Chapter V: Part 5

It would be good to say something about the different battalions who have been fighting the Battle of the Woods, and it is hard not to give some honour to them now, by name. But there are reasons against it—the enemy wants to know their names for other reasons—and we must wait until some weeks have passed. They are men from nearly all our English counties—from Northumberland, Durham, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, from the Midlands, the Home Counties, and the “West Countrie.” Welshmen were there, and Irish, and Highlanders and Lowlanders. It was a British battle, but the greater share of it fell to England alone, and it was English lads from the North, and English lads from old county towns like Worcester and Northampton, York and Bedford, Guildford and Arundel, Norwich, and old London Town itself, who fought on the way to Contalmaison and took this stronghold of the woodlands.

I passed some of them on the roads to-day. They were the men who captured Contalmaison the day before yesterday, and they were marching with such a steady swing that it was hard to think they had been through such fighting and fatigues, and that they had left behind them many good fellows who will never come back along the road.

They were bringing back trophies of victory. On their wagons, beside their own steel hats, were German helmets. Some of the enemy’s machine-guns were passing back with them, and although the men were tired, they held their heads high and there was a fine pride in their eyes. An officer who watched them pass called out the names of their regiments and said, “Well done!” and one of their own officers waved his hand and called back, “Cheery-O!” It was the greeting of gallant fighting men.

2

But before the taking of Contalmaison the day before yesterday there were other men who had done their best to take it, and did take it for a while, in spite of bad luck and every kind of hardship.

Their attack depended a good deal upon the progress made by other troops who were fighting for Bailiff Wood on the left, and by troops who were attacking up to the line of Pearl Alley on the right.

Neither of these attempts was successful at the time, and the men who had been ordered to take Contalmaison were not in a happy position. The weather had been foul, and it was this which on July 7 and 8 made all attacks difficult. When the troops of the attacking columns tried to get forward the ground was bogged, their rifles and bombs and machine-guns were covered with muddy slime, and they stumbled through water-logged trenches. Apart from this the way was perilous and tragic.

The main trench leading up to Contalmaison was the Sunken Road which goes up between Round Wood and Birch Wood, and this was being heavily barraged by the enemy’s guns sweeping down the valley from Pozières.

Further up and slanting right to Pearl Alley was a shallow trench.

Dead bodies lay there in the mud, and soon it was choked with wounded men. How could any one pass? How was it possible to bring up bombs and ammunition and machine-guns and all the stores which must follow an attack? That was not done, but our men, fellows who know the chimes of Worcester Cathedral, struggled forward over open ground and made a dash for Contalmaison, enfiladed by machine-gun fire from Bailiff Wood and Mametz Wood, which were not yet in our hands. Round the western side of Contalmaison was a shallow trench in which the enemy also kept his machine-guns, but when the remnants of the attacking force rushed forward these were withdrawn into the village, from which the German gunners swept the ground.

It seems to me quite an astonishing feat of arms that our men, in such small numbers and in such adverse conditions, should have penetrated a good way into the village. And it is wonderfully to their credit that they should have taken eighty prisoners at such a time.

They found themselves “up in the air,” as soldiers say, and they were being badly hurt by machine-gun fire. It was a bad position, and after rummaging through some German dug-outs and taking their prisoners they fell back to a strong point to the south of the village, which they held for two or three days, establishing a machine-gun post which did valuable service in the next attack.

They did not succeed in holding Contalmaison, and in war, which is a hard thing, it is only success that counts. But I see nothing to blame in the adventure of those companies who got through at great hazard. Luck was against them, and against their other battalions. Luck, and the weather.

3

In the meantime great fighting was in progress for the woods around. A very splendid body of men, among them true descendants of Sir Hugh Evans and other brave men across the Marches, had fought their way up on July 5 to Birch Tree Copse and Shelter Alley, to Quadrangle Trench on the 6th, then to Caterpillar Wood and Marlborough Wood, and they had placed, with a cunning that belongs to the genius of war, a machine-gun which covered an exit from Mametz Wood, where the enemy was still in force.

At 3 o’clock on Monday afternoon last our troops advanced to the capture of the wood—a wood whose bloom was brightened by the frightful flash of shells, whose tree trunks were broken and splintered and slashed by sharp axes hurtling through the leaves, and about whose gnarled roots, in shell-holes and burrows, German soldiers crouched with their bombs and machine-guns. A wood of terror. Yet not dismaying to those men of ours who went into its twilight. Our own guns were shelling it with a progressive barrage.

Our men were to pass forward in short, sharp rushes behind the barrage, but some of them in their eagerness went too fast, and too far, and went through the very barrage itself until a signal warned a gunner officer sitting in an O.P. behind, so that he suddenly seized a telephone and whispered some words into it, and made the guns “lift” again.

Waves of bullets were streaming like water through the trees from German machine-guns. Many of our men fell, and the others, checked awhile, lay down in any holes they could find or dig. All through the night shells broke over them, and through the glades there came always that horrible chatter of machine-guns.

It was a night to which men think back through a lifetime with a wonderment that it brought any dawn for them. But when dawn came their spirit was unbroken and they made a new attack, and went forward with bombs and bayonets to the encounter of other men not less brave. Not less brave, in truth and in fairness to them. There was a fierce fight before the last of them surrendered, so that Mametz Wood was ours, for a while, at least.

4

Meanwhile to the left of Contalmaison—our left—other men had worked their way up into Bailiff Wood and had established posts there. It was still impossible to attack Contalmaison from the south, and, as it happened, perhaps a lucky thing because the enemy had expected an attack from the south and had most of his machine-guns facing that way when our troops advanced upon him from the west.

They advanced after a series of artillery barrages from a great number of batteries working in most perfect harmony with the plan of the infantry attack.

At 4.50 the infantry went forward to their first stage in four waves and in extended order. They had to cover about 1,100 yards of open ground, and they travelled light, without their packs, fighting troops, searching parties for house-fighting, and consolidating troops.

“They went across magnificently,” said their General, and in spite of the enemy’s shells and machine-guns penetrated the town. They worked across in time to the successive barrage which preceded them, and at 7 o’clock they had the whole of Contalmaison. The enemy defended himself bravely, and there was some fierce hand-to-hand fighting, in which 200 Germans were killed, refusing to surrender. Many prisoners were taken in the dug-outs.

So at last the stronghold of the Woods was ours, and there is good hope that we shall keep it.

One other wood in this stretch of woodlands is still not ours. It is the Wood of Trones, where also there has been desperate fighting by the men who captured Bernafay Wood and Caterpillar Wood and the ground about Montauban, shelled and shelled again by the enemy, who hates to have us there.

We have taken it several times, but the evening’s shell-fire forced us from part of it. When they come, our shell-fire slashes them to death. So much of it is No Man’s Land, and a devilish place.

But we hold a great stretch of ground after the Battle of the Woods.

XII

THE FIGHT FOR OVILLERS

1

JULY 13

At Ovillers there has been fierce fighting to-day which has gained for us several important bits of trench and ground, linking up with other separate points already won, so that this German stronghold is closely besieged.

The enemy to-day was bombarding our positions round Contalmaison and Mametz Wood with a most formidable barrage, and as I watched this from a vantage point looking across a wide stretch of the battlefields it seemed to me that the Germans might be preparing a strong counter-attack along that line.

Nearer to Thiépval it was strangely quiet after the great fighting a week and more ago.

The village of Thiépval itself was deadly quiet in the German lines of brown, bombarded earth, beyond our whiter trenches. What was once a wood there, about red-roofed barns and houses and an old church tower, is now only a number of charred stumps sticking up from the brick dust and ruin of these buildings.

Behind Thiépval, captured and lost by our soldiers after heroic fighting and great sacrifice on July 1, could be seen the places which the enemy is holding in his second line of defence, the next line of village fortresses.

They were marked by the tall chimney of Courcelette, the woods of Grandcourt, and the church spire of Irles. And there, standing high and clear above the ridge, was one landmark which has been famous before in the war and will be again before the war is ended. It was the clock-tower of Bapaume, and if the sun had been shining on it we could have read the time of day.

On the ridge above Thiépval were little moving figures.

“Germans,” said a sergeant with one eye to his glass.

There was a lot of them, crawling about like ants, but none of our shells fell among them. All guns were busy on other work further to the right, where the smoke of great shells rose like smouldering fires over all the ground from Ovillers to Montauban.

2

The fighting for Ovillers has been hard, bloody, and close. Many of our men have died to gain a yard or two of earthwork. There have been great adventures in the capturing of some bits of broken brick or the working round a ditch below the remnants of a wall.

Under a steady drive of machine-gun bullets sweeping all the ground, men of ours from Cheshire and another English county in the north have crept forward at night with a few hand-grenades and flung themselves against the enemy’s bombing-posts and barricades and fought fiercely to smash down the sandbags or brickwork and get a few more yards of clear ground.

They have sapped their way underground and blown up the roofs of vaults where Germans lay in hiding with machine-guns. They have fought in small parties, gaining isolated points in the southern part of the village, and holding on to them under heavy fire until only a few men remained alive, still holding on.

There have been fights to the death between a handful of English or Irish soldiers and a dozen or more Germans, meeting each other in the darkness of deep cellars quarried out from the chalk subsoil, and German gunners peering out of slits in concrete emplacements below ground and firing bursts of bullets down the roadway have found themselves suddenly in the grasp of men covered with white clay rising out of holes in the earth, with no weapons but their picks.

Ovillers is a place of abominable ruin.

“Do you know Neuville St. Vaast?” asked an officer this morning, and when I nodded (because I had a near call there), he said, “Ovillers beats it hollow, for sheer annihilation.”

There is nothing left of it except dust. There is not a wall standing two feet high, or a bit of a wall. The guns have swept it flat.

But underground there are still great cellars quarried out by inhabitants who have long fled, and in these the Germans are holding out against our attacks and our bombardments.

Heavy shells have opened up some of them, and filled them with dead and wounded, but many still stand strong, and out of them come the enemy’s machine-guns and bombers to make counter-attacks against the ditches and débris from which our men are working forward. The ground is pitted with enormous shell holes, in which men lie buried. Ovillers is perhaps more ghastly than any ruined ground along the front.

3

It was at 8 o’clock on the morning of July 7 that the south-eastern part of the village was taken by assault. The North-Country men advanced from a line to the north of La Boiselle after a great bombardment, and went over open ground to the labyrinth of trenches which defend the village. These had been smashed into a tumult of earth and sandbags, but, as usual, some of the German machine-gunners had been untouched in their dug-outs, and they came up to serve their machines as soon as our barrage lifted.

Other Germans defended themselves with bombs. There was savage fighting between the broken traverses, in shell craters, and in ditches. Many of our men fell, but others came up and pushed further forward. One officer and a man or two ran straight towards a German machine-gun which was doing deadly work, and knocked it out with a well-aimed bomb. But higher up on this maze of broken trenches was a German redoubt, from which machine-gun fire came in streams.

Some Irish soldiers tried to storm the place but suffered heavy casualties in front of the redoubt. It was decided to fall back a little, and reform the line for the night, and all through the night the men worked to build up barricades to cut off the enemy from the southern end of the village.

That end was being “cleaned out” of Germans, who were routed out of cellars. Many of them were glad to surrender and grateful for the life they had expected to lose.

“We took bags of ’em,” said an officer in charge of this work.

Next day the men worked their way forward above ground and below ground. Some crept out of a ditch and worked up to a bombing post made by others on the left of the village.

Another body of troops made a sudden forward movement and, taking the enemy by surprise, marched round the left and took up a line right across the south-west end of Ovillers without loss. That was a great gain which enabled our men to link up from separate points. The fighting to-day has been a further process of fitting up this jigsaw puzzle of isolated groups who have been burrowing into the German stronghold.

4

A great adventure, or what the officers call a fine “stunt,” was carried out by some Lancashire men on the right of the village. They were told to send out a patrol overland in the direction of Pozières.

I think, to the young officers in charge, it must have seemed rather like a pleasant suggestion to go and discover the North Pole or the Magnetic North. However, the idea appealed to them; they would see some new country, and there was quite a chance of individual fighting, which is so much better than being killed in a ditch by shell-fire.

With them went a young machine-gun officer, who is justly proud of having gone out with sixteen machine-guns and, as you shall hear, of coming back with twenty.

I know that he is pleased with himself, as he ought to be, because he had a laughing light in his eyes when I gave him a lift in a car on the way back to a good dinner, and, having escaped without a scratch (and four extra guns) it is no wonder that he thought this adventure “a topping bit of work.”

It was gallant work, and as far as the first day went, without loss. The little company of men struck north-eastwards up an old bit of communication trench, and part of the way in the open, in the twilight and the darkness that followed. They were going steadily into German territory, to the high ground which slopes down from Pozières.

There were lots of Germans about—thousands of them not enormously far away—but they did not expect a visit like this, and were not watchful of this piece of ground.

After working forward for something like a mile they came to a redoubt inhabited by German bombers.

What happened then is not very clear to me, and was certainly not very clear to the Germans. But this place was passed successfully, and it was further on that my machine-gun friend (the fellow with the sparkle in his eyes) increased his number of guns.

This part of his adventure is also somewhat confused, as most fighting is. He tells me that he “pinched” the guns. Also that he made “a bag of ’em.” Anyhow, he captured them, and has brought them back, which is a very good proof that they were taken.

So far all went well. The night was spent in consolidating this extraordinary position right in the heart of German territory, and all next day our men stayed there. They had a wonderful view of the country below them, saw many things worth noting for future use, and sent bursts of machine-gun fire at the enemy’s infantry moving down to attack our troops.

But it was too good to last. The enemy became aware that they were being hit from a position where none of our troops could possibly be, according to the logic of things.

They could hardly believe their eyes, I imagine, when they saw these illogical young gentlemen making themselves at home in this extremely advanced post.

There must have been some frightful words used by German officers before they ordered an infantry attack to clear these Englishmen out. The infantry came down a trench from Pozières, but as they came they were met by a stream of machine-gun fire directed by the young officer who had “pinched” four more guns than he had taken out.

They suffered heavy casualties, and the attack broke down. But then the enemy put his guns to work, as he always does when his infantry fails, and what had been a great adventure, with a sporting chance, became a deadly business, with all the odds against our men.

The enemy’s shell-fire was concentrated heavily upon this one bit of trench away out in the open, and the ground was ploughed up with high explosives. The machine-guns were taken back, but the British held on until at last only an officer and six men were left.

Those who came back unwounded numbered in the end only one officer and one man—with the exception of a sergeant who stayed behind with a wounded Irishman. He would not leave his comrade, and for thirty-six hours stayed out in his exposed position, with heavy shells falling on every side of him.

The Irishman was delirious, and making such a noise that his friend knocked him on the head to keep him quiet. Every time a shell burst near him he shouted out, “You’ve missed me again, Fritz.”

But the sergeant himself kept his wits. He is a Lancashire man and with all the dogged pluck of Lancashire.

When the bombardment quieted down he brought back his friend, and then went out to No Man’s Land to search for another one.

5

But let us not forget that our men have not the monopoly of courage in this war. We have against us a brave enemy, and again and again during this battle our officers and men have paid a tribute to the stubborn fighting qualities of the German soldiers.

“For goodness sake,” said one officer, “get rid of that strange idea in the minds of many people at home that we are fighting old men and boys and cripples.”

“All the Germans we have met and captured have been big, hefty fellows, well fed until our bombardment stopped their food and with plenty of pluck in them.”

“The courage of their machine-gunners especially, is—worse luck for us—quite splendid.”

As far as food goes the watchword of the German people is “soldiers first.”

That they are suffering themselves seems certain from the letters found in great numbers in their captured dug-out. It seems to me incredible that these should be fictitious.

They bear in every line the imprint of bitter truth, and they read like a cry from starving people.

“You reproach me with writing so little to you. What can I write? If I told the truth about conditions here I should be locked up, and as I do not wish to write lies to you I had better say nothing.”

“We have tickets for everything now—flour, meat, sausage, butter, fat, potatoes, sugar, soup, &c. We are really nothing more than tickets ourselves.”

And in another letter from Cologne:—

“Hunger is making itself felt here. During the week none of the families received any potatoes. The allowance now is one egg per head per week and half a pound of bread and fifty grammes of butter per head per day.”

“England is not so wrong about starving us out. If the war lasts three months longer we shall be done. It is a terrible time for Germany. God is punishing us too severely.”

There is only one satisfaction in these pitiful letters. It is the hope it gives us that the enemy—not these poor women and children, but the Devil at the back of the business—will realise soon that war does not pay, and will haul down the flag with its skull and crossbones.

XIII

THROUGH THE GERMAN SECOND LINE

1

JULY 15

For a little while—yes, and even now—it has seemed something rather marvellous. We have broken through the enemy’s second line; through, and beyond on a front of two and a half miles, and for the first time since October of 1914 cavalry has been in action. Men who fought in the retreat from Mons, the little remnant left, look back on the old days when the enemy’s avalanche of men swept down on them, and say, as one said to me yesterday, “Through the second line? Then we have broken the evil spell.” So it seems to men who fought in the first battle of Ypres, or in the second, and then for a year more stood in their trenches staring through loop-holes at the zig-zag of German lines, barbwired, deeply dug, fortified with redoubts, machine-gun emplacements and strong places—a great system of earthworks on high ground, nearly always on high ground, which made one grow cold to see in aeroplane photographs—supported by masses of guns which had been registered on every road and trench of ours.

To smash through that could be done at a great cost. Given a certain number of guns on a certain length of front, with hardened troops ready for a big dash, and there was no doubt that we could break the enemy’s first line, or system, as we broke through at Neuve Chapelle and at Loos. But afterwards? That was the hard thing to solve. No one on the Western front had found the formula to carry the offensive beyond the first line without coming to a dead check at a river of blood. The French troops who broke through in the Champagne fell before they reached the second line. At Loos Highlanders and Londoners swept through the first line and then, at Hill 70 and Hulluch, were faced by annihilating fire, and could go no further except to death.... But to-day we broke the second German line.

2

I had the luck to give the news to some of our men who had been wounded early in the battle. It was worth a king’s ransom to see their gladness. “Have we got through, sir?” asked an English boy, bandaged about the head and face. When I told him a great light came into his eyes, and he said “By Jove!... That’s pretty good!”

A wounded officer raised himself on a stretcher and called out to me as I passed, “Any news?... How are we doing up there?... What, right through?... Oh, splendid!” Because I had come down from the battlefield, and might know something, officers and men on the roads asked eager questions. A doctor came out of an operating theatre in a field hospital. He was very busy there with men who could not answer questions. He stood for a moment in the doorway of the tent wiping his hands on a towel.

“How’s it going? Have we broken through?”

He stared at me when I answered, as though searching for the truth in me, and said, “Sure?... I hardly thought we could do it.”

The news spread quickly behind the lines, and there has been a queer thrill in the air to-day, exciting men with the promise of victory. I think they, too, feel that an evil spell has been broken because British soldiers have broken the second German line. Their hopes run ahead of the facts.

Their imagination has visions of an immediate German rout, and the enormous patience of the French people, incredulous, after two years, of any quick ending, is not shared by some of our young officers and men, who believe that we have the enemy on the run, not remembering his third line, and fourth, and God knows how many more.

For a day, anyhow, victory has been in the air, and because it was the 14th of July, France’s day, there are flags waving everywhere, on wayside cottages and barns and across the streets of an old French town. Women and children are carrying the tricolour, and as our wounded come down in ambulances and lorries, mostly lightly-wounded men straight out of the battle, wearing German helmets on bandaged heads, waving bandaged hands, or staring out gravely, with a pain in their eyes, at the life of the roads which is theirs again, the flags flutter up to them and laughing girls cry “Merci, camarades!” and old men stand on the roadsides raising their hats to these boys of ours who have won back a mile or two more of the soil of France, and have been touched by fire.

All this is part of the emotion which belongs to war, the sentiment and the faith and the hope without which men could not fight nor women hide their tears.

But the business of war itself is different and of a grimmer kind, not admitting sentiment to those Generals of ours who have been calculating chances based upon the position of their guns, the quantity of their ammunition, their reserves of men, the enemy’s dispositions, resources and difficulties, and all the mechanics of a great battle. They have had to study human nature, too, as well as the mechanism of war. To how great a test could they put these battalions of ours, in the plan to smash the German second line? How long, for instance, could they “stick it” in Bernafay Wood and the Trones Wood? Was it possible to put in troops already tired by hard fighting? How could they be replaced by fresh troops?... a thousand problems of man-power and gun-power which must be reckoned out, without much margin of error, if all the cost of the first part of the battle—a tragic cost—were to be justified by success in the second part.

Working night and day, snatching a little sleep and a little food at odd hours, in constant touch with telephones whispering messages from headquarters, batteries, battalion commanders in the field, receiving reports of local successes and local failures of German counter-attacks, of German reinforcements in guns and men, our divisional Generals and Brigadiers, keeping in touch with Corps Generals and Army Generals, had to prepare for the second big blow. It would have to be quick and hard.

3

There had been a whole fortnight’s fighting since the great attack was launched on the First of July, and it had been very desperate fighting. On the left from Hebuterne down to Beaumont-Hamel the heroic self-sacrifice of great numbers of men had not been rewarded by success. That side of the German fortress lines had remained standing—broken in places, but not carried nor held after the first bloody assaults.

The enemy had concentrated his defensive strength at that part of the line, believing the main attack was to be delivered there, and it was one vast redoubt crammed with machine-guns which scythed down battalions of our men as they advanced with incomparable valour. Further south the stronghold of Ovillers was not yet taken, though almost surrounded, and penetrated by bodies of grenadiers bombing their way into the quarries and cellars.

It was through the southern bastion of the German fortress-position that our troops had stormed their way, and in fourteen days of hard stubborn fighting they had struggled forward up the high ground from the Fricourt ridge to the Montauban ridge. In my despatches I have endeavoured to record the narrative of these daily battles, and to give some faint idea of the wonderful courage and tenacity of our men, who captured Contalmaison and lost it and captured it again under terrible storms of fire, who went forward to the Battle of the Woods, fighting for every yard of the way in Bailiff Wood on the left, and Trones Wood on the right, and Mametz Wood in the centre, with little copses of naked tree-trunks round about, into which the enemy hurled his high explosives.

Wave after wave of splendid men went up. Not one of these places was won easily. The spirit of our race, all the steel in it, all the fire in its blood, was needed to gain the ground swept by machine-guns and ploughed by shells. There were hours when men of weaker stock would have despaired and yielded. But these men of ours would not be beaten. Fresh waves of them went to get back in the morning what had been lost at night, or at night what had been lost by day because of the fire which had destroyed those who had gone up first. And every day they made a little progress, thrusting forward an advance post here, winning a new bit of wood there, bombing the Germans back from ground we needed for a new advance.

There was not a man among all our men who had any misunderstanding as to the purpose of the struggle. I have spoken to hundreds of them, and all knew that it was “up to them,” as they say, to push on to the second German line so that other men could break it. I know that many of these men, quite simple fellows, felt individually that upon his single courage, his last bit of pushful strength, his last stumble over a yard of earth towards that second German line, depended, as far as one man’s strength tells, the success of the great attack. It was this spirit which made them shout “No surrender!” when surrender would have been an easy way of escape, and “stick it” in places of infernal horror. I write the plain unvarnished truth.

It was when Contalmaison—the Stronghold of the Woods—was finally and securely taken, when Mametz Wood and Bailiff Wood were mostly ours, and when our positions were strengthened at Montauban with some footing in Trones Wood, that the attack upon the second German line became possible. It was for that moment that our generals were now waiting and preparing. Men were there who had fought long in the Ypres salient, hardened to every phase of trench warfare, and men who had won great honour in the Loos salient, and men, all of them, who had the spirit of attack.

I watched them passing along the roads towards the front, saw old friends in their ranks, and knew, as I looked, that in all the world there are not more splendid soldiers. Hardened by a long campaign, bronzed to the colour of their belts, marching with most perfect discipline, these handsome, clean-cut men went into the battlefield whistling as on the first day of the battle their comrades had gone singing, though they knew that in a few hours it would be hell for them. As I watched them pass something broke in my heart so that I could have wept silly tears. There were other men, harder than I, who were stirred by the same emotion, and cursed the war.

4

The attack was to begin before the dawn. Behind the lines, as I went up to the front in the darkness, the little villages of France were asleep. It was a night of beauty, very warm and calm, with a moon giving a milky light to the world. Clouds trailed across it without obscuring its brightness, and there was only one star visible—a watchful eye up there looking down upon the battlefields.

The whitewashed walls of cottages and barns appeared out of great gulfs of shadow, and trees on high ground above the fields were cut black against the moonlight. Warm scents of hay and moist earth, and new-baked bread, and the acrid smell of French farmyards came upon the air. Further forward there was still great quietude along the roads, but here and there long supply columns and ambulance convoys loomed black under the trees.

The ambulances were empty before the battle. For several miles only one figure stood at every cross-road. It was the figure of Christ on a wayside Calvary. Sentries gave their challenge, as on the first night of battle, and presently I saw other soldiers about in the dark entries of French courtyards, their bayonets shining like a streak of light, and officers standing together with whispered consultations, and, along side roads men marching.

A long column of them came to a halt to let our car pass, and I looked into the men’s eyes. There was a young officer there whose face I should know if I saw him again in the world, because it was in the rays of a lantern, and had a white light on it. He had the look of Lancelot.

The men were very quiet. Very quiet also were camps of men and horses in fields dipping down to hollows where a few lanterns twinkled, and presently quite close to the edge of the battlefields I passed great columns of horse-gunners and horse transport and cavalry with their lances up, and Indian native cavalry, still as statues. The men were drawn up along the side of the road, and their figures were utterly black in the darkness between an old millhouse and some other buildings. Except for one man who was humming a tune, they were quite silent, and they hardly stirred in their saddles. They seemed to be waiting, with some grim expectation.

The road was lined with trees which made a tunnel with its foliage, and at one end of the tunnel which showed a patch of sky, there were strange lights flashing, like flaming swords cutting through the darkness. We went up towards the lights and towards a monstrous tumult of noise, and walked straight across country towards the centre of a circle of fire which was all around us. Our artillery was smashing the German line.

5

I described, perhaps at too great length, the bombardment on the night before the 1st of July. Then it seemed to me that nothing could be more overwhelming to one’s soul and senses. But this was worse—more wonderful and more terrible. As I stumbled over broken ground and shell holes, and got caught in coils of wire, a cold sweat broke out upon me, and for a little while I was horribly afraid. It was not fear for myself. It was just fear, the fear that an animal may have when the sky is full of lightning—a sensuous terror. The hell of war encircled us, and its waves of sound and light beat upon us.

Our batteries were firing with an intense fury. The flashes of them were away back behind us—where the heavies have their hiding places—and over all the ground in front of our new line of attack. They came out of the black earth with short, sharp stabs of red flame whose light filled the hollows with pools of fire. And the sky and the ridges of ground and the earthworks and ruins and woods across our lines were blazing with the flashes of bursting shells. Blinding light leapt about like a will o’ the wisp. For a second it lit up all the horizon over Contalmaison, and gave a sudden picture, ghastly white, of the broken château with stumps of trees about it. Then it was blotted out by a great blackness, and instantly shifted to Mametz Wood or to Montauban, revealing their shapes intensely and the shells crashing beyond them, until they, too, disappeared with the click of a black shutter. A moment later and Fricourt was filled with white brilliance, so that every bit of its ruin, its hideous rummage of earth, its old mine-craters, and its plague-stricken stumps of trees were etched upon one’s eyes. Along the German second line by Bazentin-le-Grand, Bazentin-le-Petit, and Longueval, at the back of the woods, our shells were bursting without a second’s pause and in great clusters. They tore open the ground and let out gusts of flames. Flame fountains rose and spread from the German trenches above Pearl Wood. The dark night was rent with all these flames, and hundreds of batteries were feeding the fires.

Every calibre of gun was at work. The heavy shells, 15-inch, 12-inch, 8-inch, 6-inch, 4.7, came overhead like flocks of birds—infernal birds with wings that beat the air into waves and came whining with a shrill high note, and stooped to earth with a monstrous roar. The lighter batteries, far forward, were beating the devil’s tattoo, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, with sharp knocks that clouted one’s ears. I sat on a wooden box on the top of an old dug-out in the midst of all this fury. There was a great gun to my left, and every time it fired it shook the box, and all the earth underneath, with a violent vibration.

The moon disappeared soon after 3 o’clock, and no stars were to be seen. But presently a faint ghost of dawn appeared. The white earth of the old, disused trenches about me became visible. A lark rose and sang overhead. And at 3.30 there was a sudden moment of hush. It was the lifting of the guns, and the time of attack. Over there in the darkness by Mametz Wood and Montauban thousands of men, the men I had seen going up, had risen to their feet, and were going forward to the second German line, or to the place where death was waiting for them, before the light came.

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The light came very quickly. It was strange what a difference a few minutes made. Very faintly, but steadily, the dawn crept through the darkness, revealing the forms of things and a little colour in the grass. The sandbags at my feet whitened. Over at Ovillers there were clouds of smoke, and from its denseness red and white rockets shot up and remained in the sky for several seconds. Other rockets, red and white and green, rose to the right of Contalmaison towards Bazentin-le-Grand. Our infantry was advancing.

A new sound came into the general din of gun-fire. It was a kind of swishing noise, like that of flames in a strong wind. I knew what it meant.

“Enemy machine-guns,” said an artillery observer, who had just come out of his hole in the ground. There must have been many of them to make that noise.

Our own artillery had burst out into a new uproar. I could see our shells bursting further forward, or thought I could.

“I believe our men are getting on,” said an officer, staring through his glasses.

The gunner observer had one eye to a telescope.

“There’s too much mist about. And, anyhow, one can’t make out the confusion of battle. It’s always hopeless. And what the devil is that light?”

“Must be a signal,” said the gunner officer. “I think I’d better report it.”

He put his head into the dug-out, and spoke to a man sitting by a telephone.

At 3.55 the light was clear enough for one to see German shrapnel, very black and thick, between Mametz Wood and Bazentin Wood. High explosives were bursting there too. The enemy had got his guns to work upon our infantry.

At 4 o’clock there was a humming sound overhead, and I looked up and saw the first aeroplane flying towards the German lines, just as I had seen one on the first day of battle. It flew very low—no more than 500 ft. high—and went very steadily on towards the furnace, brave moth!

At 4.10 there was a red glow to the right of Montauban. It rose with a pulsing light and spread upwards—a great torch with sparks dancing over it.

“By Jove!” said one of the men near me. “That’s Longueval on fire!”

In a little while there was no doubt about it. I could see the sharp edge of broken buildings in the heart of the red glow. The village of Longueval was in flames.

From behind the north-west corner of Mametz Wood a great rosy light rose like a cloud in the setting sun, but more glowing at its base. It died out three times and rose again, vividly, and then appeared no more. The gunner observer was bothered again. Was it a signal or an explosion? With so many lights and flames about it was difficult to tell.

At about 4.30 I heard another furious outburst of machine-gun fire in the direction of Longueval, and it seemed to spread westwards along Bazentin-le-Grand and Bazentin-le-Petit. I strained my eyes to see any of our infantry, but dense clouds of smoke were rolling over the ground past Contalmaison and between Mametz and Bazentin woods. It seemed as if we were putting up a smoke barrage there, and later a great volume of smoke hid the ground by Montauban.

The enemy’s artillery was now firing with great violence. Enormous shell-bursts flung up the earth along the line of our advance, and the black shrapnel smoke was hanging heavily above. It seemed to me that some of their guns were firing wildly and blindly. High explosives burst down below Fricourt, where there was nothing to hurt, and in places far afield. The German gunners had got the wind up, as soldiers say, and now that darkness had gone and daylight come our men must have gone far ahead, if luck was theirs. Had they broken the second German line? Men waiting for any news of them found the strain of ignorance intolerable.... What were they doing up there?

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The first men to come back from the battle were the wounded. They were the lightly wounded, or at least men who could walk. They came across the fields in twos and threes at first, or alone, single limping figures, at a slow pace. But after an hour or two they came in a straggling procession from the first-aid dressing stations up in the lines—men with bandaged heads, men with their arms in slings, men with wounded feet, so that they could only hop along with an arm round a comrade’s neck.

Some of them were all blood-stained, with blood on their faces and hands and clothes. Others had their uniforms torn to tatters, and there were men who were bare almost to the waist, with a jacket slung over one shoulder. There was hardly a man among them who wore his steel helmet, though some carried them slung to the rifle, and others wore German helmets and German caps. Ambulances were waiting for them, and the stretcher-bearers were busy with the bad cases. The stretcher-bearers had done their duty as gallantly as the fighting men, and some of their own comrades were among the wounded.

But they had been reinforced by men who do not belong to the R.A.M.C. Some of the stretchers were being carried by men in grey uniforms with flat round caps, who walked stolidly looking about them, at all those British soldiers, and at those fields on the British side, with curious eyes as though everything were strange to them. They were German prisoners paying for the privilege of life, and glad to pay.

Later in the day there came down a long column of these men, not carrying stretchers, but marching shoulder to shoulder, under armed escort. There were over 700 of them in this one convoy, as a living proof that the day had gone well for British arms. They were tall, sturdy men for the most part, and in spite of their ordeal by fire most of them looked in good physical health, though haggard and hollow-eyed and a little dazed. There was a number of wounded among them who dragged wearily by the side of their luckier friends, but those who were badly hurt travelled with our own wounded, and I saw several of them on the lorries with their hands on the shoulders of men who had gone out to kill them.

So the backwash of battle came down like a tide, but long before then I knew that we had broken the second German line and that our men were fighting on the high ground beyond. The village of Longueval was ours. Bazentin-le-Grand, both wood and village, and Bazentin-le-Petit, were ours. A gallant body of men had swept through Trones Wood, on the extreme right of the line, and patrols were pushing into Delville Wood and towards the highest ridge behind the broken German trenches. On the left our men had swept up and beyond Contalmaison Villa, which stands far north of the village.

Every objective of the attack had been carried and our losses were not enormously heavy. The German lines had been captured on a front of nearly three miles—and the cavalry was going in.

Scottish troops were amongst those who went first into Longueval—men belonging to famous old regiments—and they fought very grimly, according to the spirit of their race, with their blood set on fire by the music of the pipes that went with them. Before the light of dawn came, and when our guns lifted forward, they rose from the ground just north of Montauban and went forward across No Man’s Land towards the German trenches. They had to make a distance of 1,200 yards over open ground and came at once under heavy shell-fire and an enfilade fire from machine-guns.

The enemy also used smoke bombs, and the ground was ploughed with high explosives. A number of men fell, but the others went forward shouting and reached the German line. In some parts the wire had not been cut by our bombardment, but the Highlanders hurled themselves upon it and beat their way. Machine-guns were pattering bullets upon their ranks, but not for long. The men poured through and surged in waves into and across the German trenches. Every man among them was a grenadier, provided with bombs and with supplies coming up behind. It was with the bomb, the most deadly weapon of this murderous war for close combat, that the men fought their way through. The German soldiers defended themselves with their own hand grenades when their machine-guns had been knocked out in the first line trenches, but as they sprang out of their dug-outs when the bombardment lifted and our men were upon them they had but a poor chance of life unless they were quick to surrender. I hear that these trenches in the second German line were not deeply dug, and that the dug-outs themselves were hardly bomb-proof.

For once in a way the enemy had been lazy and over-confident, and he paid now a bitter price for his pride in believing that the first line was impregnable. I do not care to write about this part of the fighting. It was bloody work, and would not be good to read. One incident was told me by a kilted sergeant as he lay wounded. From one of the dug-outs came a German officer. He had a wild light in his eyes, and carried a great axe.

“I surrender,” he said, in good English.

And in broad Scotch the sergeant told him that if he had an idea of surrendering it would be a good and wise thing to drop his chopper first. But the German officer swung it high, and it came like a flash past the sergeant’s head. Like a flash also a bayonet did its work.

8

While men were “cleaning up” the dug-outs in the first-line trenches other men pressed on and stormed their way into Longueval village. The great fires there which I had seen in the darkness had died down, and there was only the glow and smoulder of them in the ruins. But machine-guns were still chattering in their emplacements.

In one broken building there were six of them firing through holes in the walls. It was a strong redoubt sweeping the ground, which had once been a roadway and was now a shambles. Scottish soldiers rushed the place and flung bombs into it until there was no more swish of bullets but only the rising of smoke-clouds and black dust. Longueval was a heap of charred bricks above ground, but there was still trouble below ground, before it was firmly taken. There were many cellars in which Germans fought like wolves at bay. And down in the darkness of these places men fought savagely, seeing only the glint of each other’s eyes, and feeling for each other’s throats, unless there were still bombs handy to make a quicker ending. It was primitive warfare. The cave-men fought like that, in such darkness, though not with bombs, which belong to our age in this Christian era of grace and civilisation.

To the right of Longueval and south of the second German line lies the Trones Wood, and as it was on the right flank of our attack it could not be left in the enemy’s hands. We had held most of it once, a few days ago, and for a few hours, but the enemy’s shell-fire had made the place untenable. It was into that fire that some of our English battalions advanced yesterday morning from Bernafay Wood. “They shelled us like hell,” said a boy who came from a quiet place in Sussex before he knew what hell is like.

There were machine-guns sweeping the southern end of the woods with cross-fire, and with bursting shells overhead it was a place of black horror in the night. But these English boys kept crawling on to gain a yard or two before the next crash came, and then another yard or two, and at last they came up to the German line, and flung themselves suddenly upon German machine-gunners and German riflemen sheltered behind earthworks and trunks of trees.... The wood was captured again, and then a queer kind of miracle happened, and it seemed as if those who had been dead had come to life again. For out of holes in the ground, and from behind the fallen timbers of shelled trees, came a number of English boys, dirty and wild-looking, who shouted out, “Hullo, lads!” and “What cheer, matey?” or just shouted and laughed with a sob in their throats and big tears down their grimy faces. They were West Kents, who had first taken the Trones Wood and then had been caught in a barrage of fire. With one officer 300 men had dug themselves into the roots of trees on the eastern edge of the wood and kept the Germans at bay with a machine-gun.

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