Chapter VIII: Part 8

The story of the Sussex men is very much like that of their comrades from Kent which I have told in detail—the bombing down the trenches, the searching of the German dug-outs, the encounters with Germans who were hiding in shell-craters. But some of the episodes have a special character, worth telling.

They show the human nature of the business up there beyond Pozières. After the first rush through the German line it became a question of catching Germans in shell-holes, which are good places—or good enough—for snipers who prefer to go on killing before they die. A Sussex man who spoke some German took the risk of going out alone to one of these craters and shouted out to the men below:—

“If you don’t surrender at once we shall shoot you.”

Instantly several heads and several pairs of hands appeared.

One man came out with his hands full of gifts and, falling upon his knees, begged for mercy. He had cleared his pockets and his dug-out of little fancy articles like his watch, knife, compass, cigarette-case, scissors, silver soap-box and pipe-lighter, which he offered humbly as a ransom for his life.

It appeared later that he was in mortal terror of having his throat cut, and he was profoundly grateful when he was taken back to a dug-out and given some whisky and cigarettes. He then asked leave to tell his friends the glad tidings, and when this was allowed he went out with his guards and called to the other men. Immediately a number of them came out of their hiding-places and formed a procession with their hands up.

It was against the Sussex men that the Germans used their “flammenwerfer,” or flame-jets. It is a clumsy form of frightfulness, as I guessed when I first saw one of these machines. It takes two men to work it, one with the reservoir strapped to his back, the other pumping out the long spray of flame, which has a range of twenty-five yards. There were eight of these flame-throwers brought against the Sussex lads, but before they had done any damage the sixteen men who advanced with them were all shot down. It is not by “flammenwerfer” that the German counter-attacks have any chance of success.

9

The advance last night when the Australian troops took an important line of rising ground is a further proof that the enemy has not by any means consolidated his defensive positions so strongly that they make the same kind of barrier against us as those which had to be forced in the first attacks.

In spite of all his industry in digging he has not been able to make any system of trenches and dug-outs to withstand our shell-fire. As soon as he gets on with a trench our guns register upon it and lay it flat. His one protection is in artillery retaliation, and however great its destructive power it cannot give cover to the German infantry crouching in shallow ditches, and having to come up through communication trenches ploughed by high explosives.

They belong to battalions hurriedly gathered from other parts of the line and flung in to stop the gap. They are the victims of the general disorganisation of the divisions and the staffs which have suffered most heavily from our repeated attacks. Behind them, no doubt, the German Headquarters Staff is as cool and deliberate as ever, not allowing itself to be scared by these reverses, organising new lines of defence in case of need, shifting its guns, playing the old blood-and-iron game with cold, scientific brains that are not affected by the losses or the agonies of men, except as they have an influence upon the operations.

For they are highly-trained scientists of war, these German staff officers, and in defeat, as once in victory, they will, I fancy, be as cold and as hard as steel, and as inhuman as the devil. Therefore it is idle in my opinion to hope for a sudden and sensational collapse of the German war-machine, or to argue from local weaknesses and symptoms of bad staff work a general disorder.

Nevertheless, there are many signs that the enemy is beginning to feel a severe strain upon his defensive strength and that his men are being put to an ordeal which not even all their discipline and their courage can make endurable.

For men of a certain kind of science are apt to forget that there are other things in human nature besides the chemistry of flesh and blood, and that not even the finest soldiers can be made to fight well if their spirit is broken by repeated losses.

10

AUGUST 17

It is at the two ends of our recent line of attack—on the left above Pozières and on the right around Guillemont—that the interest of the present fighting for the moment gathers, and in both these districts some progress has been made by our infantry during the past day or two. The successful advance of the French, northwards from Hardecourt towards Angle Wood, and their capture of the ravine to the south-west of it helps to strengthen our lines about Guillemont, especially as some of our troops advancing from the trenches south of Malz Horn Farm, and west of Trones Wood, linked hands with our Allies yesterday.

I have already described in a previous despatch the great difficulty of working over the ground about Guillemont and the hard time some of our men have had in pushing forward to the outskirts of that town. The enemy has concentrated a large number of batteries in the country beyond, and near at hand is defending himself from many machine-gun emplacements and a maze of newly-dug trenches.

The operations yesterday in conjunction with the French are still in progress and the result at present is indecisive, but with both French and British troops closing upon them the situation of the garrison in Guillemont is not what soldiers would call “healthy.”

Yesterday morning I was more interested personally in the left side of the battle line above Pozières, as from an artillery observation post I was able to get a very clear view of our own and the enemy’s ground in this district—ground which has been won and held by English and Australian regiments with a determination and courage which I have described several times with some detail.

There before me on the sky-line was the windmill which should be as famous in the history of this war as the Ferryman’s House on the Yser Canal or the château at Vermelles, or the “Tower Bridge” at Loos. Waves of men have surged up the slope to it under storms of shell-fire. To Australians fighting for the high ridge on which it stands above Martinpuich it has been the goal of great endeavour, for which many of them have given their lives. The enemy defended it as if it were a great treasure house, though only an old building of timber and stone against which the wind of centuries has blown, turning the great black sails which ground the corn of the folk in Pozières before ever a howitzer had been fired in the world or a flying machine had come humming over the hill. The windmill is ours now. Our line sweeps round it and our shell-fire drops on the other side of the slope, barraging the enemy’s ways to and from Martinpuich.

But it is only the relic of a millhouse. The timbers have been blown to atoms weeks ago. The sails fell in the first bombardment, and all that stands now is the stone base in the form of a small pyramid as a memorial of great bloodshed.

11

The enemy yesterday was dropping a heavy barrage all along our line, which runs south of Mouquet Farm and sweeps below the village of Thiépval and its wood.

On the other side of Thiépval Wood the opposing lines run very close together, and here there was not much shell-fire, but on the Pozières side the shell-bursts and smoke-clouds were drifting up and down in a steady, regular way. Our own guns were busy with Mouquet Farm (called by our soldiers “Moo-cow” Farm, or “Muckie” Farm, according to their whim), and, further off, with Courcelette, whose tall factory chimney sticks up above the ridge, and now and again one of our heavies sent a great shell crashing into Thiépval.

There were no German soldiers to be seen in that village, and no sign of human life at all. It is a ghastly-looking place, with its stripped trees, like withered limbs, and a ruined church above a row of apple trees, which stand a little separate from the village.

Above is a cemetery with broken tomb-stones and shell-craters among its graves. Beyond, on a road running northwards, is a tall crucifix with the figure of Christ looking down upon all this death.

In the trenches no man puts his head above the parapet. Several times one of our machine-guns spluttered out a burst of fire as a warning to the enemy to keep well down. The only movement over this village and battlefield was made by shells which tore up the earth and sent drifting smoke clouds across the ruins.

The doom of Thiépval is creeping closer, for our men are advancing slowly but surely around Mouquet Farm, so that it will be hemmed in. The garrison hiding in the dug-outs below those broken buildings at which I gazed yesterday must be in a state of dreadful apprehension. I should not like to live in Thiépval.

12

AUGUST 20

It is quite impossible to understand the progress of our advance since July 1 without being familiar with the ground over which this has been made and the local conditions of the fighting on our present front.

In my despatches I have done my best to picture these things and to reveal the heroism of our men by describing, as realistically as one may without being too brutal to newspaper readers, the appalling difficulties they have to encounter. Even now many people wonder, I daresay, at the various pauses in the victorious progress of our troops, and look forward, day by day, to more smashing blows and greater strides over the enemy’s ground.

To me the wonder of this battle is that we should have got on so far and so fast. When one has seen the network of German trenches, their great systems of underground galleries—proof against the heaviest of high explosives—their machine-gun redoubts, against which, if even only one gun is left, it is sometimes difficult to advance, and the power of their artillery able to barrage a strip of ground which our men have to cross, it is astounding that our soldiers could have forced the enemy back from stronghold after stronghold and gained their way to the high positions of the Pozières ridge.

Take those men of ours who have won their way through a maze of trenches in this last bit of fighting between Pozières and Thiépval.

They had to force their way between machine-gun posts and scramble over ground which is like a billowy sea of earth with deep pits at the bottom of each billow, into which many of them stumbled and fell. Not good going for an attack!

Then they had to storm their way down to the enemy’s underground system of galleries, where large numbers of strong and unwounded Germans were waiting with stores of bombs and every kind of weapon.

It is true that many of these men surrender readily at the first rush of our troops, but if those dug-outs are not cleaned out at once, and if our men in their eagerness go on, it is quite likely, as it has often happened during the past six weeks, that the enemy will come up and attack them from the rear.

From one of these holes in the ground which seemed a simple little dug-out there came up, on Friday, as I have already said, six officers and over 150 men. I saw them all to-day, tall fellows with unstained uniforms and a well-fed, fresh, and healthy look.

One of the officers was quite a giant. He was wearing a steel casque of the German pattern which is very much like a mediæval helm, and he was laughing and joking with his brother officers as he marched at the head of his company. If these men had come up behind English assaulting parties who had not made sure of the dug-outs first they could have put up a very strong fight, and with one machine-gun might have done great damage.

In their underground galleries they had lived snugly and safe, sleeping on spring beds, reclining on upholstered chairs, in well-furnished rooms so much like those in the upper world that they had even false windows draped with lace curtains.

Our men have to fight below ground as well as above ground before they are in possession of an enemy position.

Above ground it is not good for a quick advance. Our guns have been bombarding so continuously that although the infantry depends utterly upon an effective artillery preparation, and not in vain, the effect of all this shell-fire impedes their progress when the time comes to cross No Man’s Land.

It is just a series of shell-craters like a wide stretch of those “trous-de-loup” which used to be dug in the old days of warfare behind the “glacis,” and have been revived again in this war, which has adopted every device known to fighting men from the time of Cain onwards.

13

When some of the Australians “went over” the other night this was their great cause of trouble. They rushed forward eagerly, and before they had gone fifty yards most of them had fallen into shell-holes deeper than their own height. It was pitch dark, except for the white light of the German flares rising and falling, and when they scrambled up the shelving sides of the craters they were black as ink in this illumination and horribly visible to the German bombers and machine-gunners, who made the most of their opportunity in the time at their disposal.

I stood by a man to-day who, since July 1, has been buried alive by shell-bursts upheaving the earth about him no fewer than six times.

He is a young Australian officer, now wounded in the back and leg, and he assured me that he did not mind this premature burial very much.

“There is mostly a little air to breathe—enough to keep one going for a few minutes—” he said, “but, of course, it’s unpleasant waiting to be dug-out, if one has the luck. Most fellows mind it very much. But it don’t affect me in that way.”

This is not an uncommon experience. There are a lot of men buried in an advance when, as the official despatch says, “We made good progress.” So that progress is not a soft job for soldiers. Then the German is beginning to leave a lot of little things behind him, even if he abandons a trench in a hurry. This is a new dodge. One invention which has come into his fertile imagination is a man trap, which he sets outside his parapet or inside a shell-hole on the way to it. As soon as one of our soldiers sets foot on to it it closes about his leg with a terrific bite and brings him down like a log.

Another little device in devilry is the “tortoise bomb.” It looks very much like a tortoise if you happen to see it—which you don’t, in the dark—and it stands on four little legs. They waggle a little, but should it be unwarily touched it may detonate the bomb and blow a man to bits.

There was some heroic fighting on Friday afternoon along a road which runs from High Wood to Delville Wood. The heroes of this fight were ordered to take this road with troops on their left and right, and in spite of the shell-holes on the way and heavy machine-gun fire sweeping down on them they took the trench all right, going even a little too far, in their eagerness.

Owing to casualties in officers, the sergeants had, in some cases, to carry on the command, and they did so with the calm courage of old soldiers. The German trench, battered by our gun-fire, was full of dead, and littered with rifles and equipment. A few of the enemy stayed and fought to the death, and others ran away. Three were dragged up out of a dug-out and made prisoners. All looked good, from a fighting point of view, in this section of the trench, and would have been good if the men on the left and right had been able to come up. But they were not able to do this, and presently from the right and left came parties of German bombers, hurling their grenades at our men, who hurled back until every one of their bombs was gone.

Then they grubbed about for German bombs, and used those until they could find no more. It was time to escape, and the way out was through a narrow sap which was also a death-trap if the enemy closed about it.

But the enemy did a strange thing. They came swarming up on both sides, and each side took the other for English soldiers, and, in the dusk, bombed each other furiously over the heads of our men, who slipped away, marvelling at their luck in ill-luck. They had five prisoners when they reached their own lines, for they were joined by two other men (in addition to the three from the dug-out), one of whom was a German hero—tired of heroism—wearing the Iron Cross and another decoration.

So the fighting goes on, and it is the grit of our troops, their splendid obstinacy, their refusal to be beaten by shell-fire or shell-holes, by machine-guns or tortoise bombs, by poison gas or tear shells, by Germans above ground or under ground, or dropping high explosives from the sky—“the whole blinking bag of tricks,” as they would call it, which keeps them going always a little bit further.

Unless one knows the cost of victory one cannot tell the greatness of the victors.

14

AUGUST 23

We are getting a stronger grip upon the ridge from Pozières to High Wood. Last night the Australians gained a little more ground, so that they have pushed out a line to the north-east of Mouquet Farm, and the Scottish troops to their right have gained another hundred yards of that famous switch-line into which I took a walk the day before yesterday to see how we held the enemy’s last line of defence on the way to Martinpuich.

The switch-line exists only as a name, and in reality is nothing but a series of shell-craters in which our men have to get what cover they can, after chasing out the Germans, before digging and strengthening an effective trench.

But it is the position that counts, and if we can hold it, as I am now certain we shall, it puts the enemy at a great disadvantage, of which our guns are already making a full and terrible use. The enemy’s endeavours to counter-attack—he made two last night—have broken down under our fire with great bloodshed, and now it is not in the least likely that he will succeed in wresting back from us any of the high ground.

The importance of the position is, of course, entirely one of observation, apart from the tactical importance of having driven the enemy on to ground beyond his first and second systems of trenches and dug-outs, so that he can get no strong cover until he retires to a considerable distance.

It gives us vantage points from which we can observe his movements down the slope, rake him with rifle and machine-gun fire if he sends out working parties, and turn the guns on to him with direct observation of results.

One of the immediate effects of being on the Pozières ridge was seen yesterday, when our artillery registered something like twenty-five direct hits upon some of the enemy’s batteries. He had a great concentration of guns.

Acting in connection with our aviators, who are always observing from high places, our gunners are punishing the enemy in a very frightful way, and the ground above Thiépval and Courcelette, into which I looked for the first time at close range from the switch trench, and Martinpuich, and the barren ground to the right of it, is swept by our shell-fire.

A very realistic and tragic picture of what is happening down there beyond the high ridge is given in a letter written on August 10 by a German officer of the 133rd Infantry Regiment:

“The relief yesterday,” he wrote, “is incredible. The route taken—Ligny—Warlencourt—Pys—Courcelette, on the way to the trenches was very dangerous. During the first part the thunder of the guns was very disagreeable, and the second part was very unsafe. Heavy shells fell right and left of the road. Mounted troops, cars, field kitchens, infantry in column of route, were all enveloped in an impenetrable cloud of dust.”

“The last stage consisted of troops in single file crouching on the slope beside the road, with shells bursting overhead. Close to Courcelette a message arrived: ‘Enemy firing gas-shells, on with your gas helmets.’ It appeared to be an error. From Courcelette to our position in the line we relieved across the open. If the enemy had only noticed that, what a target he would have had!”

“Our position was of course quite different to what we had been told. Our company alone relieved a whole battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men weakened by casualties. The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was, or if any of our troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our supposed position until 6 o’clock this evening.”

“To-night I am taking my platoon out to form a covering party. My men and I are to lie in shell holes in part of an old demolished trench of ours. The English are 400 metres away. The Windmill is over the hill. The hundreds of dead bodies make the air terrible, and there are flies in thousands. About 300 metres from us is a deserted artillery position. We shall have to look to it to-night not to get taken prisoners by the English. We have no dug-outs. We dig a hole in the side of a shell hole and lie and get rheumatism. We get nothing to eat or drink.... The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad. Many of the men are knocked up. The company commander thinks we were breathing gas yesterday, which slowly decomposes the blood, and this is an end of one. What a variety of ways one can lose one’s life in this place!... It is getting light. I must start on my way back to the front-line trenches.”

From another man in the 3rd battalion of the 124th Regiment there is a letter which pays a doleful tribute to our flying men.

“I am on sentry duty, and it is a very hard job, for I dare not move. Overhead are the English airmen and in front of us the English observers with telescopes, and as soon as they perceive anything, then twenty-four ‘cigars’ arrive at once, and larger than one cares to see—you understand what I mean. The country round me looks frightful. Many dead bodies belonging to both sides lie around.”

These letters give the other side of the pictures which I have been describing. They show what German life is like below the Pozières ridge.

We are drawing very close to Thiépval, and standing yesterday on the high ground to the right of the Windmill by Pozières, within 500 yards of Martinpuich, I could see how near our lines have been pushed to both these places. Thiépval I have seen several times from the western side, but yesterday I stood to the south-east of it looking straight across the cemetery of Pozières to the long line of branchless trees and broken roofs where the German garrison awaits its certain doom.

That doom crept a little nearer last evening when some of our English troops left their trenches south of the Leipzig Redoubt, which was already in our hands, and following in the wake of a terrific bombardment on a short line of the enemy’s position took that section quickly by assault. I saw the steady bombardment of the ground hereabouts which was continuous throughout the afternoon, but, by bad luck, having gone to another part of the line, did not see the attack which followed.

It was a highly organised and grim bit of work, very quickly done and with few casualties on our side. As soon as the guns had lifted, after concentrated fire which tore up the ground and made an utter chaos of the German line of trench, our men followed. They went over in two waves, at as rapid a pace as possible over the tumbled ground. Then they went through the broken strands of barbed wire, and by men watching them from a little distance were seen to drop down into the enemy’s trench.

After a little while—less than a minute—the result of the attack was seen by a number of German soldiers coming out of the shell-craters with their hands up. A little later a large group of soldiers ran out and tried to escape. They ran as though the devil were behind them, but there was a devilish fate in front of them, for they plunged straight into a heavy fire from our guns, and disappeared.

In less than a quarter of an hour the fight was over and men came plodding back along the way for “walking wounded,” and the Red Cross flag could be seen over there in the light of the setting sun.

The enemy must have suffered heavily. Our guns caught them during a relief, which means that there was a double garrison, resulting in a double number of killed, wounded, and prisoners. Worse still for them, it seems likely that on their way up to the lines many of them were caught in the heavy barrage we had for some time been flinging across their route.

Among the 200 prisoners taken there is an ex-waiter of the Savoy Hotel, who says that he is thoroughly sick of the war, like most of his comrades, and that Verdun, from which he has just come, is a heaven compared to the battlefields of Picardy.

Some time after our assault German troops were observed to be massing for a counter-attack behind the captured position, but these were immediately dispersed by our artillery, and no attack took place throughout last night.

The result of the operation is that we now hold a line straight above the Leipzig salient and striking across to our trenches south of Mouquet Farm, where the Australians made an attack yesterday to push further forward towards Thiépval.

15

The successful advance south of the Leipzig Redoubt was due mainly to the gallant work of some Territorial troops who attacked a maze of German trenches on Friday evening last, carried them by assault, and linked up with the redoubt itself, already in our hands immediately below Thiépval, getting a closer grip at the throat of the garrison there.

I have already told how the men captured the great dug-out and took nearly 600 prisoners. They were men of the Royal Warwicks, who did that great achievement with extraordinarily slight loss to themselves. One of the most thrilling episodes of the attack was when they were held up on the right by a German strong point, from which came a stream of machine-gun fire. The men lay down in front of it, and held on until our own Lewis guns could get to work. Four times a message came over the telephone asking whether the “heavies” should shell the place, but the colonel was afraid that his men would be hit, and refused the offer each time. Then suddenly, when it seemed impossible to stop that deadly squirt of bullets, the German machine-gun ceased fire and a white flag fluttered up.

The colonel of the Warwicks expected to see twenty men come out of that bomb-proof hiding-place. To his amazement there emerged six officers, and—not 150 men (as I think I said in my last despatch) but 242 unwounded Germans and six “stretcher cases.” There were many acts of great individual gallantry among the Warwicks, and all were splendid under the fine leadership of their officers. One sergeant jumped on to the parados of a German trench and kept a machine-gun team away from their weapon until our bombing party could arrive, thereby saving the lives of many Warwickshire lads and helping to secure victory.

Further along the trench a company officer, held up at a “bomb-stop” or barricade, called for a rifle and fired repeatedly with a cool aim at the German machine-gunners on the other side, with two men by him, who kept refilling his magazine, and bombers behind him hurling grenades over his shoulders.

16

Many of the Germans defended themselves stubbornly to the death. A sentry standing outside one of the dug-outs saw our men approaching, and, turning quickly, shouted down the word “England!” to his comrades below. One of the Warwicks who was closest to him hurled his last bomb at him, and then, seizing the man’s rifle, sprang on to the parapet ready to shoot the enemy as they came up. They came up in a swarm, with bombs, and there was a great conflict which ended only when the last German was dead.

In one dug-out there was in the midst of all this horror a comic episode, like that of a clown in tragedy. A curtain divided the dug-out, and a Warwickshire man thrust his bayonet through it. Suddenly the curtain was drawn on one side and a German soldier, yawning loudly and rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of one hand, stood there, as though to say “What’s up?” He had slept heavily through the bombardment and attack, and now when he saw the English soldiers facing him, believed he was dreaming.

So the Warwicks took 400 yards of trenches along a front of 600 yards and thrust the wedge closer to Thiépval. Meanwhile, in the centre of our line of attack, English and Scots and Australian troops had been fighting for the German switch-line beyond Bazentin-le-Petit, the newly dug trench which the enemy had made feverishly to defend the high ridge above Pozières, but could not hold. They were Scottish troops who took the trench opposite Martinpuich, so gaining at least part of the ground for which we have striven since July 1.

17

It is not long ago, as the calendar counts time, though a lifetime ago for many thousands of men who have fought along the road to Martinpuich, since that village with a queer name seemed as unattainable as any dream-city. No man of ours, except our flying men, had ever seen it, for it lies just below the Pozières ridge, and before the battle opened on July 1 the ridge itself was a high and distant barrier defended all the way by great strongholds like Fricourt and Mametz and Contalmaison, and by all those woods which could be captured, as every soldier knew, only by desperate fighting.

Now, after the greatest battle in British history—a series of battles, rather, in one great and continuous attack—we have gained that ridge above Pozières and the Windmill, and, pushing up to this German switch-line, look down the slopes beyond.

There, only 500 yards away across No Man’s Land, lies Martinpuich, as I saw it myself to-day from our front-line trench, surprised that one could see so close into its ruins. To my left as I stood out in the open, above the trenches, was the windmill for which the Australians have fought—the conical base of it being all that is left as a memorial of the heroism that gained this ground, and behind was Pozières, the desolate, shell-swept ruin which is linked also, for ever, with the memory of those boys from the Overseas Dominion who gave a treasure of life to take it.

The way to Martinpuich is truly “The Street of Adventure” for hundreds of thousands of our men who have fought their way over the ground about it since that first day of July which was the beginning of the great adventure.

When I went up it to-day, further than I have ever been before, and to our last post upon it, I passed all the places which will make chapter-headings in any history of the war—the scenes of all the big battles and of all the little desperate conflicts which have been fought along this wing from ditch to ditch, in every tiny copse, in every bit of broken woodland. It is a road of immortality. Alas! also of great death—as one sees all along the way—past Fricourt and Contalmaison, over ground dotted with new-made graves, where white wooden crosses stick up above the mounds of earth, everywhere. Amidst the torn tree-stumps, now very neat in all the upheaval of these fields flung into chaos by gun-fire, now clustering thickly about piles of broken brickwork which are still called by their old village-names are crosses—crosses and graves.

Many of those graves are the size of one man’s bed, but others are broad mounds into which many bodies have been laid, with taller crosses, to the remembrance of all of them, such as that “To the memory of the N.C.O.’s and men of the — Border Regiment who fell in action at this spot on the 1st of July, 1916.” Many of them are to unknown British soldiers who could not be identified, but whose names are on the long roll-call of honour.

18

On the road to Martinpuich we passed up by Lonely Copse—just a few “strafed” trees—and by Lozenge Wood and the Dingle and Birch Tree Wood, and Peake Wood, and Acid Drop Copse. Do you remember the names? Men fought ferociously to get these places, our artillery registered on them, and I saw them in the first days of July under tempests of shell-fire. Now they can be found only by a few charred sticks, a few black gibbets, standing above heaps of ashes and the bones and dust of men.

Contalmaison, the capital of the woodlands, is on higher ground, and is still the target of German bombardments, as it was our target when I saw it first. Most of its redbrick château was standing when I looked into its windows one day from an artillery O. Pip and saw one of its towers shot away by one of our 15-inch shells, as cleanly as one could cut a slice out of a cake. Now all that is left of the château is a broken wall or two, rose coloured except where the bricks are blackened by fire, standing in the midst of great shell-craters and solid waves of earth and ash-coloured tree-trunks all hurled about.

A devilish place is Contalmaison now, and when I walked through it yesterday the foul horror of it reeked about me. In the night the Germans had flung thousands of gas-shells into it, and the stench was still prowling about, stealing out of crannies and shell-holes with faint, sickly whiffs as though from rotten eggs. And the smell of corruption came up from all the litter of battle lying there....

We went beyond Contalmaison, and were glad to leave it, for the enemy’s shells were bursting over it, and round by Bazentin-le-Petit Wood, thinned out by successive storms of shell-fire to the mere ghost of a wood, with the light striking through its leprous-looking trunks, where many unburied dead lie among the broken trenches. The ground rose gradually past Contalmaison Villa, which stood far beyond the village itself, as the country house of some French gentleman who will never see it again except in dust and ashes, and here we were out in the centre of the battleground, where our men are now fighting between the windmill of Pozières and High Wood, on the farthest line of our advance.

The battle was going on, as it goes on all through the days and nights, with never-ceasing gun-fire. The infernal tumult of it was all around us, and death was everywhere for any man whose luck had run out. Lord God in heaven! If a man had any kind of prayer in his soul, or any special form of curse for those who made this war, his lips should mutter it in a place like this.

19

It was into the famous switch trench which has been the goal of great endeavour since July 14, when our troops broke the German second line, that we went through other trenches after the long walk in the open, and looked at last into Martinpuich, first below the high ridge. Merely to see it was the supreme proof of the greatest achievement in arms ever done by British soldiers. To get as far as this, to capture the high ground where we now stood, behind earth and sandbags, looking down into the valley beyond, our men have stormed many strongholds, fought through all the ghastly woodlands from Fricourt and Bazentin and High Wood, and many have fallen all along the road to Martinpuich.

The village itself is just like any of all those ruins which have been smashed to bits in this poor France. There was no sign of human life there among the broken buildings. But there was human life, though I could not see it, in the 500 yards of No Man’s Land between our first line and the village.

In the deep shell-craters here, as thick as holes in a sieve, there are still some German soldiers living. They have no kind of trench, for there is nothing but open ground before us for 1,000 yards, now that we have taken the German switch-line, but in these holes they hide themselves at night and snipe our men by day. They are fellows who have been sent out to hold the ground as much as possible before they are dead or captured, and their officers never expect to see them again. When our guns barrage this stretch of barren land they can be seen hopping from one shell-hole to another, and it is then the turn of our snipers. They brought down thirty-five the first day, after taking the switch-line, and about as many two days ago.

More valuable than a German prisoner—for what’s the value in this war of one man’s life?—was the German machine-gun brought in a day or two ago from the ground outside Martinpuich, where it lay half-buried, but so undamaged that it is now used against the enemy with his own cartridge belts. Other queer things have been brought back. Two days after the capture of the switch-line our soldiers saw two men waving out there in No Man’s Land, and getting their glasses on to them saw that they were wounded Englishmen. A party of Scots crawled out and brought them in, as during the same day they had carried back a number of German wounded lying about in the shell-holes close to our own line.

The real wonder of our men is only to be seen in such places as this. On these battlefields, under shell-fire, they were working as calmly as though they were building sand castles on the English seaside. Behind them lay many of their dead.

I could track my way by the blood that splashed the walls of the trenches, to the place where an amateur medico patches up the bodies of broken men in a hole in the ground.

20

The ground over which I walked with a young Scottish officer—who has no emotion at all about such things because since he went first into Loos he has lived cheek by jowl with death so that any fear he may have had is killed by habit—was nothing but one great stretch of shell-craters. There was not one yard of ground into which a shell had not fallen, over thousands of yards. Some of them were small shells making small craters, others were heavy shells which had made enormous pits, and the rim of one crater met the rim of another, or mingled. And, as we walked, the sky above our heads was filled with shells continuing this work, flinging up the earth again into new hills and hollows.

From our own batteries far away behind us there came a steady bombardment of the German ground just beyond us, and the shells passed overhead with that indescribable sound which is half a scream and half a sigh, enormous in the volume of its noise. But those sounds were comforting compared with others, which were coming overhead. They were coming from the enemy’s side with a savage overwhelming roar, which ended in a rending explosion.

“Eight inch,” said the young Scot by my side. “Heavy stuff.”

It is surprising what effect an eight-inch shell can have in the way of upheaval. But one’s sensation is not that of surprise when fifty yards away, or less, a mass of field is suddenly lifted skyward and a smoke-cloud as large as a cathedral stands there strangely solid in the wind. The whole field of battle about us was vomiting up these things, and it was damnable.

XXIII

THE GERMANS’ SIDE OF THE SOMME

1

AUGUST 9

I have not been across to the enemy’s side of the line (except when it has been broken by our guns and men), and I have no intention of following the example of a friend of mine who deliberately tried to get across to them in search of information. But now and again it is possible to get a mental glimpse of how the enemy lives and works and thinks behind the barbed wire and the ditches and the machine-gun redoubts which make up his defensive system.

I mean the enemy’s fighting men, and not all those people in Germany who starve on false promises and grow sick with hope deferred, and count up the number of their dead, and still say, with a resolute pride, “At least—we cannot be beaten.”

From talks with prisoners, and explorations of German dug-outs, and the reading of captured documents, and many days spent (before the battles of the Somme) in our own trenches from which through a loophole or a tuft of grass I have looked over to the German lines and seen, not often, but several times, German soldiers moving about in working parties, and German infantry marching down a hillside over 2,000 yards away, I have been able to conjure up a fair answer to questions which have often come into my head: “What are the fellows doing over the way? What are they thinking about and talking about? What does it look like behind their lines? And how do their methods and their moral differ from our own?”

Since the beginning of our attack on July 1 I have gained some later information about those things, and it seems to me interesting to put down a few of the facts, so that people at home may know more about the enemy than they seem to know.

2

There is no doubt at all that as a fighting man the German knows his business thoroughly, and performs it with great skill, courage, and discipline. He has had the advantage of us in an enormous reserve of highly-trained officers and non-commissioned officers, and although the advantage is rapidly disappearing, because after two years of war we are getting large numbers of the same class of men and he is losing and has lost a great mass of them by death and wounds, he still has, I imagine, more than enough for his needs.

Now, and to the end of the war (for he is careful to keep his best brains out of danger), he can call upon a great store of professional and scientific knowledge to direct the machinery of this business of destruction and defence, and to organise the lives of his machine-made men.

In minute detail of organisation, and in a driving industry behind it, the German High Command is masterly, and there is not a soldier in the Kaiser’s armies who is not well-equipped (down to the “housewife” full of pins and needles, cotton, buttons, and thread, which he carries in his pouch) and well-fed, unless our guns do not permit his supplies to come up.

Enormous attention is paid to the moral of the men, by organising concerts, religious services, and beer-parties behind the lines, so that they shall be kept cheerful until they die, and the news of the world, as we all know, is specially edited for them with that point of view in mind.

But the German High Command is careful of the lives of its men until the day comes when they have to be flung ruthlessly forward, in wave after wave, against the guns of the Allies.

Again and again I have described the spaciousness and the depth and comfort of the German dug-outs. That is part of the system of life-saving, and the divisional commanders set their men to work and keep them at work in a way which our men would call slave-driving.

I have described those at Montauban and Fricourt as I saw them immediately after their capture, and after the bombardment which crumpled up all the trenches about them, but left them, for the most part, solid and untouched.

3

At Ovillers they are even more elaborate, some of them having six or eight rooms communicating with each other, and two separate storeys—rooms as large as fifteen feet by thirty feet, furnished with spring beds, carpets, washing arrangements with water laid on, electric light, tapestries to keep out the draughts, and other luxuries. One of the dug-outs at Ovillers has nine entrances, with beds for 110 men, thirty feet below the surface, and with a cook-house containing three big boilers.

But it is not only in the trenches and in places like Ovillers that the Germans dig so industriously. Far behind their lines, wherever our long-range guns can reach them, they have these elaborate subterranean shelters, deeper and stronger than most of ours, and with much greater accommodation. It means incessant work in addition to all the work which keeps our own soldiers busy night and day.

But it is work that saves life, and the Germans do not begrudge it, and have no special pride in taking risks. That is good generalship and good soldiering. But it does not save them. Some of our officers are apt to imagine—I confess it was in my own imagination for a time—that the German was so snug in these burrows of his that our bombardments in normal times without infantry attacks to follow, did not cause him many casualties.

The truth is that continuous artillery fire, such as ours has been, is frightfully destructive of human life, and that no amount of digging will safeguard it. Transports must move along the roads. Men must go up communication trenches. Working parties must come out into the open.

During all the month that our artillery has been increasing its weight of metal and the number of rounds fired, the Germans, therefore, have been suffering great losses, and the strain upon the nerves and moral of the men has been severe.

This is certain not only from the statements of German soldiers brought into our lines, but from new instructions issued as late as July 16, which refer to the treatment of the great numbers of wounded, and the terrible conditions of the present fighting. Significant sentences reveal the truth of things behind the German lines, and again the organising minds which try to better them, as far as possible:

“As the circumstances of the present fighting do not as a rule permit of a dressing station being established near the fighting troops, the wounded must at any rate be taken to places which are easy to find, easy to describe, and easy to recognise.”

“Companies must inform battalions, and battalions regiments, where the wounded are to be found, and how many there are to remove.”

“They can as a rule only be moved at night. The stretcher-bearers who come to fetch them generally waste a good deal of time in searching for the wounded, and sometimes do not find them if they are not assisted by the unit which has been engaged.”

“The nights are short for carrying out these large evacuations.”

“I have already reminded units that troops which are relieved should carry their wounded with them.” That reveals a tragic picture of the enemy’s losses. It is emphasised again that many of the wounded are not found, and suggestions are made that pieces of canvas dipped in luminous paint might be used to indicate the whereabouts of the wounded, or white canvas cut into the form of a cross.

The German mind is busy with the problem of its dead also. The enemy goes to great risk and trouble to remove the dead from the fields because the living men who follow are disheartened and terrified by the sight of so many corpses on their way.

Search parties are sent out under shell-fire to collect them, even though many of the searchers may join the dead, and the bodies are put into mortuary chambers like one found by us the other day at Pozières.

It was filled with dead bodies waiting to be taken away on a light railway which runs up to the place, but the enemy’s artillery fired upon this mortuary and set it on fire, as though they were more jealous of their dead than of the living who were our prisoners.

4

I have said that they keep their best brains out of danger. This is true, even when the brains are second-best. It is very seldom that any officer over the rank of a captain is found in the front-line trenches, and officers of higher rank remain well in the background. Lately, during our attack, orders have been given that officers and N.C.O.’s commanding companies and platoons should visit their trenches at night “so that the men may see or hear their commanders.” It is all very naive, and reveals that curious lack of humour which characterises the German war-lord.

“The men,” say these instructions, “should be instructed as to the whereabouts of their commanding officer, and know where to go if they feel that they require inspiring with courage. To stimulate courage and to foster the feeling of confidence and the spirit of resistance these should be the first duties of an officer in the front line, at all events in the present circumstances. Courage rather than tactful theory is the essence of a true leader.”

To give their men courage, in hours when these German soldiers, who are brave men, might well give way to terror, the German chemists have manufactured tabloids which drug them with a kind of frenzy. There is no doubt of this, which sometimes I have doubted, because many of these drugs were found by a friend of mine—the medical officer of the Kentish men who helped to take the trenches north of Pozières a few days ago.

They contained ether and opium in sufficient quantity to intoxicate the strongest man. In the German opinion it is good stuff before a counter-attack.

German organisation is remarkably good. It does not neglect the spiritual or the physical side of their soldiers. It provides them with song-books and prayer-books as well as with food and drink.

It has never revealed a shortage of shells. Its gunners are full of science and wonderfully quick to get on to their targets when the infantry calls for help by sending up signals of distress.

In all the mechanics of war and in the fine art of keeping up the pride of men the German war lords and high officers show real genius. But they cannot bring dead men to life nor hide the agonies of all their wounded, nor blink the fact that British troops have broken their second line, and hammered them with terrific blows and reached out far with long-range guns to destroy them behind their lines.

They live in many ruins as bad as Ypres—French ruins, alas!—and I know that, on the eve of our great attack, all instructions were prepared for a general retreat, with every detail ready in case our troops should break through on a wide front.

That is a confusion of deep apprehension. It shows that they are envisaging defeat and preparing for it—wisely enough—in case of need. It is a state of mind not expressed in an Order of the Day issued by the German Emperor a few days ago and found on a German officer captured to the north of Pozières:

“To the leaders of the troops of the First Army,” says the Kaiser, “I express from the bottom of my heart my deep appreciation and my Imperial gratitude for the splendid achievement in warding off the Anglo-French mass attacks of the 30th of July. They have accomplished with German faithfulness what I and their country expected from them.”

“God help them further.”