Chapter XX: The Canal Du Nord and Bourlon

I.

The ruins of Morchies lay a mile and a half north-east of Beugny, at the head of a valley which descended past Lagnicourt to Quéant. On the summit of the high ground to the east of the village stood a conspicuous group of large hospital huts containing a number of beds and some rough furniture. Our men were accommodated in these, while the officers occupied a group of smaller huts a quarter of a mile away at the edge of the village. The tanks of the battalion (now twenty-four in number) were camouflaged in the ruins. About this time battalion headquarters moved to Bullecourt, to be in touch with the H.Q. of the Canadian Corps, with whom we were to work in the next advance.

The valleys around Morchies were filled with horse lines and transport, and there were many troops living in the village itself; and it struck me at once as singular that we should have found this capacious hospital empty, and not even ear-marked for any newcomers, especially as it was the only camp of huts in the neighbourhood. When one sees a cheap and otherwise desirable house untenanted in a popular district one suspects bad drains: a solitary and empty camp in an area four miles behind the line and crowded with troops made one think of shells. Soon after our arrival I was looking round the country with my glasses, and I discovered that we were overlooked, from a distance of seven miles, by the trees of Bourlon Wood. I began to feel sure that these apparently eligible quarters had their disadvantages, which had proved too much for previous tenants; and in fact on the following morning, just after the crews had marched away to their tanks, heavy shells began to fall among the huts. A cook and a water-cart driver were killed, and several other men badly wounded, and it became painfully obvious that the hospital was no place for us. Bivouacs were formed at once in the valley, and the men transferred to them that night. The officers remained for another day in their own huts nearer the village, but eventually were driven out by persistent shelling, and only one large building was retained as a Reconnaissance Office. Beale (who was now Battalion R.O. in place of Henriquez), Jack Brown, and I were fortunate in discovering the only empty dug-out in the neighbourhood--a cosy little place of two rooms partly excavated from the side of a sunken road, where we lived in great comfort for the remainder of our stay. Every one else moved into tents in the valley. Intermittent shelling of the high ground continued every day.

We were very busy during this time with preliminaries for the forthcoming renewal of the general offensive. The Germans had fallen back to their last prepared position in the West, and this was to be attacked by the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Armies on a front of over thirty miles from the Sensée to St Quentin. The 1st and 3rd Armies were to deliver the initial blow toward Bourlon and Cambrai on 27th September. Operations in this sector were complicated, and to some extent awkwardly cramped by a water obstacle which completely protected Cambrai to the north and north-west. The marshes of the Sensée, running from east to west, cross the line of the Agache and the Canal du Nord, running from north to south, near Ecourt St Quentin, the two systems forming an impassable angle of water and marsh which limited the share of the 1st Army in the attack to its right wing, the Canadian Corps, south of the Arras-Cambrai road. In addition to the marshes of the Agache, the Canal du Nord, although unfinished, was full of water as far as Sains-les-Marquion, five miles south of its crossing of the Sensée. For another four miles to a point south of the Bapaume-Cambrai road, where we were now east of the canal at Havrincourt Wood, it was dry, forming an immense ditch 50 feet wide and 15 feet deep, with steep banks of brick. At the village of Mœuvres, 3000 yards below Sains-les-Marquion, it was crossed by the original Hindenburg or Siegfried Line, which trended away to the south-east until it reached the Canal de L’Escaut at Bantouzelle. West of Mœuvres this line was in our possession; and operations since the German withdrawal, and known as the battles of Havrincourt and Epehy, had carried the 3rd and 4th Armies across the canal south of Mœuvres to within striking distance of the eastern or German section of the famous trenches. Tanks of the 4th and 5th Brigades had helped the 4th Army in these operations on the 18th, 21st, and 24th September. From north to south our line on the 26th ran from Ecourt St. Quentin near the Sensée, west of the Canal du Nord to below Mœuvres, thence across the canal and through Havrincourt, Gouzeaucourt, and Epehy in face of the Siegfried Line. The main battle was to open on the 27th, when the Canadians and the 3rd Army were to carry the line of the canal and the Hindenburg trenches[41] as far as Gouzeaucourt, the 4th Army carrying on the offensive to the south on the 29th.

The impossibility of crossing the Canal du Nord above Marquion had led to a redistribution of the 1st Tank Brigade. The 7th Battalion having become well acquainted with the Canadians in the course of several weeks’ training, was attached to them for their attack between Marquion and Mœuvres. The 15th Battalion, with Mark V.’s, was borrowed from the 2nd Brigade to help the 17th Corps of the 3rd Army south of Mœuvres. The 11th Battalion, also with Mark V.’s, having moved down from our left, was allotted to the 4th Corps for the front between Trescault and Gouzeaucourt. The 12th Battalion remained in reserve.

It is necessary to give here a more detailed description of the canal and the country on either side of it. I have spoken of a valley trending north-eastward from Morchies to Quéant. If one walked along the high ground from our camp to the right of this valley one came presently to another depression which fell away to Pronville, a mile east of Quéant. From Pronville a third valley led at an obtuse angle due east to Inchy-en-Artois and the canal. Down its centre curled the dry bed of the Hirondelle stream, lined by willows, poplars, and the anti-tank _abattis_ of railway iron; and along the ridges which enclosed it to north and south were sited the deep trenches and triple belts of wire of those portions of the Hindenburg Front and Support Lines already in our possession. The southern ridge rose to a considerable height--some 350 feet--and on approaching the canal inclined northward in a final spur which sank to the levels of the Agache near Sains-les-Marquion. The village of Inchy stood on the tip of this spur, raised slightly above the levels and within 1000 yards of the canal. Mœuvres, a mile to the south and almost on the canal bank, was at the foot of the higher end of the spur. The eastern slope of the latter fell gently like a _glacis_ to our front line, and through scattered trees beyond one could see the white chalk embankment of the canal about Lock 4. Our line took in both the villages, but there was fighting in Mœuvres a day or two before the big attack, and the front here was rather vague and was given incorrectly on our maps. On one occasion, when Jack Brown had driven me almost into Inchy in his side-car, we walked casually along behind the village until we found ourselves in a ditch full of Stokes guns and people crawling about in furtive attitudes, and learnt to our astonishment that we were in our outpost line. Our subsequent attempts to see something from the outer houses of Inchy itself, where not a soul was moving, were marked by extreme caution. We could see little in any case, for the canal was masked from this direction by intervening trees. From the hill above Mœuvres, however, one looked over the whole area behind the German front as far back as Bourlon Wood; and one particular point in the Hindenburg trenches near Tadpole Copse (where there had been severe fighting during the first Cambrai battle) gave us a bird’s-eye view of the whole section of the canal which especially interested A Company--the section about Lock 4. C Company was to cross north of Inchy, where a fairly close reconnaissance was possible. Our chief perplexity over this celebrated obstacle was caused by our lack of reliable knowledge concerning it. Fragmentary information was obtained from civilians engaged on its construction before the war, and was supplemented by engineers’ drawings of various sections; but there were intermediate patches about which we could find out nothing definite. The sections were found to differ considerably in detail, and the drawings themselves were of uncertain value. Time and shell-fire had changed the profile of the canal banks in many places, while the Germans were reported to have been at work on the unfinished portions for some purpose of their own.[42] A number of indications pointed to the fact that they considered the canal to be an insuperable obstacle to tanks, except at the causeways they had cut through its banks. These it was almost certain would be mined. The sum of our discoveries, obtained from these sources and from aeroplane photographs and more or less distant observation through binoculars, can be set out as follows. It refers only to that portion which the 7th Tank Battalion had to negotiate.

North-east of Inchy was a broken iron girder bridge. From this point to another bridge, also destroyed, at Mœuvres, the canal ran in a dead straight line pointing a little to the east of south. The embankments on their outer sides were 6 to 10 feet in height. They were 20 feet broad. The inner faces fell to the canal bed in two stages: first, there was an almost sheer drop, partially bricked, of about 9 feet, then a step or platform 8 feet wide, and finally a slope of 1 in 2 which descended for another 5 feet to the canal bed. The latter was 36 feet across. Midway between Inchy and Mœuvres there was an unfinished concrete lock, numbered 4. Immediately south of the Inchy bridge the banks had been cut and a causeway constructed out of the debris across the canal bed. Two similar causeways existed between Lock 4 and Mœuvres. All these were required for our artillery. It was suspected that they were mined; and as they would be completely blocked by any tanks which happened to be disabled while crossing, we were allowed to use only one, that nearest to Mœuvres.

A and C Companies, each with eight tanks in two sections, were detailed for the operation, B Company remaining in reserve. C, crossing near the Inchy bridge, had a comparatively easy task. The canal at this point was only half-finished, and the banks were low and dilapidated. A Company on the right was faced by a far more serious problem. We had, it is true, the use of a causeway, but this was a doubtful privilege. If, as every one believed (and as the event proved) it was mined, the leading tank probably would be disabled and would block the passage. One section, however, was detailed to attempt this hazard. It remained to find some crossing-place for the other section over the embankment itself. The latter was known to be almost finished in this portion, and appeared to be little damaged; and while it might prove easy enough for tanks to slide down on to the canal bed (although the first drop of 9 feet was not an attractive feature), to climb the other side was a very different matter. As the brickwork was incomplete we could only hope that the earth on top, after four years’ exposure to rain and a recent pounding by shell-fire, had crumbled and fallen over the steep upper lip to form a possible slope. The difficulties were thought to be so great, however, that a very wild expedient to overcome them was proposed and actually adopted. Three unfit Mark IV. tanks were to be brought up, driven into the canal at zero, and there manœuvred into position side by side across the bed to form a bridge for the others. This was all very characteristic of theoretical staff officers who had never driven a tank themselves and had no conception of the difficulties involved in such a scheme. With unfit Mark IV.’s, at least half an hour would have been taken in getting them into position, if everything else went well. If one was hit by the barrage which was almost certain to fall on the canal, the whole enterprise would be ruined at the start. Finally, assuming the bridge to be made, it is very doubtful if it would have stood the weight of the fighting machines as they crossed over. Tanks are not constructed to support thirty tons in movement on their roofs.[43] In the end, however, the experiment never reached the point of test. The only machines available were some of the 7th Battalion’s derelicts, still lying under repair far behind at Bucquoy in the hands of salvage crews. Three were put more or less in order and started on their long trek several days before the battle, but the effort was too much for them. They broke down repeatedly, and on the evening of the 26th were still some miles from Pronville. The only result of this fantastic scheme was to put an added strain upon already overworked salvage personnel.

In the meantime we had not troubled much about it. We continued to work on more normal and practical lines, seeking some point on the canal bank where tanks might cross unaided. From the Hindenburg trenches near Tadpole Copse, after a careful scrutiny through my glasses, I discovered what seemed to be a likely place immediately south of Lock 4. Both banks were somewhat dilapidated and fallen in through shell-fire at this point, and the nearer one was pierced by a communication trench called Hobart Street, which ran down from the front lines. Here, if anywhere, a tank could climb out from the bed. It was decided that the left-hand section (M’Elroy’s) should follow Hobart Street and attempt this crossing. The right-hand section (Paul’s) was to use the causeway 700 yards to the south.

Beyond the canal the ground rose gently again to Bourlon Ridge. A trench system, heavily wired, known as the Canal du Nord Line, ran parallel to the farther bank. Behind this, 1200 yards from Lock 4, was Quarry Wood, a T-shaped enclosure of meagre timber. From the Canal du Nord Line communication trenches zigzagged up the slope on either side of the wood to the Marquion Line, the last defensive work in front of Bourlon. This line was still unfinished, and, as we found when we reached it, was very imperfectly wired, there being wide gaps where only the stakes had been planted. Bourlon village and wood, upwards of 3000 yards east of the canal, were protected by a final series of trenches and entanglements, nowhere very formidable. The Canadians’ ultimate objectives for the first day included Bourlon and Haynecourt to the north, with the usual arrangements for further exploitation if circumstances permitted.

A Company’s eight tanks were to leave the front line at zero with the infantry in the normal manner. The 4th Canadian Division, however, with whom we were working, expected the tanks to be delayed considerably by the canal, and framed its plan of attack on the supposition that they would not overtake the infantry again until the latter was approaching its second objective, the Marquion Line. This supposition, as it happened, proved erroneous. As soon as the Marquion Line was carried and the barrage lifted again, the two sections were to converge on Bourlon village. The great wood was reserved for a novel treatment. We had proved by bitter experience in the first Cambrai battle that gas hung sluggishly about its hollows and undergrowth. On this occasion it was to be deluged with gas-shells for two days and nights before the attack. No frontal assault against it was to be made on the 27th, but such of its defenders as survived the poison were to be captured or driven out by envelopment from the north and south.

C Company, working on our left with the 1st Canadian Division, had in hand the capture of Sains-les-Marquion, with a subsequent advance against the northern part of the Marquion Line. The Divisional Staff was unnecessarily anxious about the tanks being heard if they approached the front line before zero, and accordingly insisted on their starting 1000 yards behind the infantry. The attack on this flank was cramped in its early stage by the water obstacle of the Agache and the canal, the latter being flooded as far south as Lock 3, above Inchy. Sains-les-Marquion and Marquion itself would therefore have to be carried by a pivotal movement from the south and east, after the canal had been crossed lower down; and this swing to the left on the part of the tanks and infantry produced, among other things, a highly complicated barrage table, the barrage turning back upon itself through half a circle. In practice this difficult evolution was performed without a hitch, as indeed were all the other arrangements made by the Canadians, whose preliminary work was thorough and intelligent to a degree which, unfortunately, was none too common. It was a pleasure to be associated with most of the divisional and brigade staffs. They were anxious to do all they could for us, they understood our difficulties, and they appreciated our help. The Canadian infantry was at this time in the best of condition. The whole corps had been withdrawn for the first prolonged rest it had known some time before the general offensive began; and by the breaking up of the new 5th Division in England the four old ones in France were brought up to a strength which no British unit could ever approach. The brigades we trained with at Enguinegatte had forty-five officers and eleven hundred men per battalion. Having broken triumphantly through the Drocourt-Quéant Line in the first days of September, the corps was still fresh and but little reduced in numbers. I never met the South Africans, whom many people declare to have been the best of the Colonial troops; but of the others, speaking from my own experience and on general grounds, I should put the New Zealand Division first and the Canadians a close second. The Australians, gifted with one essential military quality--an aptitude for fighting--were in many other respects an unmitigated nuisance.

II.

On the evening of the 25th we moved all three companies of tanks from Morchies to the neighbourhood of Pronville. Each tank was now provided with the latest development of the old Cambrai fascine--an immense hexagonal crate of timber and steel, carried as before on top of the cab. These things were intended for the Hindenburg trenches, but as the 7th Battalion worked to the north of that line, we never had occasion to use them. Most of our tanks shed them at the first opportunity after zero. I do not know that they were any improvement on the primitive fascine bundle. They were little, if at all, lighter, and required a lorry apiece to bring them on their fruitless journey to Morchies. On one or two occasions when they were used by other battalions, I believe they buckled up under the tank’s weight--an accident which could not happen with the fascine. When carried into action they undoubtedly terrified the enemy, who took them for some new engine of destruction. Some of ours were riddled by machine-gun bullets.

The fine weather had held throughout our stay at Morchies, and the night of the 25th was brilliant with a full moon. The trek to Pronville, a distance of three miles, was accomplished in peace and with only one or two slight breakdowns, which were soon rectified. The little valley leading down to the village was full of 6-inch howitzers, which fired intermittently with a blaze of flame and a shattering noise. Across the mouth of the valley, where it widened and became one with the larger depression leading eastward to Inchy, extended the black barrier of the Hindenburg wire, looking in the moonlight like a vast bed of some evil weed; and just in front of this, on the hillside to the right, were two long banks, against which the tanks of A and C Companies were parked up and camouflaged. The prodigious cribs which they carried rose high above the top of the banks, and we stretched camouflage nets outward from them to the slope of the hill beyond. B Company’s machines had pushed on by the road which led through the wire and trenches, to lie up under the willows lining the bed of the Hirondelle in the bigger valley. We had found previously and marked as our own (for what this was worth) a few small unoccupied dug-outs in the front Hindenburg trench. They were still empty, and in one of them, an L-shaped untimbered excavation about the size of a large cupboard, accessible by the usual breakneck flight of steps, the Major, M’Chlery, M’Elroy, and I settled ourselves down about 1 A.M., ate a little food, drank a little whisky and chlorinated water, and composed ourselves for a little folding of the hands in sleep.

The following morning (the 26th or Y-day) was again brilliantly fine. I walked out once more to the high ground above Mœuvres and made a final examination of the distant canal and the bare slope toward Bourlon. In the afternoon I intended to take M’Elroy and Paul, the two section commanders, over the route to Inchy and as far beyond as seemed advisable. It was very simple going for tanks along the floor of the valley, however dark the night might be, for the trees of the Hirondelle formed a guide which it was impossible to miss; but no one except myself had walked over this final stretch, and in case of accidents it was advisable for the section commanders to know it. Unpleasant developments, however, supervened to spoil our excursion. As we were having lunch the German guns became active, and we could hear and see the shells crashing in the valley toward Inchy. When we set out, about two o’clock, we were obliged to keep to the high ground along the front Hindenburg trench, so as to have a shelter to jump into in emergency. We could follow the route of our approach-march almost equally well from here, but when we got to the spur between Inchy and Tadpole Copse, with the intention of seeing what we could of the forward slope down to the canal, it began to rain shells. We spent an anxious hour dodging among half-finished trenches and sheltering in dug-outs about the head of Hobart Street, already mentioned, where there was a nasty little gulley which for no apparent reason was receiving marked attention. A small dump of 18-pounder shells was hit and exploded, and the camouflage net which covered it having caught fire, the smoke drew a heavier burst of shelling; and as the very indifferent trenches in this neighbourhood were packed with infantry and gunners, now tumbling over one another to get away from the dangerous area, there were a good many casualties. When we managed to get clear and return to Pronville about five o’clock, we were exceedingly hot and thirsty, and very little wiser for our pains.

The Pronville valley was now filling up, in a discreet way, with troops and guns. The Hindenburg trenches were crowded with men of the 63rd (Naval) Division, which was attacking on the right of the 4th Canadians. In every little gulley which offered concealment there were heavy howitzers, four huge 9-inch weapons being packed together by a cemetery close to B Company’s tanks. Zero was at 5.20 A.M. the next morning, and we decided to pull out our tanks half an hour after midnight. As luck would have it, heavy clouds drove up after dusk, and the night fell extraordinarily black until the moon rose. I had some difficulty in this intense darkness in finding even the road through the Hindenburg wire, only 200 yards from where our tanks were parked up. By one o’clock, however, we had them in line at the head of the Inchy valley, with the useful trees of the Hirondelle on our left. C company was ahead of us. The only untoward incident in this early stage was the fall of one of the huge cribs from the cab of a tank, which crushed a man’s leg. Soon after we started a drizzle of rain set in, increasing after a while to a heavy downpour; but the full moon having risen, enough light filtered through the clouds to enable us to see our way. A few shells whistled over and burst in the valley, but on the whole the German artillery, after its activity earlier in the day, was commendably quiet.

Crawling along at a snail’s pace, it was three o’clock when we reached Inchy. C Company had already turned off to the left across the Hirondelle to follow the valley round the back of the village. We had still so much time to spare, being now within 1500 yards of the front line, that we halted the tanks for nearly an hour, on a sort of terrace cut out of the spur within a stone’s-throw of the ruined wall and trees of Inchy Château. Before we moved on again the Major left us to return to the 10th Canadian Brigade H.Q. in the Hindenburg Support Line across the valley. The Colonel had insisted on this very sensible arrangement, whereby company and section commanders, instead of wandering rather aimlessly about after their tanks had gone into action, were under definite orders to attach themselves respectively to the headquarters of the infantry brigades and battalions concerned, where they were better able to keep in touch with events, and where they could easily be found.

Shortly before four o’clock, while M’Elroy and Paul got the tanks started up again, I went ahead with a runner, one Corporal Deucars, to examine the forward slope of the spur, it having been impossible to reconnoitre this thoroughly in daylight. A road, lined by tattered trees, ran from Inchy up the spur and over the main ridge to the Bapaume-Cambrai highway near Doignies. The trees, and a conspicuous ruined factory by the roadside, a quarter of a mile from the village, stood up very prominently on the crest, and it was inadvisable to show one’s self on this road in the daytime, as it was in full view from the German lines. A second road, or rather lane, left the eastern side of Inchy, descended the slope, and split in two almost on our front line, one fork leading southward to Mœuvres and the other holding straight on to the canal bank by Lock 4. It was my intention to lead the tanks round the village until we struck this lane, which would take the left-hand section direct to its crossing-place. The right-hand section would have to head south-east after zero to make the causeway, but there were several small landmarks, including a ditch lined by willows, to serve as guides. Dawn, moreover, would be breaking as the tanks moved off. Our front line for once was clearly defined between Mœuvres and Inchy, where it ran along a light railway which would make an excellent jumping-off point for the two sections.

I had taken some rolls of tape with me, as I knew that there were several wired machine-gun posts on the forward slope, which it might be necessary to avoid, while the ground here had been badly shelled at one time and another. I found, however, that the Canadians themselves, thorough in everything, had laid down that evening a number of tapes to guide their infantry and field batteries to the front line; and, following up one of these, it led me straight across the angle of the village to the lane I wished to reach. On leaving the main street of Inchy, this lane was lined for a short distance by houses and gardens. As these were now being shelled, I did not push my investigations right up to them, but having satisfied myself that the tape would serve us, I returned with Deucars to meet the tanks. They had climbed up out of the terrace by a limber track, and were approaching the road on the crest when I found them, and found also that there were only seven. One of Paul’s section had broken down--the trouble, I think, was a twisted extension-shaft--and was left behind under the trees of Inchy. I led the others across the road between the village and the factory, and then along the tape. The rain had now ceased, but the night was still very dark. Once on the forward slope we moved with extreme care. At five o’clock, twenty minutes before zero, we were close to the side of the lane and within 300 yards of the front line. A few shells were still crashing and sparkling in the gardens behind us. Halting the tanks for a few minutes, I collected the tank commanders in a shell-hole and reviewed rapidly for the last time the various points that they had to bear in mind in approaching the canal. I have forgotten to mention that owing to our extraordinary shortage of officers at this period, due to casualties, leave, and the departures to England, six out of our remaining seven tanks were commanded by N.C.O.’s. These, however, were all extremely capable men--the pick of the admirable personnel we had brought originally from Bovington. During the past week, in addition to reconnaissance, I had coached them as thoroughly as possible on the map, helped by some of the best aeroplane photographs I have ever seen; and I had little doubt of their ability, if they were able to cross the canal without undue delay, to accomplish all that was expected of them.

After five minutes’ talk they returned to their tanks, and we watched the line of dark machines file very slowly down the slope beside the trees of the lane. There was nothing more that M’Elroy, Paul, or I could do. The tanks would follow the lane until they came to the light railway, where they would wait during the few final minutes before zero. Having watched them disappear in the shadows, we turned back accordingly to a communication trench called Wartburg, which led uphill to the main Hindenburg Line near Tadpole Copse, as we had now to find the battle headquarters of the two Canadian battalions forming the first infantry wave in this sector of the attack. The morning was still very dark, its utter quietness broken only by the rare whine and crash of a German shell. There is something very impressive and eerie in this silent hour before an attack at dawn. Troops and guns are crowded everywhere, in trenches and pits and hollows, behind the front line, but one can see and hear nothing; and one wonders how much the enemy, listening nervously (as he has listened perhaps for a week or more) only a few hundred yards away, fears or suspects. As we stumbled uphill along the convolutions of the trench, picking our way among the waiting infantry whose equipment rattled faintly as they moved, the east began to lighten rather suddenly. The clouds which had blackened the night were clearing away. And ten minutes, perhaps, after we had left the tanks, the whole crest of the spur behind us blazed instantaneously with stabbing flames, and we were deafened and stunned by the intolerable crash of the opening barrage....

III.

Wartburg trench curled up through the little gulley where we had been caught by the German bombardment the previous afternoon. This gulley was now a nest of field batteries, all firing furiously. Scores of other batteries were in action higher up the slope and along the crest, and from the Pronville valley came a howling torrent of shells from the heavier howitzers. In the cup of ground up which we were climbing the noise was abominable, and my whole head throbbed and ached with it. It is always worse to hear concentrated gun-fire from close in front than from close behind. The Canadians had brought their field-guns very far forward in the night, and as the light increased I witnessed a spectacle which spoke both for their supreme confidence and for the altered aspect of the war. One or two batteries in the hollow did not fire at all, but limbered up at zero, and went rolling and jolting down the slope after the advancing infantry. I heard afterwards of an artillery Major who rode forward on his horse with the first wave of the attack to select new gun positions under the canal bank.

After much climbing about tortuous and misleading trenches on the big hill, we found the headquarters of one of our infantry battalions. From here we pushed on to the second headquarters. These were established in a fairly capacious dug-out on the summit, 100 feet above Mœuvres. It was now about six o’clock; but the whole country below was so shrouded in mist and smoke that we could see nothing. Having informed the battalion commander that the tanks had started, we sat about in the welcome peace of the dug-out for some time, listening to reports as they came through on the telephone, and having a comforting breakfast of bacon and tea. (Incidentally, at whatever hour of the day or night you interviewed Canadians, they were always drinking tea--without prejudice to the ordinary alcoholic beverages which, of course, were there as well.) From the fragmentary news which reached us the attack seemed to be going like clockwork, but we could get no information about the tanks. The bogey of the canal was always in our minds, and I began to be afraid that they had failed to cross it. At seven o’clock we scrambled to the surface again, to find the morning bright and sunny and the trenches on the hill-top lined with interested spectators of the battle. Groups of signallers were working heliographs from the parapets, and a few heavy German shells thudded on the slope below; but when I joined the audience I found that there was still little or nothing to be seen. Sheets of white vapour, out of which rose the dark trees of Bourlon Wood, covered the whole battlefield. M’Elroy and Paul decided to remain here until it was time for them to go forward to the sunken road, between the canal and Quarry Wood, which had been selected as a rallying-point for the tanks; and I left them soon after to make my own way back to the Major at the infantry brigade headquarters on the opposite ridge above Inchy.

By the time I had got down into the valley, now full of roaring guns and moving infantry and transport, and had climbed the farther slope to the Hindenburg Support trenches, the sun was growing powerful and I was becoming uncomfortably hot. I was wearing a trench-coat and other warm garments which had been welcome enough in the cold and rain of the night, and I was of course hung all over with the ghastly impedimenta that civilised officers are impelled to carry with them into battle (or near it)--glasses, water-bottle, box-respirator, revolver, map-case, compasses, and so on, all depending from an infuriating harness of separate little straps. I cannot imagine why officers are not provided with a uniform combination equipment for these articles. It would be easy to design one. The Sam Browne belt is a useless anachronism in action, and the private soldier’s webbing or leather equipment, while excellent for his own requirements, was worthless for ours. We were compelled to walk about like badly-arranged Christmas-trees suffocated by straps....

All this, however, is rather by the way. To return to our text, I found at the infantry headquarters the Brigadier and staff of the 1st Tank Brigade peering through their glasses at the battle, and also the Major, full of good news. Plenty of information had been coming through on the telephone, and all our apprehensions were proved needless. Our tanks, indeed, had won a really notable little triumph by crossing the problematical canal as easily as if it had been an ordinary trench, and actually leading the Canadians the whole way from start to finish, through the Canal du Nord Line, Quarry Wood, and the Marquion Line into Bourlon. The left-hand section apparently (for, of course, no details were to hand) had climbed in and out of the canal without a pause. The first tank of Paul’s section on the right had been disabled by a mine in the causeway, whereupon the other two had found their way over the walls with equal agility. The Canadians, who had not counted on any help from the machines short of the Marquion Line, were as astonished as they were pleased by this performance, and were generously flattering in their commendations.

From this crest by the brigade dug-outs one obtained an excellent view, over the roofs of Inchy, of the whole undulating escarpment which rose to Bourlon, and also of the country to the south around Anneux and Graincourt, other old acquaintances of the first Cambrai battle. Much of the smoke and mist had lifted, for already the tide of advance was through Bourlon and Anneux and beyond the Wood. Graincourt, just visible behind the spur above Mœuvres, was still holding out, and continued to resist, like a second Flesquières, until late in the day. I sat for some time watching this scene through my glasses. Columns of thick white smoke were rising out of Bourlon Wood, where the enveloping attack was clearing out the defenders under a screen of smoke grenades. To the right, between Anneux and Graincourt, the bare upland was diversified by the forms of four or five disabled tanks, presumably Mark V.’s of the 15th Battalion. One of them was on fire, and a second was emitting volumes of white smoke from a patent contrivance fitted for this purpose on the roof. (A tank in M’Elroy’s section was equipped with this novelty, and used it very effectively in front of Bourlon.) And presently, out of the thin haze which still hung in drifts over the slope beyond the canal, appeared one of our own machines homeward bound; and at that the Major and I began to walk down into the valley on our way to the rallying-point. The time must have been about ten o’clock in the morning, five hours since the battle opened. We followed the route the tanks had taken, round the southern gardens of Inchy, and so on to the lane which led to Lock 4. There is always a peculiar interest attached to one’s first entry into ground occupied only a few hours previously by the enemy. It is like a journey into a foreign country--which, after all, is exactly what it is. A hundred little contrasts, even amid the levelling conditions of modern war, differentiate one side of the line from the other. Either combatant betrays his personality in such common tasks as digging trenches or building cook-houses, and there seems to supervene a different atmosphere, a sort of alien local colour, as one passes from No Man’s Land into newly-captured territory. This may be largely my personal fancy: certainly the grass is the same colour and the shell-holes are very similar; and it is true that superficially there was little to show which side of the light railway at Inchy-en-Artois had been British and which German ground. Between the rusty metals and the canal bank were a few groups of our dead--mostly, I think, casualties suffered by the later waves of infantry under the counter-barrage. I did not see any Germans among them, and it was evident that this first stage had been carried at a rush with little or no trouble. Probably the scattered outposts had surrendered on the spot. The canal itself, the first solid obstacle capable of defence, did not appear to have been held with any approach to determination. One German infantryman, lying dead on his back and already stripped of every article that would make a portable souvenir, was the only piece of jetsam in the wake of the attack near Lock 4. Yet, as a singular example of the contrasts and uncertainties of war, at the very time I was scrambling down into the canal bed with the Major, six hours after the opening of the battle, a group of plucky German machine-gunners was still holding out near Mœuvres, three miles behind our new front.

The canal, which we examined with the keenest interest, bore very little resemblance to the engineers’ drawings. The sides were far steeper than represented, and the “step,” where it existed, was higher up. The photograph reproduced in this book will show more clearly than any description what sort of an obstacle it was that our worn-out and obsolete Mark IV. tanks had surmounted with such ease and speed. The farther wall near Lock 4, where M’Elroy’s four machines had crossed, was so nearly vertical that only the layer of fallen earth, combined with exceptionally skilful driving, made its ascension possible. The two surviving tanks of Paul’s section, baulked at the causeway, scrambled in some miraculous manner over the brickwork close by. His leading tank, as we have seen, was disabled by a mine on the causeway itself. The explosion broke the tracks, blew in the floor, and shattered a man’s legs. The N.C.O. in command very sensibly ran at once down the canal to Mœuvres, where some of the 15th Battalion’s tanks were crossing, and managed to induce one of them to turn back and tow the derelict off the causeway, where it was holding up our artillery. The first drivers of all the six tanks which crossed were very properly recommended for the Military Medal for this feat alone, and one or two of them received it.

As we walked on from the canal we met our first tanks returning to it. They had been shelled persistently on their way back from Bourlon to the rallying-point, the German guns apparently being kept on to the moving targets by an observation balloon which still hung insolently behind the wood, unmolested by our aeroplanes. (It was an instructive fact that when we ran up a balloon the next day from a similar position on our side of the wood, a German aeroplane had it down within an hour.) The ground at the rallying-point being entirely open, it was no place for the tanks under this malignant scrutiny, and they were returning accordingly to the canal itself for shelter. We led them through the middle causeway and parked them up against the eastern wall. The photograph shows the first three immediately after their arrival. The figure in the trench-coat fluttering a map is, I believe, myself.

In almost every case the tasks allotted to the tanks had been easily and rapidly accomplished. They were out of the canal as soon as the infantry, and in consequence were able to lend the latter unexpected help at the Canal du Nord Line and Quarry Wood, where they led the attack, crushed the wire, and disposed of numerous machine-gun posts. Still leading, the whole six charged the Marquion Line, which was carried very quickly. One tank broke down here and was not ready to move again until the others were returning for good. These, in the meantime, patrolled beyond the Marquion Line while it was being consolidated under cover of a stationary barrage, and as soon as the latter lifted once more, pushed on for Bourlon. Two entered by the main street and a third from the north, the remaining pair working along the trenches round the village. The resistance was spasmodic, and as soon as the tanks had crushed down the barricades in the streets and silenced a few machine-guns which held out in the houses, the place was rapidly overrun and cleared by the following infantry. One tank, fired on by field-guns in the outskirts, screened itself very skilfully in smoke from the experimental apparatus fixed on the roof, and passed into the village unhurt behind this curtain. Another machine, after Bourlon had been carried, pushed on at the request of the Canadians to the railway which ran past the eastern end of Bourlon Wood to Sauchy-Lestrée, silenced some machine-guns on the embankment, and enabled the infantry to seize and consolidate the latter. In four or five hours the whole action was over, so far as the tanks were concerned. There were no casualties to personnel or machines, except in the case of the mined tank on the causeway. All the other six rallied. The attack had been a model of completeness and efficiency, and was backed up throughout in the most intelligent and whole-hearted manner by the infantry.

C Company had been equally successful, although it had not escaped so lightly. Sains-les-Marquion was carried with very little effort, and the tanks spent the rest of the morning cruising about beyond the Marquion Line, mopping up machine-gun nests and enjoying some good shooting at parties of fugitive Germans. Two tanks, however, were hit and burnt out by field-guns near Deligny Mill, on the spur north of Quarry Wood. After the action the Company rallied behind the canal in the gulley below Tadpole Copse.

IV.

While our tanks were parking up in the canal bed I met the brigade commander and the Colonel with Beale and one or two other people, and after a little talk was sent back to Pronville to arrange for some lorries to be in readiness to carry all the tank crews of both companies, less the necessary guards, to Bullecourt, where a camp had been erected. On my way I met the tanks of B Company moving up to the canal. At Pronville, where I arrived very hot and dusty and incredibly thirsty, about one o’clock, I was stopped within 100 yards of our headquarters in the trench by a bucolic and extremely unintelligent private of the Battle Police, who poked his bayonet at me and demanded to know where I was going. As it never occurred to me that I could be mistaken for a deserter, I thought the man was drunk, and was on the point of putting him under arrest. Realising in time that he was only densely stupid and performing what he conceived to be his duty, I burst out laughing at his absurd face and manner, and left him there gaping after me, and wondering, possibly, if he should have fallen upon me or run me through.

By four o’clock that afternoon the tired crews had marched back to Pronville and were packing themselves in lorries, while M’Elroy, Paul, and I, glowing with a sense of virtue rewarded, were bumping over the vile roads to Bullecourt in the car. Every road and track was roaring with a flood of transport rolling eastward. All the guns about Pronville had gone forward except the 9.2 howitzers, and Holt tractors were standing by these unwieldy weapons in readiness to tow them also away. A long naval gun had come up on the railway near Quéant, and was firing from its truck. There was always something fresh and exhilarating to me in this universal surge onward which came in the wake of any big advance--perhaps because we were not yet habituated to big advances. The tide had now set in with a vengeance, and we were to become well accustomed to this healthy symptom of its progress before the end.

At Bullecourt, where our tents had been set up amid the annihilation of one of the most murderous and contested battlefields of the war, we spent that night and most of the next day. We were, I suppose, very fortunate to possess the transport which alone made these brief interludes of rest and recuperation possible. They were certainly well worth the trouble they involved. After twenty-four hours spent in moderate comfort, with rational meals, baths of a sort, and a change of clothes, officers and men returned to the forward area refreshed and ready for another spell of work that, in our case, became increasingly arduous the longer our old machines were denied their own turn of renovation.

M’Elroy left us in the morning to go on leave. He had been due to go a week before, but had stayed on to take part in the attack. When he returned a fortnight later, the battalion had finished its work, and was waiting to be withdrawn to refit. I was about to leave it to join the 12th Battalion. And a short time after I had gone, he was dead--killed, when the war virtually was over, by an epidemic of influenza and pneumonia which swept through the unhealthy camp in the Ternoise valley, and cost the battalion in addition the lives of some of its best N.C.O.’s and men, who also had come through all its battles, from Ypres to the second Cambrai, only to meet this miserable end. M’Elroy and I had been much together in the later stages, having been largely responsible between us for the company’s work in most of the final actions, and I had come to know him very well. He was a tall, dark Irishman, usually quiet and casual, but with that rare combination of a level head and careless courage which earns so many of the decorations that are worth anything, and which gained him his D.S.O. as a subaltern at Cambrai. One has always a grudge against Providence for the waste of such lives when all need for sacrifice is past.

During the interlude at Bullecourt we gathered some information about the progress of the attack in general, and in particular about the fortunes of the 15th and 11th Tank Battalions which had been in action on our right. Both of these units had suffered heavily in a rather desperate morning’s fighting. The tanks of the 15th, having negotiated the canal at Mœuvres with some difficulty, reached their final objectives beyond Anneux and Flesquières, but lost eleven machines out of twenty-six, many of them around Graincourt. The 11th Battalion, usually unfortunate, fared very badly. A dozen tanks were sent in between Trescault and Gouzeaucourt, of which eight received direct hits and two were ditched. Their casualties were heavy, and the attack in this sector was only partially successful. Elsewhere, however, everything had gone extraordinarily well. Ten thousand prisoners and 200 guns had been captured by the two armies; and on the evening of the 27th our line, from north to south, had been advanced to east of Oisy-le-Verger (in the angle between the Sensée and the canal), east of Epinoy, Haynecourt, and Bourlon Wood, through Fontaine-Notre-Dame, and east of Ribécourt and Beaucamp. Another five miles of the Siegfried Line, from Mœuvres to Ribécourt, had been carried; and from Bourlon Ridge we looked down upon the roofs and spires of Cambrai, less than three miles away.

On the morning of the 28th, eight tanks of B Company, which we saw moving up to the canal, led the infantry of the 3rd Canadian Division in an attack on Raillencourt and St Olle, on the Arras-Cambrai road. Both these villages were carried after severe fighting, several of the German machine-gun crews continuing to resist until they were crushed to death by the tanks. All the latter rallied. St Olle was a suburb of Cambrai, and the Canadians were now on the outskirts of that town, but still faced by the formidable obstacle of the Canal de L’Escaut.

That evening the personnel of A and C Companies, having spent exactly twenty-four hours at Bullecourt, returned by lorry to their tanks in or near the Canal du Nord. Both companies were to trek forward that night to the neighbourhood of Bourlon, and the Major and I went straight to that village in the car to decide where we would put our machines. As we passed through Inchy we found that the indefatigable Y.M.C.A. had already established a canteen there, and were using one of our abandoned cribs as a background for their triangular sign. The day had been fine and hot, and the country everywhere was full of pungent smells. The Canadians had a bad habit of leaving their dead horses and mules for weeks without burial, even alongside the roads, and some of these carcases had by now attained an appalling stage of decomposition. At Bourlon we fixed on the huge château wall, riddled with immense holes but still erect, as a good shelter for the tanks; and having sent the car off, walked back across country to the canal to survey an approximate route. The Major then left to interview the 4th Canadian Division. I waited about for two or three hours while a number of small irritating defects were put to rights; and toward ten o’clock, the night being starlit but very dark, we managed to get away. We had now six tanks left out of the fourteen with which we had started from Bienvillers five weeks before. Wadeson, just back from leave, was in charge in M’Elroy’s absence.

The beginning of the journey was unpropitious. Our exit from the canal bed, by way of the middle causeway, coincided with the arrival immediately above us of a bombing squadron of German aeroplanes, which proceeded to drop their cargoes liberally all round. I pushed everybody inside the tanks and walked on hopefully in front. The bombs were thudding and flashing in large numbers in the direction of Mœuvres, and some fell much nearer than was pleasant; and presently one of the raiders released a magnesium flare attached to a small parachute or balloon, which hung for a long time a few hundred feet overhead, and seemed to light up the whole country for miles. The illumination was so bright that I thought of halting the tanks until it expired, but reflected that these lights are always much less efficient, from the point of view of the observer up above, than they appear from the ground. The flare dwindled out after a while, the humming of the aeroplane engines and the crash of the bombs receded behind us as the raiders swept over the canal, and we pursued our journey without further interruption.

On arriving, after some struggles in trenches and wire, at Bourlon Château, we found that our wall bounded a narrow lane in which was situated an artillery brigade headquarters. As our tanks would have blocked the lane and interfered with traffic that might include the cars of infuriated Generals, we decided to push the machines through the holes in the wall into the tangled garden beyond. The fact that this was possible will convey some idea of the size of the holes (which did not reach even to the top of the wall in most cases), and of the immense height and solidity of the structure. After much backing and swinging and dislodging of bricks, the manœuvre was accomplished, and all six tanks were safely inserted under the trees inside. It was now midnight, or after, and we proceeded to make ourselves comfortable under a couple of tarpaulins stretched over a trench, where, packed like sardines, we had some sort of a meal and went to sleep.