October 9
Another battle was fought and another advance was made by our troops to-day with the French, in a great assault on their left. Our Allies gained about 1200 yards of ground in two strides, captured some hundreds of prisoners and many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombardments which have preceded it. The Allied troops are within a few hundred yards of that forest of which Marlborough spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst Forest holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards in depth along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres-Gheluvelt road. The enemy has suffered big losses again. Two new divisions just brought into the line—the 227th straight from Rheims only getting into the line at three o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia—have received a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three otherdivisions—the 16th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Division—have been hard hit and are now bleeding from many wounds and have given many prisoners from their ranks into our hands.
How was this thing done? How did we have any success to-day when even the most optimistic men were preyed upon last night by horrid doubts? Our troops, we know, are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked to do which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death to do. But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless in the morning except to men who had weighed all the chances, who had all the evidence in their hands—evidence, I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength and spirit—and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go!" to the start of this new battle.
It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily after heavy rains. The wind howled and raged across Flanders with long, sinister wailings as it gathered speed and raced over the fields. Heavy storm-clouds hiding the moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came down, drenching all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks, making ponds about them where they stood. And it was cold, with a coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of the wind, and there was no glimmer of light in the darkness. To those of us who know the crater-land of the battlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone stumbling through it, picking their way between the shell-holes in daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might have seemed impossible that great bodies of troops could go forward in assault over such country and win any kind of success in such conditions. That they did so is a proof, one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our troops have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal laws of life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they will face them and grapple with them, and, if the spirit and flesh of man can do it, overcome the impossible itself. This battle seems to me as wonderful as anything we have done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division captured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More wonderful even than that, because on a greater scale and in more foul weather.
This morning I have been among the Lancashire and West Riding men of the 66th and 49th Divisions who lay out last night before the attack, which followed the first gleamsof dawn to-day, and who marched up—no, they did not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in the attack. These men I met had come back wounded. Only in the worst days of the Somme have I seen such figures. They were plastered from head to foot in wet mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like the hands and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of sacking round their legs, and this was stuck on them with clots of mud. Their belts and tunics were covered with a thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and their hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who had been buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke to them I found that some of them had been buried alive and unburied while they still had life. They told me this simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A shell burst close," said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the neck." "Do you mean up to the neck?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, up to the neck." There were many like that, and others, without being flung down by a shell-burst or buried in its crater, fell up to their waists in shell-holes and up to their armpits, and sank in water and mud.
A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France. They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division.
It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead fellsuddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep shell-hole and disappeared.
"Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For God's sake give me a hand, old lad."
There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a yard or two."
So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying to work across the shell-holes.
"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in. 'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the cold. But somehow we got on."
Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying out in the shell-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high in water.
Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the night, and big shells were coming over. Thirty men were killed or wounded with one shell, and others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers—the splendid stretcher-bearers—came up to search for them.
The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink," said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."
Some of them had rum served out to them. They were the lucky ones, for it gave them a little warmth. But others could not get a drop.
One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met him this morning, had a pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I had a jar of rum in my pack," he said, "and the boys said to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first objective. We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped my pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!'"
They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold and hungry and exhausted after a dreadful night, and they gained their objective and routed the enemy, and sent back manyprisoners. I marvel at them, and will salute them if ever I meet them in the world when the war is done.
There were a number of German blockhouses in front of them, beyond Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel. These were Yetta House and Augustus House and Heine House on the way to Tober Copse and Friesland Copse just outside their line of assault. On their left there was a blockhouse called Peter Pan, though no little mother Wendy would tell stories to her boys there, and instead of Peter Pan's cockcrow there was the wail of a wounded man. Beyond that little house of death were Wolfe Copse and Wolfe Farm, from which the fire of German machine-guns came swishing in streams of bullets. There was no yard of ground without a shell-hole. They were linked together like the holes in a honeycomb, and the German troops, very thick because of their new method of defence—very dense in the support lines though the front line was more lightly held—were scattered about in these craters. Large numbers were killed and wounded when our barrage stormed over them, but numbers crouching in old craters were left alive, and as the barrage passed they rose and came streaming over in small batches, with their hands high—came to meet our men, hoping for mercy. Many prisoners were made before the first objective was reached, and after that by harder fighting. Some of the men in shell-holes, wet like our men and cold like our men, decided to keep fighting, and fired their rifles as our lads struggled forward. The boy who lost his rum-jar met three of these men in a shell-hole, and he threw a bomb at them, and said, "This is to pay back for the gas you gave me a month ago."
A little farther on there was another German in a shell-hole. He was a boy of sixteen or so, and he raised his rifle at the lad of the rum-jar, who flung the bayonet on one side by a sudden blow, but not quick enough to escape a wound in the arm. "I couldn't kill him," said the Lancashire lad; "he looked such a kid, like my young brother, so I took him prisoner and sent him down."
Not all the prisoners who were taken came down behind our lines. The enemy was barraging the ground heavily, and many of their own men were killed, and some of our stretcher-bearers, as they came down with the wounded. Up in the leafless and shattered trees on the battlefield were Germans with machine-guns, and German riflemen who sniped our men as they passed.Many of these were shot up in the trees and came crashing down. Up on the left of the attack, where our troops were in liaison with the French, the enemy were taken prisoners in great numbers, officers as well as men, and the hostile bombardment was not so heavy as on the right, so that the casualties seem to have been light there. In spite of the frightful ground all the objectives were taken, so that our line has drawn close to Houthulst Forest.
There was heavy fighting by the Worcesters of the 29th Division at a place called Pascal Farm, and a lot of concrete dug-outs on the Langemarck-Houthulst road gave trouble with their machine-guns. Adler Farm, just outside our old line, somewhat south of that, also held out a while, but was mastered, and opened the way to the second objective, which on the right carried the attack through Poelcappelle. Here there was hard fighting, by the Lancashire Fusiliers, South Staffords, and Yorkshires of the 11th, and the German garrison put up a desperate resistance in the brewery of Poelcappelle. On the right there has been grim fighting again in the old neighbourhood of Polderhoek Château, but on either side of it our troops of the 5th Division have made good progress, in spite of intense and concentrated fire from many heavy batteries. The enemy has again had a great blow, and has lost large numbers of men—dead, wounded, and captured. That our troops could do this after such a night and over such foul ground must seem to the German High Command like some black art.
October 10
In my message yesterday I described the appalling condition of the ground and of the weather through which our men floundered in their assault towards Houthulst Forest and Passchendaele. That is the theme of this battle, as it is told by all the men who have been through its swamps and fire, and it is a marvel that any success could have been gained. Where we succeeded—and we took a great deal of ground and many prisoners—it was due to the sheer courage of the men, who refused to be beaten by even the most desperate conditions of exhaustion and difficulty; and where we failed, or at least did not succeed, in making full progress or holding all the first gains, it was because courage itself was of no availagainst the powers of nature, which were in league that night with the enemy's guns.
The brunt of the fighting fell yesterday in the centre upon the troops of North-country England, the hard, tough men of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and it was Lancashire's day especially, because of those third-line Territorial battalions of Manchesters and East Lancashires and Lancashire Fusiliers, with other comrades of the 66th Division. There were some amongst them who went "over the bags," as they call it, for the first time, and who fought in one of the hardest battles that has ever been faced by British troops, with most stubborn and gallant hearts. I know by hearing from their own lips, to-day and yesterday, the narrative of the sufferings they endured, of the fight they made, and of the wounds they bear without a moan.
The night march of some of these men who went up to attack at dawn seems to me, who have written many records of brave acts during three years of war, one of the most heroic episodes in all this time. It was a march which in dry, fine weather would have been done easily enough in less than three hours by men so good as these. But it took eleven hours for these Lancashire men to get up to their support line, and then, worn out by fatigue that was a physical pain, wet to the skin, cold as death, hungry, and all clotted about with mud, they lay in the water of shell-holes for a little while until their officers said, "Our turn, boys," and they went forward through heavy fire and over the same kind of ground, and fought the enemy with his machine-guns and beat him—until they lay outside their last objective and kept off counter-attacks by a few machine-guns that still remained unclogged, and rifles that somehow they had kept dry. Nothing better than that has been done, and Lancashire should thrill to the tale of it, because their sons were its heroes. Dirty, blood-stained, scarecrow heroes, as I met some of them to-day, lightly wounded, but hardly able to walk after the long trail back from the line. It was eleven hours' walking on the way up, and then, after the wild day and half a night under shell-fire and machine-gun fire, eleven hours down again, in shell-holes and out of them, falling every few yards, crawling on hands and knees through slimy trenches, staggering up by the help of a comrade's arm and going on again with set jaws, and the cry of "No surrender!" in theirsoul.... Gallant men. They had no complaint against the fate that had thrust them into this morass, nor any whimper against their hard luck. They told of the hard time they had had simply and gravely, without exaggeration and without self-pity, but as men who had been through a frightful ordeal with many thousands of others whose luck was no better than theirs and whose duty was the same. They came under severe machine-gun fire from some of the German blockhouses, especially on their flanks. Our barrage-fire had gone travelling beyond them, and because of the swamps and pools it was impossible to keep pace with it. Men were lugging each other out of the bogs, rescuing each other free from the rain-filled shell-pits. So they lost the only protection there is from machine-guns, the screen of great belts of gun-fire, and the Germans had time to get out of the concrete houses and to get up from the shell-holes and fire at our advancing groups of muddy men. Many Germans were sniping from these holes, and others were up broken trees with machine-guns on small wooden platforms. I met one man to-day who had eleven comrades struck down in his own group by one of the snipers. A party was detached to search for the German rifleman, but they could not find him. They got ahead through Peter Pan House and then they had to face another blast of machine-gun fire. The German garrison, in a place called Yetta House, gave trouble in the same way, and there was a nest of machine-guns ahead at Bellevue. Some Yorkshire lads of the 49th Division went up there to rout them out, but what happened is not yet known.
All through the day and last night the Lancashire men were under the streaming bullets of a machine-gun barrage, which whipped the ground about them as fast as falling hailstones, so that no man could put his head above a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat. I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean through, but with the men who wore them still alive and able to smile grimly enough when they pointed to these holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried to get back had a desperate time trying to find their way. Some of them walked away to the German lines and were up to the barbed wire before they found out their mistake. It was difficult to get any sense of direction in the darkness, but the German flares helped them. They rose with a very bright light, flooding the swamps of No Man's Land with a white glare, revealing the tragedy of the battlefield, where many bodies lay still in the bogs, for many men had been killed. Before the darkness German aeroplanes came over, as it were, in dense flocks. One Lancashire boy declared he counted thirty-seven as he lay looking up to the sky from a shell-hole, and they flew low to see where our men had made their line. Our stretcher-bearers worked through the day and night, but it was hard going even with empty stretchers, and they fell and got bogged like the fighting men, and many were hit by shell-fire and machine-gun bullets. With full stretchers they made their way back slowly, and each journey took many hours, and on the way they stuck many times in bogs and slipped many times waist-deep in shell-holes. The transport and the carriers struggled with equal courage through the slough of despond, trying to get up rations to their cold and hungry comrades and ammunition wanted by riflemen and machine-gunners. Even in water beyond their belts the men tried to clean their rifles and their belts from the mud which had fouled them, knowing that later on their lives might depend on this. And it is a wonderful thing that some counter-attacks were actually repulsed by rifle-fire and by machine-guns, which jam if any speck of dirt gets in their mechanism. That was on the left, when the Coldstream, Irish, and Welsh Guards and some old county regiments of England—Middlesex, Worcesters, Hampshires, Essex—and a gallant little body of Newfoundlanders in the 29th Division had fought forward a long way with rapid success.
The losses of the Guards in going over to the first objective were not heavy. They preceded the attack by a tremendous trench-mortar bombardment, which so frightened the enemy and caused such loss among them that before the infantry advanced many of them came rushing over to our lines to surrender. On the second objective there was heavy fighting at a strong place called Strode House, which was surrounded with uncut wire and defended by heavy machine-gun fire. The Guards, after being checked, rushed it from all sides and captured it with all its garrison. There was more fighting of the same kind farther south, at ruins close to Houthulst Forest, on the edge of the swamps, which seem to be a No Man's Land, because the ground is too wet for the Germans to live there. Very quickly after the attack the enemy countered heavily on the Guards' left, but the Guards held firm and beat it off.
Farther south the Middlesex, Royal Fusiliers, and the Newfoundlanders of the 29th Division went straight through to their objective as far as Cinq Chemins Farm (the Farm of the Five Roads), and they had to resist a series of counter-attacks, starting before half-past eight in the morning. The first of these was shattered by rifle-fire, and the second by artillery-fire, but afterwards, owing no doubt to heavy shelling, our line withdrew a little in front of the Poelcappelle road.
On the left centre of our attack our progress was not maintained. The ground here was deplorable, as the two streams of the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Stroombeek had been cut through by shell-fire, so that their boundaries were lost in broad floods. Mortal men could not pass through quick enough to keep up with a barrage, and after desperate struggles they were forced to withdraw from the forward positions beyond Adler Farm and Burns House.
Round the village of Poelcappelle, now no more than a dust-heap of ruin, there was fierce fighting, and the enemy held out in the brewery, from which he swept the ground with machine-gun bullets so that all approach was deadly. The Yorkshire men of the 11th Division here made repeated rushes, but without much success, it seems.
Meanwhile, on the extreme right of the attack some very grim and desperate work was being done by English troops of famous old regiments round about Reutel and Polderhoek. At Polderhoek the enemy had a nest of dug-outs and machine-gun emplacements behind the château, and in spite of the assaults of Warwicks and Norfolks held them by unceasing fire.
On the north of Polderhoek success was complete in the attack on Reutel, though the village was defended by machine-guns in a cemetery beyond Reutel, and several defended blockhouses. These were attacked and taken by the H.A.C., Warwicks, and Devons, and our line of objectives was made good beyond Reutel and Judge Copse, which have been thorns in our side—spear-heads rather—for many days.
Splendid and chivalrous work was done on this part of the ground by the stretcher-bearers. Out of two hundred and fifty labouring in these fields over a hundred were hit, and all of them took the utmost risk to rescue their fallen comrades in the fighting-lines. The sappers and the pioneers, the transport andthe runners, fought not against the enemy from Germany, but against an enemy more difficult to defeat, and that was the mud.
October 12
OUR troops went forward again to-day farther up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, striking north-east towards the village of Passchendaele itself, which I saw this morning looming through the mist and the white smoke of shell-fire, with its ruins like the battlements of a mediæval castle perched high on the crest.
It has been a day of very heavy fighting, and the supreme success will only be gained by the spirit of men resolute to win in the face of continual blasts of machine-gun bullets, heavy shelling, and weather which has made the ground as bad as ever a battlefield has been. The enemy, if we may believe what his prisoners say, expected the attack, and that they did expect it is borne out by the quickness with which they dropped down their defensive barrage, the violent way in which they shelled our back areas during the night, and by other unmistakable signs of readiness. Perhaps the last attack two days ago through the wild gale and the mud warned them that not even the elements would safeguard them against us, and that our troops, who had already achieved something that was next to impossible, would attempt another and greater adventure.
To me these blows through the mud seem the most daring endeavours ever made by great bodies of men. The strength of the enemy—and he is very strong still—and the courage of the enemy, which is high among his best troops, are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon to overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, and they are ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have broken the first evil spell of them. But this mud of Flanders, these swamps which lie in the way, these nights of darkness and rain in the quagmires—those are the real terrors which are hardest to win through. Yet our men were confident of their fate to-day, and backed each other with astounding courage to take the ground they were asked to take; and that pledge which they made between their battalions was after that night, now three nightsago, when the Lancashire and Yorkshire men made their march through the mud which I have described in other messages—eleven hours' going before they reached their starting-line after frightful tribulations in the darkness and before they went into the battle, late for their barrage and exhausted in body, but still with the pluck to fight through machine-gun fire to their objectives. They did not go as far as had been hoped, but they did far more than any one might dare expect in such conditions, and the men in to-day's battle depended for success upon the starting-line gained for them by those comrades of North-country England.
The New-Zealanders who went over to-day swore that with any luck, or even without luck, they would plant their flag high, and among those men there was a grim, smouldering fire of some purpose which boded ill for the enemy they should find against them. These are not words of rhetoric, to give a little colour to the dark picture of war, but the sober truth of what was in those New Zealand boys' minds yesterday when they made ready for this new battle.
It was difficult to get the men anywhere near the line of attack, owing to the foulness of the ground. Those who were in their positions the night before—that is, on Wednesday night—found that they were not utterly comfortless in the sodden fields. By a fine stroke of daring and by the great effort of carriers and transport officers, who risked their lives in the task, bivouacs were taken up and pegged out in the darkness under the very nose of the enemy, so that the men should not lie out in the pouring rain, and before dawn came they were taken away, in order not to reveal these assemblies. There was food also, and hot drink close to the fighting-lines, and some of the coldness and horrors of the night were relieved. A clear line was made for the barrage which would be fired by our guns this morning. But some troops had still to go up, and some men had to march through the night as those Lancashire men had marched up three nights before. They had the same grim adventure. They, too, fell into shell-holes, groped their way forward blindly in a wild downpour of rain, lugged each other out of the bogs, floundered through mud and shell-fire from five in the evening until a few minutes only before it was time to attack. The enemy was busy with his guns all night to catch any of our men who might be on the move. He flung down a heavybarrage round about Zonnebeke, but by good chance it missed one group of men thereabouts, and scarcely touched any of the others in that neighbourhood. But his heavy shells were scattered over a wide area, and came bowling through the darkness and exploding with great upheavals of the wet earth. Small parties of men dodged them as best they could, and pitched into shell-holes five feet deep in water when they threatened instant death. Then gas-shells came whining, with their queer little puffs, unlike the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind was filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and skin, so that our men had to put on their gas-masks and walk like that in a worse darkness. These things, and this way up to battle, might have shaken the nerves of most men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them by the fainting sickness of fear. But it only made the New-Zealanders angry. It made them angry to the point of wild rage.
"To Hell with them," said some of them. "We won't spare them when we go over. We will make them pay for this night." They used savage and flaming words, cursing the enemy and the weather and the shell-fire and the foulness of it all.
I know the state of the ground, for I went over its crater-land this morning to look at this flame of fire below the Passchendaele spur. I had no heavy kit like the fighting men, but fell on the greasy duck-boards as they fell, and rolled into the slime as they had rolled. The rain beat a tattoo on one's steel helmet. Every shell-hole was brimful of brown or greenish water; moisture rose from the earth in a fog. Our guns were firing everywhere through the mist and thrust sharp little swords of flame through its darkness, and all the battlefields bellowed with the noise of these guns. I walked through the battery positions, past enormous howitzers which at twenty paces distance shook one's bones with the concussion of their blasts, past long muzzled high velocities, whose shells after the first sharp hammer-stroke went whinnying away with a high fluttering note of death, past the big-bellied nine-point-twos and monsters firing lyddite shells in clouds of yellow smoke. Before me stretching away round the Houthulst Forest, big and dark and grim, with its close-growing trees, was the Passchendaele Ridge, the long, hummocky slopes for which our menwere fighting, and our barrage-fire crept up it, and infernal shell-fire, rising in white columns, was on the top of it, hiding the broken houses there until later in the morning, when the rain ceased a little, and the sky was streaked with blue, and out of the wet gloom Passchendaele appeared, with its houses still standing, though all in ruins. There were queer effects when the sun broke through. Its rays ran down the wet trunks and the forked naked branches of dead trees with a curious, dazzling whiteness, and all the swamps were glinting with light on their foul waters, and the pack-mules winding along the tracks, slithering and staggering through the slime, had four golden bars on either side of them when the sun shone on their 18-pounder shells. There was something more ghastly in this flood of white light over the dead ground of the battlefields, revealing all the litter of human conflict round the captured German pill-boxes, than when it was all under black storm-clouds.
It was at the side of a pill-box famous in the recent fighting that I watched the progress of our barrage up the slopes of Passchendaele, and it was only by that fire and by the answering fire of the German guns with blacker shell-bursts that one could tell the progress of our men.
"How's it going?" asked a friend of two officers of the Guards who came down the duck-boards from Poelcappelle way.
"Pretty well," was the answer. "We have cut off four Boche guns with our barrage, though we only had a little way to go—on the left, you know."
"Big fellows?"
"No, pip-squeak. The usual seventy-seven."
It seemed that there had been a check on the left. Our men had come up against abominable machine-gun fire. On the right things were doing better. Our line was being pushed up close to Passchendaele, within a few hundred yards or so. Some prisoners were coming down—there had been a lot of bayonet fighting, and a lot of killing. The wounded are getting back already, most of them with machine-gun wounds, the worst of them with shell wounds. The New-Zealanders had hardly gone over before German flares rose to call on the guns. The guns did not answer for some little while; but instantly there was the chattering fire of many machine-guns; and from places above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and all the length of the Goudberg spur of the Passchendaele, where there were manyblockhouses and concrete streets, there was poured out a sweeping barrage of bullets.
Our men, advancing on all sides of the Passchendaele Ridge and right up to the edge of Houthulst Forest, were everywhere checked a while by the swampy ground. The streams, or beeks, that intersect this country, like the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Ravelbeek, had lost all kind of bounds, and by the effect of shell-fire had flowed out into wide bogs. Here and there the men crossed more easily, and that led to some parts of the line getting farther forward then others and so to being enfiladed on the right or left. It is on the left that we have had most difficulty, round about Wolfe Copse and Marsh Bottom. On the right it is reported that some of the Anzacs have been seen going up across the slopes of Crest Farm, which is some 500 yards from Passchendaele village, on the heights of the ridge. At the present time it is impossible to tell more about this battle than to say it is being fought desperately. Our airmen are unable to bring back exact news owing to the darkness which has again descended, and all that is known so far is that our men are making progress in spite of the deadly machine-gun fire against them, and that they are resolute to go on. The enemy is fighting hard, and his Jaegers, with green bands round their caps, and the men of the 223rd Reserve Division, have not surrendered easily, though many of them are now our prisoners. It is raining again heavily, and the mists have deepened.
October 14
To-day there was a fine spell, though yesterday, after Friday's battle, it was still raining, and looked as if it might rain until next April or March. Our soldiers cursed the weather, cursed it with deep and lurid oaths, cursed it wet and cursed it cold, by day and by night, by duck-boards and mule-tracks, by shell-holes and swamps, by Ravelbeek and Broenbeek and Lekkerbolerbeek. For it was weather which robbed them of victory on Friday and made them suffer the worst miseries of winter warfare, and held them in the mud when they had set theirhearts upon the heights. It was the mud which beat them. Man after man has said that to me on the day of battle and yesterday.
"Fritz couldn't have stopped us," said an Australian boy, warming his hands and body by a brazier after a night in the cold slime, which was still plastered about him. "It was the mud which gave him a life chance."
"It was the mud that did us in," said an officer of the Berkshires, sitting up on a stretcher and speaking wearily. "We got bogged and couldn't keep up with the barrage. That gave the German machine-gunners time to get to work on us. It was their luck."
A young Scottish Borderer, shivering so that his teeth chattered, spoke hoarsely, and there was no warmth in him except the fire in his eyes. "We had a fearful time," he said, "but it was the spate of mud that kept us back, and the Germans took advantage of it."
"Whenever we got near to Fritz he surrendered or ran," said a young sergeant of the East Surreys. "We should have had him beat with solid ground beneath us, but we all got stuck in the bog, and he came out of his blockhouses and machine-gunned us as we tried to get across the shell-holes, all filled like young ponds, and sniped us when we could not drag one leg after the other."
No proof is needed of the valour of our men. It is idle to speak of it, because for three years they have shown the height of human courage in the most damnable and deadly places. But I have known nothing finer in this war than the quality of the talk I have heard among the men who fought all Friday after a night exposure in wild rain, and lay out all that night in water-pools under gun-fire, and came back again yesterday wounded, spent, bloody and muddy, cramped and stiff, cold to the marrow-bones, and tired after the agony of the long trail back across the barren fields. They did not despair because they had not gained all they had hoped to gain. "We'll get it all right next time," said man after man among them. They all stated the reasons for their bad luck.
"If you step off a duck-board you go squelch up to the knees, and handling them big shells is no joke. All that means delay in getting up ammunition." This was from a young soldier who had been flung 50 yards and senseless away from agroup of comrades who were all killed by a big shell-burst. His senses had come back, and a quiet, shrewd judgment of all he had seen and his old faith that our men can win through every time if they have equal chances with the enemy. That faith, that confidence in their own fighting quality, was not dimmed because on Friday they did not go far. The fire of it, the beauty of it, the simplicity of it shone in the eyes of these men, who were racked by aches and shot through with pain, all befouled by the mud, which was in the very pores of their skin, and seared by remembrances of tragic things. To command soldiers like that should be the supreme joy of their officers, and indeed there is not one of our officers who does not think so, and is not proud of them with a pride that is full of comradeship for his good company. Napoleon's Old Guard was not of better stuff than these boys from English farms and factories, Scottish homesteads, Australian and New Zealand sheep-farm runs.
In these recent battles home troops and overseas troops have been mixed together in the mud of battlefields, and they come down together out of the shell-fire to field dressing-stations, waiting to have their wounds dressed and telling their tales of the fighting. There is no difference there between them. They are all figures carved out of the same clay, with faces and hands of the tint of clay, like men risen out of wet graves. A moist steam rises from them as they group round the braziers, and they know each other—Australian and English lad, Scot and Welsh, Irish, New-Zealander—as comrades who have taken the same risks, suffered the same things, escaped from death by the same kind of miracle. They talk in low voices. There is no bragging among them; no wailing; no excited talk. Quietly they tell each other of the things that happened to them and of the things they saw, and it is the naked truth, idle sometimes as truth itself. So when they say, as I heard them say yesterday, "It is all right, it was only the mud that checked us," one knows that this is truth in the hearts of brave men, the truth of the fine faith that is in them.
I told in my last message how the enemy was ready for attack and tried to prevent it, before it started, by violent shelling over our back areas, all through Thursday night, mixing his high explosives with gas-shells and trying to catch our men on the move and our batteries deep in the mud. It is certain that his aeroplanes, flying low through mists, saw great traffic behindthe lines and the work of thousands of men laying down new tracks and getting forward with supplies. That could not be hidden from them. We did not try to hide it, but worked in the daylight under the eyes of their observers in Passchendaele and in Crest Farm below it, and on the high ground above Poelcappelle, so that they could see the tide of all this energy when the gunners, pioneers, engineers, transports drivers, mule leaders, and the long winding columns of troops surged up the arteries of the battlefields and choked them about the Piccadilly Circus of the crater-land.
It was a supreme defiance of the enemy's power, a challenge louder than any herald's trumpet announcing the beginning of a new battle. The enemy accepted the challenge, though not, as we know, with any gladness of heart. Behind his lines there was disorder and dismay, and his organization had been horribly strained by the rapid series of blows which had fallen on him and by his great losses. His local reserves had been flung together anyhow, to meet the pressure we had put upon him. Remnants of battalions were mixed up with other remnants, and our prisoners are from many units. These divisions of his which have withstood the brunt of this recent fighting, like the 195th and the 16th and the 227th, were horribly mauled and broken, and other divisions coming up to relieve them were caught by our long-range guns far back from the lines, and lost their way in the swamps which are on their side of the battlefield as well as on ours, and struggled forward in the darkness and shell-fire to positions hard to find by troops new to this ground. Their High Command issued new orders hurriedly, and made desperate efforts to strengthen their lines. They put up new apron-wire defences around their blockhouses. All the heavy machine-guns of the supporting troops were sent forward to the front lines to reinforce those already in position in their blockhouses and organized shell-holes between the blockhouses and the narrow streets of concrete. Never before did the enemy mass so many machine-guns on his front for continuous barrage over a wide region, and to defend the last spurs of Passchendaele. He had machine-guns up trees as well as on the ground, and he scattered his riflemen among the shell-craters with orders to shoot until they were killed or captured.
It is fair to these men to say that they obeyed their orders and fought on Friday with most fierce courage. It was only hereand there that small bodies of German troops, caught in our barrage and nerve-broken by the long agony of lying in water under a ceaseless shell-fire, ran forward to our men as soon as the first brown lines appeared out of the mud and surrendered. The men behind the machine-guns opened fire at the moment of attack, and it was the noise of this light artillery, the long-drawn swish of its bullets whipping the ground, and a devil's tattoo of groups of machine-guns hidden up the slopes, that broke upon our men as soon as they began to make their way through the mud.
I have already told how many of our men had spent the night. Large bodies of them had lain out since Wednesday. Of these some had been luckier than others, getting hot drink and food and shelter under tarpaulin tents which did not keep them dry, but kept off the full force of the beating rains. Others, not so lucky, had to lie in shell-holes half full, or quite full, of ice-cold water, and rations had gone astray, as many ration parties could not get up through the hostile barrage or were bogged somewhere down below; and for some men at least there was not the usual drop of rum to warm the "cockles of their hearts" and to bring back a little glow of life to their poor numbed limbs. Other men had spent the night in marching, spurred on by the hateful fear of being too late to take their place in the battle-line, so that their comrades would not have their help, but spurred to no quickness because every yard of ground had its obstacle and its ditch, and it was a crawl all the way, with many slips and falls and shouts for help.
It was pitch-dark, and the rain beat against these men, driven by the savage wind, plucking at their capes, buffeting their steel helmets, straining at the straps of their packs, slashing them across the face. Their boots squelched deep in the mud and made a queer, sucking noise as these single files of dark figures went shuffling across along slimy duck-boards, a queer noise which I heard when I went up with some of them on the morning of the battle over duck-board tracks. Some of them lost the duck-boards and went knee-deep into bogs, and waist-deep into shell-holes, and neck-deep into swamps. In spite of all the frightfulness of the night, the coldness, the weariness, and the beastliness of this floundering in mud and shell-fire, they went forward into the battle with grim, set faces, and attacked the places from which the machine-gun fire camein blasts. The New-Zealanders attacked many blockhouses and strong points immediately in front of their first objective on the left above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and on the way to the marsh bottom and rising slope of the Goudberg spur, where at Bellevue the enemy's machine-guns were thickly clustered.
Below that, by Heine House and Augustus, the Australian troops were trying to work their way forward to the hummock of Crest Farm, barring the way to Passchendaele, and up on the left centre, from the cross-roads and cemetery of Poelcappelle, the Scottish and English battalions—Berkshires, East Surreys, West Kents, and others—assaulted the brewery, which has been captured twice and twice lost, and a row of buildings in heaps of ruin on the Poelcappelle road, which the Germans use as cover for their machine-gunners. Many of these outposts were captured by groups. Our men worked round then and rushed them, in spite of the streams of bullets which pattered around them so that many fell in the first attempts. Here and there the enemy fought fiercely to the last, and fell under the bayonets of our men. Here and there, in the open ground to the right of Poelcappelle and on the ground below Passchendaele, batches of German soldiers made little fight, but came rushing out of their holes with their hands up, terror-stricken.
But machine-gun fire never ceased from the higher ground, from tall masts of branchless trees, from shell-craters beyond the reach of our men. Our barrage travelled ahead, and slow as it was I saw it creeping up the lower slopes of the Passchendaele ridge for the second objective on Friday morning—our men could not keep pace with it. They were stuck in the swamps at Marsh Bottom in the Lekkerbolerbeek below Poelcappelle and in the bogs below Crest Farm. They plunged into these bogs, fiercely cursing them, struggling to get through them to the enemy, but the men could do nothing with their legs held fast in such slime, nothing but shout to comrades to drag them out. While they struggled German snipers shot at them with a cool aim, and the machine-gun bullets of the deadly barrage lashed across the shell-craters.
Australian troops on the right made good and reached the edge of the hummock called Crest Farm. Some of them swarmed up it and fought and killed the garrison there, but beyond wasanother knoll with machine-gunners and riflemen, and as our men came up to the top of Crest Farm they were under close and deadly fire. They would have held their ground here if they could have been supported on the left, but the New-Zealanders were having a terrible time in Marsh Bottom and Bellevue, and could not make much headway because of the deadly fire which came down from the spur on which Bellevue is perched. All this time it was raining hard, making the ground worse than before, and the wet mists deepened, preventing all visibility for our machines working with the guns. Orders were given not to continue the second stage of the attack, because the weather was too bad, and the Australians on the right centre withdrew their line in order not to have an exposed flank. In the afternoon the enemy's heavy artillery, which had been very hesitating and uncertain during the first stages of the attack, began to barrage the ground intensely, and continued this fire all the night.
Meanwhile close and fierce fighting was all about Poelcappelle. English and Scottish troops entered the ruins of the village, in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets which girdled it, drove the Germans out of the brewery buildings for a time, fought their way among the brick-heaps and ruined houses, killed many men who held out there, and with bayonet and rifle defended themselves against counter-attacks which came down the Poelcappelle road. It was as savage and desperate fighting as any episode in this war at close quarters, without mercy on either side, one man's life for another's. Our men were reckless and fierce. They fought in small parties, with or without officers. Ground was gained and lost by yards, and men fought like wild beasts across the broken walls and ditches and shell-craters which go by the name of Poelcappelle. It was five o'clock in the evening that another strong counter-attack by the enemy came down Poelcappelle road and drove in our advanced posts. The brewery then became a sort of No Man's Land—an empty shell between opposing sides. Our men were spent after all that night and day in the mud and all this fighting, and now dusk was creeping down, and it was hard to see who was friend and who was enemy among the figures that crawled about in the slime.
It was the turn for stretcher-bearers, those men who workbehind the fighting-lines and then come to gather up the human wreckage off it. With great heroism they had worked all day under heavy fire, and now went on working without thought of self. They were visible to the enemy, and their Red Cross armlets showed their mission. Away on the slopes of Passchendaele his stretcher-bearers could be seen working too. One body of 200 men came out, waving the Red Cross flag, with stretchers and ambulances, and went gleaning in these harvest-fields, and no shot of ours went over to them. But on our side shots from German snipers were still flying and our stretcher-bearers were hit. Three of them carrying one stretcher were killed, and the officer with them directing this work near Poelcappelle was fired with a flame of anger. He seized a Red Cross flag and made his way very quickly over the shell-holes towards the enemy's position, and standing there, this officer of the R.A.M.C. shouted out a speech which rang high above the noise of gun-fire and all the murmur of the battlefield.
Perhaps what he said was quite incoherent and wild. Perhaps no man who heard him could understand a word of what he said, but there in the shell-holes hidden from him in the mud were listening men with loaded rifles, and they may have raised their heads to look at that single figure with the flag. They understood what he meant. His accusing figure was a message to them. After that there was no deliberate sniping of stretcher-bearers, though they still had to go through shell-fire. It was hard on the wounded that night. The lightly wounded made their way back as best they could, and it was a long way back, and a dark way back over that awful ground. God knows how they managed it, these men with holes in their legs and mangled arms and bloody heads. They do not know.
"I thought I should never get back," said many of them yesterday. "It was bad enough going up, when we were strong and fit. At the end of the journey we could hardly drag our limbs along to get near the enemy. But coming down was worse."
They fell not once but many times, they crawled through the slime and then fell into deep pits of water with slippery sides, so that they could hardly get out. They lay down in the mud and believed they must die, but some spark of vitality kept alive in them, and a great desire for life goaded them to make another effort to go another hundred yards. They cried outincoherently, and heard other cries around them, but were alone in some mud-track of these battlefields with a great loneliness of the soul. One man told me of his night like that, told me with strange smiling eyes that lightened up the mud mask of his face under a steel hat that was like an earthenware pot on his head. All the time he opened and shut his hands very slowly and carefully, and looked at them as things separate from himself. They had become quite dead and white in the night, and were now getting back to life and touch from the warmth of a brazier over which he crouched.
"I crawled a thousand yards or so," he said, "and thought I was finished. I had no more strength than a baby, and my head was all queer and dizzy-like, so that I had uncommon strange thoughts and saw things that weren't there. The shells kept coming near me, and the noise of them shook inside my head so that it went funny. For a long time while I lay there I thought I had my chums all round me, and that made me feel a kind of comfortable. I thought I could see them lying in the mud all round with just their shoulders showing humped up and the tops of their packs covered in mud. I spoke to them sometimes and said, 'Is that you, Alf?' or 'Come a bit nearer, mate.' It didn't worry me at first because they didn't answer. I thought they were tired. But presently something told me I was all wrong. Those were mud-heaps, not men. Then I felt frightened because I was alone. It was a great, queer kind of fear that got hold of me, and I sat up and then began to crawl again just to get into touch with company, and I went on till daylight came and I saw other men crawling out of shell-holes and some of them walking and holding on to each other. So we got back together."
They came back to the field dressing-stations, where there was warmth for them and hot drinks, and clean bandages for their wounds; and groups of men, who had fought with the same courage, and now, in spite of all they had endured, spoke brave words, and said it was not the enemy that had checked them but only the mud. Their spirit had not been beaten, for no hardships in the world will ever break that.
But while I was talking with these men a figure came and sat on a bench among them speechless, because no one understood his tongue. It was a wounded German prisoner, and I saw from his shoulder-strap that he belonged to the 233rd Regiment ofthe 119th Division. Among all these men of ours who spoke with a fine hopefulness of what they would do next time he was hopeless. "We are lost," he said. "My division is ended. My friends are all killed." When asked what his officers thought, he made a queer gesture of derision, with one finger under his nose when he says "Zut." "They think we are 'kaput' too; they only look to the end of the war."
"And when do they think that will come?" He said, "God willing, before the year ends."
In civilian life he was a worker in an ammunition factory at Thuringen, by the Black Forest. He had seen many English there, and never thought he should fight against them one day. His father, who is forty-seven, is in the war. He himself looked a man of that age—old and worn, with a week's beard on his chin; but when I asked him his age he replied, "I am twenty-one. Last night I was twenty-one, when I lay after three days in a shell-hole—['ein granatenloch']—and your men helped me out because I was wounded."
"What do you think of our men?" he was asked, and he said, "They are good. Your artillery is good. It is very bad for us. We are 'kaput.'"
On one side of the fire were the men who think they are winning, whatever checks they may have, and who always attack with that faith in their hearts. On the other side was the man who said "We are finished," and sat huddled up in despair. All of them had suffered the same things.
To-day the sky is clear again, and the pale gold of autumn sunlight lies over the fields, and all the woods behind the lines are clothed in russet foliage. It is two days late, this quiet of the sky, and if Friday had been like this there would have been a flag of ours on the northern heights of Passchendaele Ridge. But still the gunners go on with their toil, those wonderful gunners of ours, who get very little sleep and very little rest and go down for an hour or two into a hole in the earth in those sodden fields where all day long and all night there is the tumult of bombardment. Piles of shells lie on the ground, heaps around them, and behind men are labouring to bring up more; and across the battlefields, strangely close to the actual fighting-line, black trains go steaming along rails which hundreds of men have risked their lives to lay a hundred yards, so that the guns shall be fed and the gunners have no respite.On the left of the line there is blue among the brown of our armies, and on the morning of the battle I saw French limbers and transport wagons using the same tracks as our own, and heard the rattle of the "soixante-quinze" again below Houthulst Forest, where there are still leaves on the trees and the beauty of a dense yellowing foliage is there beyond all those other woods where there are only fangs and stumps of trees in the fields where our men have fought.