Chapter IX: Part 9

(Signed) “Wilhelm I.R.”

Since then the ground to the north of Pozières has been captured, and to-day there has been fierce fighting and further progress made by British troops towards Guillemont. God has not helped them it seems.

Behind the German lines, in spite of the Kaiser’s gratitude for the courage of his troops—a courage which we must not belittle, for it is great—men are thinking gloomily and wondering when all the agony of this great war, which holds no victory for Germany, will have an ending, after all their blood and all their tears.

XXIV

THE ATTACK ON THIÉPVAL

1

AUGUST 25

The doom of Thiépval is near at hand. By a series of small, sharp attacks, in short rushes, after enormous shell-fire, our troops have forged their way across a tangled web of trenches and redoubts until now they are just below the row of apple trees which still show a broken stump or two below the southern end of the village. They have bitten off the nose of the Leipzig salient, and yesterday I saw them take the Hindenburg trench and its strong point, which is almost the last of the defensive works barring our way to the south entrance of the village fortress.

On the west our trenches have been dug for some time through Thiépval Wood, within four hundred yards of this place, and on the east they have been pushed forward to the left of Mouquet Farm; so that we have thrown a lasso, as it were, around the stronghold on the hill, from which its garrison has only one way of escape—by way of the Crucifix, northwards, where our guns will get them. That garrison is in a death-trap. The German soldiers in Thiépval must be praying for the end to come.

As I stood watching the place yesterday, from a trench only a few hundred yards away, it seemed to me astounding and terrible that men should still be living there. I could see nothing of the village for there is next to nothing left of it—nothing at all but heaps of rubbish which were once the roofs and walls of houses. But on the sky-line at the top of a ridge which slopes up from the Leipzig salient there still stand a hundred trees or so, which are all that is left of Thiépval. They stood black and gaunt against the blue sky, without a leaf on their broken branches, and all charred. The brown hummocks of the German trench-lines encircled them, with narrow strips of grass, vividly green, between these earthworks and below, falling away to our own lines, a turmoil of upheaved soil where a maze of trenches had been made shapeless by incessant shell-fire.

All through the afternoon, as all through the morning, and the mornings and afternoons of many yesterdays, our guns were firing in a steady, leisurely way, one shell every minute or two, at the ground marked out by the black tree-stumps. They were mostly the shells of our “heavies” firing from long range, so that for several seconds one could hear the long voyage of each shell, listen to the last fierce rush of it over our heads, and then see, before the roar of the explosion, a vast volume of smoke and earth vomit up from the place between the trees, or just below, the line of trees where the enemy’s trenches lay.

A friend of mine, sitting on some sandbags with his steel helmet just below the tops of some tall thistles which gave friendly cover in our fore-ground above the parapet, said “Beautiful!” every time there was a specially big cloud-burst. He is such a hater of war that his soul follows each shell of ours with a kind of exultation so that it shall help to end it quickly. But I kept thinking of the fellows below there, under that shell-fire.

It was only previous knowledge, explorations in German dug-outs, talks with men who have come living out of such bombardments, that made me still believe that there were men alive in Thiépval, and that before we take the place they may fight desperately and keep machine-guns going to the last. There was not a human soul to be seen, and the earth was being flung up in masses; but underground a garrison of German soldiers was sitting in deep cellars, trying to turn deaf ears to the crashes above them, trying to hide the terror in their souls, a terror invading all their courage icily, and looking into the little mirrors of long periscopes which showed them the vision of things above ground, and the stillness of the British trenches, from which at any minute there might come waves of men on a new attack.

2

With a few others in the trench where I stood I knew that our men were to make another bound yesterday afternoon, though not the exact time of it. For nearly two hours I watched the bombardment, steady and continuous, but not an intense fire from all available batteries, and every few minutes I looked at my wrist-watch and wondered “Will it begin now?” Down below me was the hummocky track of our front-line trenches, in which the attacking parties had assembled. Only now and again could I see any movement there.

In our own trench some signallers were carrying down a new wire, whistling as they worked. A forward observing officer was watching the shell-bursts through a telescope resting on the parapet and giving messages to a telephone operator who sat hunched at the bottom of the trench with his instrument. A couple of young officers came along jauntily, swearing because “these silly asses”—whoever they might be—“never tell you where they are.” An artillery officer came along for a chat, and remarked that it was a fine day for a football match.

3

It was a day when the beauty of France is like a song in one’s heart, a day of fleecy clouds in the blue sky, of golden sunlight flooding broad fields behind the battle lines, where the wheatsheaves are stacked in neat lines by old men and women, who do their sons’ work, and of deep, cool shadows under the wavy foliage of the woodlands.

Behind us was a ruined village, and German shells were falling into the corner of a wood not far away to our left, but the panorama of the French countryside beyond the edge of the battlefield was full of peace. Above our heads some British aeroplanes came flying, and the hum of their engines was like big bees buzzing. They flew straight over the German lines, and presently the sky about them was dotted with white puffs of shrapnel, and above the noise of the guns there was the high “ping!” of the German “Archies,” as each shell reached up to those soaring wings, but failed to bring them down.

Another officer came along the trench and said “Good afternoon! The show begins in ten minutes.”

The “show” is the name soldiers give to a battle.

By my watch it was longer than ten minutes before the “show” began. The leisurely bombardment continued in the same way. Now and again a German “crump” replied, like an elaborate German guttural. Then suddenly, as though at the tap of a baton, a great orchestra of death crashed out. It is absurd to describe it. No words have been made for a modern bombardment of this intensity. One can only give a feeble, inaccurate notion of what one big shell sounds like.

When hundreds of heavy guns are firing upon one small line of ground and shells of the greatest size are rushing through the sky in flocks, and bursting in masses, all description is futile. I can only say that the whole sky was resonant with waves of noise that were long-drawn, like the deep notes of violins, gigantic and terrible in their power of sound, and that each vibration ended at last in a thunderous crash. Or again it seemed as though the stars had fallen out of the sky and were rushing down to Thiépval.

The violence of this bombardment was as frightful as anything I have seen in this war in the way of destructive gun-power. The shells tore up the German trenches and built up a great wall of smoke along the crest of the ridge, and smashed through the trees of Thiépval, until for minutes together that place was only to be known by tall pillars of black, and white, and brown smoke, which swayed about as though in a great wind, and toppled down upon each other, and rose again.

4

A voice at my elbow, speaking breathlessly, said: “Look! They’re away.... Oh, splendid fellows!”

Out of our front line trenches scrambled long lines of men. They stood for a moment on the top of the parapet, waited for a second or two until all the men had got up into their alignment, and then started forward, steadily and in wonderful order. Some of the officers turned round, as though to see that all their men were there. I saw one of them raise his stick, and point towards the ridge. Then he ran ahead of his men. They were on low ground—lowest on the right, in front of the parapet where I stood, but sloping up a little on the left by the Leipzig redoubt. Beyond them the ground rose steadily to the ridge on which Thiépval stands. Our men had a big climb to make, and a long way to go over open country, for four or five hundred yards is the very devil of a way to go when it is swept with shell fire.

The enemy was not long in flinging a barrage in the way of our men. A rocket went up from his lines as a signal to his guns, and perhaps half a minute after our men had sprang over the parapet his shells began to fall. But they were too late to do any damage there. Our men were out and away. Some message seemed to reach the enemy and tell him this. He raised his barrage on to ground nearer to his own lines, and his heavy crumps fell rapidly, bursting all over No Man’s Land. Now and again they seemed to fall right into the middle of a bunch of our men, in a way frightful to see, but when the smoke cleared the group was still going forward. On the right of the line one great shell burst with an enormous crash, and this time there was no doubt that it had caught some of our men. I saw them fall in a heap.... Perhaps they had flung themselves down to avoid the shell splinters. Perhaps not one of them had been touched. It is extraordinary how men can avoid death like that.

Nothing checked the advance of the long lines of figures going through the smoke; not all the German barrage, which was now very fierce. The men had to cross one of those narrow strips of grass land between the earthworks before they came to the first line of German trenches, and they showed up black and distinct against this green belt whenever the smoke of the shells bursting above them drifted away.

They were not in close formation. They went forward after the first few moments of advance, in small parties, widely scattered, but keeping the same direction. Sometimes the parties themselves broke up and separated into individual figures, jumping over shell-craters, running first to left or right as the shriek of an enemy shell warned them of approaching death. I saw then how easy it is to lose all sense of direction in an attack like this, and the reason why men sometimes go so hopelessly astray. But yesterday it was quite marvellous how quickly the men recovered their line when they had drifted away in the blinding smoke, and how the groups kept in touch with each other, and how separate figures, running to catch up, succeeded in joining the groups.

5

We watched the single figures, following the fortunes of each man across the fire-swept slope, hoping with all our souls that he would get through and on. Then he would pick himself up when he fell face forward.

For a little while the men were swallowed up in smoke. I could see nothing of them, and I had a horrible feeling this time none of us would ever see them again. For they had walked straight into the infernal fires, and all behind them and all in front the shells were bursting and flinging up the earth and raising enormous, fantastic clouds.

It seemed an hour before I saw them again. I suppose it was only five or six minutes. The wind drifted the smoke away from the Thiépval ridge, and there, clear and distinct to the naked eye, were the lines of our men swarming up. Some of them were already on the highest ground, standing, single figures, black against the sky. They stood there a second or two, then jumped down and disappeared. They were in the German trenches, close to Thiépval.

“Magnificent!” said a French officer who was standing close to me. “By God! your men are fine!”

They were wonderful. The German barrages did not stop them. They went through and on as though proof against shells. Some men did not go on, and fell on the side of the slope, but it seemed to me there were not many of them.

In the centre of the German trenches was a strong point or redoubt, with machine-guns. It was one of those deadly places that have often checked one of our attacks, and cost many brave lives. But I could see that our men were all round it. One single figure was an heroic silhouette against the blue of the sky. He was bombing the redoubt, and as he flung his bombs the attitude of the man was full of grace like a Greek disc-thrower. A German shell burst close to him and he was engulfed in its upheaval, but whether he was killed or not I could not tell. I did not see him again.

6

Up the slope went the other men, following the first wave, and single fellows hurrying after them. In a little while they had all disappeared. They were in the enemy’s trenches, beyond all doubt.

New sounds of an explosive kind came through all the fury of gun-fire, which had slackened in intensity, but was still slashing the air. It was a kind of hard knocking in separate strokes, and I knew it was bomb-fire. Our men were at work in and about the German dug-outs, and there were Germans there who were not surrendering without a fight.

One fight took place on the top of the parapet. A man came up and stood on the sky-line—whether an English soldier or a German it was impossible to see. I think a German, for a second after another man came up as though chasing him, and the first man turned upon him. They both had revolvers and fired, and disappeared. Other men were running along the parapets of the German trenches. They were ours, and they were flinging bombs as they ran. Then a curtain of smoke was wafted in front of them again, and they were hidden.

From our own trenches another wave of men appeared. I think it wanted more courage of them even than of the first line of assaulting troops to go out over that open ground. They had to face the German barrage and to pass over a way where many of their comrades were lying. But they went on steadily and rapidly, just as the others had gone, splitting up into groups, running in short rushes, disappearing in the smoke of shell-bursts, falling into shell-craters, scrambling up, and on again....

Another wave came still later, making their way to that ridge where their comrades were fighting in the enemy’s trenches. They, too, disappeared into those ditches.

Only in the ground near to me could I see any sign of life now. Here some of our wounded were walking back, and the stretcher-bearers were at work. I watched a little procession coming very slowly to our trenches with their stretchers lifted high. It was a perilous way of escape for wounded when the enemy was flinging shells all over the ground and there was no safety zone. Somewhere on our right a shell had struck a bomb-store or an ammunition dump and a volume of smoke, reddish-brown, rose and spread into the shape of a gigantic query mark. Other fires were burning in what had been No Man’s Land, and out of an explosion in the enemy’s trenches there was flung up a black vomit in which were human beings, or fragments of them. Over the ridge by Thiépval the enemy’s barrage was continuous on the far side of the slope between our trenches on the west and the ground just gained, and the top of the smoke-clouds drifted above the sky-line as though from a row of factory chimneys.

7

Suddenly out of all this curtain of smoke came a crowd of figures, leaping and running. They were Germans trying to get to our trenches, not in a counter-attack, but to give themselves up as prisoners, and to get some cover from their own shell-fire. Terror was in their attitudes, in their wild stampede and desperate leaps over the broken ground where the shells of their own guns were bursting. One great German crump crashed close to them, and I think it must have killed some of them.

Then for more than an hour as I watched other figures came back from the high ground towards our old front line, sometimes in groups of two or three, sometimes alone. They were our lightly wounded men, with here and there a German.

It was with a sense of horrible fascination that I watched the adventures of these men, separately. One of them would jump down from the sky-line, and come at a quick run down the slope. Then suddenly he would stop and stand in an indecisive way as though wondering what route to take to avoid the clusters of shell-bursts spurting up below him. He would decide sometimes on a circuitous route, and start running again in a zig-zag way, altering his direction sharply when a shell crashed close to him.

I could see that he was out of breath. He would halt and stand as though listening to the tumult about him, then come on very slowly. I wanted to call out to him, to shout, “This way, old man!... Quick!” But no voice would have carried through that world in uproar. Then perhaps he would stumble, and fall, and lie as though dead. But presently I would see him crawl on his hands and knees, stand up and run again. He would reach our line of trenches and jump down, or fling himself down. Some cover at last, thank God! So it happened with man after man, and each journey was the adventure of a man trying to dodge death. It was horrible to see.

High above the Thiépval ridge there were perpendicular streaks of white smoke and light, strangely spectral, like tall thin ghosts wrapped in white shrouds and illumined in a ghastly way. I think they were the long tails of rockets fired as signals to the guns. The German black shrapnel and their green “universal” shell was hanging in big puffs above the denser pall below, and there was the glint and flash of bursting shells stabbing through the wall of smoke.

Our aeroplanes were right over Thiépval all through the battle, circling round in wide steady flights, careless of the German anti-aircraft guns, which were firing continuously. Two hostile planes came out and our men closed about them, and flew to attack, but after a little while the Germans fled back in retreat. The only observation the enemy had was from two kite balloons, poised well forward, but often lost and blinded in all the clouds.

So I watched, and knew, because our men did not come back from those trenches on the Thiépval ridge, that they had been successful. It was only the prisoners and the lightly wounded who came back. The assaulting parties were holding the ground they had captured in spite of all the shell-fire that crashed over them. They had tightened the iron net round Thiépval, and drawn it closer.

So at last I went away from the battlefield, back to the quiet harvest fields flooded with the golden glow of the sinking sun, luckier than the men who had to stay, and ashamed of my luck. The enemy was flinging shells at long range. The harvest fields were not quite so safe as they looked.

There were ugly corners to pass, shell-trap corners, where it is not wise to linger to light a cigarette. But hell was behind me, up there at Thiépval, where the storm of shell-fire still raged, and where, below ground, the German garrison awaits its inevitable fate.

8

AUGUST 26

Following the official communiqué, I can now say that the troops whom I saw advancing so splendidly and steadily across a great stretch of No Man’s Land to the higher ground round Thiépval were men of Wiltshire and Worcestershire. They deserve the honour that has been given them by Sir Douglas Haig in his report, because after their great assault they had to sustain last night a strong attack by Prussian Guardsmen, following a long and fierce bombardment. The courage of these English lads—among them being boys who once followed the plough and worked in the orchards of those quiet old counties—did not fail against the finest troops of the Kaiser’s armies, and that phrase in the official communiqué which records their achievement is a fine memorial:

“The success of our defences is largely due to the steadiness and determined gallantry of Wiltshire and Worcestershire men, who, in spite of being subjected to a very heavy bombardment, steadily maintained their positions, and repulsed the determined assault of the enemy.”

It seems to me probable that the enemy will make a big effort to check our continued advance along the ridge from Thiépval to High Wood, and especially to rescue Thiépval itself from its impending fate. The position our troops have gained by two months’ fighting of the most heroic kind has put the enemy at a great disadvantage from the point of view of artillery observation, which is all important in modern warfare.

On the ground in front of us now, beyond the Windmill, and the switch-line, the German battalions are in an untenable position if our attack is pressed on, until they fall back upon what is known as the Flers line, more than 2,000 yards behind Martinpuich and High Wood, and meanwhile their present line of defence is open to our bombardments, so that the enemy’s casualties must be very heavy and, as we know, the moral of their men in these shell-craters and ruins is badly shaken.

It is obvious that the German Headquarters Staff realises the gravity of the position, and is endeavouring to organise a method of defence by attack, which will stop or check the British advance. They are probably too shrewd to believe that this can be done by bringing up fresh troops to replace those who have been worn out, and stand with shattered nerves beyond the British lines.

Fresh troops or old troops are food for our guns, greedy for them. It is only by guns that the enemy can fight against guns, and he is drifting down batteries into a great concentration for the defence of Thiépval.

It will be the greatest duel of artillery ever seen on the British front, for as I have seen myself the sweep and fury of our own shell-fire in the neighbourhood reaches the most astounding intensity. Meanwhile we have in this sector, beyond any shadow of doubt or exaggeration, the mastery of the air, and that is of supreme advantage to our gunners, and to the infantry who are supported by them.

So far our progress has not been brought to a dead halt, and we have made further ground yesterday, by wonderfully fine fighting on the part of English and Scots battalions, to the north and east of Belville Wood. Our hurricane bombardment preceding the attack of these troops was countered by a heavy barrage from the enemy, but our men went forward with an unflinching spirit to a line striking across the Flers-Longueval road, and joining on the left—by a curved salient—our old position south-west of High Wood.

The hardest part of the fighting was on the left of the attack, where there was a great deal of machine-gun fire, but the enemy’s trenches were carried and prisoners were taken to the number of ten officers and 214 other ranks. Several machine-guns also were brought back after being captured by hand-to-hand fighting at the strong points.

9

AUGUST 28

I have already described my own visual impressions of the great assault made south of Thiépval by men of Wiltshire and Worcestershire, which I watched from a neighbouring trench. But there are still things to be told about this memorable achievement—as fine in its way as anything our men have done. The name of Wiltshire will always be specially remembered on the ground of the Leipzig salient, which barred the southern way to Thiépval, for they were troops of this county who, as far back as July 8, captured the butt-end of that stronghold, and, working with other county troops on their right, made the next advance, on August 22, which preceded the greater attack two days later.

That affair of August 22 was extraordinary fine and brief and successful. Twelve minutes after the attacking time, the Wilts men had gone across the one hundred yards of No Man’s Land, captured the enemy’s nearest line of trenches, and sent down their first batch of twenty prisoners.

The Wiltshires had only three casualties in getting across the open ground, though they afterwards suffered more under the enemy’s shell-fire. Most of the German dug-outs were blown in, but there was one big subterranean chamber which was not badly damaged, and wanted only a little work to make it a place of comfort for the new-comers. As their colonel said to me to-day: “It always gives us great pleasure to take lodgings in these German apartments.”

The attack on the Hindenburg trench which I saw on August 24 was complicated because the Wiltshires had to advance partly across the open—300 yards of No Man’s Land, which is no joke—and partly, on their left, through a network of trenches climbing the high ground from the Leipzig salient to Thiépval.

It was necessary therefore to organise the attack so that those advancing over the open should not arrive at the Hindenburg trench sooner than those worrying their way up through the broken earthworks, not at all an easy proposition.

Also before the Hindenburg line could be seized securely it would be essential to “kill” a German strong point at a junction made in the Hindenburg trench by a communication way running up from the Leipzig salient.

The penalty of not doing so would be certain death to many of our men by an enfilade fire of machine-guns. These are little details that worry the souls of commanding officers and company commanders before they get the men over the parapet with thousands of bombs and the supplies of picks, shovels, sandbags, Lewis gun “drums,” Very lights, and other material of war.

10

On the day before the last attack on the southern way into Thiépval the enemy, who suspected bad things coming, tried to thwart our plan by hurling a terrific storm of shell-fire all over the Leipzig salient.

He seems to have brought up new guns for the purpose, and his heavy five-point-nines “crumped” the ground in all directions. But all this did not stop the Wiltshires and the Worcesters, who went on with their own little scheme.

On Thursday afternoon last, everything went like clockwork from the moment that our artillery opened with the intense bombardment described by me in a former despatch.

The Worcesters attacked on the right, the Wiltshires on the left. Over the parapet they halted a moment, and then went forward in a steady and ordered way. I could not see the men working up through the trenches on the left until they sprang up to the crest of the ridge, but only those who went across the open. The last eighty yards was covered in the quickest time, and soon after our shell-fire lifted off the German trench the Wiltshires and Worcesters were in among the enemy.

But not close together. There was a gap of fifty yards between the two parties, and in order to get in touch with each other they bombed left and right. It was at this moment that a company officer distinguished himself by great gallantry.

There were Prussian Guards in the trench, and they fought fiercely, using the gap as a bombing centre. Unless routed out this group of men might have spoiled the attack. The officer saw the situation in a flash, and was quick to get a rifle to his shoulder. He was a dead shot, and shot, one after the other, five men who were trying to blow him to bits with their hand grenades.

At the same time a sergeant scrambled up into the open, and running along outside the trench flung his bombs at the enemy below, “to rattle them,” according to the description of his commanding officer. Another young soldier fixed his Lewis gun over the parapet and fired down into the trenches, so that the enemy had to keep quiet until our men were all round them.

The strong point by the Koenigstrasse had been rushed, and the Hindenburg trench was ours.

11

Sharp and fierce fighting had carried the trenches on the left and captured a strong dug-out belonging to the German company commanders. Here also the Prussian Guards fought with great courage, firing up from their dug-outs and only surrendering under the menace of immediate death. One sergeant here on the left walked about in the open with a cool courage and shot twelve Germans who were sniping from shell-holes. The ground was already strewn with their dead, killed by our bombardment, and over this graveyard of unburied men there was bayonet fighting and bombing until all the Prussians who remained alive became the prisoners of the Wiltshires.

There were several officers among them wearing the Iron Cross, and all the officers and men were tall fellows with brand-new equipment which showed that they had just come into the trenches.

Two captured machine-guns were turned against the enemy’s line, with their own ammunition ready for use, and both the Wiltshires and the Worcesters settled down in the new line, badly smashed as usual by our shell-fire, but with a lot of useful dug-outs still intact, to hold on under the inevitable retaliation of the enemy’s guns.

All through the night there was a steady bombardment, but nothing of extraordinary ferocity. It was the usual night’s “straf” in the neighbourhood of Thiépval, which is not really a nice place.

On the following day—last Friday—the hostile shell-fire increased. Five-point-nines were joined by eight-inches, and, as one of the officers described it, “every durned thing.” It quickened and strengthened in intensity until towards evening it was a hurricane bombardment meaning one obvious thing—a counter-attack. Our men were well down in the old German dug-outs, grateful to their enemy for digging so deep and well, but it became most necessary to warn our “heavies” that the Prussians were gathering for a smashing assault.

Runners were sent out to get back through the barrage if they had the luck, and several of these brave men tried and several failed, dying on the way. But one had more than human luck. Owing to the appalling character of the ground, “pitted and ploughed as though by a gigantic harrow”—it is his officer’s phrase—the man lost his sense of direction, staggered and stumbled on through the smoke and over the shell-craters, and then—amazed—found himself looking over a parapet into a trench full of Germans with fixed bayonets. They were crowded there, those tall Prussians, awaiting the moment to launch their counter-attack.

The runner turned back. Before him the ground was a series of volcanoes, tossed up by German shells and British shells. He knew that he had to pass through our barrage and the enemy’s barrage. The chances against him were tremendous. In his own opinion he had no more chance than a “snowflake in hell.” But he ran back, dodging this death, and—came through untouched!

The “heavies” did at last get the message, and were quick to answer it. “In three shakes,” said an officer of the Wiltshires, “they were smashing the German lines to glory.”

Those tall Prussians crowding there were caught by this storm. Their trench became a ditch-full of mangled bodies. Only a thin wave of men came out into open country, and of these not many went back.

The Prussian counter-attack was killed. The Worcesters and the Wiltshires held their ground round Thiépval, and their losses were paid for heavily by German blood.

XXV

THE LAST FIGHTS IN DEVIL’S WOOD

1

AUGUST 29

The barren ground of the battlefields was turned into swamps this afternoon, when the clouds which had been piling up in great black masses suddenly broke after a few warning flashes of lightning and a roll of thunder.

I have been watching the usual artillery bombardment over the Pozières ridge and Thiépval, spreading eastward to the thin fringe of High Wood, faintly pencilled against the darkening sky. The guns quickened their pace at about three o’clock, and on our right the French artillery was also hammering away. Then the storm burst and nature, after all, had the best of it, though all the atmospheric effects seemed like a magnificent plagiarism of our human chemistry which has filled the sky with darkness and forked lightnings, and the earth with high explosives, and the air with noise. These thunder-claps ripping the clouds before the long ruffle of their drums, and the winking of the lightning behind the black curtains on the hills, and the queer, ghastly colours edging fantastically shaped wreaths of clouds, were enormously like our miniature tempests of hate. Nature was at war with itself, and our pop-guns seemed silly toys.

Coming down to earth, and its funny ants, called men, there has not been very much activity during the past twenty-four hours, beyond the work of the gunners. Between Delville Wood and High Wood our troops captured a German barricade, and there was some bombing about the shell-craters on the way to Ginchy, all of which gives us at last a strong grip all round and beyond that Devil’s Wood, where our men have fought so often and so hard.

There seems no doubt about it now, judging from all I heard at an officers’ mess in a big-sized tent between the bombardment and the thunderstorm, where a number of young officers told me incidents of the recent fighting there.

2

It was on August 24, as I have described already, in a brief way, that the big “shove” was made all round this beastly wood and out of it on the east side, where the Germans still had some strong posts and shell-craters and machine-guns.

The troops engaged were mostly of English regiments, with one body of Scots, and they all did splendidly in spite of the tragic character of the ground and the intensity of the enemy’s barrage. Accidents happened now and then. At one point of the advance the German wire was uncut, and only eight men could get through. They killed eleven Germans in the craters beyond them, and stayed there till dusk, and came back.

On the north side of the wood the troops were hammered by shell-fire, but “stuck” it out, and went forward marvellously under the protection of their own shell-fire, while our machine-guns kept the enemy’s heads down by a stream of machine-gun bullets—a million of them—which “watered” his trenches.

There was but little hand-fighting here. Many Germans were found dead in their muck-heaps which were once trenches. Four of them ran forward to surrender so furiously that they scared one of our men who ran, too, until he realised their intention and took them prisoner. Another came running forward and was seized by the throat by his officer, who was suspicious of his intention in the heat of the moment.

There was also a bull-pup who came over and is now enjoying bully-beef.

Further on the right there was great fighting to thrust the enemy out of his last ditch in Delville Wood and to get across the ground to the east of it.

The enemy fought with high courage, and there were many bombing duels, in which one of our sergeants caught German bombs before they burst and flung them back again—which is not an easy trick to learn. A Lewis gun was thrust up very quickly to a German post where a machine-gun was concealed in a shell-crater and played its hose on the team who refused to surrender. Out of one such strong point—a nest of craters—fifty-four Prussians came up with the usual shout of surrender when our bombing parties had surrounded them.

Every man fought with reckless courage. The wounded officers carried back on stretchers brought the latest news to their brigadier, and said, “We’re doing jolly well, sir,” or explained the difficult bits of work in hand.

The stretcher-bearers went out through the heaviest fire and searched for the wounded with great self-sacrifice. One man of the R.A.M.C. was out there, over this frightful ground, for twenty hours at a stretch, saving many men, untired till the last.

One queer horror was seen. Some German sentries were found tied to posts, and one man stood there without a head, which had been blown off by a shell. It seemed some awful form of field punishment, perhaps for men who had tried to desert. Nearly 400 prisoners were taken altogether that day.

They had fought bravely—once they had the pride of Prussians. But now many of them were utterly broken, and one officer, when he was questioned, could only wring his hands and moan about the awful losses of his company.

It was fighting which continued the tradition of Devil’s Wood—where horror and heroism have gone hand in hand.

3

SEPTEMBER 2

The enemy’s attempt to recover some of his lost ground around Delville Wood has been very costly to him, and has only succeeded in two places in forcing our men back a little way, in spite of the self-sacrifice of those German soldiers who obeyed orders and came across a foul ground through the curtain fire of our guns, and fell, as they knew they must fall.

So we go back to Devil’s Wood again, and the name of its beastliness must be written down once more as a place where more dead lie among those who have lain there long, and where once more shell-fire is smashing through the charred tree-stumps and biting great chunks of wood out of sturdy old trunks still standing in this shambles.

It will be remembered, perhaps, how in the last big fighting here more than a week ago our men thrust our lines out beyond the wood, above the orchard trench of Longueval and the sunken road to High Wood, and captured the enemy’s last strong point in the north-east corner of the wood, and chased the enemy out of a network of trenches zig-zagging away from the wood towards Ginchy. Something like 400 prisoners were taken then, and in knocking out machine-gun posts, in bombing the enemy out of small redoubts, and sweeping across ground pitted with shell-craters in which lay stubborn Germans sniping our men as they passed, every quality of courage and the fighting spirit was shown by our troops engaged.

It was good to get about beyond the Devil’s Wood, and our men redug their trenches outside it with a willing industry. Then by bad luck the rain came, and heavy clouds gathered and broke, slashed by lightning, and flooded the battlefields.

It was hard luck on newly-made trenches and on the men who had dug them. I think it is difficult for people at home to understand the meaning of big rain in this war of ours; the very sandbags come slipping off the parapets, and parapets come falling on to the firesteps, and rivers come rushing down the boggy ditches.

Rifles drop and get caked with wet mud. Hand-grenades disappear into the quagmire. To get supplies up narrow ditches is tiring to the point of sheer exhaustion. So our men were tired—“fed-up” with the weather, as they would put it—when the enemy began to bombard them, not in the usual way of a war-day’s work, but furiously, with a storm of hate.

For three hours the bombardment went on and increased in violence. The front trenches had been lightly held, and the men there held on until there were no trenches, but only shell-craters and a wild upheaval of wet earth. The enemy believed, perhaps, that they had finished all our life in those muck-heaps.

German soldiers ordered to advance may, for a few minutes, have bolstered up their courage by the thought that their guns had done most of the work. Not longer than that. When the first wave of the 118th German regiment came out of their shell-craters and ditches they came full into the face of a deadly machine-gun fire, and under a great barrage of high explosives.

It was the fire of our machine-gunners which killed most of them. They fell as if swept down by invisible scythes.

The second wave came—not in a standing line, as people may imagine, but in little bunches or groups, and singly, stumbling in and out of shell-holes, in short rushes, leaping to avoid shell-bursts, but not retreating one bit from the death that waited for them. The second German wave was wiped out.

A third, fourth and fifth wave advanced, and though many of these men fell, and the waves became mingled and confused in their tide, there were enough to reach the place where our lines had been, and too many at the time for our men, who had been sorely tried, to dispute the foremost shell-craters with them.

Our troops had to fall back in one or two places along the fringe of Delville Wood and behind the line of the sunken road westward. But the enemy did not gain the ground round the wood. Even where he had damaged our trenches most we held strong posts, machine-guns in convenient shell-holes, and small groups of brave fellows in isolated bits of trench keeping their bombs and rifles dry.

During the night also our men bombed out parties of Germans in a portion of the sunken road, and regained the bit of ground for which the enemy had paid so high a price in blood.

To-day there was a blue sky again over the battlefields, and the sunlight lay over the ghastly ruin of all those villages and woodlands.

A great day for the gunners, O God!... They made the most of it, and I watched the bombardment piling up the columns of smoke and earth between Thiépval and High Wood, and a fierce German barrage between Mametz Wood and the Bazentins.

Heavy crumps were bursting also away back by Contalmaison, and once the Virgin of Albert was hidden in a smoke-cloud which rose from the ruins about it.

The sun gleamed on all our kite balloons hastening forward in the blue to watch the enemy’s lines. They were dazzling white, these “Ruperts” of the sky, and above and about them flashed our battle-planes going over the enemy’s country.

Ceaselessly the infernal clangour of great guns banged over the hills, and the shells went whining overhead. The enemy was getting the worst of it, if I could judge from the greater weight of our bombardment, but his guns were also hard at work, at long range beyond Grandcourt and Flers. He flung out a quantity of gas-shells—and the sun shone down upon all these little busy ways of men, and the fields were flooded with a golden light.

XXVI

THE AUSTRALIANS AT MOUQUET FARM

1

SEPTEMBER 3

To-day, Sunday, September 3, many of our troops have been engaged in hard fighting.

The main facts of these battles will be told officially before what I have to write is published—the capture of Guillemont, the advance at least as far as half-way through the village of Ginchy, the taking of ground eastwards beyond Mouquet Farm—and put even as briefly as that it will be known by people at home that our men have again gone forward in a great attack and fought tremendously.

Again all this countryside above the Somme has been filled with those scenes of war which I have described so often since that morning of July 1, when we began the great attack, pictures of a day of battle, when many troops are engaged, and when the power of our artillery is concentrated in a tremendous endeavour—stabs of fire from the muzzles of many guns, smoke-clouds rising above the ridges of the hills and lying dense in the valleys, the bloody trail of the walking wounded, groups of prisoners tramping down, ambulance convoys swirling through quiet lanes, bandaged men in casualty-clearing stations or sitting in harvest-fields behind the lines waiting for the Red Cross trains, guns going up, ammunition columns crawling forward, transport, mules, motor-cars, field-guns, troops—everywhere the movement of a great day of war.

2

Looking back on to-day’s battle pictures two of them rise before me now as I write, most vividly. One of them was just a smoke picture as I stared down into the boiling heart of its cauldron this morning. I was in an artillery observation post, from which on ordinary days one may see each shell burst above the ruins of Thiépval and the ragged trees of its woods and the broken row of apple-trees, and a charred stick or two of Mouquet Farm, and beyond, very clearly on the ridge, the conical base of the windmill above Pozières.

To-day one could see nothing of this. Nothing at all but a hurly-burly of smoke, black rising in columns through white, white floating through and above black, and all moving and writhing. That was where our men were fighting.

That was all the picture of this struggle, just smoke and mist. Thousands of shells were bursting there, but one could see no separate shell burst; no single human figure dodging death or meeting it. So I stood and stared and listened. It was like a world in conflict.

The noise of the guns was tense. The hammer-strokes of each explosion met each other stroke, and gave out an enormous clangour. Dante looking down into Inferno may have seen something like this, and would not have heard such a noise. It was most like the spirit of war of anything I have seen, and I have seen men go forward and fall, and watched their single adventures.

The other picture was more human and less frightful, though sad and tragic and wonderful. It was a field behind the battle lines, into which the “walking wounded” first came down after their escape from those fires further up. It was a harvest-field with rows of neat corn stooks near a wood in heavy foliage, in spite of shells which came from time to time to break the branches. Some wounded men lay about on the stubble. Others came limping between the corn stooks, with their arms about the necks of stronger comrades.

Horse ambulances halted by the side of the road, and groups of Red Cross men ran forward and brought back very slowly stretchers heavily laden with human bundles, who were laid by the side of those who could sit up with their backs to the wheatsheaves. Many of the men’s faces were caked with blood. There was every kind of wound except the worst. But men with bandaged heads called out to others who came with their arms in slings, and men gone lame gossiped with men whose jackets had been cut away at the shoulder—and I saw again the wonder that one always sees after battle, which is the cheerfulness of men who are not too far gone to hide their pain, the courage of the British soldier, which is sublime.

There were a few men there from whom one’s eyes played the coward, but it was good to see the happiness of those who had come out of the zone of death into this harvest-field, where there was safety except for chance shells. Guns were firing all round them. But they were our guns. These men were the heroes of a great day of battle, and they had been touched by fire, but had not been burnt in the furnaces to which they had gone before the dawn. They had had all the luck.

3

It is too soon to tell the story of this day. Our men are still fighting as the sun goes down this evening with a red glow in the sky after a sharp burst of rain. In those wet and broken ditches, which we call trenches, north-east beyond Mouquet Farm, and on the right by Guillemont, the enemy is still being routed out of shell-craters and trying to rally to counter-attacks, and the German guns are flinging out barrages to drive our men back if they can. At this hour, when all is confused and uncertain except the main facts that we have taken Guillemont and part of Ginchy, and far beyond Mouquet, with great news from the French on our right—the capture of Clery and 1500 prisoners—I can give only a few glimpses of the incidents of all this fighting.

On the left our attack was made on the German lines north and south of the Ancre. Our troops went over their parapets this morning almost before the first glimmer of dawn had lightened the sky. They could only see the ground immediately before them, and it was, of course, pitted with shell-craters, old and new. The new craters had just been made by our hurricane bombardment, which had laid the enemy’s parapets in shapeless ruin, killing a great number of Germans in what had been their trenches. Their light signals called to their gunners, and at the very instant our men came into the open an accurate barrage swept our lines. But the men were away, and as far as I heard from them this morning, the line on the left did not suffer uncommonly in the scramble across No Man’s Land.

A number of them forced their way into and through the enemy’s first and second lines, bayoneting the Germans who tried to resist them, and clearing the ground of strong snipers and machine-gunners. They fought—these English country fellows—in heroic style to the south of the river. The enemy’s machine-gunners played an enfilade fire upon the successful troops across the Ancre, and the enemy’s artillery was able to concentrate on this ground. Ours held on to the German second line against this overwhelming fire with a most stubborn endurance, but afterwards when a body of Prussians advanced to a counter-attack drew back to get into line again with the men on their right, south of the river.

“It was the shell-fire which made our position untenable,” said one of the officers who had been fighting here. “But in any case we put a large number of Boches out of action, and that is always worth doing, and brings the end of the war a little closer.”

4

Much more lucky and valuable was the advance made by Australian troops upon Mouquet Farm. These men knew the ground intimately, and had already penetrated the ruins of the farm by a strong patrol, which went in and out some days ago, bringing back some prisoners, as I described at the time. They were confident that they could do the same thing again, though the site of the farm might be difficult to hold against hostile fire. Our guns did not fail them this morning.

One of these clean-cut Australian boys with those fine, steady, truth-telling eyes which look so straight at one even after a nerve-breaking ordeal of fire, told me to-day that the bombardment preceding their attack was the greatest thing he has ever heard, though he has fought under many of them hereabouts.

“Our shells rushed over us,” he said, “with a strange, loud ringing noise which pierced one’s ear-drums with a violent vibration. It was just marvellous.” But the enemy’s guns were powerful, too, and he replied tremendously as soon as our own “lifted” and lengthened their fuses.

The way across No Man’s Land, which was about 200 yards, I think, was a passage perilous. There was no level ground anywhere, not a foot of it. It was all shell-holes. Our men fell in and scrambled out and fell in again. Some of the holes were full of water and mud, and men plunged up to their armpits and were bogged.