Chapter XV

THE GERMAN OFFENSIVE. MEAULTE, BOUVIGNY, AND BÉTHUNE.

I.

A further expansion of the Tank Corps, as indicated already, was the natural result of the Battle of Cambrai. The rejected proposal for an 18-battalion establishment was now almost obsequiously adopted. A little later, indeed, the War Office (dragging with it a reluctant Treasury) rushed recklessly in where it had feared to tread before, and sanctioned a still larger increase. Before all this had happened, however, an outward and visible sign had testified to the dawn of a new era. The tanks were formally manumitted from the paper control of the Machine Gun Corps, and became in name what they had always been in fact, a separate organisation. For reasons of simplicity and common-sense I have written throughout of the “Tank Corps,” where a pedantic conscience would have impelled me to speak of the H.B.M.G.C., for this change of nomenclature, with all that it implied, was not in force until late in 1917.

Two new tank brigades, the 4th and 5th, were now to be formed immediately in France. Pending the completion of these arrangements, as well as of those for the disposal of the various units in the coming year, the three old brigades, or what was left of them, were concentrated for the winter between Albert and Bray, on the edge of the Somme battlefield. There was much to be done before any of the battalions would be fit for another offensive battle, and it was suspected already that defensive rather than offensive measures would be our portion for the next few months. In the meantime, Tank Corps Headquarters, faced with the dazzling prospect of a great and possibly indefinite expansion, made a simple calculation and found that it was in danger of exhausting the resources of the alphabet. Eighteen battalions, denominated alphabetically, would leave only eight letters for future emergencies; while to continue the illogical practice of numbering the companies consecutively throughout a growing corps promised in the end a surfeit of figures as well. And so another revolutionary translation came about. Letters and figures changed places. Our old battalion designations, which had acquired a sentimental significance, were abolished at a stroke, so that A Battalion, Tank Corps, became the 1st Tank Battalion, and, what was more harrowing, G became the 7th. This reform, however necessary, was painful to the victims. It might mean nothing to the new battalions forming in England, but we, in France, felt that we had lost our individuality. It was as if the law, without obtaining my consent, had decreed that I was to be called Smith or Jones. The old names, however, are not dead. In any gathering of officers or men from the first three brigades, you will find the battalions still spoken of as A or B, F or G, and so on, as the case may be.

At the same time that this nominal change took place, the numerical order of companies was abolished also. The three companies of a battalion were known in future as A, B, and C.

I have explained how I came to be absent at Cambrai. Just before Christmas I was released from convalescent quarters (cynically so-called) at Barly, near Avesnes-le-Comte, where I had been living with other unfortunates in the coldest château in France--an outwardly imposing but actually gimcrack house like “Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall,” and short of coal into the bargain. With some difficulty (for R.T.O.’s and other dignitaries whose business it was to know such things invariably were ignorant of the whereabouts of tank units) I ran the 1st Brigade to earth in a camp of huts outside Meaulte, two miles from Albert. I will not dilate upon the arctic winter we spent at this unholy spot, beyond remarking that the camp, like all similar military establishments, was built on the bleak northern slope of a hill. There was no intervening shelter, so far as I could judge, between us and the North Pole. We contrived, however, to exist cheerfully, and indeed for a fortnight after Christmas almost too cheerfully. The celebrations common to that season and to the New Year were involved with others consequent upon the announcement of the Cambrai honours, and the promotions and partings brought about by the expansion of the corps. These last affected the 7th Battalion--as I hate to call it--very materially. Colonel Hankey, to every one’s profound regret (a feeling not so common as the conventional accounts of such departures might lead the unsophisticated to suppose), left us to take over the new 4th Brigade, carrying with him several others. Major Fernie became Battalion Commander, and was succeeded in A (late 19) Company by Winters. Major Broome left C Company to command another battalion. There were a number of minor promotions, due to these changes and to casualties; and Henriquez, of A Company, having become battalion reconnaissance officer, his vacant post as company R.O. was offered to me. The work had always appealed to me, and I was the more pleased with the opportunity at the time because I believed then that most of my old friends in C Company were leaving the battalion for more exalted posts elsewhere.

Few incidents worth recording marked our stay at Meaulte. Heavy snow fell, which added, in my opinion, to the general discomfort, and the road up to the camp remained for weeks a corrugated and painful slope of ice, down which one slid helplessly into the village. Fuel, in more senses than one, was always a burning question, and next in importance came that of leave, now six or seven months overdue. A driving school, supplied with the few fit tanks the three battalions could muster, was started at Bécordel, on the old front line near Mametz. Drafts of officers and men came from the depot to replace casualties. And in January began the reshuffling of units necessitated by the formation of two new brigades. Of the old 1st Brigade the 7th Battalion only was left. The 4th and 5th (late D and E) went to join the 1st Battalion in the new 4th Brigade, under General Hankey, as he was now, and in their place we received, with hot rum-punch and such other amenities as the arctic conditions indicated, two fledglings from England--the 11th and 12th (K and L) Battalions. The former suffered from a surfeit of Rifle Brigade officers, was rent always in consequence by internal dissensions, and, thus handicapped, struggled rather obscurely through its short active career. The 12th Battalion, to which I was posted shortly before the Armistice, was more normal and human; and, after a series of successful actions, wound up in a blaze of glory as the only one of the five surviving tank units selected to represent the corps in Cologne itself.

In February, amid half-incredulous rejoicings, the first leave allotments reached the 7th Battalion. I came to England in the middle of the month, returning in the first days of March to find our huts stripped and deserted, a rear party packing up a residue of stores and kit, and the main body of the battalion, with all the tanks, already departed northward for the 1st Army area. I followed by lorry the same afternoon. This was the last I saw of Meaulte, which then was full of inhabitants and little injured by war. A month later it was in ruins and occupied by the Germans.

II.

It was known by now that a German offensive on a large scale was imminent, and might be directed at any one point, or at several simultaneously, on the long front from Béthune to the Aisne. The move northward of the 1st Tank Brigade was part of a defensive scheme for the protection of the Bruay coal-fields, should the enemy make a direct attack upon them from the Lens-La Bassée sector. The front allotted to the Brigade extended from the La Bassée Canal to the Scarpe, and was divided into three parts--one to each battalion. These battalion fronts overlapped, while each unit was supposed to have some knowledge of the whole brigade area. The 12th Battalion was responsible for that part lying between the La Bassée Canal and Loos, the 7th Battalion for that between Vermelles and Vimy, the 11th for the remainder of the sector to a point south of Arras, where the 2nd Tank Brigade carried on the defensive line. It was assumed from the first that if tanks were employed at all it would be in a counter-attack, the probable directions of the enemy’s offensive being (1) against the Hill 70 sector, (2) a frontal attack against the Vimy Ridge, and (3) a flanking movement from the south. He occupied already so large a part of the coal district that the repulse of any further attempt was essential; and in the event of his capturing some vital point in the defence line (such as Hill 70 itself), the tanks would be employed at once to assist in driving him out. This being the general idea, little or no time was to be spent at first in collecting information about the ground beyond our front line. Reconnaissance was confined to the region between the tank-parks and the main zone of resistance, known as the Black Line. By the middle of the month this reconnaissance was in full swing. Taken as a whole, the country was not bad for tank operations; but the wide belt of shelled ground and crumbling trenches which marked the old front line before Lens, the numerous large mining villages which radiated out from that town, and the Vimy Ridge itself, so convulsed by high explosive that only three possible tank crossings could be found, presented difficult and dissimilar problems. A tank counter-attack in this unique region must have been extremely interesting.

Had such an attack taken place, almost the whole battlefield would have been spread like a map below our camp. I do not think there can have been in France any point of view quite so remarkable, in the circumstances, as the everyday outlook from the 7th Battalion’s huts above Bouvigny-Boyeffles. This camp--it was a single row of Nissens, occupied only by the officers--was situated halfway up the bold ridge which ends to the southward in the famous spur of Notre Dame de Lorette, overhanging the rubbish-heap that used to be Souchez. In front of us there was nothing but the immense flat plain of Lens and Douai. On a clear day we had only to step out of our huts and look over a hedge garnished with a screen of camouflage netting; and before us, across a stubble-field and the roofs of Boyeffles village, there rolled away to north and east and south-east the fruitless battlefields of three and a half years--Vimy and Liévin, Loos and Hulluch, La Bassée and Neuve Chapelle. And, for a background, this astonishing panorama took in Mont Rouge and Mont Noir and Kemmel Hill, thirty miles distant, near Ypres, the low ridge that covered Lille from view, the towns of Bailleul, Armentières, and Béthune, the score of wretched suburbs about Lens, with more rising ground ten miles behind, the numberless _crassiers_ and towers of the coal-fields, the smoke of trains on the Lille-Douai railway, the huge bulk of Drocourt Fosse behind which Douai itself was hidden. With my glasses, on many fine evenings before sunset, while standing at the back of my own hut, I have distinguished the church and the individual houses of Mons-en-Pevèle, a little village on a hill twenty-three miles from where I stood, and at least fifteen beyond the nearest point of the German lines. Nearer at hand in this crowded scene were other familiar landmarks--the churches of Harnes and Carvin, behind Lens, the fallen “Tower Bridge” of Loos, the white water towers of Fosse 21 and 22, the huge red-brick building with its three steel spires which had been the works of the Metallurgique Company. And everywhere, far and near, rose the black _crassiers_--the slag-heaps--of the coal-mines. Some of these were long and dwarfish, as you may see them in Lancashire, but those which took the eye were pyramidal, like colossal sable sugar-cones. Beside them were the skeletons of iron buildings, each with its tower and wheels. The foreground of all this was a jumble of white and red--white where patches of incongruous chalk were turned up along the miles of trenches, old and new, from Liévin to Loos, and red with a million shattered houses in the miners’ _cités_ which clustered about Lens--St Pierre, St Auguste and St Laurent, Calonne and Maroc, Angres and Avion. Lens itself, lying on low ground by the Souchez river, was hidden from our camp.

The men of the 7th Battalion were billeted in Bouvigny village, close to the officers’ huts. Battalion H.Q. took over the principal house in Boyeffles, a few hundred yards away at the foot of the ridge. The tanks were elaborately concealed on the very summit, amid the trees of the Bois de Bouvigny, a straggling wood which ran along the crest almost to the site of the demolished chapel of Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French line had run in the early days of the war, and where one still came across skeletons and rusted rifles three years old. North of us, in the Bois d’Olhain, were the 1st Brigade headquarters and the 12th Battalion, both in huts. The 11th Battalion was at Mont St Eloi, on our right. The troops holding this front were the Canadian Corps. During the past year they had captured Hill 70, Liévin, and a number of other suburbs of Lens, and their front line now ran through the outskirts of that dreadful town, reeking of poison gas and corruption. It was held only by German outposts, in many places occupying the half of a ruined house of which the other moiety was held by the Canadians; but it could not be taken permanently until Sallaumines, a suburb on a hillock immediately behind, was in our hands. The Canadians, always energetic, and especially anxious to round off their work by the capture of Lens, were full of schemes by which Sallaumines was to be carried with the help of tanks, but none of these materialised. While the German offensives burst upon us and drove past us to north and south, the Lens sector was privileged to remain the quietest part of the whole British front.

My new work as Reconnaissance Officer made me only too familiar with this region. For two months I did nothing but explore it. To begin with, I took part in a preliminary survey with Henriquez, Beale of B Company, and Jack Brown of C. (Gordon had left us to start a Reconnaissance School at Le Tréport.) This business presupposed ability to ride a motor-bicycle--all R.O.’s being provided with these abominable machines. I learnt eventually to ride mine with a certain amount of confidence and spirit; but to the end I knew nothing about its internal mechanism, and did not want to. I was so fortunate as to possess a draughtsman who understood petrol-engines, and I left the upkeep of my bicycle in his capable hands. Having with its help acquired a general knowledge of our area and of the routes we decided to follow if called upon to move, I proceeded to initiate the officers, N.C.O.’s, and drivers of A Company into these mysteries. In this work I had the aid, and, what was better, the congenial companionship, of Maelor Jones, who was the assistant R.O. of the company. Day after day he and I tramped about the melancholy region behind our line, exploring roads, examining bridges, selecting lying-up points, repeating every journey half a dozen times with our parties of learners, like a pair of Cook’s couriers. “On your left you now see Fosse 16, _dit de Lens_; beyond is Fosse 7, _de Béthune_. That handsome edifice far in front--it is not advisable to try to reach it--is the Metallurgique factory at Wingles....” I have never been so heartily wearied of any piece of country as I became of the Lens coal-fields. I came to know by name and to loathe at sight every pithead, every road, every clump of derelict red-brick houses. And yet, with all this repetition and monotony, the work and the place had unusual points of interest. It is the worst of a book on any set subject, that the writer cannot be as irrelevant as he would wish, for I should like to write now at some length about those two months. I should like to write of Bully-Grenay, where one could buy almost anything, and where children played about in streets that stank of poison gas; of Les Alouettes, where a woman (apparently the sole remaining inhabitant) took in washing and kept a chicken-run amid a battery of 8-inch howitzers; of the family of Aix Noulette, in whose house (rebuilt largely of biscuit-tins and brown paper) I ate so many omelettes; and of that exposed portion of the Souchez road where Jack Brown and I were sniped by a 5.9 at a moment when my wretched bicycle refused to climb a gentle slope on anything higher than bottom speed. But as these various adventures led to nothing in the end, space does not permit of any further discursions. The tanks, for whom all tribulations were undergone, were never called upon in this sector, although, before we had finished, we had extended our reconnaissance southward until we knew Souchez and the whole Vimy Ridge, with its craters and its tunnels, as well as we knew Piccadilly or Hyde Park--in the case of some of us, a good deal better.

In the meantime, startling events were happening elsewhere, and from our sort of peninsula we watched with increasing bewilderment and anxiety the great tide of the German offensives sweeping past on both flanks. On the morning of March 21, every one heard the roar of a heavy bombardment. It was known next day that the enemy was making rapid progress south of the Somme. For nearly a week the news became daily more disheartening. The four other Tank Brigades involved in the general debacle had lost nearly all their tanks, and were fighting as machine-gun units. And then, on the 29th, the Germans launched their expected attack against the Vimy Ridge and the northern part of the 3rd Army front. It was a costly failure--so costly north of the Scarpe that no further attempt was made against the ridge. But while the result was in doubt, detachments of the 7th and 12th Tank Battalions were hurried down to Roclincourt, in front of Arras, with Lewis guns, and took up a defensive position there. This party was known to us as the Oppy Expeditionary Force. Full of warlike zeal, but ignorant of the situation and even of its own whereabouts--for it arrived in the middle of the night, and was pushed immediately into holes and corners along the Roclincourt Ridge--it passed several anxious hours of darkness in the mistaken belief that a bloodthirsty and victorious enemy was close at hand. As a matter of fact, he was still four miles away, and never approached any nearer. The strain was broken with the dawn, amid shouts of laughter, by the appearance of a Decauville railway train which puffed deliberately across the front which the Lewis gunners were holding so tenaciously. The attack having definitely collapsed, the detachment returned on the 29th.

Throughout this exciting week, filled with appalling rumours, our reconnaissance continued more busily than ever. The activities of the 7th Battalion were now concentrated on the Vimy Ridge, which we explored from end to end. The 11th Battalion, some of whose tanks were now in Roclincourt, was extending its own reconnaissance far to the south of Arras. As the 3rd Army, conforming to the retreat of the 5th, withdrew its right and centre, there seemed an increased likelihood that the enemy would attempt the third alternative mentioned earlier in this chapter--a flanking attack through Arras against the rear of the Vimy Ridge. His reoccupation of Monchy-le-Preux and Orange Hill, in consequence of our withdrawal, enabled him once more to overlook the reverse slope of the ridge. Arras was shelled daily, and nearly all its inhabitants were removed; and villages far behind suffered from the German artillery. On account of this threat, and of the crippled state of the 2nd and 3rd Tank Brigades with General Byng, the 12th Battalion was transferred early in April from Olhain Wood to Simencourt, north of the Arras-Doullens road. The tanks trekked the whole way, by roads and across country--a distance of nearly twenty miles. Concentration at Simencourt was completed by the 10th April. The 11th Battalion, with its Headquarters and some tanks still at Mont St Eloi, was now in the centre of our increased brigade frontage. The 7th Battalion, having become the most northerly tank unit, would be the first involved in any developments in the La Bassée area; and such developments, of a startling character, were at hand.

During the reconnaissance of the Vimy Ridge one had been able to follow to some extent the progress of the German advance north of the Somme. From points about the southern end of the ridge, near where the road from Arras to Lens passes the crest and drops abruptly toward Vimy village, I watched through my glasses on successive mornings the dappled clouds of smoke pushing westward like the trail of some great conflagration. Viewed thus from a flank, the new salient appeared even more pronounced and ominous than it was in reality, especially as the Germans were shelling busily many places far in our rear. And when one climbed to the summit of the ridge and looked eastward over the wide flat plain south of Lens, everything was normal; a few brown puffs of dust where our occasional shells were bursting, the distant smoke of German trains, the black company of slag-heaps, and, far away but often very clear, the three spires of Douai. It was a singular contrast, and one felt like a privileged spectator watching, from a high gallery, the two halves of some gigantic tableau representing the extremes of modern war. But, as it happened, the tableau was incomplete. There was a third scene about to open, and one which our unrivalled situation at Bouvigny allowed us to witness without stirring from our camp, until we were drawn into the fringe of it ourselves.

III.

In the first days of April we were busy with what was known in the Tank Corps, from a remark by General Elles, as the “Savage Rabbit” scheme. The military outlook was gloomy, and the communications from those in authority were unusually pessimistic; and among other omens was a secret précis of instructions to be followed in various possible emergencies, including a prolonged retreat, and even a rout. The “Savage Rabbit” act was an application of tank warfare to such unpleasant circumstances. Tanks, instead of being held in hand for counter-attacks or concerted rearguard actions, were to be scattered in a long line and hidden--remaining hidden, in the event of a disaster, until our infantry had retreated through them and the enemy was close at hand, when the machines would appear from their holes, like “savage rabbits,” and sacrifice themselves to hold up the pursuit. This was a nice encouraging proposition; it was also a very faulty and wasteful method of using tanks, and could only be done once. I do not know who was responsible for it. Very fortunately there never was any need to carry it into practice, although the 12th Battalion and others actually took up their positions of concealment. In our case, it meant stringing our tanks out along the base of the Lorette Ridge, from Bouvigny to Souchez. Especial attention was to be paid to the latter place. A feature of the new tactics employed so successfully by the Germans in their offensive was the skilful use of valleys, or any sort of low ground, for the purpose of infiltration. It was thought now that if they advanced from the direction of Loos and Hill 70 (the first alternative previously mentioned), and succeeded in reaching the foot of the Lorette and Vimy Ridges, they would endeavour to turn both these obstacles by penetrating between them up the Souchez Valley. Souchez, where the French suffered so terribly in 1915, blocks the quite narrow gap that separates the Lorette spur from the northern and highest end of the Vimy Ridge; and through it ran several vital roads to Ablain St Nazaire, Carency, and Arras. Two sections of A Company (6 tanks) were therefore detailed to hold it at all costs. The tanks were to be hidden close to the roads, so that, in the event of the place being lost, they could swing across them and be blown up to form obstructions. For several days I was exploring the country behind the Lorette Ridge for routes by which the tanks could be taken into Souchez. Hiding-places were selected about the village (which had been destroyed with quite exceptional completeness), and also others for the remaining two sections along the road from Souchez to Aix Noulette, on the eastern face of the ridge. But on the day when these preparations were finished, and nothing remained but to move the tanks to their posts of sacrifice, another scene of our local tableau opened with a shattering crash; and our eyes and thoughts were diverted instantly in the opposite direction.

The 12th Battalion, as we have seen, moved south from the Bois d’Olhain about this time. Its last company trekked on the 8th April, and the following day came the new German blow along the Lys. The attack was expected, and seems to have been launched in moderate force, and with no very ambitious designs; but that fatality (or fatuity) which on several occasions during this period marked our dispositions, had dictated that a Portuguese division should still be holding our line in front of Estaires. The Portuguese infantry, utterly worthless troops, fled at once, casting away their arms--except a few who retained theirs long enough to shoot down some of our own people who tried to stop them. The artillery, on the other hand, behaved better, in some cases keeping their guns in action to the last. The Germans, in the meantime, found in front of them a wide gap, and pushed through it. One battalion penetrated--most of the way in column of route--for three or four miles without firing a shot, when its commanding officer, suspicious of this extraordinary luck, went on ahead to reconnoitre and was captured by the 51st Division, which was hurrying up from support. It was said that we had been so rash as to rely on the Portuguese holding out for an hour; but they did not hold out for five minutes. And from this period also dates the rumour that the famous Army Order about our “gallant allies” had been formally cancelled. In any case the mistake was made, and brought on its heels a most disastrous retribution. In ten hours Von Quast’s 6th Army had punched a hole 12 miles wide and 5 deep in our defences; and in front of him consternation and chaos were rolling onward like a flood.

From our huts on the slope above Bouvigny this new battlefield lay visible in its entirety. It was twelve miles away, but from our elevated site it was easy with good binoculars to follow the course of the advance. The country north of the La Bassée Canal is utterly flat, drained by innumerable small streams and ditches, and covered with orchards and villages, then full of prosperous people and hardly touched by war. It had been a quiet front since Neuve Chapelle. Even Armentières, two miles behind the line, was an inhabited town, with shops and cafés open, until the Germans began to shell it in earnest shortly before 21st March. And now, evening after evening, we used to gather with our maps and field-glasses behind our row of huts and watch the great wedge of burning villages pushing farther and farther westward behind Béthune. Those evenings were exceptionally clear, so that far across the smoking plain the church tower of Bailleul was visible against the grey background of Mont Rouge. Bailleul was a charming little town, with a wonderful red-brick belfry to its Hotel de Ville, and one of the best officers’ clubs in France. Within a fortnight it was in ruins.

Certain dates I cannot remember, and I have no diary or other aid to memory, but it must have been on the 11th or 12th that an urgent message came through demanding Lewis-gun detachments. All the gunners in the battalion, with a proportion of officers and 70 Lewis guns, the whole under Major Norton, the second in command, with whom was Winters of A Company, left that same evening by lorry. By dawn next day they were in the line at Robecq, in front of St Venant. There were rumours that the rest of us, with the tanks, would be moving somewhere by train. On the evening of the 13th or 14th, those of us who were left in A Company held a sort of guest night, interrupted by a bombing raid--the last guest night I attended until the war was over; and the following morning we received orders to trek after dark to Hersin station, to entrain for the north. The tanks at this time were in Noulette Wood, at the foot of the ridge, having moved down from the Bois de Bouvigny on the crest in order to take part in various training schemes with the Canadians. All that afternoon Jack Brown and I were marking out with small metal flags, painted white, a route from Noulette Wood to Hersin. It was after six when we returned to camp, and already growing dark. I was met by the news that only B and C Companies were entraining--the former for Lillers and the latter for Aire. I had got to lead A Company by road to a wood near Vaudricourt, south of Béthune. A route was indicated roughly on the map, but none of us knew the country. We were, of course, very short-handed, having about half a dozen subalterns and our three drivers per tank; and all the tanks had their sponsons unbolted and pushed in, preparatory to entraining. The Major being away at Robecq with the Lewis-gun detachment, the conduct of affairs fell to Moore, the second in command of the company, Rudd, the only remaining section commander, and myself.

I packed a few things in a haversack, ate a cold supper, filled a flask, and reached Noulette Wood in a box-car about nine o’clock. I knew there was no immediate hurry, as the depleted tank crews had to pull out and bolt all the sponsons again. As a matter of fact, it was after ten when we moved off. The night was clouded and pitchy dark, as it usually is on these occasions, and our supply of electric torches was miserably small. The distance to be covered--about nine miles--was not excessive; but I knew the difficulties that attend a company of twelve tanks moving along an unknown route on a black night, and I was prepared for a very tedious journey. And in fact no other trek that I can remember, except our mule fight on the St Julien road, left me so thoroughly exhausted and foot-weary. We made only one mistake, missing in the darkness a short-cut out of Sains-en-Gohelle, which cost us half a mile; but until dawn we could see practically nothing, all the electric torches gave out, and the leading tanks, as necessarily happens in a column of a dozen, had to be halted continually to let the rear ones close up. What with scouting ahead in inky blackness for cross-roads and turnings, imperfectly studied on the map by the light of a match or an expiring torch, and trotting up and down the column to give warning of misleading features or to find out the reason for some delay, I must have covered nearly double our nine miles that night; and as I had been all the day on my feet, the latter may be excused for giving unequivocal signs of wear. We did not, however, cover our full distance. Dawn broke while we had still some way to go, and at eight o’clock, when we came to an excellent sunken road near Houchin, a mile short of Vaudricourt, we decided to call a halt. The country was open, and we were getting rather too near the line by Béthune to make it advisable to move tanks about in daylight. We camouflaged the machines in the sunken road, took off our boots, and had some breakfast. Our ultimate destination we knew to be Fouquières, a village on the outskirts of Béthune, and it seemed the obvious thing now to make one bite of the remaining cherry that evening, and pass Vaudricourt without stopping there. It had been given us only as an approximate halting-place. After breakfast, therefore, Rudd and I walked--or staggered, to be correct--on to Fouquières, to find a lying-up point for the tanks, and if possible billets for ourselves. There were a number of small woods and plantations about the village, but all were occupied in force by transport and ammunition trains of the 1st Corps, which held this part of the line. Billets seemed unobtainable, for the whole neighbourhood was crowded with troops. We found a fair piece of cover for the tanks under the trees of a road which led down to a tributary of the Lawe river, and then we searched the village for food, coming to rest eventually in a cottage where they gave us omelettes and cheap champagne. We subsisted very largely upon this diet for the next three or four days.

The tanks moved on to Fouquières that evening, except one which broke down in the main street of Douvrin and remained there for some time, to the endless joy of the inhabitants, who had never seen these machines before. At the foot of the road where the others parked up was a large white house belonging to the _Maire_ of Fouquières. It was full of officers, including the headquarters of a company of the 11th Tank Battalion which was in the line at Givenchy with Lewis guns. We managed to find floorspace here for the night in a sort of hall on the top floor, into which opened innumerable doors. These were opening and shutting all night, as the occupants of the rooms into which they led came and went (and trod heavily upon us in transit) on mysterious errands of their own. However, we slept, after a fashion, and, as it fell out, we remained in this house for a fortnight.

The Major turned up next day with our gunners from Robecq. Thrust into an attenuated and almost solvent line, whose elements included every sort of man who could hold a rifle, with little artillery, no trenches, and the vaguest idea of the general situation, the detachment had passed a very unpleasant three days and nights, and had suffered a good many casualties, mostly in B and C Companies, who lost three or four officers killed or missing. The three companies were now concentrated again, but strung out on a very wide front, with C far away at Aire, B at Lillers, and ourselves at Béthune. Battalion headquarters, being very comfortable at Boyeffles, remained there, far from us all. The reason of our sudden move to these three towns was the celebrated “Delta” scheme, as, for purposes of concealment, it was called. I would not inflict upon any reader the details of this exasperating project, for they were never the same for two days together, and it came to nothing in the end. The general idea (if the words can be applied to so amorphous a conception) was to ease the communications of the troops in the Givenchy sector and relieve the pressure on Béthune, from which the Germans were distant only a few kilometres to the north and north-west. In the very beginning we got as far as Y-day: everything was ready: we had reconnoitred hurriedly that strange, almost untouched country beyond the La Bassée Canal, where a few stray cattle still wandered in orchards thick with blossom, where the empty houses still showed the litter and confusion of their owners’ sudden flight, and where no one knew where the front line lay: tank routes were worked out, bridges examined, and conferences held with corps and divisional pundits who seemed to know nothing about anything; and then the whole thing was cancelled (perhaps very wisely), and, in all its subsequent fluctuations, was never so advanced again. For another month we wrestled with its kaleidoscopic changes. The proportion of tanks to be employed rose from one battalion to the whole brigade, and frontages and objectives were shuffled like counters. After a while we felt that the whole thing had become a sort of confused and academic dream, and we ceased to take any interest in it.

This period in many respects was very novel and interesting. It was our first experience of what, in fact, was a phase of open warfare, with all its alarms and hopes and general uncertainty. The Germans were busy farther north, about Kemmel and Bailleul, but at any moment some new blow might be struck at Béthune. A few days after we reached Fouquières, indeed, an attempt was made to cross the canal on rafts opposite Hinges, and was repulsed. Béthune by now, of course, was a dead town, its shops closed, its inhabitants fled, its houses crumbling daily under shell-fire. At Choques, the big railhead just behind, two tanks of the 12th Battalion, with three of the new Whippets, had been posted to hold the roads against a raid by armoured cars. Hinges, north of Béthune, on the only hill in that level country, in whose pleasant château the 11th Corps headquarters had rested somnolently for upwards of two years, was a mere collection of empty ruins on our front line by the canal. The corps had fled hurriedly to Roquetoire, behind Aire. Our own post, Fouquières, was left more or less at peace for a while. Only a few high-velocity shells fell about it at intervals. It swarmed with people, for scores of refugees from the lost area were still living with the inhabitants. And presently its turn came also. As the shelling grew more persistent, its people were evacuated; and these unfortunates, with their box-mattresses and other cherished goods piled on waggons or hand-carts, went to swell the great flood of fugitives that streamed westward.

Everything we wished to learn about this country we had to find out for ourselves. The maps were bad, and no one knew anything. I remember trying to obtain some information and some better maps from the 1st Corps Intelligence Officer. He could give me neither. He admitted quite frankly that while he had masses of data concerning the country between our old line and the German frontier, of the Béthune district, at his very door (the Corps headquarters had been at Hesdigneul, a mile and a half from Béthune itself for many months), he knew nothing at all. Another curious sidelight upon army methods, at least during this confused period, was thrown by some inquiry I made about the “Delta” scheme at the 1st Division headquarters at Gosnay. We were attached to the 1st Division for operations, and for a fortnight past had been drawing rations from it, yet the G.S.O. 1, whom I interviewed, did not even know that there were any tanks in the neighbourhood...! I have noticed so often in France that while brigade staffs, who lived near the line, in considerable danger and in touch with the fighting, always seemed to have their wits about them, the staffs of divisions and corps, long accustomed (at a distance) to trench warfare, became atrophied and absorbed in mere details of routine. It used to be said that prolonged trench duties would render infantry unfit for the sudden emergencies of attack or open warfare; but I think in many cases it was the higher formations who were in danger of succumbing to the spell.

A feature of this time which impressed me very strongly was the magnificent behaviour of the French population. To many Englishmen the French are still incomprehensible, vain, greedy, untidy (that fatal sin!), and altogether rather absurd. We are, of course, ourselves very like our spiritual kinsfolk the Germans in some ways, and especially in our inability to understand, or wish to understand, any Latin race. A common complaint in France was the extortionate prices put on everything for our benefit. Apart from the fact that this largely was our own fault, it is true that the French, for centuries a very poor people, have learnt habits of thrift that sometimes merit an uglier name; but we should have stopped, before crying out about it, to ask what our own behaviour would have been toward a French army settled in England for upwards of four years. Can any one imagine our shopkeepers carrying gratitude so far, after the first altruistic burst of thankfulness, as to restrict their profits or even limit them to reasonable bounds? I cannot picture this myself. And, on the other hand, can any one imagine our people working as diligently and suffering as patiently as the French peasantry in the war zone? Again I, for one, cannot. And these peasants, or shopkeepers, in the country districts were almost all women. There were young boys with them, and a few old men; but men between eighteen and fifty years of age you never saw at all. There were none of those sturdy and indispensable farm hands who were exempted in droves in the English counties. And when some great disaster came, such as this German advance of which I am writing, you saw these homeless and ruined folk at their very best--patient, courageous, and courteous even in their despair. While in England prosperous tradesmen were selling goods at 100 per cent profit, saying only in extenuation, “It is the war,” the same phrase was being uttered in an infinitely finer spirit by the refugees of France, long broken to such tragedies. You met some woman leaving her home, pushing before her a hand-barrow loaded with her poor possessions; and if you commiserated, there came the inevitable answer, accepting an inevitable occurrence with a resignation that was far removed from apathy--“C’est la guerre, monsieur....” I remember a little incident of this time which illustrates, more clearly than pages of generalities, the spirit that one found in these people. When Fouquières was shelled and the inhabitants removed, our own quarters in the _Maire’s_ house became so unpleasant that we departed also, tanks and all, to Hesdigneul. A day or two later I rode over to the house to settle some business of a billeting certificate. It had been raining heavily, and the road where our tanks had been lying, churned up by their tracks, was deep in mud. As I was coming away, the mud clogged my rear wheel, between the tyre and the mud-guard, stopping the bicycle just as I passed a little party of women and children who were escaping from the _Maire’s_ farm with a few household treasures on their backs. (The _Maire_ himself, by the way, unlike most of his admirable class, had abandoned his flock long before.) Of the women in this party one was very old, and all were tired, heavily laden, and in tears. But as soon as they saw me poking about under the mud-guard with a stick they dropped their bundles, seized each a piece of wood, and ran up to help. Even the old woman was brandishing a twig and instructing the rest with a torrent of words. Before the little job was finished, the tears were forgotten and we were all chattering and laughing; and when I thanked them and rode away, they were still smiling and crying out as they shouldered their pathetic bundles, as if there were no such things as war and ruined homes.