word somehow, by fugitives, that the wood was full of English, and that they could shell it without killing many of their own men. German “crumps” now began to crash through the trees, and a counter-bombardment of high explosives fell into the cratered earth.

The attack by German infantry was made by strong parties of grenadiers, who came down saps above Longueval and from a communication trench between Delville Wood and High Wood. They came on with great resolution, followed by machine-gunners, but they were received with rifle fire, bombs, and machine-gun fire from our own men.

Some parties managed to work their way back into the orchard, and through the scattered trees about it, and there was some close and desperate fighting. For a time our men in one of the battalions were short of bombs, and sent back urgent messages for new supplies.

“We had been hanging on to them,” said one of the boys, “because it’s always well to save them for a tight place, but of course we sent them up to the chaps in front.” It was timely help, and all the German efforts to dislodge our men broke down with heavy loss, so that the ground was strewn with their dead and wounded.

Many Germans were seen retreating over the high ground above Delville Wood, to the left. Parties of them ran along the sky-line, and then seemed to drop into a sunken road.

So Delville Wood is ours again—and it is again under the fire of German guns instead of British guns, and the trouble is to know whether it is possible for either side to hold such a place without too great a sacrifice of life. It is easier to hold now that the ground to the north of Longueval and in the western corner of the wood has been cleared of its hornets’ nests—those hiding-places of machine-gunners who were able to send waves of bullets upon our advancing men.

That trouble, anyhow, is gone, and the enemy feels the loss, because several new counter-attacks last night failed as completely as those made earlier. They were our machine-guns which met them in their old haunts, and made them pay back a heavy price for the toll they had taken before.

XIX

THE WORK OF THE GUNS

1

JULY 24

More ground has been gained to-day at Pozières and the Australians after their first great assault before dawn yesterday have been pushing across the Bapaume Road, which goes through the town, and bombing out the German machine-gunners and holding parties on the western side, so that not many enemies are left among the ruins or underground in Pozières itself. There is higher ground beyond, towards the Windmill, and further north, for which a fight will have to be made before the key of the position is really captured, but the advance of English regiments on the left is a menace to the enemy which must cause him grave anxiety. The line has also been thrust forward a little by a series of posts and joined up with positions in the neighbourhood of High Wood, where the enemy is again bombarding heavily, so that no further progress has been made in this direction during the day.

One curious incident was observed here by the troops holding the ground on the south of High Wood. They suddenly noticed a body of men coming out of the glades, and were surprised to see that they were in kilts.

For a moment it may have occurred to them that they were some of the wounded Scots who had fought through High Wood a few days previously. That could hardly be possible, however, because the enemy is in strong numbers in the upper part of the wood. An officer staring through his glasses uttered a word of astonishment and two of anger. The men on the sky-line were Germans dressed up in kilts taken from the dead. Our guns put some shells over them, and they disappeared below the ridge.

For the past few days the increasing strength of the enemy’s artillery, especially of heavy guns, has been noticeable, and he has been firing at longer range, and rather wildly “into the blue” in order to make things uncomfortable behind our lines.

Owing to the great superiority of our observation and the complete failure of his own aircraft—our anti-aircraft guns have hardly been called upon to fire a round during the last few weeks—he is wasting a great deal of heavy ammunition. This is different from earlier days of the battle when the German gunners had to concentrate their fire upon very definite points of attack, and were completely mastered in many of their positions by the immensity of our bombardment.

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The work of our artillery is a wonderful achievement, and all the success we have gained during this great battle has been largely due to the science and daring of our gunners and to the labour of all those thousands of men at home who have sweated in soul and body to make the guns and the ammunition.

It is only just and fair to the munition workers to say this thing and to let them know that their toil has helped enormously to break the German lines, and that without their untiring effort all the courage of our soldiers, all their sacrifice of blood would have been in vain. If they slacken off now in the factories and workshops these men of ours in places like High Wood and Longueval and Pozières will no longer have the support that is most desperately needed now that the enemy is bringing up many new batteries against us.

Flesh and blood cannot fight against high explosives. It can only die, and the whole history of the battle is not to be written in reference to bayonets or rifles but to guns. It has been, and is still, a battle of guns, and our heroic infantry has only been able to get forward or to hold its ground when the artillery preparation has been complete, and the artillery support overwhelmingly strong. Should this fail it would not be fighting, but massacre.

From the early days of the battle onwards our artillery has been great, in weight of metal, in science, in the vastness of its supplies of shells, in the superb courage and skill of its men, who have endured a continuous strain upon them night and day, for four weeks. They broke the German spirit and the German strength to the point when our infantry could attack with something like a chance, almost for the first time in this war along the British front.

By the work of aviators and artillery observation officers we knew the positions of most of the enemy’s batteries and the geography of all his communication trenches, transport roads, and supply depots. Our guns which had been brought up secretly were unmasked one morning when the great bombardment began before the battle, and poured unceasing shells upon all those positions, smothering them with high explosives and shrapnel, while the field guns closer up were cutting the enemy’s wire.

Trenches were swept out of existence, batteries were blown to bits—I have seen many of those broken German guns now standing as trophies on French lawns—and the roads were swept by storms of death. The barrage was a great wall through which nothing could pass. The German soldiers in their lines could get neither food nor water. No reinforcements could be sent to them.

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Three of our own soldiers who were taken prisoners on the morning of the first attack could not be sent back into the German lines because no escort dared to go with them through the barrage. They were thrust down into a dug-out with some of the German soldiers and saw and suffered the effect of our fire. The enemy had no food to give them, having none for themselves, and they were tortured by thirst.

For five days they endured this until nearly dead, but when the Germans were too dazed to act as guards, these three English soldiers managed to crawl out of the dug-out and by a miracle of luck escaped back to their own lines over No Man’s Land.

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A German officer, now one of our prisoners, bears witness to the work of our gunners. He was sent with his battalion from Verdun to Contalmaison and was detrained at Bapaume. There he began a painful experience of shell-fire through an accident to one of the German 12-inch guns, which burst and blew up several carriages of the train killing some of his men. But the rest of his journey was made terrible by British gun-fire. With his battalion he came down a road which was being flung up by our 15-inch and 12-inch guns. Some more of his men were killed, and he came on towards Bazentin, where he was under the fire of our 8-inch howitzers and nine-point-twos. More of his men were killed, but he went on until near Contalmaison he came within the range of our 18-pounders and lost the remainder of his men. At Contalmaison he was immediately taken prisoner by our attack and was rejoiced to come to his journey’s end alive.

“Your artillery,” he said, “is better than anything I had seen before, even at Verdun, and worse than anything I had suffered.”

All the German officers with whom I have spoken are surprised that an “Army of Amateurs,” as they call us, should produce such scientific artillery work in so short a time, and they also pay tribute to the daring of the field gunners, who go so far forward to support the infantry attacks.

“They came up,” said one of them, speaking of the Mametz Wood attack, “like charioteers in a Roman circus, at full gallop. Many of their horses were killed, but the men were reckless of danger, and placed their batteries in the open as though at manœuvres.”

5

The field observing officers are audacious almost to the point of foolhardiness. Before the ground of attack has been cleared of Germans they walk calmly up with a telephonist, sit down on a crest or a knoll commanding a field of observation, and send back messages to a battery a mile or so behind.

When the territory round Contalmaison was still swarming with Germans, one of our officers went forward in this way and made himself at home on the top of a German dug-out, recording flashes and getting excellent information. He went back to his battery for an hour or two, and when he returned to his chosen spot found it occupied by Germans. They wanted to round him up, but he fired a few revolver shots and retired with dignity—to choose another place not quite so crowded with the enemy. Such tales seem fantastic and impossible. But they are true.

There is no doubt that many German batteries have been destroyed, apart from those which have been captured. I saw to-day a map, which told, by little coloured dots, a great drama of war. Each dot represented a German battery discovered by our gunners since the beginning of the battle, and each colour the day it was discovered, and they were arranged on the map so that one could see the exact distribution of the enemy’s guns, as it has changed during the course of the battle.

Soon after our bombardment began they began to drift down new batteries and there were clusters of little coloured dots at certain spots. But a day or two later they were wiped out, or withdrawn further back. There was one thick cluster of green dots to the north of Bazentin-le-Grand. It represented many batteries. A day later they had gone.

“What happened?” I asked.

The gunner officer laughed.

“We just smothered ’em.”

They were “smothered” by storms of shells which burst all over these battery positions, over every yard of ground there, so that no gun emplacement could escape.

But other dots are appearing on the map—other little clusters of colour, further away to the right. The enemy is massing new batteries, and it is from these positions that Delville Wood, High Wood, and other parts of our line are being shelled night and day with fierce and increasing violence.

Those batteries are not so easy to reach. To keep their fire down, and still more to knock them out we must have a continual increasing flow of guns and ammunition—ammunition in vast and unimaginable quantities, for the figures I have heard to-day of the ammunition we have used during the past three weeks are beyond one’s range of imagination. The munition workers at home must not relax their efforts if we are to continue our successes. It is by their labour that the lives of our men can be saved. All the time it is a battle of guns.

XX

THE FIGHTING ROUND WATERLOT FARM

1

JULY 30

There was some infantry fighting to-day in co-operation with the French on our right wing, and as far as our own troops were concerned some progress was made to the east of Waterlot Farm, which is on the road going down from Longueval to Guillemont. It was a very hot day, with a scorching sun, but artillery observation was not easy during certain hours owing to a rather thick haze. In spite of this our guns maintained a heavy bombardment upon the enemy’s line in support of our troops, who advanced over difficult ground.

Many prisoners surrendered at an early stage of this progress, one batch of 170 men being captured first and other groups being rounded up later, bringing the total number to something more than 200.

It was rather more than a week ago that some of our men pushed our line down from Longueval to Waterlot Farm, on the road to Guillemont, which they held against repeated attacks.

The Germans are very busy digging new trenches to the east of the road, and through these they are able to send up bombing parties and machine-gunners to protect the northern and western approaches to the ruins of Guillemont itself.

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The first forward movement from Waterlot Farm was made by some Scots who had already been fighting hard since July 14, when they helped to break the second German line. These Scots, whom I have met in many fields of war during the past year or more, had done well elsewhere, and chased the enemy out of his lines. They were grim men, and ready for a new “crack at the ould Boche” when they took over from another regiment at Waterlot Farm, south of Delville Wood. It was not a farm such as Caldecott would have drawn for his coloured picture-book. There were no cows or sheep in the neighbourhood. It was a collection of ruined buildings and yards which the enemy seems to have used as a dumping ground for old iron and machinery. There were several derelict engines here, and a steel cupola for a heavy gun-emplacement, like those at Liège in the early days of the war, and a litter of wheels and rods and wire, mostly smashed by our shell fire. As a farm it left much to be desired, but the Scots settled down here and made themselves as comfortable as possible in the circumstances.

In the darkness of that night and the next patrols went out to discover the strength of the enemy. Our young officers and their men, crawling forward over the broken ground, satisfied themselves that “the Boche” was there in strength. They only had to listen to the patter of bullets which whipped the grass to know that he had plenty of machine-guns unpleasantly near.

Those who had not met any of those bullets came back with their reports, and the artillery bombarded the enemy’s trenches to make the work of the infantry easier. An advance was made from the farm before dawn, led by bombing parties of the Scots.

It was a quiet and silent walk. The enemy’s machine-guns were chattering a little, but there was no great fire, and the Scots reached a trench north of the railway line with only three men and one officer wounded. “That’s nothing,” said the officer, and he carried on.

It was impossible to go further at that time. The enemy were holding, very strongly, a trench immediately across the railway line, and they had dug a nest of new trenches on the east of the road, from which they could enfilade our men with rifle and machine-gun fire.

The Scots got well down into a trench which was mostly a series of shell-craters, and looked to their rifles and bombs. There was not much doubt as to what was coming. It came down the main road from Guillemont—a large force of German soldiers with machine-guns.

At the same time, from the trench parallel with ours, the Germans sprang on to their parapets and came over. The Scots were hardly strong enough to resist these attacks supported by enfilade fire. They were ordered to fall back, and the retirement was carried out without disorder—to say “without panic” would be ridiculous to these men who have fought a score of battles since they came to France—and it was covered by the machine-gunners, who remained as a rearguard, sweeping down the advanced parties of the enemy, so as to gain time for our men to get back.

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A second move from Waterlot Farm was made by the same Scots, supported by other troops. The enemy suffered badly. A very strong force of German bombers made a brave counter-attack on the Scots, but were caught by rifle and machine-gun fire, and fell almost to a man.

“Practically wiped out” was the way in which an officer of the Scots described it. During the afternoon a patrol of our snipers went out on a hunting expedition and sighted a party of Germans carrying down ammunition boxes. Not all of them reached their journey’s end, for the Scottish snipers are good shots.

Some of the German soldiers were sick of the business, and had had too much shell-fire. When dusk was creeping over the countryside a group of them came out of a ruined farm—it had really been a farm in the old days of peace—standing on the left of the main road to Guillemont.

They came holding up their hands as a sign of surrender, and some of the Scots went out to bring them in. But the enemy in the trenches beyond opened fire on their own countrymen, and some of our own were killed and wounded.

When, later on, another party came out, they were not received in a friendly spirit.... That night the Scottish stretcher-bearers went out to bring in their wounded, and they found among them one man of theirs who had been discovered by a German patrol, but left behind because he gave them his water to drink. They thanked him, and said “Good luck, and a safe return to your own lines!” but when they went away he thought he had been left to die.

XXI

THE PETER PANS OF WAR

1

JULY 31

For two days now the sun has been blazing hot, and our fighting men have been baked brown. It is not good fighting weather either for guns or men. A queer haze is about the fields, as thick at times as a November mist and yet thrilling with heat, so that artillery observation is not good for anything like long-range shooting.

Mametz Wood, which is now well behind the lines, looms up vaguely, and, beyond, Delville Wood is hardly visible except as a low-lying smudge on the sky-line. Yet the sun is not shaded by the haze, and strikes down glaringly upon the white roads and the trampled fields, upon transport crawling forward in clouds of dust that rise like the smoke of fires about them, and upon soldiers trudging along with their rifles slung and their packs slipping, their iron helmets thrust forward over the eyes and their faces powdered white as millers’.

It is hot and thirsty work and painful to the spirit and flesh of men, even along roads that are not pebbled with shrapnel bullets. Men on the march to-day were glad of frequent halts, and flung themselves down on the waysides panting and sweating, moistening their dusty lips with parched tongues and fumbling for their water-bottles. They were lucky to have water, and knew their luck. It was worse for the men who were fighting yesterday in the same heat wave up by Waterlot Farm and further south by Maltzhorn Farm, not far from Guillemont.

Some of them drank their water too soon, and there was not a dog’s chance of getting any more until nightfall. Thirst, as sharp as redhot needles through the tongue, tortured some of these men of ours. And yet they were lucky, too, and knew their luck. There were other men suffering worse than they, the wounded lying in places beyond the quick reach of stretcher-bearers. “It was fair awfu’ to hear them crying,” said one of their comrades. “It was ‘Water! water! For Christ’s sake—water!’ till their voices died away.”

As usual the stretcher-bearers were magnificent and came out under heavy fire to get these men in until some of them fell wounded themselves. And other men crawled down to where their comrades lay and, in spite of their own thirst, gave the last dregs of their water to these stricken men. There were many Sir Philip Sidneys there, not knighted by any accolade except that of charity, and very rough fellows in their way of speech, but pitiful.

There was one of them who lay wounded with some water still in the bottle by his side. Next to him was a wounded German, groaning feebly and saying “Wasser! Wasser!” The Yorkshire lad knew enough to understand that word of German. He stretched out his flask and said, “Hi, matey, tak’ a swig o’ that.” They were two men who had tried to kill each other.

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On one part of the battlefields recently were some of the Bantam battalions, those little game-cocks for whom most of us out here have a warm corner in our hearts, because they are the smallest fighting men in the British army, and the sturdiest, pluckiest little men one can meet on a long day’s march. They have been under fire in several parts of the line, where it is not good for any men to be except for duty’s sake.

It has generally been their fate to act in support of other troops—troops whom it is an honour to support when they go into action, because their regiments have won fame on all the battlefields of Europe since the Napoleonic wars.

But it is always a dangerous honour to be in support. The attacking troops have often an easier time than those who lie behind them with scanty cover. It is here that the enemy’s barrage is likely to fall, and there is not much fun in lying under shell-fire hour after hour, perhaps for two days, without seeing the enemy or getting at him. The ground becomes strewn with dead and wounded. It is then that to “hold on” means the highest heroism.

The Bantams held on in hours like this, held on gamely and with wonderful grit. They became great diggers, and because they are not very high, a shallow trench was good enough for cover, and they burrowed like ants. “They would as soon forget their rifles as their shovels,” said one of their officers to-day. “There is no need to tell them to dig. They get to work mighty quick, being old soldiers now who have learnt by experience.”

They are old soldiers in cunning and knowledge, but there are young lads among them. Old or young (and there are many middle-aged Bantams who stand no higher than five feet in their socks), they are all the Peter Pans of the British Army—the Boys-who-wouldn’t-grow-up, and, like the heroic Peter Pan himself, who was surely the first of the Bantams, they are eager for single combat with the greatest enemy of England, Home and Beauty who may come along. They had their chance yesterday, and brought back a number of enormous Bavarians as prisoners fairly captured.

A certain Bantam, ex-boilermaker of Leeds (“the grandest city in the world,” he says), and the King’s Jester of his battalion was enormously amused by the incident. He said that each Bantam looked no higher than the matchstick to the candle with each Bavarian. To all these little men the German soldiers looked like giants, but like so many Hop-o’-my-Thumbs they took charge of these Bavarian Blunderbores and brought them back in triumph. They went searching for them in the ruins of Longueval some days ago, and found some of them sniping from the trees. They brought them down with a crash, and collected souvenirs.

This village was a dreadful place when some of the Bantams went into it. Only a few ruins remained, and about these many soldiers of many different regiments went prowling in search of Germans who were still concealed in dug-outs and shell-craters, and who still defended the outskirts of the village with machine-guns, which swept the streets.

There were Highlanders there, so “fey” after their fierce fighting that they went about with their bayonets, prodding imaginary Germans, and searching empty dug-outs as though the enemy were crowded there. The ground was strewn with dead, and from ruined trenches and piles of broken bricks there came the awful cries of wounded men.

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There were many wounded—Germans as well as British—and one man tended them with a heroic self-sacrifice which is described with reverence and enthusiasm by many officers and men. It was a chaplain attached to the South Africans who fought so desperately and so splendidly in “Devil’s Wood.” This “padre” came up to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter and applied himself to the wounded with a spiritual devotion that was utterly fearless.

In order to get water for them, and the means of making tea, he went many times to a well which was a danger spot marked down by German snipers, who shot our men, agonising with thirst, as though they were tigers going down to drink. They are justified according to the laws of war, but it was a cruel business. There was one German officer there, in a shell-hole, not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy to pick off any men who ventured to the well, and he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the fine figure of that chaplain, his disregard of all the bullets snapping about him, the tireless, fearless way in which he crossed a street of death in order to help the wounded, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer, and he let him pass. He passed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into its worst places, which were pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he had made from the well-water for men in agony because of their wounds and thirst.

They were officers of the Bantams who told me the story, though the padre was not theirs, and their generous praise was fine to hear. It was good also to hear the talk of these men who had just come out of battle with the grime and dirt of war upon them, about the men they love to command.

These young officers are keen, bright-eyed fellows, and in spite of all they had been through—things not yet to be described—they bore but little trace of their endurance. I sat with them under a tent propped up by stretcher-poles, with one flap tied to an old cart, while the men who had just marched down were lying in groups on the field, mostly without shirts and socks, because of the heat and the long time since they had changed their clothes.

Afterwards I went among the men—all these Peter Pans—who came from all parts of Scotland and the North of England, so that their speech is not easy to a man from the South. They were talking of German snipers and German shells, of all that they had suffered and done, and the boilermaker, their comic turn, was egged on to say outrageous things which caused roars of laughter from the Bantam crowd. The language of the boilermaker on the subject of Germans and the pleasures of war would be quite unprintable, but the gist of it was full of virtue and suited the philosophy of these five-foot Cœurs-de-Lion, who were grinning round him.

It is the philosophy of our modern knights, who take more risks in one day than their forebears in a lifetime, and find a grim and sinister humour in the worst things of war.

XXII

THE HIGH GROUND AT POZIÈRES

1

AUGUST 5

Last evening, just as dusk was creeping over the battlefields, the Australians, with English troops on their left, sprang over the parapets of their lines at Pozières, advanced up five hundred yards of rising ground, stormed through the trenches of the second German line, and captured the crest of the ridge which looks down to Courcelette and Martinpuich.

It was a great and tragic surprise to the enemy. They may have believed, I think they did believe, that after the series of battles in the July fighting, the spirit of the British offensive was broken, and that our troops were too tired to make fresh assaults. The German generals tried to put comfort into the hearts of their men by telling them that the British guns and the British soldiers had done their worst, and that the attack was at an end. The lull deceived them.

Because two or three days had passed without any infantry action after thirty days of unceasing battle there may well have seemed to the enemy a reasonable hope that we should content ourselves with digging in and holding the ground gained. One thing, however, must have disheartened the German troops and prevented any kind of nervous recuperation after the appalling strain of the month’s shell-fire. The British guns, which should have been worn out, and the British gunners supposed to be exhausted, went on firing.

They went on all yesterday, as on the day before and more than a month of yesterdays, with their long, steady bombardment, that bombardment which is now rumbling with its sullen shocks of sound as I write, and as it goes on night and day. Long-range guns were reaching out to places far ahead the German lines. Courcelette was a ruin. Martinpuich was falling to pieces. There is no safety for Germans anywhere and up in the lines no safety except in the deepest dug-outs for officers and lucky men.

2

As many men as could get into dug-outs to the north of Pozières were down there yesterday, listening to the crashes of our heavy shells which were smashing the trenches about them and screaming overhead on more distant journeys.

The Australians and English troops, including men of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey regiments, were waiting in their own trenches.

A crescent moon came up. The woods darkened. Shadows crept down from Thiépval. Distant cornfields in the world beyond the war, so near as miles are counted, so far away in peace, became bronzed and red, and then all dark and vague in the evening mist. Above, the sky was still blue, with stars very bright and glistening.

It was, I think, about 9 o’clock—as the clock goes now in France and England—when the British troops left their trenches. They went quietly without any great clamour across that 500 yards of ground, dusky figures, the brown of their khaki no different from the colour of the earth around them, through the gloom of coming night. The Australians worked up to the right, the English to the left. Before them was the German second line on a front of about 3,000 yards, and part of that long line which was pierced and taken on July 14, between Bazentin-le-Petit and Longueval, when the British troops went up in waves and astounded the world by their achievement. It was no longer a line of trenches.

It was a wavy line of hummocky and tumbled earth along innumerable shell-craters such as I described at Montauban. Only the dug-outs, or some of them, still remained in all this chaos, filled with living and wounded and dead.

Out of the wreck of earth, as our men advanced, living men came out in groups. They came forward through the dusky night with their hands held up—pitiable shadows. Most of them were utterly nerve-broken—beaten and broken men with no fight left in them, but only an animal fear, and desire of life.

Their surrender was received, and the English and Australians put guards about them and sent them back to our lines while they went on to clear out the dug-outs of men who refused to come out, or could not come out, and to deal with those who further back had still the courage to defend themselves.

There was some bayonet fighting and bombing. From behind the German lines in isolated redoubts machine-guns were at work spraying out bullets. But our casualties were very few; all told, less, I imagine, than in any action of importance during the Battle of the Somme. The enemy’s losses were heavy. More than 400 prisoners have passed the toll-bar, and others are being brought down. In dead he lost more than that, and his wounded must number high figures. It was a blow which must be grievous to him after all the hammer-strokes of the month, and what is most significant is the troubled state of his soldiers, these dazed and nerve-shattered men who surrendered. They had no pride left in them.

These men were mostly of the 17th and 18th Reserve Division of the 9th Reserve Corps with miscellaneous drafts from various Ersatz or reserve battalions, the scourings of the last class whom Germany can, I suppose, put into the field. By that I do not mean they are physically weak or undersized—there are very few German soldiers who could be described like that—but they are not soldiers of the proud and highly-trained kind who fought in earlier days of the war. They are men with families and with a great yearning for peace, and no love of this massacre which is ordained by their warlords.

During the night the troops behind them were rallied to make three separate counter-attacks. They came on very bravely—there is nothing the matter with German courage as a rule—but in a spirit of self-sacrifice and stupidly. They walked into our barrage, and our shells caught them and shattered them.

To-day up to the time I write there has been no further attack by infantry, but the enemy’s guns have opened and maintained a very fierce fire upon the positions gained by our troops.

The new part of the German second line now in our hands makes up with the other part of his line captured on July 14 a distance of nearly 10,000 yards.

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AUGUST 7

All last night, which was still and calm, as the weather goes, there was a great hammering of guns, and this morning, when I went out in the direction of Thiépval, the artillery on both sides was hard at work. The enemy was dropping “heavy stuff” in the neighbourhood of Pozières, with occasional shots at long range into fields about quiet villages behind the lines which look utterly peaceful in the warm light of this August sun gleaming upon their church spires and upon the thick foliage of the trees around them.

It was in the midst of a tumult of guns and below the long resonant journeying of great shells on their way to the enemy’s territory that I sat to-day with some of the officers who have just chased the Germans out of their trenches to the north of Pozières.

They were all men of Kent around me. The captain is a merry soul, who laughs most heartily over his hairbreadth escapes and still more loudly when he describes little exploits which would make most men shudder at the mere remembrance.

The colonel of his battalion, who sat opposite, is of a different type, quiet and thoughtful, but with a sense of humour also that lights his eyes. And two places off was the M.O.—a doctor who loves his men and would not leave this battalion of the Kents for any other in the Army (he has patched up all their bodies after every scrap and did heroic work for them the other night).

Before the fighting began the colonel took the jovial captain up to the line “to view the Promised Land,” as he called it. And the Promised Land looked very uninviting on this high ridge—above the blackened ruins of Pozières—where the German second lines were guarded by a tangle of barbed wire. It was also difficult to look at it very long or very closely, because the enemy was “lathering” the field of observation with every kind of “crump” and shell.

“When we popped over the parapet,” says the captain, “we advanced into the middle of the Brock’s Benefit, and it was obvious that the blinking Boche had got the wind up.”

That is to say the enemy was sending up distress signals to his guns, and in the anticipation of an attack, was flinging coloured lights over to our lines so as to illuminate any British infantry who might be advancing. These lights were fired out of a special kind of pistol, and when they fell flared up with vivid red and green fires. At the same time the enemy’s machine-guns played upon any figures so revealed, so that it was almost certain death to be in those flare lights. At great risk several men sprang forward into the illumination and kicked out the burning canisters. Then in the momentary darkness, the leading companies advanced in waves towards the German trenches south of Mouquet (or, as the soldiers call it, Moo-Cow) Farm.

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The colonel of the battalion went very gallantly with his men, and as he drew near to the enemy’s line saw two figures silhouetted like his own men had been against the enemy’s lights. He called out to them, thinking they might be his own men working forward on his right. But he saw they were Germans when one man threw up his hands as a sign of surrender, and the other dropped on to one knee to fire a rifle shot. The colonel sprang forward, covering them with his revolvers, and took both of them prisoner.

Without many casualties in spite of machine-gun fire, our men reached the German trenches. Great heroism was shown by a young lieutenant and a party of bombers who went first over No Man’s Land so quickly behind our barrage that they risked death by our own shells and came against the first defence. The officer and several of this first wave were found lying wounded 400 yards further than the “jump-out” position, and it was their quick advance which scared the enemy and helped to demoralise him.

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One of the prisoners taken later was a forward observing officer, a Prussian giant well over six feet high and enormously stout, and he was put in charge of a little Kentish man standing five foot one in his socks. The German giant was very frightened at the machine-gun fire of his own people, which was whipping over the ground, and he went back crouching in a bear-like way, prodded from behind by the wee man in khaki. This sight, illuminated by the flares, was seen by the men left behind in our own trenches, and they stood up on their parapets laughing and cheering wildly.

But there were other trenches ahead, and the men “hared” off to these, and found them held by scared men. The Kentish men started bombing down the trench “like mad,” and blocked it at each end in case of accidents, while a young officer posted a machine-gun on the left of it.

The position, however, became quite obviously an untenable one, when the Germans rallied and attacked in bombing parties from the farm. Many of them were cut down by the young officer with his Lewis gun and by the Kentish grenadiers, but they brought up machine-guns and made the position “very hot.” A lance-corporal behaved very gallantly in going back 700 yards under heavy fire to report the situation, and volunteered to return with the message that the patrol could not be supported and must fall back in small groups. This he did, and returned again in safety with the other party, who brought with them three more prisoners “as samples” (to use their own phrase), including the huge officer whom I have described previously.

They have funny fellows among them—this British battalion—and the amount of comedy they extract from all this grim business is astounding. There is one of their number who was once a member of Fred Karno’s troupe, and has not lost his old instincts for a knock-about turn. When he took a prisoner he caught him by the hand and danced a “pas de quatre” with him.

“Offizier?” asked the astounded man.

“Oui, oui,” said the comic turn, “and you—prisonnier—savez?”

So much for the men of Kent, though I should like to tell more if I had the time to-night about their medical officer who tended all the wounded men of two companies and thirty wounded Germans in a subterranean dressing station (there was no comedy there), and more about their very fine and fearless colonel, and about the cheerful captain, whose adventures since the war began would fill a book as strange as the Memoirs of Marbot.

To-day other men were fighting in the same place, and I must tell at some later time the fine work of the Surrey and Sussex men.

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AUGUST 11

The enemy has made several attempts to regain the high ground taken from him to the north of Pozières, and yesterday evening, between the hours of five and seven o’clock, he sent out a strong body of infantry to attack our trenches. It was a curious, vain, and tragic endeavour, like several other counter-attacks launched at the command of the German staff by men recently brought up as support troops, knowing quite obviously nothing of the country in which they are called upon to fight, and just blundering out with a kind of desperate courage towards our lines. It was exactly thus last evening.

From the prisoners we took it is certain knowledge that these troops had no familiarity with this ground between Mouquet Farm and the Windmill, and when they were ordered to attack regarded themselves as sheep sent to the slaughter. They knew only that the Australians were in front of them, and from what they have heard of the Australians they did not have much hope.

What hope they had was in the guns behind them, and certainly, in spite of all the German guns we have knocked out by counter-battery work, and all those having had to shift their ground from day to day owing to our ceaseless searchings for their emplacements with the aid of our aerial scouts, the bombardment that preceded the German assault was intense and formidable.

The Australians “stuck it,” guessing what was to follow. In the trenches they have dug, and the shell craters, and the old German trenches which are now almost shapeless under our own and the enemy’s fire, they held on, and kept their bombs ready, and their machine-guns handy, and watchful eyes, wherever a man could see, upon a row of broken tree stumps appearing over the crest of the Pozières ridge beyond the Windmill.

Then, below the crest on the other side of the ridge—the German side—is Mouquet Farm, called “Moo-cow Farm” by men who will still jest, whatever the conditions of life. A small valley or gully runs behind the farm towards the quarries, and it was from this that the German soldiers came streaming out in open order when their guns lengthened range so that they could get forward without walking into their own barrage.

As it happened, they walked into our barrage. Our guns were waiting for them. At the end of a telephone wire was a gunner-general who does not keep people waiting very long when they are in need of his “heavies,” and many gunner officers were standing by their batteries ready to give the word “Fire!” with their guns and howitzers registered on the line across which the enemy’s troops would come as soon as they were ordered to attack.

In our lines the trench mortar batteries were making ready to hurl their high explosives, and the Lewis gunners were eager to get to work instead of standing under German shell-fire.

The enemy’s infantry came straggling forward in extended order, and in irregular waves. There were two battalions of them in the open—out in that 750 yards of No Man’s Land upon which the evening sun was shining with a golden haze—when our shells burst over them and the trench mortars made a target of them, and our machine-guns whipped into their ranks with a scourge of bullets.

The men fell face forward in large numbers. Others came on and fell further from their own lines. Men ran quickly, as though to escape from all the bursting shells into the Australian lines, flung up their arms, and lay still.

They were very brave. Quite a number of these German soldiers travelled a quarter of a mile over this open ground in spite of the terrific fire concentrated upon it before some bit of shell caught them and killed them, or left them lying there in agony.

No German soldier came through alive. Only a few men out of the two battalions escaped. Men were standing on the parapets of the German line, calling to them, calling them back, trying to save something out of this senseless slaughter that had been ordered.

The counter-attack was an utter failure, and one is left wondering why the enemy attempted such attacks, pre-destined to end in disaster. It is an expensive form of reconnaissance to test our strength.

The German soldiers would have a right to call it murder. It seems to show that the enemy’s Staff is disorganised, perhaps a little demoralised, by the continual bombardment which cuts their signal lines and prevents the sending up of supports and supplies.

The Australians are still fighting in a way which wins the admiration of their generals and Staff and of all the Army. These clean-cut men, so fine in physique and appearance that one always turns to look at them in any street of war, are not stolid fellows who can stand the test of shell-fire without suffering in spirit.

They are highly strung and sensitive, with a more nervous temperament than many of our English soldiers, but they have a pride and an heroic quality that keeps them steady, and an intelligence in the individual as well as in mass which makes them great soldiers.

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AUGUST 13

There have been no sensational advances since the great day of July 14, when our men broke through the second German line, but hardly a day passed since then without some progress being made to get a stronger grip on the high ridge which rolls down on the enemy’s side from Pozières and the two Bazentins and High Wood. This fighting has been very hard and grim, and the enemy has done his utmost to check every yard of our men’s advance by continual curtain-fire, so that to take a trench or two, or to rush over a few dozen yards of No Man’s Land, has been a perilous adventure.

It is most excellent, therefore, that last night our men were able to make a further “shove,” as they call it, of nearly 400 yards in depth on a front of about a mile. This was to the north-west of Pozières, and at the same time ground was gained on the north-west of Bazentin-le-Petit closer to the German switch-line between us and Martinpuich.

The men who have been fighting this uphill battle, for that is what it is literally and morally, have been showing remarkable qualities. It is an alliance between the Australians and old English regiments with new men in them, including some of the “Derby recruits.” Although the Australians have had the greater share of the fighting round Pozières, being in greater numbers, they are the first to pay a tribute to the spirit of the English lads, and their admiration is returned. An episode which happened a week ago shows the way in which they are sharing the struggle.

I have already written how the men of Kent went forward on August 4, and took the German line, under the command of that fine colonel and jovial captain, whose exploits will be remembered. On the right of them were the Sussex men—fair-haired fellows from Arundel and Burpham, and little old villages lying snug in the South Downs, and quiet old market towns like Chichester—Lord!—a world away from places like Pozières. The line of their trenches was in touch with the Australians, and as they scrambled over the parapets at the time of the attacks these comrades on the right shouted out to them,

“Hullo, boys, what’s up? Where are you going?”

“Oh, just up along,” said the Sussex lads, pointing to a “hotshop,” as they call it where a lot of shells were bursting.

“Is that so? You don’t say? Gosh! We’ll come with you.”

It wasn’t discipline. The men had no orders to go, as far as I can make out, but some of them certainly did go, in a friendly way, and joined in the “scrum” up there, where it was no joke.

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