France, August 20th.
It is a month this morning since Australians plunged into the heart of the most modern of battles. They had been in many sorts of battle before; but they had never been in the brunt of the whole war where the science and ingenuity of war had reached for the moment their highest pitch. One month ago they plunged into the very brunt and apex of it. And they are still fighting there.
People have spoken of this war as the war of trenches. But the latest battles have reached a stage beyond that. The war of trenches is a comfortable out-of-date phase, to be looked upon with regret and perhaps even some longing. The war of to-day is a war of craters and potholes—a war of crannies and nicks and crevices torn out of the earth yesterday, and to be shattered into new shapes to-morrow. It may not seem easy to believe, but we have seen the Germans under heavy bombardmentleaving the shelter of their trenches for safety in the open—jumping out and running forward into shell holes—anywhere so long as they got away from the cover which they had built for themselves. The trench which they left is by next day non-existent—even the airmen looking down on it from above in the mists of the grey dawn can scarcely tell where it was. Then some community of ants sets to work and the line begins to show again. Again it is obliterated, until a stage comes when the German decides that it is not worth while digging it out. He has other lines, and he turns his energy on to them.
The result of all this is that areas of ground in the hot corners of battles like that of the Somme and Verdun, and especially disputed hill summits such as the Mort Homme or this Pozières Ridge, become simply a desert of shell craters.
A few days back, going to a portion of the line which had considerably altered since I was there, I went by a trench which was marked on the map. It was a good trench, but it did not seem to have been greatly used of late, which was rather surprising. "You won't find it quite so good all the way," said a friend who was coming down.
Presently, and quite suddenly, the trench shallowed. The sides which had been clean cut were tumbled in. The fallen earth blocked the passage, and the journey became a switchback over tumbled rubbish and into the trench again. Someone had before been living in the trench, for there were tools in it and bits of soldiers' gear. Here and there a shattered rifle stuck out of the terra-cotta soil. The trench shallowed still further. There had been little hastily scraped dug-outs in the sides of it. They were more than three parts filled with earth; but in them, every now and again, there showed a patch of muddy grey cloth above the debris. It was part of the uniform of a German soldier buried by the shell that killed him. It must have been an old German trench taken by our men some weeks before. It can scarcely have been visited since, for its garrison lay there just as the shells had buried them. Probably it had been found too broken for use and had been almost forgotten.
The trench led on through these relics of battle until even they were lost altogether; and it came out into a region where it was really a puzzle to say what was trench and what was not. Around one stretched a desert of shell craters—hole bordering upon hole so that there wasno space at all between them. Each hole was circular like the ring of earth at the mouth of an ants' nest several thousand times magnified, and they stretched away like the waves of the sea. Far to the left was a bare, brown hill-side. In front, and to the right, billows of red shell-holes rose to the sharp-cut, white skyline a hundred yards away.
You feel as a man must feel in a very small boat lost in a very wide ocean. In the trough of a shell-hole your horizon was the edges of the crater on a level with your head. When you wandered over from that shell-hole into the next you came suddenly into view of a wide stretch of country all apparently exactly the same as that through which you were plunging. The green land of France lay behind you in the distance. But the rest of the landscape was an ocean of red craters. In one part of it, just over the near horizon, there protruded the shattered dry stubble of an orchard long since reduced to about thirty bare, black, shattered tree stumps. Nearer were a few short black stakes protruding among the craters—clearly the remains of an ancient wire entanglement. The trench was still traceable ten or twelve paces ahead, and there might be something which looked like the continuation of it a dozen yardsfarther—a line of ancient parapet appeared to be distinguishable there for a short interval. That was certainly the direction.
It was the parapet sure enough. There, waterlogged in earth, were the remains of a sandbag barricade built across the trench. A few yards on was another similar barrier. They must have been the British and German barricade built across that sap at the end of some fierce bomb fight, already long-forgotten by the lapse of several weeks. What Victoria Crosses, what Iron Crosses were won there, by deeds whose memory deserved to last as long as the race endures, God only knows—one trusts that the great scheme of things provides some record of such a sacrifice.
Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way. Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially—about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close—a black burst on the brown hill—two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side—a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline—an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are.
THE WINDMILL OF POZIÈRES AND THE SHELL SHATTERED GROUND AROUND ITTHE WINDMILL OF POZIÈRES AND THE SHELL SHATTERED GROUND AROUND IT
THE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCHTHE BARELY RECOGNISABLE REMAINS OF A TRENCH
One picked the likeliest line, and wasploughing along it, when a bullet hissed not far away. It did not seem probable that there were Germans in the landscape. One looked for another cause. Away to one side, against the skyline, one had a momentary glimpse of three or four Australians going along, bent low, making for some advanced position. It must be some stray bullet meant for them. Then another bullet hissed.
So out on that brown hill-side, in some unrecognisable shell-hole trench, the enemy must still have been holding on. It was a case for keeping low where there was cover and making the best speed where there was not; and the end of the journey was soon reached.
Now that is a country in which I, to whom it was a rare adventure, found Australians living, working, moving as if it were their own back yard. In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world, to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice, here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position with its wickerwork shell-covers aroundit—the whole looking like a broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. An officer crawled out to some of this jetsam the other day, and, putting up his head from the wreckage, found nothing in the horizon except one solitary figure standing about two hundred yards in front of him; and it was a German.
Imagine the factory hand from Saxony set down to do outpost duty in this sort of wilderness. I spoke the other day to a little tailor or bootmaker, with a neck that you could have put through a napkin ring, a tremendous forehead, and big, startled eyes. "Yes, we were put out there to dig an outpost trench," he said. "The sergeant gave us a wrong direction, I think. We took two days' rations and went out hundreds of yards. No one came near us. There was firing on all sides, and we did not know where we were. Our food was finished—we saw men working—we did not know who they were—but they were English, and we were captured."
France, August 28th.
It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozières Ridge towards Mouquet Farm. Along a good part of the line the troops were back in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in the trenches they had gone out for.
The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down. The artillery Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had turned into bed. The normal early morning gun wassending its normal shell at intervals ranging up the long valley—rattle, rattle, rattle, until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its gun barking too—every now and again the little shell came and spat over the hill-side.
The morning broke very pale and white through the mist—as though the earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling over ground smashed in by the last night's fire—red earth new turned. Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the mist—you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory—not ours. For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.
It was while we did so that I noticed alittle grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines. It came very slowly—the steady, even pace of a funeral. The leader was a man—a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman—who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.
They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly—sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely—the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.
We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days, had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I have of it still—that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one recognised that itwasa road, because the banks of it ran straight. It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin—it took you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.
There was a shrapnel shell regularly spitting across that country. We knew we should have to pass it, and one was naturally anxious to be under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business which needed care when theexpected shell whizzed over the hill and burst. I ducked.
The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.
We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed—ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on until the shelter petered out and the shorter shells were already bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into when you heard them singing towards you—and then we decided to giveit up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea.
A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them.
They were stretcher-bearers—Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.
I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke of a barrage on the skyline. And comingstraight from it were two little parties each headed by a flag.
We hurried to the place—and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry shells behind them.
I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the shell-bursts how the Germans treated them.
"They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said. "You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery," he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a line of black shell-bursts was fringing the hill. "That's not meant for us."
That understanding, if you can maintain it honourably and trust the enemy to do the same, means everything—everything—to the wounded of both sides. The commander who, sitting safely at his table, condemns his wounded and the enemy's in No Man's Land to death by slow torture without grounds for suspecting trickery, would incur a responsibility such as few men would face the thought of.
Load after load, day and night, mile upon mile in and out of craters across the open and back again—assuredly the Australian stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious amongst his fellow soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.
France, October 10th.
There are next to us at present some Scotsmen.
Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian Mountain Batteries and Infantry were their outstanding friends in Gallipoli. In France—the artillery of a certain famous regular division. And the Scotsmen.
It is quite remarkable how the Australian seems to forgather with the Scotsman wherever in France he meets him. You will see them sharing each other's canteens at the base, yarning round each other's camp fires at the front. Wherever the pipers are, there will the Australians be gathered together.
I asked an Australian the other day how it was that he and his mates had struck up such a remarkable friendship with some of theseHighland regiments now camped near them. "Well, I think it's their sense of humour," he said.
We looked at him rather hard.
"You see, they can understand our jokes," he said. "They don't seem to take us too serious like."
And I think he had just hit it. The Australian has a habit of pulling his mate's leg, and being on his guard against a leg-pull in return. He has sharpened his conversation against the conversation of his friends from the time he could speak—his uncles are generally to blame for it; they started him on the path of repartee by pulling his legs before those same legs had learnt to walk. As a result he is always sparring in conversation—does not mean to be taken seriously. And the Scotsman, cautious and always on the look-out for a feint, is seldom caught by it. If he is, the chances are he gives it back—with interest.
It is a grim, old, dry variety of humour, and it goes with a wonderful, grim, sturdy nature. Few people here see a Scottish regiment passing without waiting, if they have the time, to watch the last square figure disappear down the road. Many look at the perfect swing of the kilts, and the strong bare knees. Formyself I can never take my eyes off their faces. There is a stalwart independence in their strong mouths and foreheads and chins which rivets one's interest. Every face is different from the next. Each man seems to be thinking for himself, and ready to stand up for his own decision against the world. There is a sort of reasoned determination uniting them into a single whole, which, one thinks, must be a very terrible sort of whole to meet in anger.
And it is. The Scotsman is, I think, the most unrelenting fighter that I have come across. The Australian is a most fierce fighter in battle, but he is quite ready to make friends afterwards with his enemy. Once he has taken a German prisoner, he is apt to treat him more liberally than most troops—more so even, I think, than the English soldier—and that is saying a good deal. To the Scotsman, when he escorts his prisoners home, those prisoners are Germans still. He has never forgotten the tremendous losses which Scottish regiments suffered at the beginning of the war. He does not feel kindly towards the men who inflicted them. With the Australian, once the fight is over, the bitterness is left behind. The Scotsman makes prisoners, but he does not make friends.
I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter. He had not been in the Army Service Corps in those days. He was in a certain famous regiment of infantry—joined up in the first weeks of the war as a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once—by some process which I do not now understand—to replace heavy casualties. He was with them through that first winter in their miserable, overflowing apology for a trench. It was a shallow ditch with a wretched parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into the trench over the top of the ground at night—they had actually to approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a marsh—get into it over the parapet, and sit there on the back of the trench until nightfall, sheltered only by the parapet, since the trench was too wet to live in.
At last there came a dawn when the regiment charged, to cover operations elsewhere. They left their ditch, and half-way across No Man's Land John Henderson—it is not his name, but it will do as well as another—John Henderson was hit. He lay out there for a day and a night. A brave officer bandagedhim and passed on to others. John Henderson was brought in at last, delirious, with two bullets in him and a heavy rheumatism. He was invalided out of the service, and as soon as he thought himself well enough he came back and enlisted at another place, under another name, in another corps; he could not face his native village if he remained out of it, and at the same time he could not get into the fight again if the authorities knew he had once been invalided. His dread still was that they might find out. He would not ask for his leave, when it became due, for fear of causing inquiries; he preferred to stick it out at the front.
He was as stern against the German after two years as he was on the day when he enlisted. "It's a funny thing," he said to me, "but Ah was no worrying about anything at all that night, when Ah was lying out there wounded, excepting that they might tak me a prisoner. Ah was kind of deleerious, ye know, but there was always just that thought running through ma head. I just prayed to God that He wad tak ma life."
And, oddly, I found that he was of the same mind still.
That spirit makes great fighting men; andthe friendship between the Scot and the Australian persisted into the fighting. A Scottish unit has been alongside of the Australians for a considerable time. I was told that an Australian working party, while digging a forward trench, was sniped continually by a German machine-gunner out in front of his own line in a shell-hole. One or two men were hit. The line on the flank of the working party happened to be held by Scottish troops. An officer from the Australians had to visit the Scottish line in order to make some preparations for a forthcoming attack.
He found the Scotsmen there thirsting for that sniper's blood, impatiently waiting for dark in order to go over the parapet and get him—they could scarcely be held back even then, straining like hounds in the leash.
The sniper was bagged later, and his machine-gun. It was a mixed affair, Scottish and Australian; and I believe there was an argument as to which owned the machine-gun.
France, September 7th.
On the same day on which the British took Guillemont and reached Ginchy and Leuze Wood; on the same day on which the French pushed their line almost to Combles; at the same time as the British attacked Thiépval from the front, the Australians, for the fifth time, delivered a blow at the wedge which they have all the while been driving into Thiépval from the back, along the ridge whose crest runs northwards from Pozières past Mouquet Farm.
It was a heavy punch this time. I cannot tell of all these fierce struggles here—they shall be told in full some day. In the earliest steps towards Mouquet British troops attacked on the Australian flank, and at least once the fighting which they met with was appallingly heavy. Victorians, South Australians, New South Welshmen have each dealt their blow at it. The Australians have been in heavyfighting, almost daily, for six solid weeks; they started with three of the most terrible battles that have ever been fought—few people, even here, realise how heavy that fighting was. Then the tension eased as they struck those first blows northwards. As they neared Mouquet the resistance increased. Each of the last five blows has been stiffer to drive. On each occasion the wedge has been driven a little farther forward. This time the blow was heavier and the wedge went farther.
The attack was made just as a summer night was reddening into dawn. Away to the rear over Guillemont—for the Australians were pushing almost in an opposite direction from the great British attack—the first light of day glowed angrily on the lower edges of the leaden clouds. You could faintly distinguish objects a hundred yards away. Our field guns, from behind the hills, broke suddenly into a tempest of fire, which tore a curtain of dust from the red shell craters carpeting the ridge. A few minutes later the bombardment lengthened, and the line of Queenslanders, Tasmanians and Western Australians rushed for the trenches ahead of them.
On the left, well down the shoulder of the hill towards Thiépval, was the dust-heap ofcraters and ashes, with odd ends of some shattered timber sticking out of it, which goes by the name of Mouquet Farm. It was a big, important homestead some months ago. To-day it is the wreckage of a log roof, waterlogged in a boundless tawny sea of craters. There is no sign of a trench left in it—the entrances of the dug-outs may be found here and there like rat-holes, about half a dozen of them, behind dishevelled heaps of rubbish. They open into craters now—no doubt each opening has been scratched clear of debris a dozen times. You have to get into some of them by crawling on hands and knees.
The first charge took the Western Australians far beyond the farm. They reached a position two hundred yards farther and started to dig in there. Within an hour or two they had a fairly good trench out amongst the craters well in front of the farm. The farm behind them ought to be solidly ours with such a line in front of it. A separate body of men, some of them Tasmanians, came like a whirlwind on their heels into the farm. The part of the garrison which was lying out in front in a rough line of shell craters found them on top of the craters before they knew that there were British troops anywhere about.They were captured and sent back. The Australians tumbled over the debris into the farm itself.
The fight that raged for two days on this ridge was not one of those in which the enemy put up his hands as soon as our men came on to him. Far on the top of the hill to the right, and in the maze of trenches between, and in the dug-outs of the farm on the left, he was fighting stiffly over the whole front. In the dim light, as the party which was to take the farm rushed into it, a machine-gun was barking at them from somewhere inside that rubbish yard itself. They could hear the bark obviously very close to them, but it was impossible to say where it came from, whether thirty yards away or fifty. They knew it must be firing from behind one of the heaps of rubbish where the entrances of the dug-outs probably were, firing obliquely and to its rear at the men who rushed past it. They chose the heap which seemed most probable, and fired six rifle grenades all at once into it. There was a clatter and dust; the machine-gun went out like a candle. Later they found it lying smashed at the mouth of a shaft there.
MOQUET FARMTHE TUMBLED HEAP OF BRICKS AND TIMBER WHICH THE WORLD KNOWS AS MOQUET FARM
"PAST THE MUD HEAPS SCRAPED BY THE ROAD GANGS""PAST THE MUD HEAPS SCRAPED BY THE ROAD GANGS" (see p. 192)
The Germans fought them from their rat-holes. When a man peered down the darkstaircase shaft, he sometimes received a shot from below, sometimes a rifle grenade fired through a hole in a sandbag barricade, which the Germans had made at the bottom of the stair. Occasionally a face would be seen peering up from below—for they refused to come out—and our men would fling down a bomb or fire a couple of shots. But those on the top of the stair always have the advantage. The Germans were bombed and shot out of entrance after entrance, and at last came up through the only exit left to them. Finding Australians swarming through the place, they surrendered; and the whole garrison of Mouquet Farm was accounted for. Those who were not lying dead in the craters and dust-heap were prisoners. Mouquet Farm was ours, and a line of Australian infantry was entrenching itself far ahead of it.
On the ridge the charge had farther to go. It swarmed over one German trench and on to a more distant one. The Germans fought it from their trench. The rush was a long one, and the German had time to find his feet after the bombardment. But the men he was standing up to were the offshoot of a famous Queensland regiment; and, though the German guardsmen showed more fight than anyGermans we have met, they had no match for the fire of these boys. The trench is said to have been crowded with German dead and wounded. On the left the German tried at once to bomb his way back into the trench he had lost, and for a time he made some headway. Part of the line was driven out of the trench into the craters on our side of it. But before the bombing party had gone far, the Queenslanders were into the trench again with bomb and bayonet, and the trenches on the right flank of the attack were solidly ours.
The Queenslanders who reached this trench and took it, found themselves looking out over a wide expanse of country. Miles in front of them, and far away to their flank, there stretched a virgin land. They were upon the crest of the ridge, and the landscape before them was the country behind the German lines. Except for a gentle rise, somewhat farther northward behind Thiépval, they had reached about the highest point upon the northern end of the ridge.
The connecting trenches, between Mouquet Farm and the ridge above and behind it, were attacked by the Tasmanians. The fire was very heavy, and for a moment it looked as if this part of the line, and the Queenslanders immediately next to it, would not be able to get in. Officer after officer was hit. Leading amongst these was a senior captain, an officer old for his rank, but one who was known to almost every man in the force as one of the most striking personalities in Gallipoli. He had two sons in the Australian force, officers practically of his own rank. He was one of the first men on to Anzac Beach; and was the last Australian who left it: Captain Littler.
I had seen him just as he was leaving for the fight, some hours before. He carried no weapon but a walking-stick. "I have never carried anything else into action," he said, "and I am not going to begin now." He was ill with rheumatism and looked it, and the doctor had advised that he ought not to be with his company. But he came back to them that evening for the fight; and one could see that it made a world of difference to them. He was a man whom his own men swore by. Personally, one breathed more easily knowing that he was with them. It would be his last big fight, he told me.
Half-way through that charge, in the thick of the whirl of it, he was seen standing, leaning heavily upon his stick. It was touch and go at the moment whether the trench was wonor lost. "Are you hit, sir?" asked several around him. Then they noticed a gash in his leg and the blood running from it—and he seemed to be hit through the chest as well.
"I will reach that trench if the boys do," he said.
"Have no fear of that, sir," was the answer. A sergeant asked him for his stick. Then—with the voice of a big man, like his officer, the sergeant shouted, and waved his stick, and took the men on. In the half-dark his figure was not unlike that of his commander. They made one further rush and were in the trench.
They were utterly isolated in the trench when they reached it. A German machine-gun was cracking away in the same trench to their right, firing between them and the trench they had come from. There was barbed wire in front of it. When they tried to force a way with bombs up the trench to the gun, German bombers in craters behind the trench showered bombs on to them. Then a sergeant crawled out between the wire and the machine-gun—crawled on his stomach right up to the gun and shot the gunner with his revolver. "I've killed three of them," he said, as he crawled back. Presently a shell fell on him and shattered him. But our bombers, like the Germans,crept out into craters behind the trench, and bombed the German bombers out of their shelter. That opened the way along the trench, and they found the three machine-gunners, shot as the sergeant had said. The Tasmanians went swiftly along the trench after that, and presently saw a row of good Australian heads in a sap well in front of them. There went up a cheer. Other German guardsmen, who had been lying in craters in front of the trench, and in a scrap of trench beyond, heard the cheering; seeing that there were Australians on both sides of them, they stumbled to their feet and threw up their hands. They were marched off to the rear, and the Tasmanians joined up with the Queenslanders.
So the centre was joined to the right. On the left it was uncertain whether it was joined or not. There was a line of trench to be seen on that side running back towards the German lines. It was merely a more regular line of mud amongst the irregular mud-heaps of the craters; but there were the heads of the men looking out from it—so clearly it was a trench. As the light grew they could make out men leaning on their arms and elbows, looking over the parapet. Every available glass was turned on them, but it was too dark still to see if theywere Australians. Two scouts were sent forward, creeping from hole to hole. Both were shot. A machine-gun was turned at once on to the line of heads. They started hopping back down their tumbled sap towards the German rear. Clearly they were Germans. The machine-gun made fast practice as the line of backs showed behind the parapet.
There were Germans, not Australians, in the trenches on the Tasmanians' left—in the same trench as they. The flank there was in the air. There was nothing to do except to barricade the trench and hold the flank as best they could.
And for the next two days they held it, shelled with every sort of gun and trench mortar, although fresh companies of the Prussian Guard Reserve constantly filed in to the gap which existed between this point and Mouquet Farm. Their old leader, who had promised to reach that trench with them, was not there. They found him lying dead within a few yards of it, straight in front of the machine-gun which they had silenced. So Littler had kept his promise—and lost his life. They had a young officer and a few sergeants. All through that day their numbers slowly dwindled. They held the trench all the next night, and in the grey dawnof the second day a sentry, looking over the trench, saw the Germans a little way outside of it. As he pointed them out he fell back shot through the head. They told the Queenslanders, and the Queenslanders came out instantly and bombed from their side, in rear of the Germans. The Queensland officer was shot dead, but the Germans were cleared out or killed.
That afternoon the Germans attacked that open flank with heavy artillery. For hours shell after shell crashed into the earth around. A heavy battery found the barricade and put its four big shells systematically round it. They reduced the garrison as far as possible, and four or five only were kept by the barricade. They were not all Australians now.
For the end of the Australian work was coming very near. But that occasion deserves a letter to itself.
France, September 19th.
It was before the moment at which my last letter ended that the time had come for the first relieving troops to be drafted into the fight.
I shall not forget the first I saw of them. We were at a certain headquarters not a thousand miles from the enemy's barrage. Messages had dribbled through from each part of the attacking line telling exactly where every portion of it had got to; or rather telling where each portion believed it had got to—as far as it could judge by sticking up its collective head from shell craters and broken-down trench walls and staring out over the limitless sea of craters and crabholes which surrounded it. As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant—and a dozen shell-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun,all very close—the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be. The next business was to fill up certain gaps. An order was dispatched to the supports. They were to send an officer to receive instructions.
He came. He was a man nearing middle age, erect, tough as wire, with lines in his face such as hard fighting and responsibility leave on the face of every soldier.
The representative of authority upon the spot—an Australian who also had faced ugly scenes—explained to him quietly where he wished him to take his men, into such and such a corner, by such and such a route. It meant plunging straight into the thick of the Somme battle, with all its unknown horrors—everyone there knew that. But the new-comer said quietly, "Yes, sir"—and climbed up and out into the light.
It was not an Australian who spoke. That "Yes, sir" came unmistakably from the other side of the Pacific. It was the first of the Canadians upon the Somme battlefield.
An hour or so later an Australian officer, moving along with his men to improve an exposed and isolated trench (a trench which wasoutflanked already, and enfiladed, and in half a dozen ways unhealthy) into a condition to be held against any attacks at all costs—found, coming across the open towards his exposed flank, a line of stalwart men in kilts. His men were dead tired, the enemy's shell-fire was constant and heavy, grey heads and helmets constantly seen behind a red mud parapet, across a hundred yards of red mud craters, proved that the Prussian Guard Reserve was getting ready to counter-attack him. Every message he sent back to Headquarters finished, "But we will hold this trench."
And yet here the new men came—a line of them, stumbling from crater into crater, and by one of those unaccountable chances that occur in battles, only two or three of them were hit in crossing over. They dropped into the trench by the side of the Australians. Their bombers went to the left to relieve the men who had been holding the open flank. They brought in with them keen, fresh faces and bodies, and an all-important supply of bombs. It was better than a draught of good wine.
So it was that the first of the Canadians arrived.
Long before the last Australian platoon left that battered line, these first Canadians werealmost as tired as they. For thirty-six hours they had piled up the same barricades, garrisoned the same shell-holes, were shattered by the same shells. Twenty-four hours after the Canadians came, the vicious bombardment described in the last letter descended on the flank they both were holding. They were buried together by the heavy shell-bursts. They dug each other out. When the garrison became so thin that whole lengths of trench were without a single unwounded occupant, they helped each others' wounded down to the next length, and built another barricade, and held that.
Finally, when hour after hour passed and the incessant shelling never ceased, the garrison was withdrawn a little farther; and then five of them went back to the barricade which the enemy's artillery had discovered. They sat down in the trench behind it. A German battery was trying for it—putting its four big high-explosive shells regularly round it—salvo after salvo as punctual as clockwork. It was only a matter of time before the thing must go.
So the five sat there—Tasmanians and Canadians—and discussed the rival methods of wheat growing in their respective dominions in order to keep their thoughts away from that inevitable shell.
It came at last, through their shelter—slashed one man across the face, killed two and left two—smashed the barricade into a scrap-heap. Then others were brought to stand by. Shells were falling anything from thirty to forty in the minute. One of the remaining Tasmanian sergeants—a Lewis gunner—came back from an errand, crawling, wounded dangerously through the neck. "I don't want to go away," he said. "If I can't work a Lewis gun, I can sit by another chap and tell him how to." In the end, when he was sent away, he was seen crawling on two knees and one hand, guiding with the other hand a fellow gunner who had been hit.
That night a big gun, much bigger than the rest, sent its shells roaring down through the sky somewhere near. The men would be waked by the shriek of each shell and then fall asleep and be waked again by the crash of the explosion. And still they held the trench. And still every other message ended—"But we will hold on."
They had withdrawn a little to where they could hold during the night; but before the grey morning, the moment the bombardment had eased, they crept back again lest the Germans should get there first.
With the light came a reinforcement of new Canadians—grand fellows in great spirit. And the last Australian was during that morning withdrawn. It was the most welcome sight in all the world to see those troops come in. Not that the tired men would ever admit that it was necessary. As one report from an Australian boy said, "The reinforcement has arrived. Captain X—— may tell you that the Australians are done. Rot!"
Whether they were done or whether they were not, they spoke of those Canadian bombers in a way it would have done Canadian hearts good to hear. Australians and Canadians fought for thirty-six hours in those trenches inextricably mixed, working under each others' officers. Their wounded helped each other from the front. Their dead lie and will lie through all the centuries hastily buried beside the tumbled trenches and shell-holes where, fighting as mates, they died.
And the men who had hung on to that flank almost within shouting distance of Mouquet for two wild days and nights—they came out of the fight asking, "Can you tell me if we have got Mouquet Farm?"
We had not. The fierce fighting in thebroken centre had enabled us to hold all the ground gained upon the crest. But through this same gap the Germans had come back against the farm. They swarmed in upon its garrison, driving in gradually the men who were holding that flank. Under heavy shell-fire the line dwindled and dwindled until the Western Australians, who had won the farm and held it for five hours, numbered barely sufficient to make good their retirement. The officer left in charge there, himself wounded, ordered the remnant to withdraw. And the Germans entered the farm again.
But on the crest the line held. The Prussian Guard Reserve counter-attacked it three times, and on the last occasion the Queenslanders had such deadly shooting against Germans in the open as cheered them in spite of all their fatigue. I saw those Queenslanders marching out two days later with a step which would do credit to a Guards regiment going in.
So ended a fight as hard as Australians have ever fought.
Mouquet Farm was taken a fortnight later in a big combined advance of British and Canadians. The Farm itself held out many hours after the line had passed it, and was finally seized by a pioneer battalion, working behind our lines.
Back in France.
It was after seven weeks of very heavy fighting. Even those whose duty took them rarely up amongst the shells were almost worn out with the prolonged strain. Those who had been fighting their turns up in the powdered trenches came out from time to time tired well nigh to death in body, mind and soul. The battle of the Somme still grumbled night and day behind them. But for those who emerged a certain amount of leave was opened.
It was like a plunge into forgotten days. War seemed to end at the French quayside. Staff officers, brigadier-generals, captains, privates and lance-corporals—they were all just Englishmen off to their homes. They jostled one another up the gangway—I never heard a rough word in that dense crowd. They lay side by side outside the saloon of the Channel turbine steamer. A corporal withhis head half in the doorway, too seasick to know that it was fair in the path of a major-general's boots; a general Staff officer and a French captain with their backs propped against the oak panelling and their ribs against somebody else's baggage; a subaltern of engineers with his head upon their feet; a hundred others packed on the stairs and up to the deck; and a horrible groaning from the direction of the lavatories—it was truly the happiest moment in all their lives.
The crossing passed like a dream—scarcely noticed. Seven weeks of strain can leave you too tired almost to think. A journey in a comfortable railway compartment through prim, hazy English fields, the carriage blue with smoke from the pipes of its inhabitants (a Canadian, three or four Englishmen and a couple of Australians), has gone almost unremembered. As the custom is in England, they were mostly ensconced behind their newspapers, although there is more geniality in an English railway carriage to-day than was usual before the war. But most people in that train, I think, were too tired for conversation.
It was the coming into London that left such an impression as some of us will never forget. Some of us knew London well beforethe war. It is the one great city in the world where you never saw the least trace of corporate emotion. It divides itself off into districts for the rich and districts for the poor, and districts for all the grades in between the two, which are the separate layers in the big, frowning edifice of British society; they may have had some sort of feeling for their class or their profession—the lawyer proud of his Inns of Court and of the tradition of the London Bar, the doctor proud of London schools of medicine, and the Thames engineer even proud of the work that is turned out upon the Thames. But there was no more common feeling or activity in the people of London than there would be common energy in a heap of sand grains. They would have looked upon it as sheer weakness to exhibit any interest in the doings even of their neighbours.
The battle of the Somme had begun about nine weeks before when this particular train, carrying the daily instalment of men on leave from it, began to wind its way in past the endless back-gardens and yellow brick houses, every one the replica of the next, and the numberless villa chimneys and chimney-pots which fence the southern approaches of the great capital. They are tight, compact littlefortresses, those English villas, each jealously defended against its neighbour and the whole world by the sentiment within, even more than by the high brick wall around it. But if they were all rigidly separate from each other, there was one thing that bound them all together just for that moment.
It happened in every cottage garden, in every street that rattled past underneath the railway bridges, in every slum-yard, from every window, upper and lower. As the leave train passed the people all for the moment dropped whatever they were doing and ran to wave a hand at it. The children in every garden dropped their games and ran to the fence and clambered up to wave these tired men out of sight. The servant at the upper window let her work go and waved; the mother of the family and the girls in the sitting-room downstairs came to the window and waved; the woman washing in the tub in the back-yard straightened herself up and waved; the little grocer out with his wife and the perambulator waved, and the wife waved, and the infant in the perambulator waved; the boys playing pitch-and-toss on the pavement ran towards the railway bridge and waved; the young lady out for a walk withher young man waved—not at all a suppressed welcome, quite the reverse of half-hearted; the young man waved, much more demurely, but still he did wave. The flapper on the lawn threw down her tennis-racket and simply flung kisses; and her two young brothers expressed themselves quite as emphatically in their own manner; the old man at the corner and the grocer-boy from his cart waved. For a quarter of an hour, while that train wound in through the London suburbs, every human being that was near dropped his work and gave it a welcome.
I have seen many great ceremonies in England, and they have left me as cold as ice. There have been big set pieces even in this war, with brass bands and lines of policemen and cheering crowds and long accounts of it afterwards in the newspapers. But I have never seen any demonstration that could compare with this simple spontaneous welcome by the families of London. It was quite unrehearsed and quite unreported. No one had arranged it, and no one was going to write big headlines about it next day. The people in one garden did not even know what the people in the next garden were doing—or want to know. The servant at the upperwindow did not know that the mistress was at the lower window doing exactly as she was, and vice versa. For the first time in one's experience one had experienced a genuine, whole-hearted, common feeling running through all the English people—every man, woman and child, without distinction, bound in one common interest which, for the time being, was moving the whole nation. And I shall never forget it.
It was the most wonderful welcome—I am not exaggerating when I say that it was one of the most wonderful and most inspiriting sights that I have ever seen. I do not know whether the rulers of the country are aware of it. But I do not believe for a moment that this people can go back after the war to the attitude by which each of those families was to all the others only so much prospective monetary gain or loss.
France, November 13th.
Last week an Australian force made its attack in quite a different area of the Somme battle.
The sky was blue in patches, with cold white clouds between. The wind drove icily. There had been practically no rain for two days.
We were in a new corner. The New Zealanders had pushed right through to the comparatively green country just here—and so had the British to north and south of it. We were well over the slope of the main ridge, up which the Somme battle raged for the first three months. Pozières, the highest point, where Australians first peeped over it, lay miles away to our left rear. From the top of the ridge behind you, looking back over your left shoulder, you could just see a few distant broken tree stumps. I think they marked the site of that old nightmare.
We were looking down a long even slope to a long up-slope beyond. The country around us was mostly brown-mud shell-holes. Not like the shell-holes of that blasted hill-top of two months back—I have never seen anything quite like that, though they say that Guillemont, which I have not seen, is as devastated. In this present area there is green grass between the rims of the craters. But not enough green grass to matter. The general colour of the country on the British side is brown—all gradations of it—from thin, sloppy, grey-brown mud, trampled liquid with the feet of men and horses, to dull, putty-like brown mud so thick that, when you get your foot into it, you have a constant problem of getting it out again.
For it is the country over which the fight has passed. As we advance, we advance always on to the area which has been torn with shells—where the villages and the trenches and the surface of the green country have been battered and shattered, first by our guns and then by the German guns, until they have made a hell out of heaven.
And always just ahead of us, a mile or so behind the German lines, there is heaven smiling—you can see it clearly; in this part, up theopposite slope of the wide, open valley. There is the green country on which the Germans are always being driven back, and up which this monstrous engine of war has not yet begun its slow, gruesome climb. There are the beautiful green woods fading to soft autumn brown and yellow—the little red roofs in the trees, an empty village in the foreground—you can see the wet mud shining in its street and the white trickle of water down the centre of the road.
Down our long muddy hill-slope, near where the knuckles of it dip out of sight into the bottom of the valley, one notices a line of heads. In some places they are clear and in others they cannot be seen. But we guess that it is the line ready to go out.
At the top of the opposite up-slope the tower of Bapaume town hall showed up behind the trees. We made out that the hands of the clock were at the hour—but I have heard others say that they were permanently at half-past five, and others a quarter past four—it is one of those matters which become very important on these long dark evenings, and friendships are apt to be broken over it. The clock tower, unfortunately, disappeared finally at eighteen minutes past eleven yesterday morning, so the controversy is never likely to be settled.
The bombardment broke out suddenly from behind us. We saw the long line of men below clamber on to the surface, a bayonet gleaming here and there, and begin to walk steadily between the shell-holes towards the edge of the hill. From where we were you could not see the enemy's trench in the valley—only the brown mud of crater rims down to the hill's edge. And I think the line could not see it either, in most parts at any rate. They would start from their muddy parapet, and over the wet grass, with one idea above all others in the back of every man's head—when shall we begin to catch sight of the enemy?
It is curious how in this country of shell craters you can look at a trench without realising that it is a trench. A mud-heap parapet is not so different from the mud-heap round a crater's rim, except that it is more regular. Even to discover your own trench is often like finding a bush road. You are told that there is a trench over there and you cannot miss it. But, once you have left your starting-point, it looks as if there were nothing else in the world but a wilderness of shell craters. Then you realise that there is a certain regularity in the irregular mud-heaps some way ahead of you—the top of a muddy steel helmet moves between two earth-heaps on the ground's surface—then another helmet and another; and you have found your bearings. That is clearly the trench they spoke about.
Well, finding the German trench seems to be much the same experience, varied by a multitude of bullets singing past like bees, and with the additional thought ever present to the mind—when will the enemy's barrage burst on you? When it does come, you do not hear it coming—there is too much racket in the air for your ears to catch the shell whistling down as you are accustomed to. There are big black crashes and splashes near by, without warning—scarcely noticed at first. In the charge itself men often do not notice other men hit—we, looking on from far behind, did not notice that. A man may be slipping in a shell-hole, or in the mud, or in some wire—often he gets up again and runs on. It is only afterwards that you realise....
Across the mud space there were suddenly noticed a few grey helmets watching—a long, long distance away. Then the grey helmets moved, and other helmets moved, and bunched themselves up, and hurried about like a disturbed hive, and settled into a line of menfiring fast and coolly. That was the German trench.
It was fairly packed already in one part. The rattle of fire grew quickly. The chatter of one machine-gun—then another, and another, were added to it. Our shells were bursting occasionally flat in the face of the Germans—one big bearded fellow—they are close enough for those details to be seen now—takes a low burst of our shrapnel full in his eyes. A high-explosive shell bursts on the parapet, and down go three others. But they are firing calmly through all this.
Three or four Germans suddenly get up from some hole in No Man's Land, and bolt for their trench like rabbits. Within forty yards of the German parapet the leading men in our line find themselves alone. The line has dwindled to a few scanty groups. These are dropping suddenly—their comrades cannot say whether they are taking cover in shell-holes, or whether they have been hit. The Germans are getting up a machine-gun on the parapet straight opposite. The first two men fall back shot. Two or three others struggle up to it—they are shot too; our men are making desperate shooting to keep down that machine-gun. But the Germans get it up. It cracksoverhead. In this part of the line the attack is clearly finished.
One remembers a day, some months back, when a Western Australian battalion, after a heavy bombardment of its trench, found a German line coming up over the crest of the hill about two hundred yards away. The Western Australians stood up well over the parapet, and fired until the remnant of that line sank to the ground within forty or fifty yards of them. That line was a line of the Prussian Guard Reserve. We have had that opportunity three or four times in the Somme battle. This time it was the Germans who had it. The Germans were of the Prussian Foot Guards—and it was Western Australians who were attacking.
In another part, where the South Australians attacked, they found fewer Germans in the trench. They could see the Germans in small groups getting their bombs ready to throw—but they were into the trench before the Germans had time to hold them up. They killed or captured all the German garrison, and destroyed a machine-gun, and set steadily to improve the trench for holding it.
Everything seemed to go well in this part, except that they could get no touch with anyother of our troops in the trench. As far as they knew the other portions of the attack had succeeded, as well as theirs. And then things changed suddenly. After an hour a message did come from Australians farther along in the same trench—a message for urgent help. At the same time a similar message came from the other flank as well. A shower of stick-bombs burst with a formidable crash from one side. A line of Germans was seen, coming steadily along in single file against the other end of the trench. A similar shower of crashes descended from that direction. A machine-gun began to crackle down the trench. Our men fought till their bombs, and all the German bombs they could find, were gone. Finally the Germans began to gain on them from both ends, and the attack here, too, was over. They were driven from the trench.