June 11
The effect of our capture of Messines and Wytschaete has been such a stunning blow on the enemy that he has not as yet made any attempt at counter-attacking on a big scale. The rapid advance of our men below the farther slopes of the ridge and the rush forward of our guns made it impossible for him to rally his supporting troops quickly, and as the hours pass it becomes more impossible for him to storm his way back. His early attempts to assemble troops in the Warneton neighbourhood were annihilated instantly by enormous shell-fire directed by the new observation we had gained at Messines, and during the past twenty-four hours, up to the time I write, he shows no further sign of asking for trouble, but is obviously engaged in reorganizing his forces, demoralized by defeat, and getting his guns into safer positions. Many of his guns liebattered and buried about the battlefield, and some of his batteries, put out of action by our bombardment, remain between our new lines and his, but so covered by our fire that he has a poor chance of getting them away. His losses in guns, trench-mortars and machine-guns must be alarming to him, for I have no doubt at all, after seeing the frightful effect of our bombardment, that these were destroyed on a great scale, so that the number of our trophies will not at all represent his actual loss in weapons and material of war.
That is the human mechanical side of things. More horrible to the unfortunate soldiers of the German army is the devilish punishment inflicted upon them during the past ten days, culminating on that day of battle when every weapon for the slaughter of men, from the heaviest of high explosives to boiling oil and gas-shells, was let loose upon them in one wild tempest of destruction, which blew them out of the earth and off the earth, and frizzled them and blinded them, and choked them and mutilated them, and made them mad.
One German boy, who looked not more than fifteen years of age—a child—was found yesterday lying in a shell-hole by the side of a dead man who had been shot through the temple, and he was a gibbering idiot through fear. Not the only one. German officers say that many of their men went raving mad under the strain of our bombardment, and tried to kill their comrades or themselves, or fell into an ague of terror, clawing their mouths, with all the symptoms of the worst shell-shock.
Many of our prisoners believe they were betrayed, and were sacrificed coldly and deliberately by their higher command. Before the battle an order of the day was issued to them, telling them to hold out if surrounded and fight their way back with the bayonet, because behind them would be fresh divisions ready to support immediate counter-attacks. Those fresh divisions never appeared. We know that they had no chance of getting near our lines because of our far-reaching fire, and the work of our aircraft—and the men of Messines and Wytschaete and all the ground south of St.-Eloi were cut off and captured, if they did not die. After our first assaults, the enemy, panic-stricken, were more concerned in getting away their guns than in protecting their troops, and they were left to our mercy.
Walking about those monstrous mine-craters which we toreout of the earth at dawn on June 7, and across the old German lines beyond St.-Eloi on the left of our attack, southwards by Wytschaete and the lower slopes of Messines, to-day, as after the morning of battle, I pitied any human souls who had to suffer what these German soldiers must have suffered in the agony of fear before death came to many of them. All this wide area of country is blasted and harrowed and holed with monstrous pits. There was at least one great shell to every nine yards, and at 200 yards its flying steel has a killing power. No idea of it all can be conveyed by many words describing this upheaval of sand-bags and barricades and trenches and redoubts, and this sieve of earth, pitted by countless shell-craters. All the woods where the Germans lived—Oaten Wood and Damstrasse Wood and Ravine Wood, down to Wytschaete Wood and Hell Wood—are but gaunt stumps sticking out of ash-grey heaps of earth. German dead lie here and there in batches or in rows as they were shot down by enfilade fire, but I have seen very few bodies, for the most of them were buried in the upheaved earth, as one can tell by the foul vapours which creep out from the smashed trenches, where the deep dug-outs have collapsed and tunnels have fallen in, so that all this battle-ground is a graveyard of men, buried as they died or before they died.
Three men escaped by some wild freak of chance from a mine-crater under the Mound by St.-Eloi. I stood on the lip of it to-day, high above its shelving sides, and find it hard to believe that any living thing could have escaped from its upheaval. But the Germans had many dug-outs in the old craters which existed here before this last one was blown, and after that ferocious fighting a year ago, when we lost this ground. One of those dug-outs remained firm when our mine was touched off four days ago, and out of its mouth crept, two days later, three haggard men, still shaking and dazed, who had been deep in the ground when all about them was hurled sky-high, with a rush of gas and flame and a monstrous uproar. They were unscathed, except in their souls, where terror lived.
By my side to-day, as I looked down into this pit of hell, stood a man who had worked for a year in the making of it—an Australian officer of engineers. He stood smoking his pipe on the edge of the shell-crater, and said in a cheerful way, "It is good to be in the fresh air again."The fresh air did not seem to me very good there this morning. It was filled with abominable noise, which is a menace of death—the savage whine of German shrapnel flung about between the Bluff and St.-Eloi in a haphazard way, and heavy crumps searching for our batteries in their new positions, and our shells whistling over in long flights. Hideous sounds in a ghastly scene which filled me with nausea, so that I wanted not to linger there.
But I understood this Australian's craving for open-air life, even such open air as this, when he told me that he had been working underground for nearly two years in the dark saps pierced under the German lines, and running very close to German saps nosing their way, and sometimes breaking through, to ours, so that the men clawed at each other's throats in these tunnels and beat each other to death with picks and shovels, or were blown to bits by mine explosions. It was always a race for time to blow up the charges, and sometimes the enemy was first, and sometimes we were, and once the enemy in a great attack against the Canadians got in and blew up our shafts and sapheads and cut off our tunnellers. That Australian officer was one of those. For forty-eight hours he was buried alive, and had to dig his way out. So now after his job was done he likes the open-air life.
"No more underground work for me after this war," he said. "I've had enough of it."
The German ground hereabouts was taken by those troops of ours whose fighting across the Damstrasse and in Ravine Wood I described yesterday. Through them went another body of troops—the troops of the 24th Division—whose fortunes I have described in other battles, including some Leinster lads who have a padre for their hero, and English county troops who knew the look of Vimy Ridge before the Canadians reached the crest of it. They had to make the final assault to the farthest line of attack, passing through masses of men who had taken the first lines. All this was rehearsed in fields behind the battle-ground so thoroughly that the men could have gone forward blindfold. It all went like clockwork, and though the enemy fought hard on that last line beyond the Damstrasse by Rose Wood and Bug Wood, one post holding out with machine-guns, our men captured it with few casualties. They took 300 prisoners that day, with six field-guns,and their spirit is high after victory. Next morning the Irish padre was seen sitting outside a shell-hole with a clean white collar and white socks with his boots off. "Well done, boys!" he said, and they were glad to see him there.
All our men were wonderfully inspired by a belief in the guns, so that they walked close behind a frightful barrage. Each body of troops vied with other regiments in a friendly rivalry. There was a race between the South and North Irish as to whether a green flag or an orange should be planted first above the ruins of Wytschaete. I don't know which won, but both flags flew there when the crest had been gained.
June 12
"The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price."
This sentence stands out as an absolute command in the German order issued to their troops before the battle which they knew was coming. The words are peremptory, among promises of artillery support and immediate counter-attacks from divisions behind the first-line troops, which would be read now as a hollow mockery by those men who are our prisoners, captured in crowds from their welter of mined and cratered earth. While half-way through the battle their artillery tried to drag their field-guns back to something like safety in the wake of heavy guns, which even before the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest possible range of action, though forward observing officers tried to conceal this from the infantry by coming to their usual posts. The battle is over. Messines Ridge, which was not to be ours at any price, is ours at a price which our Army thinks very cheap—though many brave men paid for it with their lives—and our outposts are pushing forward towards Warneton, far beyond the farther slopes, after an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who have fought in the Ypres salient know the full meaning of that order. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price."
The Messines Ridge was our curse, and the loss of it to the enemy means a great relief to that curse by straightening outthe salient south of Hooge, and robbing the enemy of direct observation over our ground and forcing his guns farther back.
From Messines and Wytschaete he had absolute observation of a wide tract of country in which our men lived and died—how complete an observation I did not realize until after this battle, when standing in Wytschaete Wood and on the Mound by St.-Eloi, and on the ground rising up to Messines, I looked back, and saw every detail of our old territory laid out like a relief map brightly coloured. "My God," said an officer by my side, "it's a wonder they allowed us to live at all." He had fought in the old days in the salient, had lived like a hunted animal there, hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead in search of human flesh. Before us now, looking as the Germans used to look, we saw all this countryside, which is a field of honour, where our youth has fallen in great numbers, a great graveyard of gallant boyhood. The enemy could see every movement of our men, unless they moved underground, or under the cover of foliage on Kemmel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camouflage screens which run along the roadways, or between the gaps in the ruined villages. Startlingly clear were the red roofs of Dickebusch and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses, into which for two years and a half the enemy has flung big shells, and the church tower of Kemmel, where the graves are opened by shell-fire and old bones laid bare. The roads to Voormezeele and Vierstraat, through which I went yesterday, are still under the old spell of horror, and all those obscene ruins of decent Flemish hamlets. Southward one saw Neuve-Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street Wood, where bullets snapped between the branches about Piccadilly Circus and down the Strand and across to Somerset House, and where at Hyde Park Corner I first heard the voice of "Percy," a high-velocity fellow, who kills you with a quick pounce. German eyes staring from Wytschaete and Messines, making little marks on big maps, talking to their gunners over telephone wires, and registering roads and cross-roads, field-tracks, camps, billets, farmhouses tucked into little groups of trees through which their red roofs gleamed, watching through telescopes for small parties of British soldiers or single figures in a flowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks ofsand-bag parapets, had all this ground of ours at the mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful.
Day by day two years ago I used to see Dickebusch in clouds of smoke, and hated to go through the place. They shelled separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our transports came at night, and communication-trenches up which our men moved to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dug-outs foolishly frail against their frightful 5·9's, which in early days we could only answer with a few pip-squeaks. Yet by some extraordinary freak, not certainly by any kind of charity, for that does not belong to war, there were places they failed to shell, though they were clearly visible--little groups of Flemish cottages with flaming red tiles, a big old house here or there with pointed roofs rising above a screen of poplar-trees, fields still cultivated, as I saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over the beetroots and hung out washing under German eyes and German guns, and went up and down with plough-horses close to our gun-positions, and sold bad beer to English soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where death was imminent and where, as they drank, the glass might be smashed out of their hand by a flying scythe or a yard of wall.
"Why do you stay here?" I asked an old woman in Plug Street village a year and a half ago. Four children played about her, though at the time shells were whining overhead and crashing but half a field away. "It is my home," she said, and thought that a good enough answer.
"How about the children?" I asked, and she said, "It's their home, and we earn a little money."
Even when this last battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men gazed up to the sky, watched the flame-bursts of the mines, then turned to their earth again; and the battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of cocks in little farmsteads somewhere down by Kemmel. Chanticleer sounded the battle-charge with his clarion note, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn in line of battle.
An officer who was with me in Wytschaete Wood, looked downat these old places where he had lived in the menace of death, and remembered his escapes; that time when the back of his dug-out was hit by a huge shell as he sat in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that other time when his servant was buried alive quite close to him, and the nights and days under constant shell-fire. But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and elsewhere there is not a building which stands unpierced or in more than a fragment of ruin. Young officers of ours lived within these ruins wondering whether it would be this day or next, now, as they spoke, or in the silence that followed, that some beastly shell would burst through and tear down the Kirchner prints which they had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bits of mirror they used for shaving-glasses and lay them out in the wreckage. When he goes home on leave and sits at his own hearthside these dream-pictures come back to him with their old horror, as to thousands of men who have fought in the salient, like those London boys I met one night in Ypres cooking cocoa under shell-fire, like those King's Royal Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first attack by "flammenwerfer," and the padre who went up to the canal bank at night and found five dead men in a Red Cross hut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians who fought through a storm of shells in Maple Copse.
The horror of that salient in its old evil days lives in its sinister place-names: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street, Dead Dog Farm, and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi, Stinking Farm, and Suicide Corner, and Shell-Trap Barn. I passed by some of these places and felt cold in remembrance of all the evil of them. Boys of ours have been smashed in all these ill-famed spots. Every bit of ruin here is the scene of foul tragedy to young life. To these places women will come to weep when the war is done, and the stones will be memorials of brave hearts who came here in the darkness with just a glance at the lights in the sky and a word of "Carry on, men," before they fell.
June 17
The sun is fierce and hot over Flanders, giving great splendour to this June of war, but baking our troops brown and dry. Up in the battle-line thirst is a cruel demon in that shadowless land of craters, where the earth itself is parched and cracked, and where there is a white, blinding glare.
On the day of the Messines battle water went up quickly, with two lemons for each man, "to help them through the barrage," according to a young staff officer with a bright sense of humour at the mess-table. But there was never too much, and in some places not enough for the wounded men, whose thirst was like a fire, and yet not greedy, poor chaps, if there was only a little to go round.
"Can you spare a drop," said a group of them—all Australian lads—to a friend of mine who was going up one day with a kerosene-tin full of water to the front line. "The fellows up in front want it badly," said my friend, "and I promised to get it there, but if you'll just take a sip——"
Those Australians were all in a muck of wounds and sweat. But they just moistened their lips and passed the water on. One man shook his head and said, "Take it to the fellows in front." It was the old Philip Sidney touch by way of Australia, and it is not rare among all our fighting men—lawless chaps when they are on a loose end, but great-hearted children at times like this.
All this pageant of war in France and Flanders is on fire with sun, and it is wonderful to pass through the panorama of the war zone, as I do most days, and get a picture of it into one's eyes and soul—columns of men marching with wet, bronzed faces through clouds of white dust, or through fields where there is a patchwork tapestry of colour woven of great stretches of clover drenching the air with its scent, and of poppies which spill a scarlet flood down the slopes, and of green wheat and gold-brown earth. Gunners ride in their shirts with sleeves rolled up. About old barns men work in their billets stripped to the belt. Up in the "strafed" country of the oldsalient men sit about ruins between spells of work on roads and rails on the shady side of shell-broken walls, dreaming of bottled beer and rivers of cider, and the New-Zealanders are as brown as gipsies under their high felt hats.
Talk to any group of men, or go into any officers' mess, and one hears about new aspects and angles of the recent fighting by our Second Army; episodes which throw new light on the enemy's losses and our men's valour, and sufferings—because it wasn't a "walk-over" all the way round—and incidents, which ought to be historic, but just come out in a casual way of gossip by men who happened to be there.
I only heard yesterday about twenty German officers who were dragged out of one dug-out near Wytschaete. They were all huddled down there in a black despair, knowing their game was up as far as the Messines Ridge was concerned. Their men had all gone to the devil, according to their view of the situation, abandoned by the guns, which might have protected them. The Second Division of East Prussians had been wiped out. Of a strength of 3600 we captured over 2000, whilst most of the remainder must be killed or wounded. In the counter-attack the Germans brought up a new division and flung them in, and the queer thing is that our men were not aware of this, but just marched through them to their final goal, believing they belonged to the original crowd on Messines Ridge, and not the counter-attacking troops who had just arrived.
The Australians had some great adventures in this battle, and not enough has been told about them, because they took a good share of the fighting, especially in the last phase of it, when they passed through some of our first-wave troops and held a broad stretch of new front under violent fire and against the enemy's endeavours to retake the ground. On the extreme right of our line, forming the pivot of the attack, was a body of Australian troops who had to get through the German barrage and fling duck-board bridges over the little Douve river, and cross to the German support line under machine-gun fire from a beastly little ruin called Grey Farm. The enemy was sniping from shell-holes, and bullets were flying about rather badly. A young Australian officer dealt with Grey Farm, crawling through a hedge with a small party of men, and setting fire to the ruin, so that it should give no more cover. Meanwhile, farther to the north, the Germans were stillabout in gaps not yet linked up, and in strong points not yet cleared. A body of them gave trouble in Huns' Walk on the Messines road, where there was a belt of uncut wire when the Australians arrived. "Hell!" said the Australians. "What are we going to do about that?" There was heavy shell-fire and machine-gun fire, and the sight of that wire was disgusting.
"Leave it to me," said a young Tank officer. "I guess old Rattle-belly can roll that down." He and other Tank officers were keen, even at the most deadly risks, to do good work with their queer beasts alongside the Australians for reasons that belong to another story.
They did good work, and this Tank at Huns' Walk crawled along the hedge of wire and laid it flat, as its tracks there still show. Another Tank was slouching about under heavy shelling in search of strong posts, with the Australian boys close up to its flanks with their bayonets fixed. Suddenly, a burst of flame came from it, and it seemed a doomed thing. But out of the body of the beast came a very cool young man, who mounted high with bits of shell whistling by his head. He stamped out the fire, and did not hear the comments of the Australian lads, who said, "Gosh, that fellow is pretty game. He's all right."
Much farther north another Tank came into action, with the Australians near. A few old remnants of charred wall and timber, where there was a strong post of Germans in concrete chambers, were causing our troops loss and worry. "Anything I can do to help you?" asked a Tank officer very politely through the steel trap-door. "Your machine-guns would be jolly useful in our trench," said an Australian officer. "We are a bit under strength here."
The Tank officer was a friend in distress. He dismantled his machine-guns, took them into the trench and fought alongside the Australians until they were relieved.
Just west of Van Hove Farm, in a gap between the Australians and the English, the Germans got into a place called Polka Estaminet—don't imagine it as a neat little inn with a penny-in-the-slot piano in the front parlour—and they had to be driven out by sharp rifle-fire. Next morning one of our men walked into a pocket of a hundred Germans, and a young Australian officer was told off with twenty men to bomb themout. There was a battle of bombs, which was very hot while it lasted, and then the Germans bolted off under machine-gun and rifle fire. Australian patrols went out and brought in forty wounded Germans and counted sixty to eighty dead.
June 29
In a violent thunder-storm whose noise and lightning mingled in an awesome way with the tumult and flame of the great artillery a minor battle broke out last evening round Lens and southwards beyond Oppy. The Canadians fought their way into Avion, a southern suburb of Lens, to a line giving them the larger half of the village, and driving the enemy back across the swamps to the outer defences of Lens city. Outside Oppy and south of it troops of old English county regiments seized the front-line system of German trenches and captured about 200 prisoners and several guns. West of Lens some Midland troops stormed and gained a line of trenches which belong to the main defences of the city, and north of it there was a big raid which caused great loss of life to the enemy. It was a heavy series of blows falling suddenly upon him, and giving him no time for a leisurely retirement to his inner line of defence in Lens.
I saw the beginning of the battle, and watched the frightful gun-fire until darkness and dense banks of smoke blotted out this vision of the mining cities in which men were fighting through bursting shells. That beginning was a terrifying sight, and a sense of the enormous tragedy of the world in conflict overwhelmed one's soul, because of the strange atmospheric effects, and that most weird mingling of storm and artillery, as though the gods were angry and stirred to reveal the eternal forces of their own thunderbolts above this human strife. Just in front of where I crouched in a shell-crater was Swallows' Wood, or the Bois d'Hirondelle, and beyond that La Coulotte, which the Canadians had just taken, and a little way farther the long straggle of streets which is Avion, leading up to Lens, with its square-towered church and high water-towers and factory chimneys. Straight and long, bordered by brokentrees, went the Arras-Lens road, on which any man may walk to a certain rendezvous with death if he goes far enough, and I saw how it crossed the Souchez river by the broken bridge of Leauvette, from which the Canadians were going to make their new attack. A gleam of sunlight rested there for a while, and the little river was a blue streak this side of Avion. But the sky began to darken strangely. The air was still and hushed. A blue dusk crept across the landscape. The trees of Hirondelle Wood and the towers of Lens blackened. Far behind Vimy, old ruins—of Souchez and Ablain-St.-Nazaire—were white and ghostly.
One of my companions in a shell-hole looked up and said: "Is the 'good old German God' at work again?" Other powers were at work. Huge shells from our heavy howitzers, now away behind us, passed overhead with a noise such as long-tailed comets must have. I watched them burst, raising volumes of ruddy smoke in Avion and Lens. To the right of Lens by Sallaumines there was some other kind of explosion, rolling up and up in big, curly clouds. In the still air there was the drone of many engines. The darkening sky was full of black specks, which were British aeroplanes flying out on reconnaissance over Lens and Avion. "O brave birds!" said a friend by my side, waving up to them. German shrapnel puffed about their wings, bursting with little glints of flames, but they flew on.
It was then just seven o'clock. Our guns had almost ceased fire. There were strange sinister silences over all the battlefield, broken only by single gun-shots or the high snarl of German shrapnel or the single thud of a German crump. It was almost dark. The blue went out of the little Souchez river. Lens and Avion were in gulfs of blackness. A long rolling thunderclap shook all the sky, and flashes of lightning zigzagged over the Vimy Ridge, whitening the edges of its upheaved earth. The sky opened, and a storm of rain swept down fiercely.
"Yes, the 'good old German God' is busy again," said my fellow-tenant of the shell-crater and of the pond that welled up in it. "Just our beastly luck!" It was ten minutes past seven, and we had heard that the battle was to begin at seven. Perhaps it had been postponed.
As the thought was uttered the battle began. It began withone great roar of guns. Not only behind us but far to our right and left. Flights of shells passed over our heads as though long-tailed comets of the spheres had broken loose from the divine order of things. In a wide sweep round Lens they burst with sharp flashes and lighted fires there. Outside the Cité du Moulin, at the western edge of Lens, a long chain of golden fountains rose as though little mines had been blown, and they were followed by a high bank of white impenetrable smoke. On the right of Avion another smoke-barrage was discharged, and above it there rose one of the strangest things I have seen in war. It was the figure of a woman, colossal, so that her head seemed to reach the heavens. It was not a fanciful idea, as when men watch the shapes of clouds and say, "How like Gladstone!" or "There is a camel!" or "A ship!" This woman figure of white solid smoke was as though carved out of rock, and she seemed to stare across the battlefield, and stayed there unchanged for several minutes. The guns continued their fury. Rockets went up out of Avion, and the German guns answered these signals. There was one wild tumult of artillery beating down the lines southward to Oppy, and beyond and above and through and into all this violence of sound there was the roll and rattle of thunder—heavy claps—and the rattle of the storm-drums. Lightning flashed above the flashes of our batteries, gave a livid outline to black trees and chimneys, and pierced the heart of all this darkness with long light swords. It was bad luck for our men, as I have heard since from messages which came back out of those smoke-banks through which no mortal eye could see. The men were drenched to the skin as soon as they started to attack. The rain beat into their faces and upon their steel hats. In a few minutes all the shelled ground across which they had to fight became as slippery as ice, so that many of them stumbled and fell. In Avion the enemy had already let loose floods to stop the way to Lens, and by the rain-storm they spread into big swamps. But the Canadians went ahead straight into the streets of Avion, leaving little searching-parties on their trail to make sure of the ruined houses, where machine-guns might be hidden.
This street fighting is always a nasty business, but in the south and western streets there was not much trouble from German infantry. Round Leauvette many of them lay dead.The living rear-guards surrendered in small parties from cellars and tunnels. The chief trouble of the Canadians was on the right, by Fosse 4 and a huddle of pit-heads where the enemy was in strength with many machine-guns, where he fired with a steady sweep of bullets, which I heard last night above all the other noise. The Canadians swing to the left a little to avoid that stronghold, and established themselves on a diagonal line, striking north-west and south-east through the slums, where they took what cover they could from the German shell-fire. To the left of Lens our Midland troops had some hard fighting in front of the Cité du Moulin, and gave a terrible handling to the Eleventh Reserve Division, who have previously suffered on the Canadian front, so that they were disgusted to find themselves near their old enemies again. They relieved the Fifty-sixth Division, which is down to one-seventh of its strength since fighting against the Leinsters in the Bois-en-Hache, near Vimy. The raid farther north inflicted frightful losses on the enemy in his dug-outs. In one big tunnelled dug-out not a man escaped.
The attack at Oppy, in the south, was a successful advance by Warwickshire lads and other English troops, who followed a great barrage into the enemy's front-trench system and captured all those of the garrison who were not quick enough to escape. They were men of the Fifth Bavarian Division, which is one of the best in the German army, and made up of very tough fellows.
So the evening ended in our favour, and our losses were not heavy, I am told. Not heavy, though always the price of victory has to be paid by that harvest of wounded who came back under the Red Cross down the country lanes of France.
July 13
The Germans have claimed a victory near Lombartzyde, and it is true that by heavy gun-fire they have driven us from our defences in a wedge-shaped tract of sand-dunes between the sea and the Yser Canal. This reverse of ours is not a great defeat. It is only a tragic episode of human suffering such as one must expect in war. But what is great—great in spiritualvalue and heroic memory—is the way in which our men fought against overwhelming odds and under annihilating fire, and did not try to escape nor talk of surrender, but held this ground until there was no ground but only a zone of bloody wreckage, and still fought until most of them were dead or disabled.
The men who did that were the King's Royal Rifles and Northamptons of the 1st Division, and this last stand of theirs beyond the Yser Canal will not be forgotten as long as human valour is remembered by us. It is wonderful to think that after three years of war the spirit of our men should still be so high and proud that they will stand to certain death like this. Those men who came back from the other side of the canal came back wounded, and had to swim back. They were a remnant of those who have stayed, lying out there now in the churned-up sand, or have been carried back to German hospitals. They were soldiers of the Northamptons and the Sixtieth. Among the King's Royal Rifles there were many London lads, from the old city which we used to think overcivilized and soft. Well, it was men like that who have shed their blood upon the sand-dunes, so that this tract by the sea is consecrated by one of the most tragic episodes in the history of this war.
It was on the seashore, when a high wind ruffled the waters on the morning of July 10, that the enemy began his attack with a deadly fire. His position was in a network of trenches, tunnels, concrete emplacements, and breastworks of thick sand-bag walls built down from the coast to the south of Lombartzyde. Facing him were other trenches and breastworks which we had recently taken over from the French. Behind our men was the Yser Canal, with pontoon bridges crossing to Nieuport and Nieuport-les-Bains. Without these bridges there was no way back or round for the men holding the lines in the dunes. The enemy began early in the morning by putting a barrage down on our front-line system of defences from a large number of batteries of heavy howitzers. Most of his shells were at least as large as 5·9's, and for one long hour they swept up and down our front, smashing breastworks and emplacements and flinging up storms of sand. After that hour the enemy altered his line of fire. There was a five minutes' pause, five minutes of breathing-space for men still left alive among many dead, and then the wall of shells crossed the canal and stayed there for another hour, churning up the sand with a tornado of steel.The guns then lifted to the front line again, and for another hour continued their work of destruction, pausing for one of those short silences which gave men hope that the bombardment had ceased. It had not ceased. It travelled again to the support line and stayed smashing there for sixty minutes—then across the canal again, then back all over again.
There was one interval of a whole quarter of an hour, and the officers had time to tell their men that it must be a fight to the death, because the position must be held until that death. There must have been few of them who did not know that after that bombardment they would meet the enemy face to face if they still remained alive.
The commanding officer of the Sixtieth became convinced by three o'clock in the afternoon that all this destructive fire was preparatory to a big attack. He saw that his bridges had gone behind him, so that there was no way of escape, and he saw that the enemy was trying to cut off all means of relief and communication. He tried to get messages through, but without success. Two shells came into his battalion headquarters, killing and wounding some of the officers and men crowded in this sand-bag shelter and dug-out in the dune. He took the survivors into a tunnel bored by the miners along the seashore, and here for a time they were able to carry on. But it was almost impossible to get out to reconnoitre the situation, or to give some word of comfort or courage to men standing to arms amongst the wreckage. Flights of hostile aeroplanes were overhead, and they flew low and poured machine-gun fire at any living man who showed. Away behind they were searching for our batteries.
At 6.15 all the German batteries broke into drum-fire and flung shells over the whole of our position for three-quarters of an hour without a second's pause. After all these previous barrages it reached the utmost heights of hellishness, destroying what had already been destroyed, sweeping all this wide tract of sand-dunes right away from the coast to the south of Lombartzyde with flame and smoke and steel, and reaping another harvest of death.
There are many details of this action which may never be known. No man saw it from other ground, and those who were across that bank of the Yser could see very little beyond their own neighbourhood of bursting shells. But a sergeant ofthe Northamptons, who had an astounding escape, saw the first three waves of German marines advance with bombing parties. That was shortly after seven o'clock in the evening. They were in heavy numbers against a few scattered groups of English soldiers still left alive after a day of agony and blood. They came forward bombing in a crescent formation, one horn of the crescent trying to work round behind the flank of the Rifles on the seashore as the other tried to outflank the Northamptons on the right.
A party of German machine-gunners crept along the edge of the sands, taking advantage of the low tide, and enfiladed the support line, now a mere mash of sand, in which some wounded and unwounded men held out, and swept them with bullets. Another party of the marines made straight for the tunnel, which was now the battalion headquarters of the Sixtieth, and poured liquid fire down it. Then they passed on, but as if uncertain of having completed their work, came back after a time and bombed it. Even then there was at least one man not killed in that tunnel. He stayed there among the dead till night and then crept out and swam across the canal. Two platoons of Riflemen fought to the last man, refusing to surrender. One little group of five lay behind a bank of sand, and fired with rifles and bombs until they were destroyed.
Meanwhile the Northamptons, on the right, were fighting desperately. Seeing that the German marines were trying to get behind them on the right flank and that they had not the strength to resist this, they got a message through to some troops farther down in front of Lombartzyde to form a barrier so that the enemy could not come through, and these fought their way grimly up, thrusting back the enemy's storm troops, and then made a defensive block through which the marines could not force their way.
The Northamptons fought without any chance of escape, without any hope except that of a quick finish. The German marines brought up a machine-gun and fixed it behind the place where the Northampton officers had established their headquarters, and fired up it. Our machine-guns were out of action, filled with sand or buried in sand. One gunner managed to get his weapon into position, but it jammed at once, and with a curse on it, he flung it into the water of the Yser, and then jumped in and swam back. Another gunner lay by theside of his machine-gun, hit twice by shells, so that he could not work it. One of his comrades wanted to drag him off to the canal bank, in the hope of swimming back with him. To linger there a minute meant certain death. "Don't mind about me," said the machine-gunner of the Northamptons. "Smash my gun and get back." There was no time for both, so the gun was smashed and the wounded man stayed on the wrong side of the bank.
The fighting lasted for an hour and a half after the beginning of the infantry attack. It was over at 8.30. The wounded sergeant of the Northamptons who swam back saw the last of the struggle. He saw a little group of his own officers, not more than six of them, surrounded by marine bombers, fighting to the end with their revolvers. The picture of these six boys out there in the sand, with their dead lying around them, refusing to yield and fighting on to a certain death, is one of the memories of this war that should not be allowed to die.
Over the Yser Canal men were trying to swim, men dripping with blood and too weak to swim, and men who could not swim. Some gallant fellow on the Nieuport side—there is an idea that it was a Lancashire man—swam across with a rope under heavy fire and fixed it so that men could drag themselves across. So the few survivors came over, and so we know, at least in its broad outline, how all this happened. It is a tragic tale, and there will be tears when it is read. But in the tragedy there is the splendour of these poor boys, young soldiers all who fought with a courage as great as any in history, and have raised a cross of sacrifice beyond the Yser, before which all men of our race will bare their heads.
The enemy did not reach the canal bank, but stayed some 300 yards away from it. He was beaten back from the trenches south of Lombartzyde, and gained no ground there.
June 14
Between Wytschaete and Messines is a wood, horribly ravaged by shell-fire, called on our trench-maps Bois de l'Enfer, or Hell Wood. North of it was a German strong point, withbarbed-wire defences and heavy blocks of concrete, called l'Enfer—Hell itself—and south of it, behind a labyrinth of trenches, some broken walls above a nest of dug-outs, known as Hell Farm. These filthy places were central defences of great fortified positions held by the enemy just north of Messines, and just south of Wytschaete, and round them and beyond them was some of the fiercest fighting which happened on that day of battle when we gained the Messines Ridge.
Until now I have left out that part of the battle story—one cannot write the history of a battle like that in a day or two—but it must be told, because it was vastly important to the success of the general action, and the troops engaged in it showed the finest courage. They were men of the 25th Division, including Cheshires, Irish Rifles, Lancashire Fusiliers, North Lanes, and Worcesters, and other country lads who were blooded in battles of the Somme, where once I watched them surging up the high slopes under a heavy fire and fighting their way into the German trenches. In this battle of Hell Wood they were so wonderful in the cool, steady way they fought that when an airman came down to report their progress he said to their General, "I knew your fellows, because they advanced in perfect order as though on parade."
Before the battle, when they lay about Wulverghem, opposite the fortress positions they had to attack, they did some great digging in the face of the enemy assembly trenches, as plain as pikestaves to German observers, and advertising, as did the enormous ammunition dumps, new batteries and wagon-lines, the awful stroke of attack that was being prepared.
It was a record night's work of twelve hundred Lancashire lads who went out into the dead strip between their trenches and the enemy's, and dug like demons. When at dawn they crept back to their own lines they left behind them a trench four-feet-six deep and 1050 yards long for a jump-out line on the day of battle. The enemy officers saw it, and must have sickened at the sight. They marked it on their maps, which were captured afterwards. It was frightful ground in front of these troops of ours, as I have seen it partly for myself from ground about the mine-craters looking over Hell Wood.
The first part of our men's advance after the moment of attack was hardly checked, and they went forward in open order as steadily as though in the practice fields, throughbuttercups and daisies. Their trouble came later, when they found themselves under machine-gun fire from Hell Wood, on the left of their advance line, and from Hell Farm in front of them. It was a body of Cheshires who side-slipped to the left to deal with that fire from the wood. They made a dash for those scarred tree-trunks, from which a stream of bullets poured, and fought their way through to the German machine-gun emplacements, though a number of them fell. As they closed upon the enemy the German gunners ceased fire in a hurry. Many of them stopped abruptly, with bullets in their brains, and fifty men surrendered with fourteen machine-guns. Hell Farm was gained and held, and at the top of Hell Wood the Cheshires routed out another machine-gun, so that all was clear in this part of the field.
Meanwhile the main body of assaulting troops—Lancashire Fusiliers, North Lanes, Irish Rifles, and Worcesters—had passed on to another system of defences known as October Trench, which was a barrier straight across their way. Here, as they drew close, they came to a dead halt against a broad belt of wire uncut by our gun-fire, and hideously tangled in coils with sharp barbs. Behind, as some of the officers knew, the enemy had brought up twenty-six machine-guns, enough to sweep down a whole battalion held by wire like this. Even now the men don't know how they went over that wire. They knew instantly that they must get across or die. From October Support Trench, farther back, with another belt of uncut wire in front of it, heavy fire was coming from Germans who had their heads up. "Over you go, men," shouted the officers. The men flung themselves over, scrambled over, rolled over, tearing hands and faces and bits of flesh on those rusty prongs, but getting over or through somehow and anyhow. Parties of them raced on to October Support Trench, flung themselves against that wire and got, bleeding and scratched, to the other side, unless they were killed first. Some of them fell. It was the most deadly episode of the day, but the Germans paid a ghastly price for this resistance, and 300 German dead lie on that ground round the old ruins of Middle Farm behind the wire.
Away back when fighting here began was a body of Irish Rifles who had gone as far as they had been told to go. They saw what was happening, watched those other men flingingthemselves against the barbed hedge. "To hell with staying here," shouted one of them. "To hell with it," said others. "We could do a power of good up there."
"Come on then, boys," said the first men, beginning to run. They ran fast towards the end of the wire belt, slipped round it, and fell on the flank of the enemy. It was timely help to the other men, some of whom owe their lives to it.
The second phase of the battle began when another body of the same troops passed through those who had already assaulted and won their ground, and went forward to a new line beyond. They passed through in perfect order, which is a most difficult manœuvre in battle when the ground is covered with troops who have already been fighting, with wounded men and stretcher-bearers, and souvenir-hunters and moppers-up and runners, and all the tumult of new-gained ground. But in long, unbroken waves the fresh troops lined up beyond these crowds, and made ready to advance upon the new line of attack. Again, groups of them had to be separated from the main body in order to seize isolated positions on the wings, where groups of Germans were holding out and sweeping our flanks with fire.
North-east and south-east of Lumm Farm were bits of trench from which the enemy was routed after sharp bouts of fighting. Beyond were some holed walls called Nameless Farm, and these were captured before the call of "cease firing," which was the signal for the party to halt while our guns began a new bombardment over the new line of attack.
It was this silence which scared an officer of the Cheshires, who had led his men away forward to capture a body of Germans trying to escape from Despagne Farm, right out in the blue this side of Owl Trench, which was the next position to be attacked, after our guns had dealt with it. A sergeant and two men of the Cheshires ran right into Despagne Farm and bayoneted the German machine-gunners who had been spraying bullets on our men. Then the officer seemed to feel his heart stop. He looked at his wrist-watch, and was shocked at the time it gave. The realization of the frightful menace approaching as every second passed made every nerve in his body tingle. It was our new bombardment. A vast storm of explosives which was about to sweep over this ground, already pitted with deep shell-holes, it seemed as though nothing couldsave this body of Cheshires, who had gone too far and could not get back before their own guns killed them. There was only one chance of escape for any of them, and that was for each man to dive into one of those eight-feet-deep shell-holes and crouch low, scratching himself into the shelving sides before the hellish storm of steel broke loose. The Cheshires did this, flung themselves into the pits, lay quaking there like toads under a harrow, and hugged the earth as the bombardment burst out and swept over them. By an amazing freak of fortune it swept over them quickly, and there were only two casualties among all those men huddled in holes, expecting certain death. A bit of luck, said the men, getting up and gasping. Weaker men would have been broken by shell-shock and terror-stricken. These Cheshires went on, took the next German defences and many prisoners, and then dug in according to orders and prepared for anything that might happen in the way of trouble. It was the German counter-attack which happened. Six hundred men came debouching out of a gully called Blawepoortbeek, with its mouth opposite Despagne Farm. The Cheshires had their machine-guns in position and their rifles ready. They held back their fire until the German column was within short range. Then they fired volley after volley, and those 600 men found themselves in a valley of death, and few escaped.