Chapter XIII: Part 13

There was a young officer there whom I had met yesterday on the roadside. He sat up when he saw me again, and said he wanted nothing that could be given to him, and was grateful for the treatment. He had just been writing down the address of one of his wounded comrades, who was going to die, so that he might send a letter to the man’s wife. He had been asked to do this by one of the English doctors, and he was glad to do it.

I sat down by the side of a young soldier from the Rhineland.

“Are you badly wounded?” I asked.

He pointed to his shoulder, and said “Here.”

When I said he looked very young, he shrugged that wounded shoulder of his, and said, “All my comrades were young. We fought as well as older men. The English came behind us, or we would not have been taken.”

The pride of the boy remained with him even now, and it seemed to me fine and plucky.

But these men, as a whole, have none of the braggart confidence of the prisoners we used to take a year ago. The truth, I think, is beginning to dawn upon them. The guns that protected them have been matched by British guns, and the new army that has grown up against them has broken their strongest lines.

It is only the beginning. People at home must not think that the German army has lost its power of defence and that the great rout is at hand. They are drawing back their guns, but saving most of them. They are retreating, but will stand again, and dig new trenches and defend other villages.

There will be greater and fiercer and more desperate fighting before the end comes, and God alone knows when that will be. But so far as the fighting goes it is a real stroke of victory for us. Within the last forty-eight hours we have put out of action eight German battalions between Lesbœufs and Morval, and the enemy can ill afford such loss after all that has happened since the first day of July.

4

The story of the meeting of the French and British in the stronghold of Combles is an historic incident, which may form one day the subject of a great painting, though perhaps no artist’s eye was there to see it. Some brigades of English troops were holding on Monday morning, the ground of the Quadrilateral (where our men had been badly held up on September 15), to the west of Bouleaux Wood.

The French were hammering forward with their soixante-quinze and masses of splendid infantry to the east of Combles in the direction of Frégicourt. The plan of attack was to box in Combles by the French advance on one side, and on ours by forming a strong line to the north-west of Combles.

The operation was of great importance to the whole of our attack on Morval and Lesbœufs on Monday morning, because, apart from cutting off Combles, the new position was needed as a solid plank to our right wing.

The men who were given the task—it is sad that I am not yet able to say who they were—had been fighting heavily in previous battles, and had suffered many losses. But for this new assault they rallied up again with a brave spirit, and did all that was asked of them and a little more.

Instead of attacking Bouleaux Wood itself, where the Germans were in great force, they were ordered to take two lines of trenches on the west side of it, and to establish the flank line there—a clever bit of strategy which a German officer has since complained of bitterly as “not playing the game.” Because at Bouleaux Wood the Germans were waiting for an attack and ready for it with massed machine-guns, which they could not put to their full use, poor lads!

The trenches were taken easily and rapidly—in five minutes from the moment of attack—but nearly at right angles to it was an embankment with a rabbit warren of dug-outs, which gave more trouble.

It was the German flank line, and enormously important to the enemy, so that he held it with a large force of men and many machine-guns and minenwerfer.

Fierce, savage fighting took place here, and it was only four hours later that the dug-outs were finally cleared. Hereabouts eighty prisoners were taken, but a great many dead bodies lay below the embankment when the fight was done.

Near by five minenwerfer were captured, and our men found some empty gun emplacements, which had been abandoned in such a hurry by the German gunners that they had left behind them a great store of four-point-two shells and all their ammunition carriers.

Our strong flank was formed and a new trench dug in great style by a pioneer battalion, and then in the darkness patrols of infantry pushed forward in the direction of Combles. It was dark, yet not an absolute and lasting darkness. The sky was very calm and strewn with bright stars, and up above the Combles road at Morval white flares went up and down, throwing every few moments a white, vivid glare over the battlefield, lighting up its desolation, with the rim of every shell-crater white as snow and with black pits in the depths of them.

The sky was not quiet except high above the strife of men. Away down the French lines it was all on fire, and shells were bursting in a great semi-circle where the British were fighting at Lesbœufs and Gueudecourt.

But Combles was dark and quiet. No star-shells came up from its ruined houses. There was no sign of life there, only a few black shadows came up from the town towards our patrols and exchanged shots with them and then tried to escape. Twenty of these stragglers were taken prisoner. Ten were killed in fights with our patrol parties.

Hour after hour there was the tremendous tattoo of the French soixante-quinze coming nearer and nearer, and a final outburst of gun and rifle fire when Frégicourt was taken.

The night was passing, but it was long before dawn—at 3.15—when a strong patrol of English soldiers with machine-guns advanced down a tramline into the town of Combles. They were tired men, worn with fighting, craving sleep, hating all this hell around them, not in that night hour inspired by any thrill of joy because they were entering Combles “in triumph.” They were not quite sure how far the beastly place had been abandoned. News had come to them that the enemy had found a way out.

But you never can tell. There might be desperate fellows in the cellars, machine-guns behind any of these broken walls. They went on slowly and cautiously until they reached the ruined streets.

Dead men lay about, with white faces turned upwards to the stars. The ground was littered with broken bricks and twisted iron and destroyed wagons. But no shot came through the gaping holes in houses which still stood as roofless shells. It was all as quiet and still as death. A halt was made at the railway line, and then our tired men saw through the gloom other tired figures trudging towards them.

Officers went forward. Words were spoken in French and English:

“Ce sont les Anglais.”

“Them’s the French all right.”

“The blooming town’s abandoned.”

“Les sacrés Boches n’existent plus!”

Combles was taken thus in the early hours of the morning of the day before yesterday without any demonstration or dramatic ceremony, without cheers or theatrical nonsense, by grim, quiet, tired men who were glad to be at the end of another day’s fighting, with a dog’s chance of rest.

It was a great place for booty. The cellars were stacked with thousands of rifles and a great store of ammunition. The enemy had left behind four thousand rounds of five-point-nine shells—the less to fire at us, thank God!—and a mass of material and kit of every kind.

This flight from Combles is the most ignominious thing that has happened to the enemy on the Western front since he was hammered back on the Marne, and it must have hurt his pride—the pride of his “High Command”—as a smarting wound.

XXXVI

THE DOOM OF THIÉPVAL

1

SEPTEMBER 27

The doom of Thiépval is fulfilled. That place upon the high ridge, with its thirty-four black tree-stumps—I counted them this morning—which has been harrowed and ploughed and cratered under incessant storms of high explosive, fell into our hands last evening—all but one corner to the north-west, which is ours to-day.

Weeks ago I said—as it may be remembered—that the German garrison there must have known that their doom was creeping nearer, and that sooner or later they must surrender or die.

It was longer reaching them than I expected when I watched the attack on the Zollern trench, and the defences running up to the Wunderwerk, and saw our men crossing a wide stretch of No Man’s Land through great shell-fire which tossed up the earth about them, and go on until those who had not fallen leapt upon the German trenches and bundled back batches of prisoners, and then went on again until they were very near to the row of apple trees which used to blossom in April on the outskirts of Thiépval town perched upon the hill.

It seemed to me then, watching the rapid progress of our men and their wonderful courage, that in a few days more from the Wunderwerk and Mouquet Farm on the east side our lines would close in and put the strangle-grip upon the place.

It has taken longer than that, more storms of shells, more splendid lives, to win the stronghold, and the wonder to me is, now that I know the full strength of the place, the resistance of its underground fortifications, and the fighting spirit of the troops holding it, that we captured it yesterday and to-day with such little loss.

For our loss was amazingly light considering the long and stubborn fighting there and the machine-gun fire which swept upon our men from many hidden places, and the desperation of the garrison who defended themselves with great gallantry. Let us give them the honour of saying that, for they were fine fighting men.

In defence the advantage was all with them. But for the power of our guns and the way in which British troops fight—meaning to win whatever the cost—they were in an impregnable position. The taking of Mouquet Farm by the Australians and afterwards by the Canadians was the worst menace to them, enclosing them on the right, but an astounding episode which happened yesterday will show most clearly the difficulties of our troops and the cunning of the enemy’s earthworks.

2

It is many days since I reported the final capture of Mouquet Farm, after in and out fighting, and since I saw its ruins from the high ridge.

These bits of broken brickwork, all that was left after the Australians had made it their own, were the remnants of a place more important once than an ordinary French farmstead.

It was a series of buildings such as one finds in France attached to a big château, with barns and out-houses and stables, or to an old monastic institution, covering a large space of ground.

Our last line of trenches struck through the middle of the place, leaving two bits of ruin to the north of the trench and one to the south, behind the line. The enemy seemed to be well away northwards in the shell-craters beyond our parapet, and nobody suspected “Brother Boche” near at hand.

It was with great surprise a few days ago that one of our English officers saw two Germans rise suddenly from a hole behind our line, near the southern ruin of bricks.

One of them beckoned to him. “Be careful, sir,” said the sentry. But the officer imagined that the two Germans had strayed into our lines and wanted to be taken prisoner, as some do from time to time.

He went forward slowly until he was quite close to them. Then he fell dead, shot by the man who had beckoned to him, who with his comrade disappeared immediately into some hole which could not be found.

A day or two later a working party digging in the neighbourhood broke through to a deep tunnel. Instead of searching it there and then they filled it up again. Our men found themselves being sniped from other holes in the ground. It came into the heads of our officers that beneath the ground, even behind our lines, were nests of Germans who might turn upon them at any moment, or blow them up by a charge of guncotton.

Orders were given to draw back a little from Mouquet Farm, and the guns were turned on it again, flinging high explosives and shrapnel over the place, as in the old days. Then some of our men were sent forward to clear the trenches, if they could find them. They came back without success. So the place remained one of our “mystery corners” until yesterday, when the attack was to begin on Thiépval, from the trenches south, and swinging left from Mouquet. It was dangerous, but it was decided to carry out the attack without worrying about the underground inhabitants.

The attack on Thiépval began, and instantly our men on the right had advanced beyond the farm to the Zollern trench parties of grey-coats came out of the tunnels of Mouquet and began firing machine-guns into the backs of the British soldiers.

By good luck there was a young British officer not far away who kept his head on his shoulders, and had a quick way of dealing with a situation of this kind. He was in charge of a working party, but he saw his chance of a “scrap.” “Come on, boys!” he shouted. “Never mind your shovels.” His men threw down their tools and followed him.

I don’t know how many there were of them, but only thirteen came back. They did not come back ingloriously. They brought with them one German officer and fifty-five men as prisoners, and there were no living men left at six o’clock last night in the tunnels of Mouquet.

It was only a small episode in the rear of the assault on Thiépval, but extraordinary, and not without importance, on the right wing of our advance, for men do not like to go forward with machine-gun fire from behind. It shows the way in which the ground all about here has been used for subterranean fighting.

3

So it was in Thiépval. Above ground there was nothing to see to-day, and for a long time, but the black and broken tree-trunks with their lopped branches high above Thiépval Wood, which is just as utterly destroyed—those bare poles, and to the left a mass of reddish brickwork which was once Thiépval chateau, and, standing solitary, a queer-shaped monster, looking like a sleeping megatherium, which I recognised as an old Tank on the war-path.

No men could have remained alive above ground yesterday when our guns hurled upon it a stream of heavy shells which burst all over the site of the village with violent upheavals of earth and vast clouds of curly black smoke filled with death.

The German garrison kept below, in a long series of vaults and tunnels which they had strengthened and linked up, and dug deeper, in a way that would have surprised the old French farmers who used to keep their wine and stores down there centuries ago. They had made many exits, so that they could pop up with rifles and machine-guns at many spots between the four corners of the village, and they were ready for another British attack.

I know these things because I have been talking with the German survivors of the garrison. They were nearly all men of the 180th Regiment, and they have held Thiépval for two years.

“In the old days,” said one of them this morning—he talked very frankly to me in excellent French—“the place was quiet and happy. We had no great comfort below ground, no fancy furniture or fine decorations (our beds were just wooden planks raised above the ground); but we worked hard to fortify the vaults. We pierced many new tunnels. We made this underground world perfectly safe, and we were proud of it.”

It belonged so much to the 180th Regiment that instead of being relieved in the ordinary way like other troops, and sent off to different parts of the front, they were given the honour of defending Thiépval since the beginning of the Battle of the Somme. The regiment arranged its own reliefs company by company, Bapaume being their rest camp. The men I met to-day had been actually in Thiépval only seven days, without relief, and had guessed that it would be their turn to defend the place against a great English assault. They had pledged themselves to defend it to the death.

Before telling the narrative of our attack and the adventures of our own men I think it is interesting to give this glimpse of the defenders, of their life underground. When I talked with them this morning they had just been captured. I was struck by the superior bearing and intelligence of them all.

They were certainly the best type of Germans I have seen on this front—Württembergers all, and handsome fellows, who had kept their spirit—one of the last groups of men who fought against us in the early days, and survivors of the first-line troops of the German army who have fallen like autumn leaves upon the battlefields of Europe, in the endless massacre of this war.

They are weary of the war, like all their troops. They laughed when I asked “Will England win?” and would not pretend that Germany is still victorious. They had heard of the downfall of the two Zeppelins in England, “Kaput,” as they called it, and had all the news that is given to German people by the newspapers which they had every day—even yesterday!—in their underground dwelling-place at Thiépval. But they were not dupes of false news.

“Do you believe the British Fleet is destroyed?” I asked, testing them. “The English Fleet is too great to be destroyed,” they said. “We did not believe all those stories. But we gave you a good fight at sea.”

They gave us a good fight on land, and underground, this garrison of Thiépval, and with a few exceptions they fought honourably, so that our men have no grudge against them now that they are prisoners of war.

4

Our attack began yesterday at half-past twelve after a great bombardment that had been continuous for twenty-four hours, rising to infernal heights of shell-fire. Our men leapt out of their trenches to the south of the trees, just north of the “Wunderwerk,” and advanced in waves up to the trench by the row of apple trees, the right wing swinging round, as I have said, from Mouquet.

It was on the left that the men had the hardest time. One battalion leading the assault had to advance directly upon the château, that heap of red rubbish, and from cellars beneath it came waves of savage machine-gun fire. They were also raked by an enfilade fire of machine-guns from the left top corner of the ground where the village once stood.

Our men were astounded.

“I didn’t believe it possible,” said one of them, “that any living soul could be there after all that shell-fire. But blessed as soon as it switched off if the Germans didn’t come up like rabbits out of bunnyholes and fire most hellishly.”

For a long time it was impossible to get near the château or take a trench dug in front of it. It was a château once belonging to a German. French gossip said that he had tunnelled it for such a defence as that of yesterday, which is a fantastic tale, but its cellars stood now, and were a strong place from which one party of the garrison poured out a stream of lead.

“Where are the old Tanks?” shouted our men, and stared back to catch a glimpse of them.

It is splendid to see the smiles spreading over our men’s faces every time they talk of the Tank. Whatever their sufferings have been they cheer up and laugh in a comical way at this thought, for the Tank is a wonderfully fine tonic to the spirits of our men and an outrageous comedy thrusting a blunt nose into the grim business of this fighting.

A Tank had been coming along slowly in a lumbering way, crawling over the interminable succession of shell-craters, lurching over and down into and out of old German trenches, nosing heavily into soft earth, and grunting up again, and sitting poised on broken parapets as though quite winded by this exercise, and then waddling forward in the wake of the infantry. Then it faced the ruins of the château, and stared at them very steadily for quite a long time, as though wondering whether it should eat them or crush them. Our men were hiding behind ridges of shell-craters, keeping low from the swish of machine-gun bullets, and imploring the Tank to “get on with it.”

Then it moved forward, in a monstrous way, not swerving much to the left or right, but heaving itself on jerkily, like a dragon with indigestion, but very fierce. Fire leapt from its nostrils. The German machine-guns splashed its sides with bullets, which ricocheted off. Not all those bullets kept it back. It got on top of the enemy’s trench, trudged down the length of it, laying its sandbags flat and sweeping it with fire.

The German machine-guns were silent, and when our men followed the Tank, shouting and cheering, they found a few German gunners standing with their hands up as a sign of surrender to the monster who had come upon them.

“We couldn’t have faced the château without the help of the old Tank,” said several men. “It didn’t care a damn for machine-guns. It did them in properly.”

Unfortunately the great grasshopper got into trouble with some part of its mysterious anatomy, and had to rest before crawling home to its lair, so that the rest of the fighting in Thiépval was without this powerful support, and our infantry faced many other machine-guns alone.

5

I suppose only Ovillers can rank with Thiépval for long and close fighting. Our men had to tackle an underground foe, who fired at them out of holes and crevices while they remained hidden.

They had to burrow for them, dive down into dark-entries, fight in tunnels, get their hands about the throats of men who suddenly sprang up to them out of the earth.

“I went down into some of those deep dug-outs,” said one boy, “but ran back again every time I saw Germans there. Some of them wanted to surrender, but how did I know if they wouldn’t have killed me? And other chaps were coming along with bombs. As likely as not I should have been done in by our own lads. It was very difficult to know how to handle ’em, and up above we were being raked by rifles and machine-guns something frightful.”

Many of the deep dug-outs were blown in at the entrances, so that the men were forced to come up the other side. Our men smoked them out, and dug holes for them to tease them out. It was like rat-hunting, but dangerous rats, life-size, and often desperate. They surrendered in hundreds when our men were all round them and right down in their tunnels.

I cannot tell the number of the German garrison. Nine hundred and ninety-eight unwounded men and forty wounded were brought down safely as prisoners, but others were killed on the way by their own barrage, and many fought until they died, so that some of the dug-outs are filled with dead and many lie above in the shell-craters. In one case a party of sixteen prisoners behaved treacherously.

They turned on the escort of two English soldiers taking them down, wounded them, and tried to go back to fight. They had no mercy from other English soldiers who came up at this moment. All through the night and early this morning the last remnant of the garrison held out in the north-west corner of Thiépval, until they were swept into the net by a separate and gallant assault of South Country troops.

Later in the morning the enemy attempted a counter-attack after a tremendous barrage which I watched falling along the ridge and below in Thiépval Wood. Very-lights rose through all this smoke, and I saw our men signalling for the help of our guns.

The help came quickly, and a new storm of white and black smoke-clouds rent by little flashes of flame burst beyond the village on to the German positions in and beyond the cemetery.

It was queer that this seemed to silence the enemy’s guns, for after this Thiépval was quiet for a time, and our men came poking about in the open as though looking for souvenirs, and dug new holes down into the tunnels.

They seemed to be teasing out more prisoners, because I saw trails of smoke rising from those holes in the earth, and one black volume gushed out of a cavern mouth made through the heap of red rubbish which was once the château.

6

I have no space or time to deal with many events on other parts of the line, but everywhere the enemy is harassed, and his troops do not seem able yet to rally up to strong counter-attacks. In many parts of the line patrols find it difficult to locate the enemy, and No Man’s Land is widening out. His guns were active to-day along all the line, shelling Combles now and then, and Morval heavily, but even his gun-power seems to be weakening here and there, and it is likely that he is shifting some of his batteries.

One of the most remarkable Tank adventures was in the direction of Gueudecourt where our troops were held up yesterday in the usual way, that is to say by the raking fire of machine-guns. They made two attacks, but could not get beyond that screen of bullets.

Then a Tank strolled along, rolled over the trench, with fire flashing from its flanks, and delivered it into the hands of the infantry with nearly 400 prisoners, who waved white flags above the parapet. That was not all. The Tank, exhilarated by this success, went lolloping along the way in search of new adventures. It went quite alone, and only stopped for minor repairs when it was surrounded by a horde of German soldiers. These men closed upon it, with great pluck, for it was firing in a most deadly way, and tried to kill it.

They flung bombs at it, clambered on to its back, and tried to smash it with the butt-ends of rifles, jabbed it with bayonets, fired revolvers and rifles at it, and made a wild pandemonium about it.

Then our infantry arrived, attracted by the tumult of this scene, and drove the enemy back. But the Tank had done deadly work, and between 200 and 300 killed and wounded Germans lay about its ungainly carcass. For a little while it seemed that the Tank also was out of action, but after a little attention and a good deal of grinding and grunting, it heaved itself up and waddled away.

These things sound incredible.... They are true. And though I write them in fantastic style because that is really the nature of the thing, it must not be forgotten that these Tanks are terrible engines of war, doing most grim work, and that the men inside are taking high risks with astonishing courage.

They are of the same breed as those flying men of ours who to-day and yesterday flew in flocks over and beyond Thiépval “ridiculously low down,” as one of our officers observed, swooping down like hawks over German batteries so that they did not dare to fire. All our soldiers are fighting with a spirit beyond the normal laws of human nature. They are fighting for a quick finish—if that may be had by courage—to this most infamous and vile war.

XXXVII

NORTHWARD FROM THIÉPVAL

1

SEPTEMBER 28

The weather is still in our favour—and soldiers watch the weather like seamen in frail craft, knowing that two days of heavy rain, or less than that, may make a month’s difference in the progress of attack, and that when mist gathers over the hills airmen cannot see to report to the guns, and guns cannot shoot on certain targets, and enemy troops may come creeping up to a counter-attack.

One of his battalions was spotted by our airmen to-day, and our artillery found the range quickly and scattered them. It puts them into the same villainous plight as our men have had to endure under the brow of the Messines and Wyghtschaete ridges and other high ground from which the enemy could see the slightest movement of our troops and would snipe even a solitary wagon with shell-fire.

The tables are turned down here by the Somme and the Ancre. The German soldiers will know now the devilish torture of living always under hostile observation, and under great guns. They are already beginning to find it intolerable, not “sticking” it as our men “stuck” it in the salient, when we had hardly any guns to answer back.

A further gain of ground was made yesterday on the high ridge where Thiépval stood when our men captured a strong line of trenches known as the Stuff Redoubt, and again to-day when they advanced northwards from the black trees of Thiépval to the Schwaben Redoubt, which is on the edge of the plateau.

This attack at mid-day to-day was similar to other operations which I have described on this part of the front before. A large number of batteries concentrated intense, violent fire upon the position beyond the last blighted trees on the ridge and on the upheaved lines of soil, of white chalk and brown earth, which marked the enemy’s next defensive system.

Our heavy shells tore up the ground, opening great chasms and raising hell fires, until all the blue of the sky was hidden behind heavy spreading smoke, gushing up in round, dense masses which mingled and thickened the overhanging pall.

Then our guns lengthened their range, and our infantry trudged across through this fog and under the wild scream of shells flung beyond them, and fought their way down into the enemy’s ditches. Later, after signals of distress, the German gunners barraged the line of the Schwaben Redoubt, which seemed to prove the successful advance of our men, and ranged their heavies on to Thiépval itself as we did until the day before yesterday, when it changed hands.

The industry of the men who lived there first—that 180th regiment which has held Thiépval for two years—is now of use to our own soldiers, who can find ample and shell-proof cover in those underground rooms, one of them, at least, large enough to hold three companies of men.

I am not certain at this hour whether we hold the whole of the Schwaben Redoubt, but if not all, the rest will be taken quickly, and the whole of the high plateau will be ours from Thiépval to Ginchy old telegraph.

Meanwhile on the right we hold a firm straight line, down from Gueudecourt to Combles, and it forms a solid flank.

2

SEPTEMBER 30

It is here beyond Thiépval that the slaughter of men is greatest just now—the scene of the shambles changes quickly these days—and here that the enemy is sacrificing many more lives in the vain hope of driving our men back from the underground fortress and its surrounding redoubts.

Desperate German counter-attacks were made last night and this morning on the Schwaben Redoubt, just north of Thiépval, and on the Hessian Redoubt, further east, where the German troops hold out in a wedge made by a sunken road from Grandcourt.

I have not often heard such a menace in the sound of gun-fire as when I went to an artillery O.P. in this direction this morning. There was something in the atmosphere as well as in the intensity of the bombardment which made the shell-bursts—they were German crumps—thunder out in a queer, hollow, reverberating way.

The enemy had concentrated a heavy weight of metal on to our lines here (so recently his own), and I watched these high explosives vomiting up from the Thiépval ridge, just below the Schwaben Redoubt, with a great hope that our men holding out there might have found good cover in old German dug-outs.

That is one advantage gained in capturing these strongholds. The enemy’s industry through two years of trench warfare may be turned to our own good and safety. In Thiépval itself many of the elaborate underground chambers have now been found, though when our men first won the place, after all their hard hand-to-hand fighting with the garrison they could not get to cover at once.

A major belonging to one of the battalions who came up first behind the assaulting troops—New Army men who fought like the old Regulars, though many of them were quite new to this fortress fighting—tells me that the entry into Thiépval was the most devilish experience he has had, though he has been through other frightful “shows.”

A dug-out next to a hole in which he had made his temporary headquarters was blown up with sixteen men, and when he moved on beyond the château—a fine name for the only rubbish heap which marked the site of a town—he found the headquarters of the leading battalion “sitting on red bricks” in the midst of dead men.

By that time his colonel and adjutant had been badly wounded, and the major arrived with only three runners, surprised to see the C.O. of the other battalion standing up on the brick heap waving his stick and rallying his men.

It is not really surprising. I met that officer to-day, and I saw the ice-cold fervour of the man, the quiet determination of his character, utterly scornful of any kind of danger. Men would follow such a man into furnace fires—and did.

The enemy was six hours before he began to get his barrage fixed (before then he was not quite sure of his own soldiers’ whereabouts) and it was colossal when it came. Many of our men lay about wounded. It was difficult to get them into safety.

The medical officer of one of the battalions lost his stretcher-bearers and went up alone to do what he could, dodging great shells, binding up the wounds of men.

For a time a Tank gave valuable cover. It had heaved itself across a trench, enfilading it each side with deadly fire. Underneath its body there was good shelter, and the M.O. worked here for a while with a heap of wounded.

The fighting on the north-east of Thiépval is in a land of shell-craters. Most of the trenches are just linked shell-craters, into which men burrow as soon as they have rushed the ground, getting a little cover in their depths from the barrage which searches them out.

The Hessian trench has changed hands several times within the last forty-eight hours, after savage bomb-fights and bayonet work. Forty Germans have been brought in from one bit of ground, but it is not country in which prisoners are gathered in great numbers. It is difficult to know one’s own whereabouts.

There are single combats over the rim of a shell-hole. Men knock up against each other in the dark, and peer into each other’s faces to know if it is friend or foe. If friend they drop into a shell-hole together; if foe, fight till one is dead.

3

Queer things happen in shell-crater land, as when a Canadian officer brought up the rum ration for his men, and found himself in a ditch with a number of German wounded. They were lying in a row, in a tragic state.

What was the officer to do? He was puzzled, but decided to give the rum to these poor suffering devils, who were grateful for it.

In the Hessian trench or in a twist of the crater-land about it, two German officers and twenty-two men came down across the holes. They were met by a private soldier, who was surprised to see them. He emptied his revolver at them, shooting one of them.

Then he picked up a German rifle and fired that and killed another. A second time he stopped and grasped a German rifle at his feet, and killed a third man. The others ran. Our man ran after them.

It was a chase along a dirty ditch which had once been a trench, and the hunter was a dead shot, with abandoned rifles, all along the way. At the end of the hunt there was only one German unwounded, and he was brought back as a prisoner.

It sounds like a lie—preposterous in the numbers given. But the German prisoner tells the same tale, and other men watched the hunt at different stages—this fearful man-hunt down a bloody ditch.

4

Things happen like that in this present fighting. Worse than that in human anguish, and better than that in courage. Out in crater-land were found three Australians in a hole.

One of them was unwounded, the other two rotting with wounds. They had been there for nine days. The unwounded man had stayed with his “pals” all that time, day after day, night after night, hoping for rescue. This part of crater-land was swept with machine-gun fire—ours or the enemy’s, how could these men tell who had lost all sense of direction?—but at night the unwounded Australian crawled out of his hole and rummaged among dead bodies for rations and water-bottles, which he took back to his friends and shared with them.

It is only one incident of the kind. In crater-land there are many like it, though not so long-drawn. But it is the enemy who suffers most out there.

Many times men left to hold a line against us do not get their reliefs, for the reliefs cannot get up through our curtain-fire or will not come.

So the others, starving and wounded, crawl back, leaving a trail of dead on the way, and for a time, here and there, the enemy has disappeared before us, so that when our patrols push out they can find no living man.

Then, after a while, the reliefs come up, dodging our shell-fire, leaving another trail of dead and wounded, and then dropping into shell-holes inhabited by corpses.

It is the way of the war, about which the orators have much to say, not knowing quite the meaning of it. Herr Bethmann-Hollweg has not seen his men in crater-land.

5

OCTOBER 4

A little romance clings to old buildings, even the remnant of a wall or two, so that a place like Eaucourt l’Abbaye—the ruin of a French monastery—seems of greater importance than a heap of earth and a network of ditches like the Schwaben or Hessian redoubts. It is of no more importance (I suppose less, except as another stepping-stone on the way to Bapaume), but it is the scene of fighting which has a special interest because of those old bricks built up centuries ago by French monks to enclose a place of prayer and peaceful work.

On Monday last, when the fighting began, two monsters came crawling up to the ditches which had been dug by the fighting men outside the monastery walls. They breathed out smoke and fire. Their sides opened with stabs of flame, and they killed the men in the ditches by rolling on them and crushing them, and hurling invisible bolts at them.

The ghosts of the monks, if any were there, would have seen that modern warfare has brought back the mediæval dragon-myth, and made it real, and more terrible than superstition. They were the Tanks who came.

One could write all this fantastically and make a queer tale of it. The truth is fantastic, but one must write it soberly, because they were British boys who have given their lives or a little of their blood to get these bits of wall called Eaucourt l’Abbaye, with its vaults and cellars. To them it was not like an old fairy-tale, but was just one of those grim bits of fighting, damnably dangerous and ugly and cheerless, which belong to the Battle of the Somme.

The first part I have already told, two days ago, how our men, in their attack on the double line of trenches outside the monastery, were checked by barbed wire and machine-guns, and two Tanks came to the rescue. One of them, after doing useful work, came to a stop, and the skipper came out and, after doing most gallant service, was wounded.

Three of the crew put him into a shell-crater and would not leave him. A day later he was wounded again by a bomb, which—amazing as it seems—did not burst, but injured him badly in the ribs, so that he had to endure great suffering out there in the crater.

Our infantry passed over the trenches and through the monastery ruins and dug a new ditch on the north side for defence and cover. Heavy rain came and drenched them and swamped the ditch. They were cold and wet and hungry.

For a time it was impossible to get food up to them. The ground behind was a quagmire for miles. The carriers became bogged. That little body of men to the north of the abbey were dangerously isolated, and might have starved but for the help of troops on their right who discovered their needs and sent food.

That was on Monday night. To the best of their belief the enemy was in force all round them. They could see flares going up, at Warlencourt, and from a primeval burial ground, about forty feet high, called the Butte de Warlencourt, just north of them, and they could hear the snap of rifle bullets from close shell-craters and the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun from a millhouse 300 yards away, north-west.

From what our men learnt yesterday, there was an hour or two at least when they had only a few Germans in the close neighbourhood of the Abbey.

The enemy’s troops were expecting their relief. When they found that the reliefs did not come up they cursed the war and the weather—they were as wet and hungry as our men—and decided to go back without further waiting. Only a few snipers and machine-gunners stayed.

Such things have happened before in the enemy’s lines as I have already described. It was given away this time by a body of twenty men with an officer and non-commissioned officer, who came down past the millhouse and took cover under a bank close to the abbey buildings.

They were seen by our men, who crept out towards them with a machine-gun, and then shouted “Hands up!” Twenty men held up their hands. The officer and the “unteroffizier” did not surrender, but ran hard back and made their escape, unless two of our bullets reached them.

The twenty men told their tale. They belonged to the battalion who had been sent up to relieve the troops holding the outskirts of the Abbey. They had found no one to receive them or to explain the lie of the land. They had not the slightest notion of the amount of ground held by the English here.

Other bodies of the relieving troops were just as ignorant. Some of them blundered against trenches held by our men on the right of the Abbey, and were dealt with by them.

Meanwhile a telephone message had been sent to our artillery, which flung out a barrage and caught more of the relief coming down from Warlencourt.

In spite of their horrible mess, the men who got through the barrage were bold fellows and attacked the abbey and the trenches south of it. They had a new supply of bombs and used them freely. Our men were sadly at a disadvantage. Bombs were very scarce.

A dump had exploded by accident, sending their store to blazes. They had to fight with what they carried on their bodies, and it was not enough. For a time they had to submit to the fortune of war, and while still holding the north side of the abbey and ground to the east and south-east, could not keep the enemy from bombing his way into a part of the ruins and into the southern ditch which had been captured with the help of the Tanks.

So the situation remained last evening and night. New and heavy rain-storms increased the ugly discomforts of our men.

They were clinging on to water-logged holes. They were wet to the skin, covered in slimy mud, and cold and weary. The wounded among them were in a tragic plight.

The dead seemed to have all the luck.... But the fighting spirit did not desert them. New bombs arrived, and that heartened them. Some of their comrades came fighting up from the south.

Early in the morning there were roars of explosion as the bombs crashed into the south ditch and then burst among the abbey ruins. It was then that there was hot fighting underground as well as above ground. Our men “cleaned up” Eaucourt l’Abbaye.

It is a technical phrase which has a very grim meaning. There are no Germans there now in the abbey vaults, except the bodies of their dead.

In those great arched cellars, where old spiders have spun their webs, and where old monks once came blinking down with horn lanterns to fetch the abbot’s wine, or to count their stores, English soldiers, covered with mud, but drier now, sit rubbing up their rifles and binding up their wounded and talking of the fight that is over.

XXXVIII

THE WAY TO BAPAUME

1

OCTOBER 7

Our troops have taken advantage of fine weather after heavy rains to make a new attack this afternoon upon a German front of 12,000 yards, and have captured a number of important positions, including the fortified village of Le Sars, to the north-west of Eaucourt l’Abbaye. For several days past the pressure of our attack had to be slackened on account of the bad state of the ground and the rain-storms, which prevented artillery and aerial observation.

It was bad luck upon our men, as it increased the difficulties for getting up the supplies essential to the success of a new move forward, and made the battlefields one vast bog, in which guns and men and wagons and mules were clogged with slime and mud.

Yesterday the sky cleared, and the men who had taken Eaucourt l’Abbaye by such a gallant struggle pushed out and seized the millhouse to the west of those ruins from which the enemy had been maintaining heavy machine-gun fire.

It is to those who know what mud and rain mean to an army in the field an astonishing and audacious thing to attack in such numbers to-day, abruptly and without waiting for more favourable conditions of ground.

At this hour, when heavy fighting continues along the whole line from Le Sars eastwards towards Le Transloy, it is impossible to write more than a few details of the progress that has been made already.

The taking of Le Sars itself is the gain of another fortress defending the way to Bapaume, the main road to that town running through the village, which was in a natural position of defence protected by a deep cutting on the right, by a double line of trenches to the south and by machine-gun emplacements with a wide field of fire.

It was from that position that our troops were heavily enfiladed in their first assaults upon the Abbey ruins, and the enemy had determined to defend it desperately, as it holds a position of great strategic importance to our future drive against them.

Well, they have lost it. Before the red dusk this evening our airmen, who were hovering over the place high above the shell-fire, signalled back that our infantry were well into the town and sending back batches of prisoners.

It was a rapid assault. Within an hour our men had fought their way across the tangle of trenches and shell-craters just below the village, and had gained their chief objectives, which included the deep cutting striking into the village from the right.

The only way of escape for the Germans was westwards through a belt of scarred and blackened tree-stumps. I do not know yet whether they had been dislodged from that primeval burial-place called the Butte de Warlencourt, which rises about fifty feet to the north of Le Sars on the right of the Bapaume Road.

The ground beyond has the village of Le Barque on the right of the road and four sunken cross-roads called the Cut-Throat on the west of a deep ravine, just above the village of Warlencourt-Eaucourt. It is here that the enemy will be under our barrage and the enemy’s troops must rally there if they can for any counter-attack.

East of Le Sars and north of Flers and Lesbœufs British battalions have made solid progress, driving back the enemy out of trenches hurriedly scraped up during recent weeks, but not so richly provided with dug-outs as his earlier lines, so that when our guns concentrated their fire on them the only escape from great slaughter was to hold them thinly with the main reliance on machine-guns for defence.

Our right wing has advanced about a kilometre from Lesbœufs towards Le Transloy, where it has linked up with the French battalions pressing forward to Sailly-Saillisel, with their usual dashing spirit of attack.

It seems that the day has been in our favour all along the line of this sweeping movement. We shall know more and may tell more in a few hours.

2

OCTOBER 8

The men who took Le Sars are still holding it, and only the short facts of their case come back from them through the mist and across the waterpools. Last night and this morning it has been raining again, in a drizzling way, and all the shell-craters are ponds.

It would be possible to swim in some of them, those scooped out by the biggest shells and linked up with others. It is not easy to get runners back across country like that, and the Germans find it harder and are drowned in many of those pits, because of our artillery fire pouring “stuff” over them.

Yet, curiously, it is from the Germans that one learns most of the frightful drama which went on yesterday afternoon in Le Sars village. They are prisoners, 300 of them, with five officers who were sent back to safety, while our men stayed on and fought on.

Those from the village—it’s just the name that stands—belong to the 321st and 322nd “Ersatz,” or Reserve Regiment. They had been reinforced, strengthening the garrison and expecting an attack, by some uncanny means, at the exact minute.

They were stout fellows—our officers pay them this tribute—and they had been ordered to fight to the last man rather than surrender this fortress, which is one of the gates barring the long road to Bapaume.

They trained their machine-guns and trench mortars on our front trenches, kept their rifles dry by wrapping them in rags, and sent out volunteers and victims to lie in the shell-pits waist-high in water to snipe our men as they came over.

They knew that they had a poor chance really to keep Le Sars, and their best hope of life or death was to put up a hard fight. Our guns had already smashed the houses and barns to rubbish heaps like those of Martinpuich and Courcelette—even a little more, judging from what our airmen saw—and our nine-point-twos, eight inches, and other monster guns were making a worse hell of the place.

The men of the German 361st and 362nd regiment of reserves lay low in their dug-outs and tucked their heads down in new trenches, finely built in a hurry.

What happened first was that our barrage lifted and long waves of brown soldiers sprang over their parapets facing up from ground close south of Le Sars and on the German left from the edge of Eaucourt l’Abbaye and the millhouse beyond.

Their first goal on our right was one of those beastly quadrilateral redoubts called the Tangle (there is another behind our new line at Eaucourt), and after that the road from Martinpuich, north-eastwards, and then forward to the Butte de Warlencourt—that old high tumulus in which the bones of some prehistoric man lay until we flung them up to the surface of our modern civilisation.

3