not to take an unfair advantage of the enemy, to launch the assault. That had always been the English way and that was our way in many battles of the great war, which were won (unless they were lost) by the sheer valor of men who at great cost smashed their way through all obstructions.
The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled; inventing the concrete blockhouse or “pill-box” for a forward defensive zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in order to lessen their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for a time); scattering their men in organized shell- craters in order to distract our barrage fire; using the “elastic system of defense” with frightful success against Nivelle’s attack in the Champagne; creating the system of assault of “infiltration” which broke the Italian lines at Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we may set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to victory, but the German High Command blundered atrociously in all the larger calculations of war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the greatest power in the world–in numbers of men and in potential energy–to their list of enemies at a time when their own man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course, was great. The British naval blockade was causing severe suffering by food shortage to the German people and denying them access to raw material which they needed for the machinery of war.
The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly menace to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the British navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities. By those miscalculations they lost the war in the long run, and by other errors they made their loss more certain.
One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them into gulfs of ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold- blooded cruelty of Ludendorff’s Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of millions of men upon a gambling chance of victory with the hazards weighted against him, as he admits. Writing of January, 1917, he says: “A collapse on the part of Russia was by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, not reckoned upon by any one. . . Failing the U-boat campaign we reckoned with the collapse of the Quadruple Alliance during 1917.” Yet with that enormous risk visible ahead, Ludendorff continued to play the grand jeu, the great game, and did not advise any surrender of imperial ambitions in order to obtain a peace for his people, and was furious with the Majority party in the Reichstag for preparing a peace resolution. The collapse of Russia inspired him with new hopes of victory in the west, and again he prepared to sacrifice masses of men in the slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this time fatally. His time-table was out of gear. The U–boat war had failed. American manhood was pouring into France, and German soldiers on the Russian front had been infected with ideas most dangerous to German discipline and the “will to win.” At the end, as at the beginning, the German war lords failed to understand the psychology of human nature as they had failed to understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great Britain, and of America. One of the most important admissions in history is made by Ludendorff when he writes:
“Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was through a combination of innumerable circumstances.”
So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death which has happened before in the folly of mankind.
II
During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of primitive savages. “The decision to retreat,” he says, “was not reached without a painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness that was bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to lower our own. But as it was necessary for military reasons we had no choice. It had to be carried out. . . The whole movement was a brilliant performance. . . The retirement proved in a high degree remunerative.”
I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into beautiful little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being gutted by smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them, fall into chaotic heaps of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of old French chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now a litter of brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron–work above open vaults where not even the dead had been left to lie in peace. I saw the little old fruit-trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had to be bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy’s retreat.
There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out from cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the ruins in a silence that was broken only by the sound of one’s own voice or by a few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy was in the next village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of machine-gunners.
In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with objects lying amid the litter, he had left “booby traps” to blow our men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes. Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey- tricks. Our engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made.
In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven in from the other villages burning around them, their own villages, whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who had lived under German rule and talked with many of them–old women, wrinkled like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about the psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme. They told me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and of their rage against the “Great People” who used them for gun-fodder. Habitually many of them talked of the war as the “Great Swindle.” These French civilians hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the thought of German discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly every one of these people had something good to say about some German soldier who had been billeted with them. “He was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he told me that the village was to be destroyed.” Even some of the German officers had deplored this destruction. “The world will have a right to call us barbarians,” said one of them in Ham. “But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of war.”
On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no tales of actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many women shrugged their shoulders when I questioned them about this and said: “They had no need to use violence in their way of love–making. There were many volunteers.”
They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money and said, “You understand?”
I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated districts. “All those are the children of German fathers,” said the old Reverend Mother. “That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”
Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne, where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a babies’ creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty little ones whose chorus of “Guten Tag! Guten Tag!” was like the quacking of ducks.
“After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them,” she said.
“And then?” I asked.
“And then many of them will die.”
She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the old Reverend Mother.
“How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”
Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which deal with the strategy and machinery of war.
III
Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was organizing a great offensive in the Champagne and desired the British army to strike first and keep on striking in order to engage and exhaust German divisions until he was ready to launch his own legions. The “secret” of his preparations was known by every officer in the French army and by Hindenburg and his staff, who prepared a new method of defense to meet it. The French officers with whom I talked were supremely confident of success. “We shall go through,” they said. “It is certain. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a traitor who betrays his country by the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will deal the death– blow.” So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, and a friend in the infantry of the line, over a cup of coffee in an estaminet crammed with other French soldiers who were on their way to the Champagne front.
Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April 16th, seven days after the British had captured the heights of Vimy and gone far to the east of Arras. Hindenburg was ready. He adopted his “elastic system of defense,” which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his troops beyond the range of the French barrage fire, leaving only a few outposts to camouflage the withdrawal and be sacrificed for the sake of the others (those German outposts must have disliked their martyrdom under orders, and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were exhilarated by the thought of their heroic service). He also withdrew the full power of his artillery beyond the range of French counter- battery work and to such a distance that when it was the German turn to fire the French infantry would be beyond the effective protection of their own guns. They were to be allowed an easy walk through to their death-trap. That is what happened. The French infantry, advancing with masses of black troops in the Colonial Corps in the front-line of assault, all exultant and inspired by a belief in victory, swept through the forward zone of the German defenses, astonished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity of Germans, until an annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and smashed their human waves. From French officers and nurses I heard appalling tales of this tragedy. The death–wail of the black troops froze the blood of Frenchmen with horror. Their own losses were immense in a bloody shambles. I was told by French officers that their losses on the first day of battle were 150,000 casualties, and these figures were generally believed. They were not so bad as that, though terrible. Semi-official figures state that the operations which lasted from April 16th to April 25th cost France 28,000 killed on the field of battle, 5,000 who died of wounds in hospital, 4,000 prisoners, and 80,000 wounded. General Nivelle’s offensive was called off, and French officers who had said, “We shall break through. . . It is certain,” now said: “We came up against a bec de gaz. As you English would say, we ‘got it in the neck.’ It is a great misfortune.”
The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow. From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban’s earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right. By the afternoon the entire living German population, more than seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down below in the valley on our side of the lines, and on the ridge were many of their dead as I saw them afterward horribly mangled by shell-fire in the upheaved earth. The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper–“Uncle Harper,” he was called–had done as well as the Canadians, though they had less honor, and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional sign as I saw it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. “Well, General,” said a Scottish sergeant, “they don’t call us Harper’s Duds any more!” . . . On the right English county troops of the 12th Division, 3d Division, and others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had broken through, deeply and widely, capturing many men and guns after hard fighting round machine-gun redoubts. That night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras, where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in other days of history. They herded together with their bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow and giving a little human warmth. All night through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: “It is cold! It is cold!” And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.
Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.
“The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the capital fighting during this year.
“April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six thousand yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without more ado. It takes a good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and guns as well as munitions that results from such a breach. It was the business of the Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large scale. But in view of the troops available, and of the war situation, it was simply not possible to hold a second division in readiness behind each division that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day like April 9th upset all calculations. It was a matter of days before a new front could be formed and consolidated. Even after the troops were ultimately in line the issue of the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very materially upon whether the enemy followed up his initial success with a fresh attack and by fresh successes made it difficult for us to create a firm front. In view of the weakening of the line that inevitably resulted, such successes were only too easy to achieve.
“From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as Bullecourt. On April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the night before the 12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23d and 28th, and also May 3d, were again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between there was some bitter local fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor successful counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost ground slightly at various points.”
I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city itself, when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its ruined streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the German lines, and I went along them when one line of men was going into battle and another was coming back, wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the fumes of gas in their lungs–their steel hats clinking as they groped past one another. In vaults each side of these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras-Cambrai road was a death-trap for our transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman on “point duty” on the Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel helmet, as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the road beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way. They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells plowing holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep. They were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of labor in their sweat.
Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe. I saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched by fire, and afterward when there was no village. I was in the village below Observatory Ridge on the morning of April 11th when cavalry was massed on that ground, waiting for orders to go into action. The headquarters of the cavalry division was in a ditch covered by planks, and the cavalry generals and their staffs sat huddled together with maps over their knees. “I am afraid the general is busy for the moment,” said a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked about the fields and said, “It’s very unhealthy here.” I agreed with him. The bodies of many young soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines (5.9’s) were coming over in a haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But some squadrons of the 10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues were ordered to take Monchy, and rode up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German gunners and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in the village or outside it, and the men suffered many casualties, including their general– Bulkely Johnson–whose body I saw carried back on a stretcher to the ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It is an astonishing thing that two withered old French women stayed in the village all through the fighting. When our troops rode in these women came running forward, frightened and crying “Camarades!” as though in fear of the enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy and held up their scraggy old faces to be kissed by these troopers. Afterward Monchy was filled with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers crawled out from the ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be attacked and captured again by our infantry of the 15th and 37th Divisions, who were also badly hammered.
Heroic folly! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory Hill stood to their horses, staring up at a German airplane which came overhead, careless of our “Archies.” The eye of the German pilot must have widened at the sight of that mass of men and horses. He carried back glad tidings to the guns.
One of the cavalry officers spoke to me.
“You look ill.”
“No, I’m all right. Only cold.”
The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a night in the open.
“Do you think the Germans will get their range as far as this? I’m nervous about the men and the horses. We’ve been here for hours, and it seems no good.”
I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly the herald of long-range shells. They came within a few minutes. Some men and horses were killed. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a ditch not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close, scattering us with dirt.
“Let’s strike away from the road,” said Major Schiach. “They always tape it out.”
We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there . . . other men had to stay.
The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of Monchy and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of the Scarpe, which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to machine–gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after week, for no object apparent to our battalion officers and men, who did not know that they were doing team-work for the French. The Londoners of the 56th Division made a record advance through Neuville- Vitasse to Henin and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come, revealing the enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack their way through if they could, There were many who could not, and even divisional generals were embittered by these needless losses and by the hard driving of their men, saying fierce things about our High Command.
Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young officers. I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group of three, all gunner officers who were looking about for better gun positions not so clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little woods–the Bois de Sart and Bois Vert–which stared down upon them like green eyes. Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their horses killed; some of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a shell had crashed into a bath close to their hut, where men were washing themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood and bits of flesh. The younger officer stared at me under the tilt forward of his steel hat and said, “Hullo, Gibbs!” I had played chess with him at Groom’s Cafe in Fleet Street in days before the war. I went back to his hut and had tea with him, close to that bath, hoping that we should not be cut up with the cake. There were noises “off,” as they say in stage directions, which were enormously disconcerting to one’s peace of mind, and not very far off. I had heard before some hard words about our generalship and staff-work, but never anything so passionate, so violent, as from that gunner officer. His view of the business was summed up in the word “murder.” He raged against the impossible orders sent down from headquarters, against the brutality with which men were left in the line week after week, and against the monstrous, abominable futility of all our so-called strategy. His nerves were in rags, as I could see by the way in which his hand shook when he lighted one cigarette after another. His spirit was in a flame of revolt against the misery of his sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of death. Every shell that burst near Henin sent a shudder through him. I stayed an hour in his hut, and then went away toward Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire following along the way. I looked back many times to the valley, and to the ridges where the enemy lived above it, invisible but deadly. The sun was setting and there was a tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical beauty over the landscape despite the desert that war had made there, leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees where once there were good villages with church spires rising out of sheltering woods. The German gunners were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting heavily again amid our gun positions.
Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of death as they called it, and Australian gunners made little slit trenches and scuttled into them when the Germans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went walking there with another war correspondent and an Australian officer who at a great pace led us round about, amid 5.9’s, and debouched a little to see one of our ammunition-dumps exploding like a Brock’s Benefit, and chattered brightly under “woolly bears” which made a rending tumult above our heads. I think he enjoyed his afternoon out from staff-work in the headquarters huts. Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I think he was only brave. I hated those hours, but put on the mask that royalty wears when it takes an intelligent interest in factory-work.
The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations day by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers’ Shops of war, where busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men’s wounds.
Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and as at the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their bodies were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of rest behind the lines. In that early summer of ’17 there was laughter in Arras, lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed pipers and brass bands, jolly comradeship in billets with paneled walls upon which perhaps Robespierre’s shadow had fallen in the candle-light before the Revolution, when he was the good young man of Arras.
As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the pipers who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel’s chair and mine, and played the martial music of Scotland, until something seemed to break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a French friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat next to the colonel, and the eight pipers played behind his chair. He went pale, deadly white, and presently swooned off his chair . . . and the Gordons thought it the finest tribute to their pipes!
The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries, Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and passion, though they were tangled sometimes in the maze . . . many of them fell in the fields outside or in the bogs of Flanders.
On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men, and Surreys, Buffs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They played cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the sunshine of the day, and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one found no trace of war’s agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the quality of their laughter.
My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street. The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The tits twittered fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain at one’s heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by week, month by month.
“This makes for madness,” said a friend of mine, a musician surprised to find himself a soldier. “In the morning we see boys with their heads blown off”–that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them with a silly smile and said, “They’ve copped it all right!” and went on to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a little sick in the stomach–“and in the afternoon we walk through this garden where the birds are singing. . . There is no sense in it. It’s just midsummer madness!”
But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.
IV
The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea- and-land attack with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions, followed by an attack “in depth,” divisions passing through each other, or “leap-frogging,” as it was called, to the final objectives against an enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the explosions.
For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60 and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one another’s workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies’ galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided by the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers, had beaten the enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and they had abandoned it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as they found to their cost.
I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I had gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking my steel hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams overhead, coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines, the murmur of men’s voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men sleeping on bunks in the gloom of caverns close beneath the German lines, and listening through a queer little instrument called a microphone, by which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German galleries a thousand yards away, the dropping of a pick or shovel, the knocking out of German pipes against charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument, more perfect than the enemy’s, that we had beaten him, and by the grim determination of those underground men of ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they worked, who coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who packed high explosives at the shaft-heads–hundreds of tons of it–for the moment when a button should be touched far away, and an electric current would pass down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown into dust.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas- shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill. I saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as though the fires of hell had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of men against their fellow–creatures. . . It was the signal for seven hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field– guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting shells English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves. It was almost a “walk-over.” Only here and there groups of Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were comparatively small, though some brave men had died, including Major Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in Ireland.
Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:
“The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering. . . The 7th of June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the front was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage; apparently it only intended to improve its position for the launching of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between the old Arras battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. The object of the enemy was to wear us down and distract our attention from Ypres.”
That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered in clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army, and it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to escape.
All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked him when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.
I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun emplacements at Malo-les–Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged in sand–dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes. Our artillery positions were mapped out.
“Three shots to one, sir,” said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, “that’s the stuff to give them!”
But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division, cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a fury of fire.
At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas– mustard gas–which raised blisters and burned men’s bodies where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to “put the wind up.” Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.
V
The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his position along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand outstretched through Flanders, with streams or “beeks,” as they are called, flowing in the valleys which ran between the fingers of that clawlike range, were strengthened by chains of little concrete forts or “pill-boxes,” as our soldiers called them, so arranged that they could defend one another by enfilade machine-gun fire. These were held by garrisons of machine–gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was to break up our waves of attack until, even if successful in gaining ground, only small bodies of survivors would be in a position to resist the counter-attacks launched by German divisions farther back. The strength of the pill–boxes made of concrete two inches thick resisted everything but the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were not easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them fought often with the utmost courage, even when surrounded, and again and again this method of defense proved terribly effective against the desperate heroic assaults of British infantry.
What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what they were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I have attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders. There was nothing missing in the list of war’s abominations. A few days after the battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for four months. Night after night the skies opened and let down steady torrents, which turned all that country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers or “beeks,” which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was by “duck-boards,” tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire men–the 66th–took eleven hours in making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.
Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six months’ horror were “exaggerated.” As a man who knows something of the value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gun-fire (thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.
They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells which burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine- gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50 per cent of their strength after a few days in action, before they were “relieved.” Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no body of men could lose more than 25 per cent of their fighting strength in an action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost double that, and more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope.
The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,o49. Those were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day’s fighting in Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand casualties, and they were considered “light” by the Higher Command in relation to the objects achieved.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his opinion the official communiques and the war correspondents’ articles gave only one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their optimism. (I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) “We tell the public,” he said, “that an enemy division has been ‘shattered.’ That is true. But so is mine. One of my brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand men since the spring.” He protested that there was not enough liaison between the fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and could not blame them for their hatred of “the Staff.”
The story of the two Irish divisions–the 36th Ulster; and 16th (Nationalist)–in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy. They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every day groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody and the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores of wounded crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to crawl. Before the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost nearly two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand more, and over one hundred officers. The 16th Division lost as many men before the attack and more officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in holding the line. On the night before the battle hundreds of men were gassed. Then their comrades attacked and lost over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty–two officers. All the ground below two knolls of earth called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which were defended by German pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli, Beck House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite of their dreadful losses the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward to the assault with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th, surrounded the pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun fire, and toward the end of the day small bodies of these men had gained a footing on the objectives which they had been asked to capture, but were then too weak to resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers had been almost exterminated in their efforts to dislodge the enemy from Hill 37. They lost seventeen officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent of their men. One company of four officers and one hundred men, ordered to capture the concrete fort known as Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four officers and seventy men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of seventeen, and 66 per cent of their men.
The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers called it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy shelling, and after the battle they complained that they were cast aside like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of the men who had survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and bring them down, but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the 16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down south.
I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for many tragic happenings, he was badly served by some of his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion of speech.
“You must be glad to leave Flanders,” I said to a group of officers trekking toward the Cambrai salient.
One of them answered, violently: “God be thanked we are leaving the Fifth Army area!”
In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to the Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of staff. There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to detail, a care for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second Army staff which did at least inspire the troops with the belief that whatever they did in the fighting-lines had been prepared, and would be supported, with every possible help that organization could provide. That belief was founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but by strenuous work, a driving zeal, and the fine intelligence of a chief of staff whose brain was like a high-power engine.
I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned, when Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert Plumer, and he, as General Plumer’s chief of staff, had been ordered to Italy–in the middle of a battle–to report on the situation which had become so grave there. He expressed his regret that he should have to leave Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad that Passchendaele had been captured before his going.
In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: “I often used to think how much of that range we should get this year. Now it is nearly all ours.” He thanked the war correspondents for all their articles, which had been very helpful to the army, and said how glad he had been to have our co-operation.
“It was my ambition,” he said, speaking with some emotion, “to make cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get rid of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against the staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers that the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff work, and has inspired them with confidence in the preparations and organization behind the lines.”
Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog’s chance of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.
Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff has described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls “terrific,” inflicting “enormous loss” upon his armies and increasing his anxiety at the “reduction of our fighting strength.”
“Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell- pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but continually, and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by the hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and–only too often–it was the mass that won.
“What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!
“The enemy’s losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a hero’s death.
“And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.
“October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base. He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it against Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed through its foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to receive were extremely grave. Tactically everything had been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery practice had materially improved. Behind nearly every fighting–division there stood a second, as rear wave. In the third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that the wear and tear of the enemy’s forces was high. But we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong and, what was equally important, possessed extraordinary will-power.”
That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:
“If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at any moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death.”
To British and to Germans it meant the same.
VI
During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague me like that, saying:
“What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a slaughter on both sides.”
“It is all your fault,” I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. “You do not pray enough.”
He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.
“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory? Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!”
One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I saw dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip of whisky with them now and then before they attacked again; and groups of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.
There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish Chateau, which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores of times when I passed it I saw it crowded with the “walking wounded,” who had trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer “cheerful” like the gay lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life, excited by their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.
“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.
“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”
Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded, with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long- range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.
There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and God’s heaven.
The little old town of Cassel on the hill–where once a Duke of York marched up and then marched down again–was beyond shell-range, though the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There is an inn there–the Hotel du Sauvage–which belongs now to English history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian. It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a table-cloth, with candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was Mademoiselle Suzanne, “a dainty rogue in porcelain,” with wonderfully bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again. Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott, the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and other officers came in with waterproofs sagging round their legs and top-boots muddy to the tags, abashed because they made pools of water on polished boards.
“Pardon, Madame.”
“Ca ne fait rien, Monsieur.”
There was a klip-klop of horses’ hoofs in the yard. I thought of D’Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very yard, strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds, and any accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of them touched the piano with a loving touch and said, “Ye gods, a piano again!” and played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after other tunes, “The Long, Long Trail,” which his comrades sang.
“Come and play to us again,” said Madame.
“If I come back,” said the boy.
He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.
From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants and children were killed with them. For some strange reason Cassel itself was never bombed.
“We are a nest of spies,” said some of the inhabitants, but others had faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.
Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid, though officers in the room were startled.
“Vous n’avez pas peur, meme de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m’en fiche de la mort!” (“I don’t care a damn for death!”)
The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had ridden down from hell-fire to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth, and drink tea in a room again. They were refused permission, and their language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood and bones. They raised their hands to heaven to send down wrath upon all skunks dwelling behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind of comfort to fighting-men. They included the P.M. in their rage, and all staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne, and away back to Whitehall.
To cheer up the war correspondents’ mess when we assembled at night after miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain clouted the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were falling in near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the company sometimes of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who told merry little tales of executions and prison happenings at which he assisted in the course of his duty.
I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice (there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post. The firing–party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The boy was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had to shoot him twice with his revolver before he died.
That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who seemed to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.
The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians, and that year’s fighting on the western front cost us 800,000 casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For the first time the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders.
Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from intolerable life under fire. They would have been superhuman if they had not revolted in spirit, though still faithful to discipline, against the foul conditions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite of all they had, in that four months or so of fighting, achieved the greatest effort of human courage and endurance ever done by masses of men in obedience to command.
VII
At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious adventure in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under General Byng, when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke through the Hindenburg line, and infantry streamed through the breach, captured hundreds of guns, ten thousand prisoners, many villages and ridges, and gave a monstrous shock to the German High Command.
The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of manpower with which it was attempted and supported. The divisions engaged had all been through the grinding mill of Flanders and were tired men. The artillery was made up largely of those batteries which had been axle– deep in Flanders mud. It was clearly understood by General Byng and Gen. Louis Vaughan, his chief of staff, that Sir Douglas Haig could not afford to give them strong reserves to exploit any success they might gain by surprise or to defend the captured ground against certain counter-attacks. It was to be a surprise assault by tanks and infantry, with the hope that the cavalry corps might find its gap at last and sweep round Cambrai before the enemy could recover and reorganize. With other correspondents I saw Gen. Louis Vaughan, who expounded the scheme before it was launched. That charming man, with his professional manner, sweetness of speech, gentleness of voice and gesture, like an Oxford don analyzing the war correspondence of Xenophon, made no secret of the economy with which the operation would have to be made.
“We must cut our coat according to our cloth,” he said.
The whole idea was to seize only as much ground as the initial success could gain, and not to press if resistance became strong. It was a gamble, with a chance of luck. The cavalry might do nothing, or score a big triumph. All depended on the surprise of the tanks. If they were discovered before the assault the whole adventure would fail at the start.
They had been brought up secretly by night, four hundred of them, with supply-tanks for ammunition and petrol lying hidden in woods by day. So the artillery and infantry and cavalry had been concentrated also. The enemy believed himself secure in his Hindenburg line, which had been constructed behind broad hedges of barbed wire with such wide ditches that no tank could cross.
How, then, would tanks cross? Ah, that was a little trick which would surprise the Germans mightily. Each tank would advance through the early morning mists with a bridge on its nose. The bridge was really a big “fascine,” or bundle of fagots about a yard and a half in diameter, and controlled by a lever and chain from the interior of the tank. Having plowed through the barbed wire and reached the edge of the Hindenburg trench, the tank would drop the fascine into the center of the ditch, stretch out its long body, reach the bundle of fagots, find support on it, and use it as a stepping-stone to the other side. Very simple in idea and effect!
So it happened, and the mists favored us, as I saw on the morning of the attack at a little place called Beaumont, near Villers Pluich. The enemy was completely surprised, caught at breakfast in his dugouts, rounded up in batches. The tanks went away through the breach they had made, with the infantry swarming round them, and captured Havrincourt, Hermies, Ribecourt, Gouzeaucourt, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and a wide stretch of country forming a cup or amphitheater below a series of low ridges south of Bourlon Wood, where the ground rose again.
It was a spectacular battle, such as we had never seen before, and during the following days, when our troops worked up to Bourlon Wood and through the intervening villages of Anneux, Graincourt, Containg, and Fontaine Notre Dame, I saw tanks going into action and cruising about like landships, with cavalry patrols riding over open ground, airplanes flying low over German territory, and masses of infantry beyond all trench-lines, and streams of liberated civilians trudging through the lines from Marcoing. The enemy was demoralized the first day and made only slight resistance. The chief losses of the tanks were due to a German major of artillery who served his own guns and knocked out a baker’s dozen of these monsters as they crawled over the Flesquieres Ridge. I saw them lying there with the blood and bones of their pilots and crews within their steel walls. It was a Highland soldier who checked the German major.
“You’re a brave man,” he said, “but you’ve got to dee,” and ran him through the stomach with his bayonet. It was this check at the Flesquieres Ridge, followed by the breaking of a bridge at Masnieres under the weight of a tank and the holding of a trench-line called the Rumilly switch by a battalion of Germans who raced to it from Cambrai before our men could capture it, which thwarted the plans of the cavalry. Our cavalry generals were in consultation at their headquarters, too far back to take immediate advantage of the situation. They waited for the capture of the Rumilly switch, and held up masses of cavalry whom I saw riding through the village of Ribecourt, with excitement and exaltation, because they thought that at last their chance had come. Finally orders were given to cancel all previous plans to advance. Only one squadron, belonging to the Canadian Fort Garry Horse in General Seely’s division, failed to receive the order (their colonel rode after them, but his horse slipped and fell before he caught them up), and it was their day of heroic folly. They rode fast and made their way through a gap in the wire cut by the troopers, and came under rifle and machine-gun fire, which wounded the captain and several men.
The command was carried on by a young lieutenant, who rode with his men until they reached the camouflaged road southeast of the village of Rumilly, where they went through in sections under the fire of the enemy hidden in the banks. Here they came up against a battery of field-guns, one of which fired point-blank at them. They charged the battery, putting the guns out of action and killing some of the gunners. Those who were not destroyed surrendered, and the prisoners were left to be sent back by the supports. The squadron then dealt with the German infantry in the neighborhood. Some of them fled, while some were killed or surrendered. All these operations were done at a gallop under fire from flanking blockhouses. The squadron then slowed down to a walk and took up a position in a sunken road one kilometer east of Rumilly. Darkness crept down upon them, and gradually they were surrounded by German infantry with machine-guns, so that they were in great danger of capture or destruction. Only five of their horses remained unhit, and the lieutenant in command decided that they must endeavor to cut their way through and get back. The horses were stampeded in the direction of the enemy in order to draw the machine- gun fire, and while these riderless horses galloped wildly out of one end of the sunken road, the officer and his surviving troopers escaped from the other end. On the way back they encountered four bodies of the enemy, whom they attacked and routed. On one occasion their escape was due to the cunning of another young lieutenant, who spoke German and held conversations with the enemy in the darkness, deceiving them as to the identity of his force until they were able to take the German troops by surprise and hack a way through. This lieutenant was hit in the face by a bullet, and when he arrived back in Masnieres with his men in advance of the rear-guard he was only able to make his report before falling in a state of collapse.
Other small bodies of cavalry–among them the 8th Dragoons and 5th Hussars–had wild, heroic adventures in the Cambrai salient, where they rode under blasts of machine-gun fire and rounded up prisoners in the ruined villages of Noyelles and Fontaine Notre Dame. Some of them went into the Folie Wood nearby and met seven German officers strolling about the glades, as though no war was on. They took them prisoners, but had to release some of them later, as they could not be bothered with them. Later they came across six ammunition–wagons and destroyed them. In the heart of the wood was one of the German divisional headquarters, and one of our cavalry officers dismounted and approached the cottage stealthily, and looked through the windows. Inside was a party of German officers seated at a table, with beer mugs in front of them, apparently unconscious of any danger near them. Our officer fired his revolver through the windows and then, like a schoolboy who has thrown a stone, ran away as hard as he could and joined his troop. Youthful folly of gallant hearts!
After the enemy’s surprise his resistance stiffened and he held the village of Fontaine Notre Dame, and Bourlon Wood, on the hill above, with strong rear-guards. Very quickly, too, he brought new batteries into action, and things became unpleasant in fields and villages where our men, as I saw them on those days, hunted around for souvenirs in German dugouts and found field-glasses, automatic pistols, and other good booty.
It seemed to me that the plan as outlined by Gen. Louis Vaughan, not to exploit success farther than justified by the initial surprise, was abandoned for a time. A brigade of Guards was put in to attack Fontaine Notre Dame, and suffered heavily from machine-gun fire before taking it. The 62d (Yorkshire) Division lost many good men in Bourlon Village and Bourlon Wood, into which the enemy poured gas-shells and high explosives.
Then on November 30th the Germans, under the direction of General von Marwitz, came back upon us with a tiger’s pounce, in a surprise attack which we ought to have anticipated. I happened to be on the way to Gouzeaucourt early that morning, and, going through the village of Fins, next to it, I saw men straggling back in some disorder, and gun- teams wedged in a dense traffic moving in what seemed to me the wrong direction.
“I don’t know what to do,” said a young gunner officer. “My battery has been captured and I can’t get into touch with the brigade.”
“What has happened?” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise.
“Don’t you know? The enemy has broken through.”
“Broken through where?”
The gunner officer pointed down the road.
“At the present moment he’s in Gouzeaucourt.”
I went northward, and saw that places like Hermies and Havrincourt, which had been peaceful spots for a few days, were under heavy fire. Bourlon Wood beyond was a fiery furnace. Hell had broken out again and things looked bad. There was a general packing up of dumps and field hospitals and heavy batteries. In Gouzeaucourt and other places our divisional and brigade headquarters were caught napping. Officers were in their pajamas or in their baths when they heard the snap of machine-gun bullets. I saw the Guards go forward to Gouzeaucourt for a counter-attack. They came along munching apples and whistling, as though on peace maneuvers. Next day, after they had gained back Gouzeaucourt, I saw many of them wounded, lying under tarpaulins, all dirty and bloody.
The Germans had adopted our own way of attack. They had assembled masses of troops secretly, moving them forward by night under the cover of woods, so that our air scouts saw no movement by day. Our line was weakly held along the front–the 55th Division, thinned out by losses, was holding a line of thirteen thousand yards, three times as much as any troops can hold, in safety–and the German storm- troops, after a short, terrific bombardment, broke through to a distance of five miles.
Our tired men, who had gained the first victory, fought heroic rear- guard actions back from Masnieres and Marcoing, and back from Bourlon Wood on the northern side of the salient. They made the enemy pay a high price in blood for the success of his counter-attack, but we lost many thousands of brave fellows, and the joy bells which had rung in London on November 20th became sad and ironical music in the hearts of our disappointed people.
So ended 1917, our black year; and in the spring of 1918, after all the losses of that year, our armies on the western front were threatened by the greatest menace that had ever drawn near to them, and the British Empire was in jeopardy.
VIII
In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas Haig’s command. At that very time, also, after the bloody losses in Flanders, the French government and General Headquarters brought severe pressure upon the British War Council to take over a greater length of line in France, in order to release some of the older classes of the French army who had been under arms since 1914. We yielded to that pressure and Sir Douglas Haig extended his lines north and south of St.-Quentin, where the Fifth Army, under General Gough, was intrusted with the defense.
I went over all that new ground of ours, out from Noyon to Chaulny and Barisis and the floods of the Oise by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon Forest and Francilly and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez by St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Hargicourt and Jeancourt and La Verguier. It was a pleasant country, with living trees and green fields not annihilated by shell-fire, though with the naked eye I could see the scarred walls of St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages near the frontlines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead quiet there for miles, except for short bursts of harassing fire now and then, and odd shells here and there, and bursts of black shrapnel in the blue sky of mild days.
“Paradise, after Flanders!” said our men, but I knew that there was a great movement of troops westward from Russia, and wondered how long this paradise would last.
I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and did not see them, and wondered what our defense would be if the enemy attacked here in great strength. Our army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There were few men to be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was all strangely quiet. Alarmingly quiet.
Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother commanding a battery along the railway line south of St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we had a picnic meal on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin cathedral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. The colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on his horse and called out, “Fine morning, and a pretty spot!” The infantry divisions were cheerful. “Like a rest-cure!” they said. They had sports almost within sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an Irish battalion, and while two fellows hammered each other I glanced away from them to winding, wavy lines of chalk on the opposite hillsides, and wondered what was happening behind them in that quietude.
“What do you think about this German offensive?” I asked the general of a London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a wagon and watching a tug-of–war. From that place also we could see the German positions.
“G.H.Q. has got the wind-up,” he said. “It is all bluff.”
General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the same opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking the Germans would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the Intelligence reports were full of evidence of immense movements of troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions in back areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery positions. There was overwhelming evidence as to the enemy’s intentions. Intelligence officers took me on one side and said: “England ought to know. The people ought to be prepared. All this is very serious. We shall be ‘up against it.'” G.H.Q. was convinced. On February 23d the war correspondents published articles summarizing the evidence, pointing out the gravity of the menace, and they were passed by the censorship. But England was not scared. Dances were in full swing in London. Little ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted. Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked.
“I am skeptical of the German offensive” said Mr. Bonar Law.
Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our liberty of the pen.
They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the world–our world, as we knew it–with our liberties and power. For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One laughed, but the specter echoed one’s laughter and said, “Wait!” The mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one’s spirit in the woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.” But the specter chilled one’s blood at the reminder of vast masses of field- gray men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war–D’Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the journey’s end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said between them, “Ah, les sacres Boches! . . . If only I could fight again!”
I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair. We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I brought my brother to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We dined well, slept well.
“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give me a lift.”
A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.
So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.
Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words which froze my blood.
“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that.”
“The crossings of the Somme . . . Amiens!”
Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history again.
They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new method of “infiltration” which had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of ’17 at Caporetto.
It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine- gunners constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in masses at a great pace with immense machine–gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.
I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a chill in one’s heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence of panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune’s wheel by many officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.
The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had slipped and they were caught by German shell-fire and German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their homes like the first fugitives. I saw old women coming down lanes where 5.9’s were bursting and where our gunners were getting into action. I saw young mothers packing their babies and their bundles into perambulators while shells came hurtling over the thatched roofs of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats looking down upon a wide sweep of battle, and saw many little farmsteads on fire and Bailleul one torch of flame and smoke.
There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse, the Kaiser’s cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and friends. Then his body was borne down the hill at night and buried secretly by a parish priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know the whereabouts of his cousin’s grave, the priest to whom his message was conveyed said, “Tell the Kaiser he shall know when the German armies have departed from Belgium and when reparation has been made for all their evil deeds.” It was the prior who told me that story and who described to me how the British cavalry had forged their way up the hill. He showed me the scars of bullets on the walls and the windows from which the monks looked out upon the battle.
“All that is a wonderful memory,” said the prior. “Thanks to the English, we are safe and beyond the range of German shells.”
I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German shells. An eight–inch shell had just smashed into the prior’s parlor. Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had fled by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The Ulster gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did not stay there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.
From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They did not weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a little family in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began to fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in her arms, and a mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a wood some miles away. She was gay and smiling when she said, “Au revoir et merci!” A few days later the cottage and the wood were behind the German lines.
The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who had been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of Cheshires, Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and others, who fought “with their backs to the wall,” as Sir Douglas Haig demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were worn thin, was heroic and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of their horses), followed by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind our thin brown line. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve, but had to hold them until other plans were developed–the Crown Prince’s plan against the French, and the attack on Arras.
The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions–the Iron Division and the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and Guards on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We had a breathing–space while heavy blows fell against the French and against three British divisions who had been sent to hold “a quiet sector” on their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames, struck right and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne again, and threatened Paris.
Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of his counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions went with them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th English. The flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles, was massed behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American marines and infantry were given their first big job to do. What happened all the world knows. The Crown Prince’s army was attacked on both flanks and in the center, and was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.
IX
Ludendorff’s great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again, and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy’s line beyond Amiens and slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous losses.
For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit, and made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners, capturing batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many actions.
“August 8th,” writes Ludendorff, “was the black day of the German army in the history of this war.”
He describes from the German point of view what I and others have described from the British point of view, and the general narrative is the same–a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which broke not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk across the foul waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval, assembled under the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength of the enemy, stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and hurled the enemy back from what he thought was an impregnable position, and followed him day by day, taking thousands of prisoners and smashing his rear-guard defenses one by one.
The most decisive battle of the British front in the “come-back,” after our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American troops of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands, the 46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along the St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep cliffs rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun redoubts and tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis. It seemed to me an impossible place to assault and capture. If the enemy could not hold that line they could hold nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men, with the Americans and Australians in support, went down to the canal- bank, waded across where the water was shallow, swam across in life- belts where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, under blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank bridges. A few hours after the beginning of the battle they were far out beyond the German side of the canal, with masses of prisoners in their hands. The Americans on the left of the attack, where the canal goes below ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they forgot, however, to “mop up” behind them, so that the enemy came out of his tunnels and the Australians had to cut their way through), and that evening I met their escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy opposite the British front, and after that our troops fought through open country on the way to victory.
I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us so long, and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable, when old men and women and girls and boys and little children crowded round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all the horror had passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and other villages, the enemy’s shell-fire and poison-gas killed and injured many of the people who had been under the German yoke so long and now thought they were safe. Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying children. In Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there on its day of capture, so that when shells began to fall the people could not go down to shelter. Some of them did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and with his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. He called out, “Merci! Merci!” when English soldiers passed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands through the window and could not speak for the tears which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead German of the war in that part of the line. He lay stretched outside the railway station into which many shells had crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own comrades toward our line before a bullet caught him.
Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments gave themselves up to tanks. “Retiring troops,” he wrote, “greeted one particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly to the attack, with shouts of ‘Blacklegs!’ and ‘War- prolongers!”‘ That is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French girls: “The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!” On a day in September, when British troops broke the Drocourt-Queant line, I saw the Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies, and after they had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed and clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as prisoners. I thought then, “Something has broken in the German spirit.” For the first time the end seemed very near.
Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places, especially in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others were badly cut up.
General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and went into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was a roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the last Germans from their hiding-places.
The British army could not have gone on much farther after November 11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months our troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many canals under heavy fire, and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a time we had reached that limit. There were not many divisions who could have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. But they had broken the German armies against them by a succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their rapidity and in their continuity, which I need not here describe in detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I have narrated that history as I was a witness of it day by day.
Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady, driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even for a final gamble.
Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the bloody, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this “Great Swindle” against their race. It was defeat and agony which enlightened them, as most people–even ourselves–are enlightened only by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.
X
After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at one’s heart. What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this massacre! What had any one gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.
The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff- officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch them. Here they were among the “Huns.” The men they passed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were “the enemy,” the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the table-cloth. “I was just there.” The three cavalry officers laughed. “Extraordinary! We were a few yards away.” They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match. They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.
That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a strident voice.
“Some English gentlemen are swine,” said the young waiter. “But all German gentlemen are swine.”
Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the “Huns.” But it was impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the house brought them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed their boots before the kitchen fire, said, “God be praised, the war is over.” For English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.
“Kids are kids,” said a sergeant-major. “I don’t want to cut their throats! Queer, ain’t it?”
Many of the “kids” looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing–or a profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted their houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son. Some of them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in blood.
In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was going too far! I looked round the Cafe Bauer–a strange scene after four and a half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their hats to English “Tommies”; our men, Canadian and English, said “Cheerio!” to German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or buttons. English people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of the blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to this German cafe before the signing of peace.
Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face, British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite of being a “Hun.” As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to patriotic fury, they had been made “in the image of God.” There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. They were clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless even than English homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they found water came out of it. Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were hard–working and dutiful. There was something, after all, in German Kultur. At night the children said their prayer to the Christian God. Most of them were Catholics, and very pious.
“They seem good people,” said English soldiers.
At night, in the streets of Cologne, were women not so good. Shameless women, though daintily dressed and comely. British soldiers–English, Scottish, and Canadian–grinned back at their laughing eyes, entered into converse with them, found they could all speak English, went down side-streets with them to narrow-fronted houses. There were squalid scenes when the A.P.M. raided these houses and broke up an entente cordiale that was flagrant and scandalous.
Astonishing climax to the drama of war! No general orders could stop fraternization before peace was signed. Human nature asserted itself against all artificial restrictions and false passion. Friends of mine who had been violent in their hatred of all Germans became thoughtful, and said: “Of course there are exceptions,” and, “The innocent must not suffer for the guilty,” and, “We can afford to be a little generous now.”
But the innocent were made to suffer for the guilty and we were not generous. We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars, and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the streets of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged themselves on buns and cakes for afternoon tea. They were cakes of