September 21
In spite of many German counter-attacks yesterday and many vain and costly attempts to counter-attack to-day, we hold all the ground gained by our men yesterday, except at one or two strong points, after their victorious progress. This morning when I went again among the men who have been fighting—there was a blue sky over the rags and tatters of the City of Ypres, and behind the tall, solitary tree-stumps on the ridge that goes up to Polygon Wood by way of Glencorse Copse, and all the air was filled with the song of many aeroplanes—all that I learned yesterday about the battle was made more certain by the narratives of these young soldiers, who are proud and glad of what they call a real good show. The wounded men walking down over the wide stretch of fields, which are still under gun-fire, weak with loss of blood, suffering the first pain of their wounds, and shaken by their experiences under shells and machine-gun fire, spoke with a quiet enthusiasm of the day's success, and said "It was easy" behind such a colossal barrage as our guns rolled in front of them. Some ofthem in their eagerness went too fast for the barrage in order to chase the enemy, and I have met Australians here and there and some men of the Welsh Regiment, who fought farther south, wounded because they ran in front of the barrage-lines, and were caught in our shell-splinters. But that was a rare episode, and along the whole line of attack the men followed the moving walls of shells, vast shells that fling up masses of earth like suburban villas, and the smaller shells that fell like confetti, all glinting in the wet mist, and felt sure that the enemy in front of them, would have lost all his fight when they reached his hiding-places, if any lived. Many Germans died on that ground, so that the shell-holes between the blockhouses are wet graves in which their bodies lie, and many of the blockhouses which resisted so long in former attacks are smashed, or at least so battered that the garrisons inside were dazed and demoralized by the fearful hammering at their walls.
There was a broad belt of death across that mile deep of woods and ridges and barren fields, but here and there, as I have already told, men stayed alive in the concrete houses and fought with their machine-guns to the last, and even kept sniping from shell-holes in which they had escaped, up to the time our troops reached them. They were brave men, most of them, for it needs great courage to show any fighting spirit after such a fury of gun-fire, and 50 per cent. of our prisoners are wounded, as I have seen myself, and the others are haggard and spent after their frightful adventure. An hour or two ago I met a column of them on the road, marching down slowly through a ruined village, and staring hollow-eyed at all the movement of our troops, at all the transport behind our lines, at all our whistling, busy Tommies, who glance back at them without any malice now that the battle is over. In a dressing-station a young wounded German sprang to his feet as I came in, and said, "Good day, sir," very politely, but the pallor of his face was that of a dead man. The German officers who are prisoners show the same kind of eagerness to salute, which is a rare thing for them, and I hear that they do not disguise that yesterday was a day of great defeat for themselves, and of great victory for us. The completeness and quickness of it staggered them, and they speak of our barrage-fire as an awful phenomenon that has undone all their plans and destroyed the new method of defence which they believed could save themto the end. As wounded men or prisoners they see things darkly, and we should be deep in folly if we believed that all the enemy's strength of resistance is destroyed. But at least this is clear after yesterday, that the new German method of holding his lines lightly by small garrisons in blockhouses, with reserves behind for counter-attacks, has broken down, and by reverting to the old system of strong front lines he would suffer again as he suffered in the Somme under the ferocity of our artillery.
The German officers have hard words to say about their Higher Command which has led them into this tragedy, and their own pride is broken. Yesterday the reserve divisions, which were brought up in buses and then assembled in places near our new front, to be flung against our advanced lines, had a dreadful time, and must have suffered great losses. After the rain of the night and the mist of the morning, the weather cleared in time for our airmen to go out reconnoitring, as I saw them in swarms in yesterday's sky, and they were quick to report the massing of the enemy. Our guns were quick to fire at these human targets. These counter-attacks developed several times against the English and Highland troops, who were fighting across the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, north-west of the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, at a place called the Schreiboom, north of Langemarck. Some of the Rifle Brigade and King's Royal Rifles, with other light-infantry troops, failed at first to get a certain trench, and very hard fighting took place during the day in a pocket with desperate courage. At the same time the Highlanders south of them were fighting very hard also round about the blockhouses by Rose House, Pheasant Farm, and Quebec Farm beyond the Pilkem Ridge, into which I looked a week or two ago, when things were quiet on the line. The Highlanders were driven back for a while, and the enemy's counter-attacks were made in strong force at about ten o'clock in the morning, and several times later. But they were broken up each time by the rifle-fire of the Scottish troops, and by our field-batteries.
Large numbers of the enemy were killed here in our first attack and afterwards. Besides the artillery, a heavy bombardment was made before the men went out by trench-mortars, which raked a small area of shell-holes so thoroughly that the German snipers in them were destroyed, and an importanttrench was taken by the Scots with hardly any casualties. A good deal more than 100,000 rounds of shells must have gone over from the guns before the battle, and afterwards the German storm troops who tried to recover the ground were smothered with fire. Six times they came on with much determination, and six times their waves were broken up. Some London Territorials had to repel part of the assaulting waves, after a gallant struggle for their objectives, and one young officer among them earned special honour by gathering a company of men together and leading them against the advancing enemy, whom they scattered with bombs and rifles.
Most of the Germans here in this district round Wurst Farm, east of Winnipeg, were men of the 36th and 208th Divisions, and were a mixture of Prussians and Poles, who seem to have been stout-hearted fellows. Their local reserves were quickly exhausted, and in the afternoon, when they threw in further reserves, these were broken up in the same way. A frightful fate met a German division which was brought up in the afternoon near Roulers to be hurled against the Londoners and Highlanders. Our guns broke up their columns, and when they rallied and re-formed, broke them again. Our aeroplanes flew low over them, strafing them with machine-gun fire, and at intervals gas clouded about them, so that they had to put on their masks, if they had time to put them on before they fell, and marched blindly forward to another doom, for some of those who came within range were shot down by the London men, little fellows, some of them, with the Cockney accent which makes me homesick for the Fulham Road when I hear it along the roads of Flanders, but with big, brave hearts. Three of the German battalions deployed and drove against the Highlanders at Delva Farm and Rose House, and fought so hard that they could only be driven back when the Highlanders rallied, and at eight o'clock in the evening swept them out and away. Strong counter-attacks were made between six and seven in the evening in the neighbourhood of Hill 37 and the country round Bremen Redoubt, against the King's Liverpools, where the South-African Scots held their line.
There were a great many blockhouses in this district, some of them damaged and some still intact, and in those undamaged forts little parties of men, who fired their machine-guns to thelast moment before death or surrender. Hill 37 was a hard place to attack, as the Irish found it, and here Lancashire men fought their way up and round in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets that swept the ground about them. The Bremen Redoubt, which had been so costly to the Irishmen on July 31, was carried by the South-Africans in a fine assault, while Scottish troops were gaining other strong points and drawing tight nets round any blockhouse from which came any fire. Out of these places, in all that part of the line, many prisoners were taken, and they made their way down anxiously through their own shell-fire, which was barraging these fields. A great party of Germans, white-faced and afraid, were found in the long galleries running out of a fortified place called Schuler Farm.
South of all this the Australians were fighting in the centre of yesterday's great attack where the ground rises to the foul heights of Polygon Wood. The Australian lads were in their most perfect form. They had had some rest since the hard, bad days at Bullecourt and in the dreadful valley of Noreuil, where I went to see them outside the Quéant-Drocourt line. Since then I had seen them in the harvest-fields of France, in the market squares of Flemish towns, along the dusty roads which lead up to the Front. Always I felt it good to see those easy-going fellows in their flap hats, so lithe, so clean-cut, so fresh. It was an honour to get a salute from them now and then, for they are not great at that sort of thing, and one could see with half an eye that they have not lost any of their quality since some of them fought their great epic at Helles and Suvla Bay, and afterwards at Pozières gained and held their ground under months of great shell-fire, and then at Bullecourt fought with the grim endurance of men who will not yield to any kind of hammering if their pride is in the job. They are boys, many of them, and simple-looking fellows who were not cut to the model of barrack-room soldiers. They have a wildish gipsy look when one sees them camped in the fields, and free-and-easy manners in the village estaminets. When I heard they were going to attack Polygon Wood I knew that we should get it, if human courage could have the say, for the Australians are not easily denied if they set their mind on a thing, and for all their boyishness—though they have middle-aged follows among them too—they have a grim passion in them at suchtimes. Yet they are free-and-easy always, even on the battlefield, and a bit impatient of checks and restraints. Knowing them, and the heart and soul of them, one of their commanding officers arranged a method of preventing them from getting bored with the long strain of a two hours' wait, which was ordered when they should have gained their first objective. He sent up to them by the carrying parties bundles of the previous day's papers, all the picture papers especially, and large quantities of cigarettes. The idea worked beautifully, and it was the strangest thing that has happened in any great battle. The Australian lads got at the papers, and on the ground which they had just captured spread them out and studied the news of the day and smoked their cigarettes with quiet enjoyment, while ahead of them rolled a stupendous barrage, with thousands of heavy shells that came screaming over their heads from our guns behind them, answered by other shells that came the other way, and burst farther back on the battlefield. So they were seen by one of our airmen, who was surprised by what he saw.
The going had been pretty bad before then, as I was told to-day by some of the men whom I met slightly wounded along the Menin road. The enemy seemed to smell danger in the night and put over a heavy barrage just before the attack started. It was on the tail of the Australians, and might have demoralized them if they had not been so high in heart. They got away in good order, and kept going to keep pace with the travelling storm of shells which broke before them. One queer thing happened near Clapham Junction. The enemy had apparently planned a raid with "flammenwerfer," or flame-jets as we call these devilish engines, at the very time of the attack and they were met by the Australian shock of assault, and fell before it. While some of the Australians worked round Glencorse Copse and Nonne Boschen or Nuns' Wood, others fought up by Westhoek across the Hanebeek towards the post called by a curious coincidence Anzac Corner. After heavy fighting for a little while at one of the blockhouses the Australian flag was planted at Anzac Corner and waves there still. In Nonne Boschen the ground was marshy and encumbered with fallen trees, but the boys struggled through somehow, and then started for the Polygon Wood, where there is no wood, as there seldom is in these places when our artillery has done its work,but only some blasted trunks and stakes. In Glencorse Wood and round about it there were a good many Germans, and they fought hard. Fifty of them were killed in hand-to-hand fighting, or fighting at close quarters, and a blockhouse on the north-west of the wood, where the garrison would not surrender, but kept his machine-guns going, was taken by a bombing attack. So after a two hours' wait at the end of the first lap the Australians flung away their cigarettes and the assaulting waves passed on to the ridge of Polygon Wood. They could not take all the line they had been asked to take in the first attempt, and were checked on the right by machine-gun fire. So they dug in on a crescent, which had its right ear somewhere by Carlisle Farm to the north of Black Watch Corner, until supports came up to make good their losses on the way, and they were able to go forward and straighten out. After that the counter-attacks began. All of them were broken up by artillery-fire, and when one of the German divisions was flung in, the only men who reached our lines were those who tried to escape from the barrage which our guns put over their assembly position. I should like to give a fuller history than I did yesterday about the taking of Inverness Copse and the bogs of the Dumbarton Lakes, and the tangled ground of Shrewsbury Forest, but I have no time, as the wires wait, except to pay a tribute to the men who fought there over most difficult country, crowded with blockhouses, and under severe fire from the enemy's guns. Men from Surrey and Kent, from the Midlands, from Wales, from the North, the battalions of the 8th and 14th Divisions, all fought and won with equal courage and success.
September 23
The enthusiasm of the troops who fought in Thursday's battle of the Menin road is good enough proof that they achieved success that morning without those great losses which take the heart out of victory. All the men I have seen are convinced that the enemy's losses are heavy. Not so much in the actual attack, where he held his blockhouse system with small garrisons, as afterwards, when he tried to counter-attack.
I have already put on record some of the attempts he made to regain ground on the afternoon of the battle. Yesterday and to-day he has continued his efforts with even more disastrous results to his unhappy troops. About midday yesterday aGerman regiment was sent up in motor-omnibuses to a point behind the enemy's lines to make a new assault upon our positions in Polygon Wood. The three battalions then took to the road, and were seen very quickly by our observers. The artillery made that road a way of fire, and the German soldiers were caught in it and dispersed. Odd companies of them worked their way forward by other tracks, but lost themselves in the chaos of shell-craters, where other heavy shells burst among them. They were no longer battalions or companies, but a terror-stricken collection of individual soldiers, taking cover in holes and without guidance or command. An officer collected fifty of them and led them back to reorganize. He had no notion of what had happened to the rest of the regiment, except that it was broken and ineffective, in this wild turmoil of crater earth. He went forward again on reconnaissance, and walked into a body of Australians, who took him prisoner.
So it happened with another column at Zandvoorde. One of our aerial observers watched the long trail of men marching up the road and sent a message to the guns. They were the heavy guns which found the target with 9·2 shells and with twelve-inchers, which are monstrous and annihilating. Down there at Zandvoorde it must have been hell. We can only guess how many men were blown to pieces, and it is not a picture on which the imagination should care to linger. It was a bloody shambles.
Along the Menin road later in the day came another long column of marching men. They were men of the Sixteenth Bavarian Division, who had been sent up in urgent haste without knowledge of the ground, without maps, and with officers who seem to have had no definite instructions except to fling their men in an attack somehow and anyhow. Over their heads in the darkness under the stars flew a British aeroplane with a bomb of the heaviest kind. When our airman saw these hostile troops advancing, flying low like a great black bat he dropped his frightful thing on the head of the column. It burst with a deafening roar and scattered the leading company. Flying in the same sky-space as the big aeroplane was a number of other night raiders of ours. They also flew low above the marching troops, and all down the road dropped their explosives. Our guns added their help, and they fired many rounds down the Menin road, bracketing the ditches. It is a dreadful thing to walk along a road which is being "bracketed," and withthose birds of prey above them the Bavarians must have suffered the worst kind of horror. They did not get near to our lines with any counter-attack.
None of these counter-attacks has reached our lines near Polygon Ridge, which is the ground most wanted by the enemy, and the nearest seems to have been yesterday afternoon, when some of the Australian boys with whom I talked to-day saw the movement of men and the glint of bayonets in a little wood on an opposite spur. They saw the movement of men for a minute of two, and after that a fury of shells which fell into the wood and filled it with flame and smoke.
"I don't know how a mortal man could have lived through that," said one of these lads. "If any Fritz got out of that without being cracked he must have had the luck of Old Harry."
There were many of these Australian boys among whom I went to-day before they had cleaned themselves of the dirt of battle, and while they were still on fire with the emotion of their amazing adventure. Some of them had escaped only by enormous luck. I talked with one stretcher-bearer, a fine, big, bullet-headed fellow with an unshaven chin and a merry smile, who was astounded to find himself alive. He had spent the day and night bandaging wounded, and, with his mates, carrying them down to the dressing-station, a mile and more back. All the time he walked and worked with bursting shells about him. They knocked out several of his mates, but left him untouched. They killed two or three of the wounded on his stretchers going down, but did not scratch him. They blew up dug-outs just as he had gone out of them, and trenches through which he made his way. He was buried in earth flung up by heavy shells, and he fell many times into deep craters, and men dropped all round him, but to-day he still had a whole skin and a queer, lingering smile, in which there is a look of wonderment because of his escape.
An Australian officer, who was through the Dardanelles and the Somme and Bullecourt, a slim, small-sized Australian, with a delicate, clean-cut face, thoughtful and grave, with a fine light in his eyes, was helping a wounded lad on to a stretcher when a shell came over his head, killed the boy, but left the officer unscathed. It was this officer, this slight, delicate-looking man, who captured, with three lads, sixty men and a German battalion staff in their headquarter dug-outs below Polygon Wood.
"Where is your revolver?" he said to the captain. The German hesitated, and said: "You will shoot me if I fetch it." "I will shoot you if you don't," said the little Australian. And he meant what he said, as I could see by the set of his lips when he told me the tale. But the German captain handed over his revolver quietly, and his maps, which were very useful.
It was a wonderful scene to-day among all these Australian lads, who had just been relieved and were talking over the scenes of yesterday's history in small groups while they scraped off the mud and shaved before bits of broken mirror, and polished up German rifles and machine-guns and handled their souvenirs, found in the dug-outs and blockhouses. Many of them were stripped to the waist, some of them wore German caps, some of them slept like drugged men in spite of all the noise about them. After taking the first objective they had to wait for two hours before they went on, and there were queer scenes about the blockhouses and in the felled woods. They had found the German rations, and besides the sausages and bread and gallons of cold coffee in petrol-tins, which the boys shared among themselves, quantities of long, fat, and excellent cigars. Hundreds of Australians smoked these cigars while they waited for the barrage to lift, and when they went on again hundreds of them were still puffing them as they trudged on to Polygon Wood. They had a good day. I have met some of them, who said they enjoyed it, and would not have missed it for worlds. The excitement of it all kept them going. The battlefield was a wild pandemonium of men, and the imagination of people who have never seen war will hardly visualize such scenes, with lads laughing and smoking while others lay dead, with groups fighting and falling round blockhouses while others were eating German sausages and joking in captured emplacements, with stretcher-bearers carrying men back under heavy shell-fire and German prisoners dodging their own barrage-fire on their way to our lines. An Australian doctor had his arm smashed, but stayed among the boys, regardless of his own hurt. A V.C. officer of the Dardanelles was killed as he went back wounded on a stretcher. German wounded lay crying for help, and our men rescued them. So about Glencorse Wood and Polygon Wood human agony and the wild spirits of Australian youth, death, and the vitality of boyhood in the passion of a great adventure were queerly mixed, and one sideof this picture of war would be hopelessly untrue if it left out the other side.
One enthusiasm of the Australians was about the English soldiers who fought on their right, the Yorkshire boys and others who went through Inverness Copse. Again and again yesterday I heard them loud in praise of the Tommies.
"By gosh, they'll do for me! They went ahead in grand style. They couldn't be stopped anyhow, though they came up against a durned lot of machine-gun fire. They were just fine."
Far north of all this, above the Zonnebeke, were the Londoners of the 58th Division and the Highlanders of the 51st Division, and, as I have already written in previous messages, they had severe fighting and had to bear the brunt of great counter-attacks. The ground in front of the London Territorials was bad and difficult—bad because it was intersected with swamps and cut up by weeks of shell-fire, and horribly difficult because of a ridge rising up on the left to the German strong point of Wurst Farm.
The London boys swung left in order to attack Wurst Farm, and, avoiding a frontal assault, worked left-handed all the time till they reached the ridge, and then rushed the blockhouse from the rear. The garrison was surprised and caught. They fought desperately, but the Londoners overpowered them. The surviving Germans complained bitterly, and said it was impossible to use their machine-guns on every side at once. "It is not a fair way of fighting," said a German officer, and the Londoners laughed and said, "Not half!" and "I don't think!" and other ironical words.
In a big dressing-station up there they captured two doctors and sixty men, of whom many were wounded. The German doctors said, "Have you any wounded we can help? We are not fighting men." And they made themselves useful, and were good fellows.
Down in the valley the Londoners came face to face with a party of Germans who showed fight, but the Londoners—little fellows some of them—walked through them and over dead bodies who had fallen before their rifle-fire. There was a lot of musketry both then and afterwards when the enemy counter-attacked, and they fired like sharpshooters. Down below them and almost behind them the line dropped away to the fort ofSchuler Farm, where the enemy still held out. "There are a lot of Boches down there," said an officer on the brigade staff of the London Territorials. "No," said the brigade major, and then: "Yes, and, by the Lord, there's a German officer staring at me. The blighter is telling one of his men to take a pot at me. See!" The brigade major ducked down his head as a bullet flattened against the blockhouse wall.
It was an awkward situation for the Londoners, but they formed a defensive flank and sent some lads to help the troops who were attacking the position. "Domine dirige nos" is the London motto, and there were many London boys who had it in their hearts that day, and said with the dear old Cockney accent, "Gord 'elp us." That was when the German counter-attacks developed, but were smashed by gun-fire.
In all this fighting, as far as I can find, the Highland Territorials of the 51st Division upon the left had the bloodiest fighting. They gained their ground with difficulty, because a battalion of the Royal Scots was badly held up by wire and bogs and machine-gun fire at a stream called the Lekkerbolerbeek. They had to fall back, reorganize, and attack again, which they did with splendid gallantry, and held their ground only by most grim endurance, because the enemy counter-attacked them violently all day long after the objectives had been gained.
The enemy's losses were certainly appalling to him. Officers in this fighting, who have been through many of our great battles, tell me that they have never seen before so many dead as lie upon this ground. In one section of Pheasant Trench a hundred yards long there are nearly a hundred dead. Before the attack our barrage rolled forward slowly, like a devouring fire. Instantly all along the German line green lights rose as SOS signals, but as the barrage swept on, followed by the Scots, the lights went out. They rose again from the farther lines, and then those ceased as the shells reached them. Only in the blockhouses and the dug-outs down by the Lekkerbolerbeek were any Germans left alive.
The blockhouses were dealt with by small parties of Highlanders, who had been in training to meet them, and went like wolves about them, firing their machine-guns and rifles through the loopholes if the garrisons would not come out. So they swept on to their final goal, which was at Rose House and thecemetery beyond Pheasant Farm. These men had some terrible hours to face. By ill-luck their left flank was utterly exposed, and hostile aeroplanes, flying very low, saw this and flew back with the news. The enemy was already developing a series of counter-attacks by his "Stosstruppen," or storm troops, of the 234th Division, which from three o'clock in the afternoon till seven o'clock that evening made repeated thrusts against the Highlanders' front, and the heaviest weight of two and a half battalions was sent forward against this flank. It was preceded by the heaviest German barrage ever seen by these Scots, who have had many experiences of barrage-fire. Officers watching from a little distance were horrified by that monstrous belt of fire, and the garrison of Gordons seemed lost to them for ever. It was not so bad as that. Eventually this flank fell back from Rose House to Pheasant Farm Cemetery and other ground, where they were rallied by a battalion commander, one of the youngest men of his rank in the British Army, who supplied them with fresh ammunition and directed them to hold up the German infantry advancing under cover of their bombardment. In spite of their losses our men fought their way back and regained part of the ground by desperate valour. Our guns wiped out the other counter-attacks one by one, inflicting frightful losses on the enemy. They were caught most horribly as they came along the road. Thirty machine-guns played a barrage-fire on his lines where German soldiers tried to escape across the shell-craters. The Highlanders used their rifles effectively, one man firing over 500 rounds. And a gun was brought into action from a Tank which had come up as far as an advanced blockhouse, in spite of the boggy ground.
There was great slaughter among the enemy that day. Since then the slaughter has gone on, for his counter-attacks have not ceased. His guns have been very active, bombarding parts of our line intensely, and in the air his scouts and raiders have been flying over our lines in the endeavour to observe and destroy our troops and batteries, flying low with great audacity, and using machine-guns as well as bombs. But we hold all the important ground gained last Thursday.
September 26
During the past forty-eight hours there has been hard and prolonged fighting north and south of the Menin road, and in spite of formidable counter-attacks by the enemy which began early yesterday morning and still continue, our troops have made a successful advance in the neighbourhood of Zonnebeke and southward beyond the Polygon Wood racecourse, which now belongs to the Australians.
It is south of that, by Cameron House and the rivulet called the Reutelbeek, that the enemy's pressure has been greatest, and where the battalions of the 33rd and 39th Divisions on the right of the Australians, including the Queen's, have had the hardest time under incessant fire and attack since dawn yesterday, but on their right Sherwood Foresters and Rifle Brigade men, also severely tried, have swept across the Tower Hamlets Ridge in the direction of Gheluvelt.
It was fully expected that any new endeavour of ours to advance beyond the ground gained in the battle of September 20 would be met by the fiercest opposition. The capture of Polygon Wood and Westhoek seriously lessened the value of Passchendaele Ridge, which strikes northward and forms the enemy's great defensive barrier, and it was certain that in spite of the heavy losses he has already suffered in trying to get back that high ground above Inverness Copse he would bring up all his available reserves to hinder our further progress at all costs.
For two days before yesterday he made no sign of movement in his lines, and was kept quiet by the breakdown of all his previous counter-attacks, which our men repulsed with most bloody losses to the enemy, so that their divisions were shattered and demoralized. The German Command used that time to drag the broken units out of the line and to replace them or hurry up to their support the reserves who had been waiting in the rest areas behind. These men were rushed up by motor-omnibus and railways to points where it was necessary to take to the roads and march to the assembly positions ready for immediate counter-attacks. Those were in the Zandvoordeand Kruiseik neighbourhood, south-east of Gheluvelt, ready to strike up to the Tower Hamlets Ridge while others could be assembled behind the Passchendaele Ridge.
No doubt our attack for this morning did not leave out of account the strength of resistance likely to be offered. The enemy showed signs of desperate anxiety to check us on the Polygon Wood line, and the ground going south of it to the Gheluvelt Spur, and he made a great effort by massed artillery to smash up the organization behind our lines, and by a series of thrusts to break our front. On Monday afternoon, increasing to great intensity yesterday, he flung down his barrage-fire in Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, fired large numbers of heavy long-range shells over Westhoek Ridge, Observatory Ridge, Hooge, and other old spots of ill-fame, and concentrated most fiercely on the ground about Cameron House, Black Watch Corner, and the Tower Hamlets.
At six o'clock yesterday morning, supported by this terrific fire, he launched his first attack on the Surreys, Scottish Rifles, Middlesex Regiment, and other troops around the Tower Hamlets, and owing to their losses they were obliged to fall back some little way in order to reorganize for an assault to recapture their position. These fought through some awful hours, and several of their units did heroic things to safeguard their lines, which for a time were threatened.
While they were fighting in this way the 4th and 5th Australians, on the high ground this side of Polygon Wood racecourse and the mound which is called the Butte, also had to repel some fierce attacks which opened on them shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. The enemy was unable to pierce their line, and fell back from this first attempt with great losses in dead and wounded. It was followed by a second thrust at midday and met the same fate. At two o'clock in the afternoon the Australians sent some of their men to help the Surreys and the English troops on their right, who were passing through a greater ordeal owing to the storm of fire over them and the continued pressure of the enemy's storm troops, who were persistent through the afternoon in spite of the trails of dead left in their tracks. It was a serious anxiety on the eve of a new battle, but it failed to frustrate our attack. All the area through which the enemy was trying to bring up his troops was made hideous by artillery-fire and the work of the Royal Flying Corps.
It was a clear moonlight night, with hardly a breath of air blowing, and all the countryside was made visible by the moon's rays, which silvered the roofs of all the villages and made every road like a white tape. Our planes went out over the enemy's lines laden with bombs, and patrolled up and down the tracks and made some thirty attacks upon the German transport and his marching columns. All his lines of approach were kept under continual fire by our guns of heavy calibre, and for miles around shells swept the points which marching men would have to pass, so that their way was hellish. Our aircraft went out and flew very low, and dropped bombs wherever they saw men moving through the luminous mists of the night. Behind our own lines air patrols guarded the countryside. They carried lights, and as they flew in the starlit sky they themselves looked like shooting stars until they dropped low, when their planes were diaphanous as butterfly's wings in sunlight. On the battlefield then was no unusual gun-fire for several hours after dark. Guns on both sides kept up the usual night bombardment in slow sullen strokes, but at least on the Australian front it was not until about 4.45 in the morning that the enemy opened a heavy barrage in Glencorse Wood. The Australian troops were already massed beyond that ground for the attack which was shortly due. On the north, up by Wurst Farm, on the lower slopes of the Gravenstafel, our London Territorials were also waiting to go "over the bags," as they call it. Against them the German guns put over a heavy barrage, but that line of explosives failed to stop or check the assault.
It was almost dark when our London lads went forward through a thick ground mist, which was wet and clammy about them. Our artillery had opened before them the same monstrous line of barrage-fire which they had followed on the 20th. and they went after it at a slow trudge, which gave them time to avoid shell-craters and get over difficult ground without lagging behind that protecting storm. That violence of fire was as deadly and terrifying this morning as on that other day. Through the mist our men saw the Germans running and falling, and many of them did not stay in the blockhouses, though it was almost certain death to come out into the open before the barrage passed. There were dead men in many shell-craters before our men reached them, and others afterwards, as they passed through clumps of ruin which had once beenhamlets and farms. There was such a mess of brickwork and masonry at Aviatik Farm, where Germans hiding in concrete walls fired machine-guns and rifles for a time until the British troops closed on them.
Something like 150 prisoners were taken in this section of the attack, and one of them was a queer bird who belonged to the sea. That is to say, he had been a sailor on theDresdenand was in the battle of Falkland Island and off Coronel, where he was picked up by a Swedish boat and taken back to Germany. To his disgust he was put in the 10th Ersatz Division, and now, after his soldier life, wants to work in a British shipyard. He was surprised at the food given to him, and thought it was a bribe to get information from him, believing that England is agonizing with hunger.
About a hundred and fifty prisoners were taken also, by the troops on the right of this section, belonging mostly to the 23rd Reserve Division, with some of the 3rd Guards. Our men who attacked in the direction of Zonnebeke village were Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, East Yorks, Royal Scots, Gordons, and King's Own, and they had some stiff fighting on the way to the Windmill Cabaret and Hill Forty, which seems to be the key to the position. Here they came against some of the blockhouses at Toronto Farm and Van Isackere Farm, but did not meet great trouble there. Some of them had been so badly knocked by shell-fire that the garrisons inside were killed, by concussion, and from others men came out to surrender as soon as our men were near them. Near the village of Zonnebeke the fight was more serious against the Royal Scots and East Yorks, and the enemy's gun-fire, which had not been very heavy on the other ground of attack, smashed along the line of the railway embankment.
The Australian advance across the racecourse of Polygon Wood and northward across the spur to below Zonnebeke Château was steady and successful. There was a regular chain of blockhouses on the way, but there again the old black magic of the pill-box failed. The men rallied inside them, many of them being Poles of the 49th Regiment, who hate the Prussians in a fierce way and ask us to kill as many as possible for their sake. Most of them were quick and glad to surrender. A platoon of them were taken in some wooden dug-outs below the high mound of Polygon Wood, that old Butte which is supposed tobe the burial-place of a prehistoric chief, though by the Australians it is believed to be the observation-post of Sir Douglas Haig in 1914.
The enemy's gun-fire was heavy over part of the ground, and there was a nest of machine-guns along a road which gave some trouble, but in the main attack the losses of the Australians were not heavy up to the time they gained the last objective. It was our aircraft which brought back the first news of the Anzacs on the racecourse in Polygon Wood, and later they had reached the farthest goal, where prisoners were surrendering freely. On the left of their front the Australians were quite satisfied with their position. On the right they had great anxiety because of the check to the troops below them. At one time it was found advisable for the Australians to swing back their flank a little in order to avoid its exposure. But the Australians are full of confidence and are sure that they can handle any counter-attack which may be launched against them. It has been a hard day for all our men, especially for those who bore the brunt of the enemy's fire, and I believe will be counted as one of the biggest days of fighting in this war. Its decision is of vital importance to the enemy and to ourselves, and so far it is in our favour.
September 27
The battle which began yesterday morning, after a whole day of counter-attacking by the enemy, in great numbers and by great gun-fire, lasted until nightfall, and, as I told yesterday, did not pass without anxious hours for those in command, and trying hours for some of our fighting men.
From the left above Zonnebeke down to the Australian front on the heights of the Polygon Wood Racecourse the advance was made with fair ease through the blockhouse system and without severe losses, as they are reckoned in modern warfare, in spite of difficult bits of ground and the usual snags, as our men call them, in the way of unexpected machine-gun fire, odd bits of trench to which small groups of Germans clung stubbornly,dirty swamps which some of our men could not cross quickly enough to keep up with the barrage, and danger zones upon which the enemy heaped his explosives.
There were incidents enough for individual men to be remembered for a lifetime, hairbreadth escapes, tight corners in which men died after acts of fine heroism, and strong points like Hill 40, on the left of the ruins of Zonnebeke, around which some of our troops struggled with fortune.
The Ypres salientThe Ypres salient
Apart from local vicissitudes here and there during those first hours of the battle it became clear by midday, or before, that from the extreme left of the attack down to the vicinity of Cameron House, on the right of the Australians, the general success of the day was good. The critical situation was on the right of the 4th and 5th Australians, and involving theirright because of the enemy's violent pressure on British troops there during the previous day, and again when our new attack started, so that their line had been somewhat forced back and the Australian right flank was exposed.
Hour after hour reports coming from this part of the field were read with some anxiety when it was known how heavily some of our battalions were engaged. This menace to our right wing was averted by the courage of men of the Middlesex and Surrey Regiments of the 33rd Division, with Argylls and Sutherlands and Scottish Rifles, and by the quick, skillful, and generous help of the Australian troops on their left. It is an episode of the battle which will one day be an historic memory when all the details are told. I can only tell them briefly and in outline.
After terrific shelling, on Tuesday last, the enemy launched an attack at six o'clock against our line by Carlisle Farm and Black Watch Corner, south of Polygon Wood, and forced some of our English troops to fall back towards Lone House and the dirty little swamp of the Reutelbeek. These boys of Middlesex and Surrey suffered severely. For some time it was all they could do to hold out, and the enemy was still pressing. A body of Scottish Rifles was sent up to support them, and by a most brave counter-thrust under great gun-fire restored part of the line, so that it was strong enough to keep back any advancing wave of Germans by rifle and machine-gun fire.
Another body of men, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, held out on exposed ground, isolated from the main line, and threatened with being cut off by the enemy's assault troops. Sir Douglas Haig has mentioned them specially in his message yesterday, and they deserve great honour for the heroic way in which they held on to this ground for many hours that day and night under harassing fire from coal-boxes, or 5·9's, which threatened to wipe out their whole strength. Yesterday they had strength and spirit left to renew the attack, and to make another attempt to get back the lost ground into which the enemy had driven a wedge.
At the same time the Australians had realized the dangerous situation which exposed their right flank, and they directed a body of their own troops to strike southward in order to thrust back the German outposts. Those Australian troops sharedthe peril of their comrades on the right, and withstood the same tornado of shelling which was flung over all the ground here; but in spite of heroic sacrifice did not at first wholly relieve the position of the Australian right, which remained exposed. After the great attack by the Anzacs in the morning their line was thrust right out beyond Cameron House, but the English and Scottish troops of the 33rd Division, who had also gone forward in the new attack south of them, were again met by a most deadly barrage-fire and checked at a critical time. I was with some of the Australians yesterday when all this was happening, and when there was cause for worry. They were unruffled, and did not lose confidence for a moment.
"Give us two hours," said one of them who had a right to speak, "and we will make everything as sound as a bell." In those two hours they drew back their flank to get into line on a curve going back towards Lone House, and established defensive posts which would hold off any attack likely to be launched against them.
"It is hard luck on the English boys down there," said the Australians, "but they have had a bad gruelling, and they will come along in spite of it. There is not an Australian in France who doesn't know how the Tommy-Boys fought on the 20th, and that will do for us."
The "Tommy-Boys," as the Australians call them, fought as they have fought in three years of great battles, and in spite of the ordeal through which they had passed—and it was not a light one—they saved the situation on that ground below Polygon Wood, and made it too dangerous and too costly for the enemy to stay. Early this morning the survivors of the Germans who had thrust a wedge between our lines past Cameron House crawled out again and our line was straightened.
How the Australians established themselves on Polygon Wood Racecourse and beyond the big mound called the Butte I told in my message yesterday. Farther north the Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, Royal Scots, Gordons, and King's Own of the 59th and 3rd Divisions had attacked north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, running at right angles to the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. On that road, barring the way, was the station of Zonnebeke, now a mass of wreckage, fortified withmachine-gun redoubts, and farther south the ruins of Zonnebeke church and village. Across the road was the Windmill Cabaret, an old inn which has been blown off the map on the high ground of Hill 40, which rises gradually to a hump a hundred yards or so north of the station. It was bad ground to attack, and strewn with little blockhouses of the new type, though they are still called pill-boxes after an older and smaller type. The blockhouses did not give much trouble. Our new form of barrage, the most frightful combination of high explosives and shrapnel that has yet appeared in war, rolled backwards and forwards about them, so that the garrisons huddled inside until our men nipped behind them and thrust rifles or bombs through the machine-gun loopholes, if they had not previously escaped to shell-craters around where they might have more chance of escape.
And here I might say in passing that the enemy has already modified his methods of holding the blockhouses, and while only a few men remain inside, distributes the rest of the garrison in shell-holes on either side, with their machine-guns in the organized craters. Some of them were found by our men, and though many of them had been killed by our gun-fire, others remained shooting and sniping until they were routed out.
The worst part of the ground on this line of attack was around a blockhouse called Bostin Farm, where there was a dismal, stinking swamp so impassable that the Royal Scots, Scottish Fusiliers, and East Yorks of the 3rd Division who tried to make their way through it lost touch with the barrage, which rolled ahead of them, and had to work round and up towards Hill 40. Here they came under machine-gun fire, and although some men forced their way up the slope of the knoll on which the Windmill Cabaret stood, they did not quite reach the crest.
Meanwhile men of the Gordons, Suffolks, and Welsh Fusiliers were attacking round about Zonnebeke, where the ground was swept by machine-gun bullets, and seized the ruin of the church and the outskirts of the station yard. There was heavy shelling from the enemy all day, which caused the line to fall back a little, and at six o'clock yesterday evening the enemy launched two counter-attacks from Zonnebeke and another around Hill 40. Half an hour later the Royal Scots andRoyal Scottish Fusiliers moved forward to thrust the enemy back, and at exactly the same time another counter-attack of his advanced in their direction. Each body of men were protected by barrage-lines of heavy shell-fire, and our shells and the German shells mingled and burst together in a wide belt of fury, and sometimes neither side could cross it.
Farther north South Midland men did well. They advanced from Zevenkote on the right and Schuler Farm on the left to Van Isackere Farm and Dochy Farm and other blockhouses on each side of the high road between Langemarck and Zonnebeke with hardly a check. They found many of the blockhouses badly damaged after the heavy fire that had been poured on each one of them, and if they were not damaged the men inside were so nerve-shaken that they were eager to surrender. Apparently they had not expected the attack to follow the hurricane bombardment, because there had been other shoots of this kind before, and they made no real attempt to get their machine-guns into action. It was from the slopes of the Gravenstafel and the Abraham Heights beyond that machine-gun fire fell upon the Midland men, and the enemy's guns were shooting down the gullies between these ridges. But the ground in this part of our attack yesterday was taken without grave trouble and without great losses.
Most of the prisoners taken on this ground were Saxons, and those I have seen marching down to a captivity which they prefer to the field of battle are men of a good physique, and smart, soldierly look. It is astonishing how quickly they recover from the effect of bombardment and the great horror of battle as soon as they get beyond the range of shell-fire. But they are gloomy and disheartened. The officers especially acknowledge that things are going badly for Germany, and say that there is, for the time at least until the new class is ready, a dearth of men of fighting age, so that the drafts they get are miserable and unfit. They are overwhelmed with the thought of the monstrous gun-power which we have brought against them to counteract their own artillery, which once had the mastery, and they are struck by the audacity of our air service.
Certainly our flying men have been doing all in their power to make life intolerable on the German side of the lines. I havealready described how they went out on Tuesday night and broke up the columns of men marching to attack us. One of these birds found a different kind of prey. It was opposite the Australian front where a team of German gunners were getting a gun away. Our airman flew low over the heads of the gunners and played his machine-gun on to them and dropped bombs. He smashed up the gun-limber and laid out the gunners, and the gun remains there still, with the bodies of men and horses around it. To-day out beyond Ypres I saw flights of our men going out again beyond the German lines for that battle in the air which has never ceased since the battle of Flanders two months ago.
The weather is still in our favour, and there is a blue sky to-day and a soft, golden light over all this Flemish countryside where our troops go marching up to the lines with their bands playing, or lie resting in the hop-fields on the way. That old place of horror, the Yser Canal, reflected the blue above, and in the air there was that sense of peace which belongs to the golden days of autumn. But the guns were loud, and the flight of their shells went crying through the sky.