October 2
Through the haze which lies low over Flanders, though above there is still a blue sky, the noise of great gun-fire goes on, rising and falling in gusts, and, like the beat of surf to people who live by the sea, it is the constant sound in men's ears, not disturbing their work unless they are close enough to suffer from the power behind the thunder-strokes. The trees are yellowing into crinkled gold, and there is the touch and smell of autumn in the night air, and the orchards of France are heavy with fruit. Wonderful weather, the soldiers say. The artillery battle is endless, and on both sides is intense and widespread. It was followed yesterday by five German counter-attacks, which did not reach our lines. In a very desperate way the enemy is trying to push us back from positions which are essential to the strength of his defence. All his guns are at work. Is it the last phase of the war? Does the enemy know that he must win or lose all? Our men have that hope in their hearts, and fight more grimly and with higher spirit because of it. The success of the last two battles has deepened the hope, and men come back from the line, backto the rest-billets, with the old conviction newly revived that at last they have the enemy down and under and very near hopelessness. In the rest-billets are the men who come back. They come marching back along the dusty roads from the fire-swept zone, first across ground pitted with new-made shell-holes, with the howl of shells overhead, and then through broken villages on the edge of the battlefields, and then through standing villages where only a gap or two shows where a haphazard shell has gone, and then at last to the clean, sweet country which no high explosives reach, unless a hostile airman comes over with his bombs.
In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle told by men who were there, and it is worth while, as yesterday, when I sat down at table with the officers of a battalion of Suffolks in a Flemish farmhouse. The men were camped outside, and as I passed I liked the look of these lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights of the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's rest, and they stood in groups telling their yarns in the good old dialect of their county, laughing as though it had all been a joke, though it was more than a joke with death on the prowl.
"Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suffolks, and he smiled as though he liked my words, and said, "You couldn't get their tails down with a crowbar. It was a good show, and that makes all the difference. They have been telling the Australian boys that you have only got to make a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. They knocked the stuffing out of the enemy."
Inside the farmhouse there was the battalion mess, at one long table and one short, because it was felt better for all the officers to be together instead of splitting up into company messes. I looked down the rows of faces, these clean-cut English faces, and was glad of the luck which had brought so many of these young officers back again. They told the tale of the battle, and each of them had some detail to add, because that was his part of the show, and it was his platoon, and they had left the fighting-line the night before. They spoke as though all the things had happened long ago, and they laughed loudly at episodes of gruesome interest and belonging to those humours of war which are not to be written.
There was a thick mist when they went away at dawn, sodense that they could not see the line of our barrage ahead, though it was a deep belt of bursting shells. They had been told to follow close, and they were eager to get on. They went too fast, some of them almost incredibly fast, over the shell-craters, and round them, and into them, and out of them again, stumbling, running, scrambling, not turning to look when any comrade fell.
"I was on the last position three-quarters of an hour before the barrage passed," said a young officer of the Suffolks. He spoke the words as if telling something rather commonplace, but he knew that I knew the meaning of what he said, a frightful and extraordinary thing, for with his platoon he had gone ahead of our storm of fire and had to wait until it reached and then passed them. Some of their losses were because of that, and yet they might have been greater if they had been slower because the enemy was caught before they could guess that our men were near. They put up no fight in the pill-boxes, those little houses of concrete which stank horribly because of the filth in them, and from the shell-craters where snipers and machine-gunners lay men rose in terror at the sight of the brown men about them, and ran this way and that like poor frightened beasts, or stood shaking in an ague of fear. Some ran towards their own lines with their hands up, shouting "Kamerad," believing they were running our way. They were so unready for attack that the snipers had the safety-clip on their rifle-barrels, and others were without ammunition.
In one shell-hole was an English-speaking German. "I saved him," said one of the young Suffolk officers. "He was a downhearted fellow, and said he was fed up with the war and wanted nothing but peace."
Near another shell-hole was a German who looked dead. He looked as if he had been dead for a long time, but an English corporal who passed close to this body saw a hand stretch out for a bayonet within reach, and the man raised himself to strike. Like a man who sees a snake with his fangs out, the corporal whipped round, grabbed the German's bayonet and ran him through. The way to the last objective was easy on the whole, and the enemy was on the run with our men after them until they were ordered to stop and dig in. The hardest time came afterwards, as it nearly always comes when the ground gained had to be held for three more days and nightswithout the excitement of attack and under heavy fire. That is when the courage of men is most tried, as this battalion found. The enemy had time to pull themselves together. The German gunners adapted their range to the new positions and shelled fiercely across the ways of approach, and scattered 5·9's everywhere. It was rifle-fire for the Suffolk men all the time. They had not troubled to bring up a great many bombs, for the rifle has come into its own again, now that the old trench warfare is gone for a time, or all time, and with rifle-fire and machine-gun fire they broke down the German counter-attacks and caught parties of Germans who showed themselves on the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, and sniped incessantly. They used a prodigious quantity of small-arms ammunition, and the carriers risked their lives every step of the way to get it up to them. They fired 30,000 rounds and then 16,000 more. There was one officer who spent all his time sniping from a little patch of ground that had once been a garden. He lay behind a heaped ruin and used his field-glasses to watch the slopes of rising ground on his left, where human ants were crawling. Every now and then he fired and picked off an ant until his score reached fifty. German planes came flying over our troops to get their line, flying very low, so that their wings were not a tree's height above the shell-craters, and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away. Some of the hostile planes were red-bellied, and others which came searching the ground were big, porpoise-like planes. They dropped signal-lights and directed the fire of the 5·9's. A private of the Suffolks, lying low but watchful, saw a light rise from the ground as one of these machines came over, and it was answered from the aeroplane. "That's queer," he thought; "dirty work in that shell-hole." He crept out to the shell-hole from which the signal had come, and found three German soldiers there with rockets. They tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man brought back their rifles and kit as souvenirs.
More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time passed, and the carriers took frightful risks to bring it. The drums of the Suffolks did well that day as carriers and stretcher-bearers, passing up and down through the barrage-fire, and there was a private who guided a party with small-arms ammunition—ten thousand rounds of it—to the forward troops, with big shells bursting over the ground. Twice he was buried by shell-bursts,which flung the earth over him, but on the way back he helped to carry a wounded man 800 yards to the regimental aid post under hot fire. He was a cool-headed and gallant-hearted fellow, and went up again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on the same night crawled out on a patrol with a young lieutenant to reconnoitre a position on the left which was still in German hands. From farther left, on rising ground, the Germans sprinkled machine-gun fire over the battalion support lines, and the earth was spitting with those bullets. But in their own lines the German soldiers were moving about with Red Cross flags picking up their wounded, and they did not fire at our stretcher-bearers, apart from the barrage-fire of 5·9's through which they had to make their way. Only once did they play a bad trick. Under the Red Cross flag some stretcher-bearers went into a pill-box which had been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun fire came from it. That is the kind of thing which makes men see red.
October 4
Another great battle has opened to-day, and in a wide attack from the ground we captured on September 26, north and south of the Polygon Wood crest, our troops have advanced upon the Passchendaele Ridge, and have reached the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, which crown a western spur of the ridge, and Broodseinde, which is the high point and keystone of the enemy's defence lines beyond Zonnebeke. South of that they are fighting between Cameron House and Becelaere, across the Reutelbeek and its swampy ground, and down beyond Polderhoek to the south end of the Menin road. The divisions engaged, from north to south, were the 29th, 4th, 11th, 48th, New Zealand, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Australians.
This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back across the battlefield, and crowds of them within the barbed-wire enclosures set apart for them behind our lines. Our lightly wounded men coming down the tracks for walking wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages, of a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete victory. "We havehim beat," say the men, and they are sure of this, sure of his enormous losses and of his broken spirit, although the fighting has been bloody because of the great gun-fire through which our men have had to pass. It has been a strange and terrible battle—terrible, I mean, in its great conflict of guns and men—and the enemy, if all goes well with us, may have to remember it as a turning-point in the history of this war, the point that has turned against him with a sharp and deadly edge. For, realizing his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the Passchendaele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that—all signs showed him that, and all our pressure on these positions—he prepared an attack against us in great strength in order to regain the ground he lost on September 26, or, if not that, then so to damage us that our advance would be checked until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they were not weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammering at the right wing by Cameron House, below Polygon Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our line, though for a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave anxiety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and critical. But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and now the German High Command decided for a big blow, and it was to be delivered at seven o'clock this morning. It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was fixed for an hour before his.
And so it happened that our men had to pass through a German barrage to follow their own, a barrage which fell upon them before they leapt up to the assault, and it happened also most terribly for the enemy that our men were not stopped, but went through that zone of shells, and on the other side behind our barrage swept over the German assault troops and annihilated their plan of attack.... They did not attack. Their defence even was broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached and broke the second and third waves of the men who had been meant to attack, caught them in their support and reserve positions, and we can only guess what the slaughter has been. It is a slaughter in which five German divisions are involved.
This battle of ours, which looks like one of the greatest victories we have had in the war, was being prepared on a bigscale as soon as the last was fought and won. No words of mine can give more than a hint of what those preparations meant in the scene of war. For several days past the roads to the Front have been choked with columns of men marching forward, column after column of glorious men, hard and fit, and hammering a rhythm on the roads with the beat of their feet, and whistling and singing, in tune and out of tune, with the fifes and drums far ahead of them. Always, night and day, there was the sound of this music, always in the stillness of these moonlight nights the thud, thud of those tramping feet, always, along any track that led towards the salient, the vision of these battalions led forward by young officers with their trench sticks swinging and a look of pride in their eyes because of the fellows behind them. Their steel helmets flashed blue in the sun so that a column of them seen from a distance was like a blue stream winding between the hop-fields, or the broken ruins of old villages, or the litter of captured ground. With them and alongside of them went the tide of transport—lorries, wagons, London buses, pack-mules, guns and limbers, and the black old cookers with their trailing smoke. Everywhere there has been a fever of work, Tommies, "Chinkies," coloured men piling up mountains of ammunition to feed the guns. Under shell-fire, bracketing the roads on which they worked, pioneers carried on the tracks, put down new lengths of duck-board, laid new rails. The enemy's artillery came howling over to search out all this work, which had been seen by aeroplanes, and at night flocks of planes came out in the light of the moon to drop bombs on the men and the work. Now and again they made lucky hits—got a dump and sent it flaming up in a great torch, killed horses in the wagon-lines or labouring up with the transport, laid out groups of men, smashed a train or a truck; but the work went on, never checked, never stopping in its steady flow of energy up to the lines, and the valour of all these labourers was great and steady in preparing for to-day. Knowing the purpose of it all, the deadly purpose, the scene of activity by any siding filled one with a kind of fear. It was so prodigious, so vastly schemed. I passed a dump yesterday, and again to-day, in the waste ground on the old battlefield near Ypres and saw the shells for our field-batteries being unloaded. There were thousands of shells, brand-new from thefactories at home, all bright and glistening and laid out in piles. The guns were greedy. Here was food for a monstrous appetite. We watched all this—the faces of the men going up so bright-eyed, so splendid in their youth, so gay, and all these shells and guns and materials of war, and all this movement which surged about us and caught us up like straws in its tide, and then we looked at the sky and smelt the wind, and studied a milky ring which formed about the moon. Rain was coming. If only it would come lightly or hold another day or two—one night at least.
Rain fell a little yesterday. The ground was sticky when I went up beyond Wieltje to look at the Passchendaele Ridge to see some boys getting ready for the "show" to-day, and to watch the beginning of the great bombardment.... Curse the rain! It would make all the difference to our fighting men, the difference perhaps between great success and half a failure, and the difference between life and death to many of those boys who looked steadily towards the German lines which they were asked to take. What damnable luck it would be if the rain fell heavily! Last night the moon was hidden and rain fell, but not very hard, though the wind went howling across the flats of Flanders. And this morning, when our men rose from shell-holes and battered trenches and fields of upheaved earth to make this great attack, the rain fell still but softly, so that the ground was only sticky and sludgy, but not a bog. The rain was glistening on their steel helmets, and the faces of our fighting men were wet when they went forward. They had passed already through a fiery ordeal, and some of them could not rise to go with their comrades, and lay dead on the ground. Along the lines of men, these thousands of men, the stretcher-bearers were already busy in the dark, because the enemy had put over a heavy barrage at 5.30, and elsewhere later, the prelude to the attack he had planned. His old methods of defence and counter-attack had broken down in two battles. The spell of the pill-box, which had worked well for a time, was broken, so that those concrete blockhouses were feared as death-traps by the men who had to hold them. The German High Command hurried to prepare a new plan, guessing ours, and moved the guns to be ready for our next attack, registered on their own trenches, which they knew they might lose, and assembled the best divisions, or the next best, readyfor a heavy blow to wind us before we started and to smash our lines, so that the advance would be a thousand times harder. The barrage which the Germans sent over was the beginning of the new plan. It failed because of the fine courage of our troops first of all, and because the German infantry attack was timed an hour too late. If it had come two hours earlier it might have led to our undoing—might at least have prevented anything like real victory to-day. But the fortune of war was on our side, and the wheel turned round to crush the enemy.
The main force of his attack, which was to be made by the Fourth Guards Division, with two others, I am told, in support, was ready to assault the centre of our battle-front in the direction of Polygon Wood and down from the Broodseinde cross-roads. It was our men who fought the German assault divisions at the Broodseinde cross-roads, and took many prisoners from them before they had time to advance very far. The enemy's shelling had been heavy about the ground of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, where a week or so ago I saw the frightful heaps of German dead, and spread over a wide area of our line of battle along the Polygon Wood heights and the low ground in front of Zonnebeke. The men tell me that it did not do them as much harm as they expected. The shells plunged deep into the soft ground, bursting upwards in tall columns, as I saw them this morning on the field, and their killing effect was not widespread. Many of them also missed our waves altogether. So, half an hour later, our men went away behind our own barrage, which was enormous and annihilating. The wet mist lay heavily over the fields, and it was almost dark except for a pale glamour behind the rain-clouds, which brightened as each quarter of an hour passed, with our men tramping forward slowly to their first objective.
The shell-craters on the German side were linked together here and there to form a kind of trench system, but many of these had been blown out by other shell-bursts, and German soldiers lay dead in them. From others, men and boys, many boys of eighteen, rose with their arms upstretched, as white in the face as dead men, but living, and afraid. Across these frightful fields men came running towards our soldiers. They did not come to fight, but to escape from the shell-fire, which tossed up the earth about them, and to surrender. Many ofthem were streaming with blood, wounded about the head and face, or with broken and bleeding arms. So I saw them early this morning when they came down the tracks which led away from that long line of flaming gun-fire.
The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great and terrible picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts in the minds of men who saw it. The ruins of Ypres were vague and blurred in the mist as I passed them on the way up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump of the Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the fretted outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so fair a city once, leapt out in light which flashed redly and passed. So it was all along the way to the old German lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to show that buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about great piles of greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. Through shell-holes in fragments of walls red light stabbed like a flame, and out of the darkness of the mist they shone for a second with an unearthly brightness. It was the light of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere in the low concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to avoid the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. Flashes leapt from them with only the pause of a second or two while they were reloaded. There was never a moment within my own range of vision when hundreds of great guns were not firing together. They were eating up shells which I had seen going up to them, and the roads and fields across which I walked were littered with shells. The wet mist was like one great damp fire, with ten miles or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through which the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. The noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of those big-bellied howitzers was to me an agony. It rose like a beast stretching out its neck, and there came from it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and shook one's body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were all firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken with their blasts of fire. The enemy was answering back. His shells came whining and howling through all this greater noise, and burst with a crash on either side of mule tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on each side of the paths down which German prisoners came staggering with their wounded. Fresh shell-holes,enormously deep and thickly grouped, showed that he had plastered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the morning, his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do over there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, unless the guns lay smashed, with their teams lying dead around them, killed by our counter-battery work with high explosives and gas; for in the night we smothered them with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and all others.
I went eastward and mounted a pile of rubbish and timber, all blown into shapelessness and reeking with foul odours, and from that shelter looked across to the Passchendaele Ridge and Hill 40 on the west of Zonnebeke and the line of the ridge that goes round to Polygon Wood. It was all blurred, so that I could not see the white ruins of Zonnebeke as I saw them the other day in the sunlight, nor the broken church tower of Passchendaele. It was all veiled in smoke and mist, through which the ridge loomed darkly with a black hump where Broodseinde stands. But clearly through the gloom were the white and yellow cloud-bursts of our shell-fire and the flame of their shell-bursts. It was the most terrible bombardment I have seen, and I saw the fire of the Somme, and of Vimy, and Arras, and Messines. Those were not like this, great as they were in frightfulness. The whole of the Passchendaele Crest was like a series of volcanoes belching up pillars of earth and fire. "It seemed to us," said soldier after soldier who came down from those slopes, "as if no mortal man could live in it, yet there were many who lived despite all the dead."
I saw the living men. Below the big pile of timber and muck on which I stood was a winding path, and other tracks on each side of it between the deep shell-craters, and down these ways came batches of prisoners and the trail of our walking wounded. It was a tragic sight in spite of its proof of victory, and the valour of our men and the spirit of these wounded of ours, who bore their pain with stoic patience and said, when I spoke to them, "It's been a good day; we're doing fine, I think." The Germans were haggard and white-faced men, thin and worn and weary and frightened. Many of them, a large number of them, were wounded. Some of them had masks of dry blood on their faces, and some of them wet blood all down their tunics. They held broken arms from which the sleeves had been cut away, and hobbled painfully on wounded legs. The worstwere no worse than some of our own men who came down with them and among them.
It has been a bad defeat for them, and they do not hide their despair. They did not fight stubbornly for the most part, but ran one way or the other as soon as our barrage passed and revealed our men. Our gun-fire had overwhelmed them. In the blockhouses were groups of men who gasped out words of surrender. Here and there they refused to come out till bombs burst outside their steel doors. And here and there they got their machine-guns to work and checked our advance for a time, as at Joist Farm, on the right of our attack, and at a château near Polderhoek, where there has been severe fighting. There was heavy machine-gun fire from a fortified farm ruin to the north of Broodseinde, and again from Kronprinz Farm on the extreme left. The enemy also put down a heavy machine-gun barrage from positions around Passchendaele, but nothing has stopped our men seriously so far.
The New-Zealanders and Australians swept up and beyond the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, went through and past the ruins of Zonnebeke village, and with great heroism gained the high ground about Broodseinde, a dominating position giving observation of all the enemy's side of the country. It has been a wonderful battle in the success that surmounted all difficulty, and if we can keep what we have gained it will be a victorious achievement. The weather is bad now and the rain is heavier, with a savage wind blowing. But that is not good for the enemy's plans, and may be in our favour now that the day has gone well. Our English troops share the honour of the day with the Anzacs, and all were splendid.
October 5
The men who were fighting in the great battle yesterday, and after the capture of many strong positions held their ground last night in spite of many German counter-attacks and heavy fire, tell grim tales, which all go to build up the general picture of the most smashing defeat we have inflicted on the enemy.
On one section of the Front, where the Warwicks, Sherwoods, Lancashire Fusiliers and other county troops of the 48th and 11th Divisions fought up to Poelcappelle and its surrounding blockhouses, six enemy battalions in the front line were eithertaken or killed. The men themselves do not know those figures. They only know that they passed over large numbers of dead and that they took many prisoners.
The New-Zealanders and the Australians on their right, fighting up the Abraham Heights, took over 2000 prisoners, and say that they have never seen so many dead as those who lay shapeless in their tracks. Other Australians fighting for the Broodseinde cross-roads have counted 960 dead Germans on their way. The full figure of the German dead will never be counted by us. They lie on this battle-ground buried and half-buried in the water of shell-holes, in blockhouses blown on top of them, and in dug-outs that have become their tombs. They fought bravely in some places with despairing courage in or about some of the blockhouses which still gave them a chance of resistance, and sometimes worked their machine-guns to the last. Men lying in shell-craters still alive among all their dead used their rifles and sniped our men, knowing that they would have to pay for their shots with their lives. That is courage, and New-Zealanders I met to-day, and English lads, were fair to their enemy, and said Fritz showed great pluck when he had a dog's chance, though many of them ran when we got close to them behind the barrage. It was the barrage that made them break. The Fourth Guards Division seems to have fought well on the line of our first objective, though after that they would not stand firm, and ran or surrendered like the others.
Owing to the coincidence of the simultaneous attack from both sides yesterday morning, and the complete overthrow of the German assault divisions who were about to advance on us, there seems no doubt that some confusion prevailed behind the German lines and on the left and centre of our attack. All their attempts at counter-thrusts were badly planned, and led to further disaster. They did not advance in orderly formation, but straggled up from local reserves and supports, and were smashed in detail by our artillery. So it happened with two battalions who came down the road to Poelcappelle, but withered away. The Lancashire Fusiliers of the 11th Division in that region say the thing was laughable, though it is the comedy of war, and not mirthful in the usual sense. Small groups of Germans wandered up in an aimless way, and were shot down by machine-gun and rifle fire. On the right of the battle-front the enemy's attacks have been more serious and thrust homewith grim persistence against the "Koylies," Lincolns, West Kents, and Scottish Borderers of the 5th Division.
It was after the advance of our men on Polderhoek and its château by the Gheluvelt spur of the Passchendaele Ridge. Some of the Surreys, Devons, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry swung round the stream and marshlands of the Reutel and accounted for many of the enemy in close and fierce fighting. The Devons were astride the stream and, working north of it, attacked a slope called Juniper Spur.
In Polderhoek was a nest of machine-guns, which fired out of the ruins of the château, and for some time our men had difficult and deadly work. This was worst against the Scottish Borderers, who were facing the château grounds, but they dug in and made some cover, while behind the prisoners, about 500 of them, were getting back to the safety of our lines.
It was at three o'clock in the afternoon that the enemy sent a very strong counter-attack down the slopes of the Gheluvelt Spur against the 5th and 7th Divisions. Six times through the afternoon masses of men appeared and tried to force their way forward, but each time they were caught under rifle-fire and machine-guns and artillery.
It was at seven o'clock that the heaviest attack came, under cover of savage shelling, and our men had to fall back on the ground beyond Cameron House, which is the scene of the enemy's fierce attacks on September 25, when they were for some little time a serious menace to us. This morning the enemy had driven a wedge into our line in this neighbourhood, and it is quite possible that he will deliver other blows in the same direction. Last night he made no great endeavour to get back ground. It was a dirty night for our men, who had been fighting all day. The rain fell heavily, filling the shell-holes and turning all the broken ground of battle to the same old bog which made so much misery in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood and other positions attacked on July 31 and afterwards.
"I lay up to my waist in water," said one of the Devons who came down wounded this morning; "it was bitter cold, and Fritz was putting over his 5·9's; he was also putting over a lot of machine-gun fire, and the bullets came over the heads of our men like the cracking of whips." It was bad for the wounded and the stretcher-bearers—the splendid stretcher-bearers, who worked all through the night up and down through fierce barrage-fire.Most of them got through with their burdens by that queer miracle of luck which is often theirs. But one little party came down when the fire was fiercest, and took cover in a shell-hole close beside some Warwickshire boys who were crouching in another hole until the storm of shells had passed. Suddenly they heard the howl of a monstrous shell—an eight-inch or even a twelve-inch by the noise if it. It fell and burst right inside the shell-crater where the stretcher-bearers were huddled with their wounded men, and they were blown out of it yards high, so that their bodies were tossed like straws in a fierce wind.... I met many men who worked their way down under fire like that, and some who had been wounded already were wounded again, and some of the comrades who trudged with them were killed.
The Warwickshire battalions of the 48th Division on the left of the New-Zealanders had some very hard fighting, lasting all through the day, which concluded with an attack on a position called Terrier Farm, above the pill-boxes of Wellington House and Winchester House, which they had captured after some bad quarters of an hour.
The Warwicks had started with great luck. In spite of the German shelling they had got away to their first objective with only three casualties. They went through the first line of blockhouses without much trouble, picking up prisoners on the way in most of them. Their first trouble came from one of these concrete places called Wellington House. Machine-gun fire came crackling from it, and bullets were also sweeping the ground from hidden emplacements. After twenty minutes' struggle Wellington House fell, and the flanks on either side closed up and went forward, the Warwicks helped on the right by a body of New Zealand men. In the centre the machine-gun fire from those concrete walls ahead caused a check and a gap, and although they tried many times with great gallantry under brave officers, to silence that fire and work round the blockhouses, they could not do this without greater loss, and decided to link up with their flanks by digging a loop-line in front of those positions, which make a small wedge, or pocket, in our line there.
The attack against Terrier Farm was done by other Warwickshire lads, who were very game after a long day under fire, but for all their spirit tired and cold. They stood almost knee-deepin mud, and they were wet to the skin, as it was now raining steadily, so a Tank came up to help them, and drew close enough to Terrier Farm to fire broadsides at its concrete and machine-gun its loophole. A white rag thrust through a hole in the wall was the sign of the enemy's surrender. But the conditions were too bad for any greater progress, and the men dug in for the night, while brother Tank crawled back.
All the Tanks used in the battle did well, in spite of the bad going, and helped to reduce several of the blockhouses. They had only two casualties among their crews, and most of them got back to their hiding-places without damage from German shells.
It is astounding that the German counter-attacks were so quickly signalled to the guns, for the light all day was bad, and the weather was dead against the work of the flying men. They did their best by flying low and risking the enemy's fire. There was one pilot who is the talk of the Australians to-day. They watched that English child doing the most amazing "stunts" over the fighting-lines. He was out all day, swooping low, so that his plane seemed just to skim over the craters. The Germans tried to get him by any manner of means. They turned their "Archies" on to him and their machine-guns, and then tried to bring him down with rifle-fire, and that failing, though they pierced his wings many times, they called up the heavies and tried to snipe him with 5·9's, which are mighty big and beastly things. But he went on flying till many of his wires were cut and his struts splintered, and his aeroplane was a rag round an engine. He was bruised and dazed when he came to earth, making a bad landing in our own lines, but not killing either himself or the observer, who shares the honour and the marvel of this exploit.
It was a great day for the Australians and the New-Zealanders, their greatest and most glorious day. I saw them going up—these lithe, loose-limbed, hatchet-faced fellows, who look so free and fine in their slouch hats and so hard and grim in their steel helmets. There were many thousands of them on the roads or camped beside the roads, and Flanders for a time seemed to have become a little province of Australia.
Then the New-Zealanders came along, a type half-way between the English of the old country and the Australian boys—not so lean and wiry, with more colour in the cheeks, and a squarer,fuller build. It was good to see them—as fine a set of boys as one could see in the whole world, so that it was hard to think of them in the furnace fires up there, and to know that some of them would come back maimed and broken. In a dug-out on the battlefield I talked with some of them, and they were cheery lads, full of confidence in the coming battle. They wanted to go as far as the Australians, to do as well, and among the Australians also there was a friendly rivalry, the new men wanting to show their mettle to those who are already old in war, one battalion keen to earn the honour which belongs by right of valour to another which had fought before. It was certain they would get to the Broodseinde cross-roads if human courage could get there against high explosives, and they were there without a check, over every obstacle, regardless of the enemy's fire, too fast some of them behind their own. So the New-Zealanders went up to Abraham Heights and carried all before them. The hardest time was last night in the mud and the cold, under heavy fire now and then, but they have stuck it out, as our English boys have stuck it through many foul days and in harder times than these, and that is good enough.
The German prisoners do not hide their astonishment at the spirit of our men, and they know now that our troops are terrible in attack, and arrive upon them with a strange, fearful suddenness behind the barrage. One man, a German professor of broad intelligence and a frank way of facing ugly facts, said that our artillery was too terrific for words. They got harassed all the way up to the front line, and lost many men. When they got there they had to lie flat in the bottom of shell-holes, and the next thing they knew was when they were surrounded by masses of English soldiers. He described our men as gallant and chivalrous. This professor thinks it will not be long before Germany makes a great bid for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By midwinter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine, Russia will remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany will get back some of her colonies, he thinks. He laughed when an indemnity was mentioned, and said "Germany is bankrupt." He describes the German Emperor as a broken man and all for peace, the Crown Prince posing as the head of the military party but being unpopular. If the German people knew thatthe submarine threat had failed they would demand that the war should stop at once. That is the opinion of one educated German who has suffered the full horror of war and his words are interesting if they represent no more than his own views.
October 7
The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer luminance were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen masonry. Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly all the night, and as it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from the ground where the shell-craters were already ponds brimming over into swamps of mud. Through the murk our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the drum-fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack from our side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, uncanny thing to hear all that crashing of gun-fire and the wail of great shells in flight to the German lines through this midday darkness.
I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long—so long through the days and nights—feeding those monsters. The infantry have a hard time. It is they who fight with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter which is set against them. It is they who go out across the fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners, standing by the heavies and the 18-pounders in the sodden fields, with piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I sawthe enemy's shells searching for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries, ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, between one round and another, a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those howling beasts which seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and a high torch rises to the dark sky, and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the line of guns saying, "Are you ready, Number One?—Number One, fire!" with no sign of the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in progress. For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before the infantry advance, it lulls a little and then breaks out into new fury when the German counter-attacks begin. It does not end when the SOS signals have been answered by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter their gun positions.
So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back behind the Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements from which they can pour explosives on the ground we have captured, our gunners could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the upheaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. They were the old winter pictures of war that I saw yesterday round about the old Ypres salient, when wet men gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs with cold rain sweeping upon them,so that their waterproof capes stream with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and New Zealand horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' flanks splashed with heavy gobs of mud. Gun-wagons and transports pass, flinging mud from their wheels. Ambulances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go threading their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of muddy boots upturned beneath the blankets which show through the flap behind, and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled together, with their steel hats clashing and their tired eyes looking out on the traffic of war which they are leaving for a time. They come down cold and wet from the line, but in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-stations, between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined houses, still within range of shell-fire, but safer than the fields from which these men have come.
"If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, "give him a hot-water bottle." To a man who had been lying in cold mud until an hour or two before it was like offering him a place by the fireside at home.
The Y.M.C.A. is busy in another tent or another dug-out. It has a cheery way of producing hot cocoa on the edge of a battlefield and of thrusting little packets of chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes, and matches into the hands of lightly wounded men as soon as they have trudged down the long trail for walking wounded and reached the first dressing-station, where there is a little group of men waiting to bandage their wounds, to say, "Well done, laddy; you did grandly this morning," and to fix them up with strange and wonderful speed for the journey to the base hospital, where there are beds with white sheets—sheets again, ye gods!—and rest and peace and warmth.
There are queer little groups between the sand-bags of those forward dressing-stations. On one bench I saw a tall New-Zealander and some Warwick boys—the Warwicks of the 48th Division did famously in this battle—and a farmer's lad from the West Country, who said "It seems to Oi," and spoke with a fine simple gravity of the things he had seen and done; and a thin-faced Lancashire boy, who still wanted to kill more Germans and put them to a nasty kind of death; and a fellow of the Lincolns, who said, "Our lads went over grand."
Near by was a wounded German soldier who had clotted blood over his face and a bloody bandage round his head. A friendly voice spoke to him and said, "Wie gehts mit Ihnen?" ("How are you getting on?") And he looked up in a dazed way and said, "Besser hier als am Kampfe" ("Better here than on the battlefield.")
The tall New-Zealander said: "Fritz fought all right. His machine-gunners fired till we were all round them."
"'Twas a bit of a five-point-nine that hit Oi in the arm," said the farmer's lad. "He put over a terrible big barrage, and Oi was a-laying up till the waist in a shell-hole all filled with mud, and Oi was starved with cold."
"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire boy. "They ran so hard I couldn't catch them with my bayonet. Then a bullet came and went slick through my head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire boy by the smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull.
The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and they bear out what I have heard from their officers elsewhere. There were numbers of German soldiers who lay about in shell-holes after our barrage had passed over their lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers and men as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last supreme courage of the human beast at bay. There was one of these who lay under the wreckage of an aeroplane, and from that cover he shot some of our men at close range; but because there were many bullets flying about, and shells bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was not discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the Warwicks who saw him first, and just in time. The German had his rifle raised at ten yards range, but the sergeant whipped round and shot him before he could turn. Some of these men were discovered after the general fighting was over, and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who went with his Divisional General to see the captured ground next day. The General, who is a quick walker, went ahead over the shell-craters, and the A.D.C. suddenly saw two Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the General from one of the deep holes.
"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling for his revolver. But when he came up he heard the Generaltelling two wounded Germans that the English had won a very great victory, and that if they were good boys he would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down.
All over the battlefield there were queer little human episodes thrust for a minute or two into the great grim drama of this advance by British and Overseas troops up the heights of the Passchendaele Ridge, where thousands of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them were caught by the rolling storm of shells which smashed the earth about them and mingled them with its clods. One tragic glimpse like this was on the Australian way up to the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole position, after a body of those Australians had marched many miles through the night over appalling ground under scattered shell-fire, and were only in their place of attack half an hour before it started. The story of that night march is in itself a little epic, but that is not the episode I mean. The Australians drew close to one of the blockhouses, and the sound of their cheering must have been heard by the Germans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just passed and its line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went travelling ahead. Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen men or so came running, and the Australians shortened their bayonets. From the centre of the group a voice shouted out in English, "I am a Middlesex man, don't shoot. I am an Englishman." The man who called had his hands up, in sign of surrender, like the German soldiers.
"It's a spy," said an Australian. "Kill the blighter." The English voice again rang out: "I'm English." And English he was. It was a man of the Middlesex Regiment who had been captured on patrol some days before. The Germans had taken him into their blockhouse, and because of our gun-fire they could not get out of it, and kept him there. He was well treated, and his captors shared their food with him, but the awful moment came to him when the drum-fire passed and he knew that unless he held his hands high he would be killed by our own troops.
The New-Zealanders had many fights on the way up to the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, and one thing that surprised them was the number of pill-boxes and blockhouses inhabited by the enemy close to their own lines. They believed that the foremost ones had been deserted. But it must not beforgotten that running all through the narrative of this battle is the thwarted plan of the enemy to attack us in strength the same morning and at nearly the same hour. For that reason he had thrust little groups of men into advanced posts and into these most forward blockhouses with orders to hold them at all costs until the attacking divisions should reach and pass them. And for that reason, as we know, the enemy's guns laid down a heavy barrage over our lines half an hour before our attack started.
The New-Zealanders did not escape this shelling, and their brigadiers were under the strain of intense anxiety, not knowing in their dug-outs, over which the enemy's fire passed, whether their boys were so cut up that a successful assault would be impossible. As it happened, the New-Zealanders were not seriously hurt nor thrown into disorder. When the moment came they went away in waves, with the spirit of a pack of hounds on a good hunting morning. As fierce as that and as wild as that. They had not gone more than a few yards before they had fifty prisoners. This was at a blockhouse just outside the New Zealand assembly line. There was no fight there, but the garrison surrendered as soon as our men were round their shelter. The Hanebeek stream flows this way, but it was no longer within its bounds. Our gun-fire had smashed up its track, and all about was a swamp made deeper by the rains.
The New Zealand lads had a devil of a time in getting across and through. Some of them stuck up to the knees and others fell into shell-holes, deep in mud, as far as their belts. "Give us a hand, Jack," came a shout from one man, and the answer was, "Hang on to my rifle, Tom." Men with the solid ground under their feet hauled out others in the slough, and all that was a great risk of time while the barrage was travelling slowly on with its protecting screen of shells.
The only chance of life in these battles is to keep close to the barrage, risking the shorts, for if it once passes and leaves any enemy there with a machine-gun, there is certain death for many men. The New Zealand boys nearly lost that wall of shells because of the mud, but somehow or other managed to scramble on over 800 yards in time enough to catch it up. Many blockhouses yielded up their batches of prisoners, who were told to get back and give no trouble. The first fight fora blockhouse took place at Van Meulen Farm, just outside the New-Zealanders' first objective. The barrage went ahead and sat down—as one of the officers put it, though the sitting down of a barrage is a queer simile for that monstrous eruption of explosive force. From Van Meulen Farm came the swish of machine-gun bullets, and New Zealand boys began to drop. They were held up for half an hour until the "leap-frog" battalions—that is to say, the men who were to pass through the first waves to the next objective—came up to help.
It was a New Zealand captain, beloved by all his men for his gallantry and generous-hearted ways, who led the rush of Lewis-gunners and bombers and riflemen. He fell dead with a machine-gun bullet in his heart, but with a cry of rage because of this great loss the other men ran on each side of the blockhouse and stormed it.
On the left of the New-Zealanders' line, one of their battalions could see Germans firing from concrete houses on the slopes of the Gravenstafel, and although they had to lose the barrage, which was sweeping ahead again, they covered that ground and went straight for those places under sharp fire. Some of them worked round the concrete walls and hauled out more prisoners. "Get back, there," they shouted, but there was hardly a New-Zealander who would go back with them to act as escort. So it happened that a brigadier, getting out of his dug-out to see what was happening to his men away there over the slopes, received the first news of success from batches of Germans who came marching in company formation under the command of their own officers, and without escort. That was how I saw many of them coming back on another part of the field. From the Abraham Heights there was a steady stream of machine-gun fire until the New-Zealanders had climbed them and routed out the enemy from their dug-outs, which were not screened by our barrage so that they were able to fire. Only the great gallantry of high-spirited young men could have done that, and it is an episode which proved the quality of New Zealand troops on that morning of the battle, so keen to do well, so reckless of the cost. On Abraham Heights a lot of prisoners were taken and joined the long trail that hurried back through miles of scattered shell-fire from their own guns.
The next resistance was at the blockhouse called Berlin, andthe New-Zealanders are proud of having taken that place, because of its name, which they will write on their scroll of honour. It is not an Imperial place. It is a row of dirty concrete pill-boxes above a deep cave, on the pattern of the old type of dug-outs. But it was a strong fortress for German machine-gunners, and they defended it stubbornly. It was a five minutes' job. Stokes mortars were brought up and fired thirty rounds in two minutes, and then, with a yell, the New-Zealanders rushed the position on both sides and flung pea-bombs through the back door, until part of the garrison streamed out shouting their word of surrender. The other men were dead inside. A battalion commander and his staff were taken prisoners in another farm, and the New-Zealanders drank soda-water and smoked high-class cigarettes which they found in this place, where the German officers were well provided. After that refreshment they went on to Berlin Wood, where there were several pill-boxes hidden among the fallen trees and mud-heaps. They had to make their way through a machine-gun barrage, and platoon commanders assembled their Lewis-gunners and riflemen to attack the house in detail. From one of them a German officer directed the fire, and when the gun was silenced inside came out with another and fired round the corner of the wall until our men rushed upon him. Even then he raised his revolver as though to shoot a sergeant, who was closest to him, but he was killed by a bayonet-thrust.
At other parts of the line our English boys were fighting hard and with equal courage, and some of them against greater fire. It was on the right that the enemy's gun-fire was most fierce, and our old English county regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions—Devons and Staffords, Surreys and Kents, Lincolns with Scottish Borderers, Northumberland Fusiliers, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry—opposite Gheluvelt and Polderhoek and the Reutelbeek had to endure some bad hours. I have already mentioned in earlier messages how the enemy made ceaseless thrusts against this right flank of our attacking front, driving a wedge in for a time, so that our men had to fall back a little and form a decisive flank. It is known now that they were misled somewhat by some isolated groups of the enemy who held out in pill-boxes behind Cameron House. When these were cleared out our line swept forward again and established itself on thefar side of that wood. Our men hold the outer houses of Gheluvelt.
The whole of the fighting here was made very difficult by the swamps of the Reutelbeek, worse even than those of the Hanebeek, through which the New-Zealanders crossed, and our English boys were bogged as they tried to cross. But they fought forward doggedly, and by sheer valour safeguarded our right wing in the hardest part of the battle. Meanwhile, far on the north in the district of the Sehreiboom astride the Thourout railway, Scottish and Irish troops were fighting on a small front but on an heroic scale. It was the Dublin Fusiliers who fought most recklessly. They had begged to go first into this battle, and they went all out with a wild and exultant spirit. The ground in front of them was a mud-pit, and they had to swing round to get beyond it. They did not wait for the barrage. They did not halt on their final objective, but still went away into the blue, chasing the enemy and uplifted with a strange fierce enthusiasm until they were called back to the line we wanted to hold. They excelled themselves that morning, and could not be held back after the word "Go!"