The British trench comes to life—The line goes forward—A modern charge no chance for heroics—Machine-like forward movement—The most wicked sound in a battle—The first machine gun—A beautiful barrage—The dreaded "shorts"—The barrage lifts to the second line—The leap into the trenches—Figures in green with hands up—Captured from dugouts—A man who made his choice and paid the price—German answering fire—Second part of the program—Again the protecting barrage—Success—Waves of men advancing behind waves of shell fire—Prisoners in good fettle—Brigadier-General Philip Howell.
The British trench comes to life—The line goes forward—A modern charge no chance for heroics—Machine-like forward movement—The most wicked sound in a battle—The first machine gun—A beautiful barrage—The dreaded "shorts"—The barrage lifts to the second line—The leap into the trenches—Figures in green with hands up—Captured from dugouts—A man who made his choice and paid the price—German answering fire—Second part of the program—Again the protecting barrage—Success—Waves of men advancing behind waves of shell fire—Prisoners in good fettle—Brigadier-General Philip Howell.
Now the British trench came to life. What seemed like a row of khaki-colored washbasins bottom side up and fast to a taut string rose out of the cut in the earth on the other side of the valley, and after them came the shoulders and bodies of British soldiers who began climbing over the parapet just as a man would come up the cellar stairs. This was the charge.
Five minutes the barrage or curtain of fire was to last and five minutes was the allotted time for these English soldiers to go from theirs to the German trench which they were to take. So many paces to the minute was the calculation of their rate of progress across that dreadful No Man's Land, where machine guns and German curtains of fire had wrought death in the preceding charge of July 1st.
Every detail of the men's equipment was visible as their full-length figures appeared on the background of the gray-green slope. They were entirely exposed to fire from the German trench. Any tyro with a rifle on the German parapet could have brought down a man with every shot. Yet none fell; all were going forward.
I would watch the line over a hundred yards of breadth immediately in front of me, determined not to have my attention diverted to other parts of the attack and to make the most of this unique opportunity of observation in the concrete.
The average layman conceives of a charge as a rush. So it is on the drill-ground, but not where its movement is timed to arrival on the second before a hissing storm of death, and the attackers must not be winded when there is hot work awaiting them in close encounters around traverses and at the mouths of dugouts. No one was sprinting ahead of his companions; no one crying, "Come on, boys!" no one swinging his steel helmet aloft, for he needed it for protection from any sudden burst of shrapnel. All were advancing at a rapid pace, keeping line and intervals except where they had to pass around shell-craters.
If this charge had none of the display of other days it had all the more thrill because of its workmanlike and regulated progress. No get-drunk-six-days-of-the-week-and-fight-like-h—l-on-Sunday business of the swashbuckling age before Thiepval. Every man must do his part as coolly as if he were walking a tight rope with no net to catch him, with death to be reckoned with in the course of a systematic evolution.
"Very good! A trifle eager there! Excellent!" Howell sweeping the field with his glasses was speaking in the expert appreciation of a football coach watching his team at practice. "No machine guns yet," he said for the second time, showing the apprehension that was in his mind.
I, too, had been listening for the staccato of the machine gun, which is the most penetrating, mechanical and wicked, to my mind, of all the instruments of the terrible battle orchestra, as sinister as the clicking of a switch which you know will derail a passenger train. The men were halfway to the German trench, now. Two and a half minutes of the allotted five had passed. In my narrow sector of vision not one man had yet fallen. They might have been in a manoeuver and their goal a deserted ditch. Looking right and left my eye ran along the line of sturdy, moving backs which seemed less concerned than the spectator. Not only because you were on their side but as the reward of their steadiness, you wanted them to conquer that stretch of first-line fortifications. Any second you expected to see the first shell-burst of the answering German barrage break in the midst of them.
Then came the first sharp, metallic note which there is no mistaking, audible in the midst of shell-screams and gun-crashes, off to the right, chilling your heart, quickening your observation with awful curiosity and drawing your attention away from the men in front as you looked for signs of a machine gun's gathering of a human harvest. Rat-tat-tat-tat in quick succession, then a pause before another series instead of continuous and slower cracks, and you knew that it was not a German but a British machine gun farther away than you had thought.
More than ever you rejoiced in every one of the bursts of stored lightning thick as fireflies in the blanket of smoke over the German trench, for every one meant a shower of bullets to keep down enemy machine guns. The French say "Belle!" when they see such a barrage, and beautiful is the word for it to those men who were going across the field toward this shell-made nimbus looking too soft in the bright sunlight to have darts of death. All the shell-bursts seemed to be in a breadth of twenty or thirty yards. How could guns firing at a range of from two to five thousand yards attain such accuracy!
The men were three-quarters of the distance, now. As they drew nearer to the barrage another apprehension numbed your thought. You feared to see a "short"—one of the shells from their own guns which did not carry far enough bursting among the men—and this, as one English soldier who had been knocked over by a short said, with dry humor, was "very discouraging, sir, though I suppose it is well meant." A terrible thing, that, to the public, killing your own men with your own shells. It is better to lose a few of them in this way than many from German machine guns by lifting the barrage too soon, but fear of public indignation had its influence in the early days of British gunnery. The better the gunnery the closer the infantry can go and the greater its confidence. A shell that bursts fifteen or twenty yards short means only the slightest fault in length of fuse, error of elevation, or fault in registry, back where the muzzles are pouring out their projectiles from the other side of the slope. And there were no shorts that day. Every shell that I saw burst was "on." It was perfect gunnery.
Now it seemed that the men were going straight into the blanket over the trenches still cut with flashes. Some forward ones who had become eager were at the edge of the area of dust-spatters from shrapnel bullets in the white chalk. Didn't they know that another twenty yards meant death? Was their methodical phlegm such that they acted entirely by rule? No, they knew their part. They stopped and stood waiting. Others were on the second of the five minutes' allowance as suddenly all the flashes ceased and nothing remained over the trench but the mantle of smoke. The barrage had been lifted from the first to the second-line German trench as you lift the spray of a hose from one flower bed to another.
This was the moment of action for the men of the charge, not one of whom had yet fired a shot. Each man was distinctly outlined against the white background as, bayonets glistening and hands drawn back with bombs ready to throw, they sprang forward to be at the mouths of the dugouts before the Germans came out. Some leaped directly into the trench, others ran along the parapet a few steps looking for a vantage point or throwing a bomb as they went before they descended. It was a quick, urgent, hit-and-run sort of business and in an instant all were out of sight and the fighting was man to man, with the guns of both sides keeping their hands off this conflict under ground. The entranced gaze for a moment leaving that line of chalk saw a second British wave advancing in the same way as the first from the British first-line trench.
"All in along the whole line. Bombing their way forward there!" said Howell, with matter-of-fact understanding of the progress of events.
I blinked tired eyes and once more pressed them to the twelve diameters of magnification, every diameter having full play in the clear light. I saw nothing but little bursts of smoke rising out of the black streak in the chalk which was the trench itself, each one from an egg of high explosive thrown at close quarters but not numerous enough to leave any doubt of the result and very evidently against a few recalcitrants who still held out.
Next, a British soldier appeared on the parapet and his attitude was that of one of the military police directing traffic at a busy crossroads close to the battle front. His part in the carefully worked out system was shown when a figure in green came out of the trench with hands held up in the approved signal of surrender the world over. The figure was the first of a file with hands up—and very much in earnest in this attitude, too, which is the one that the British and the French consider most becoming in a German—who were started on toward the first-line British trench. All along the front small bands of prisoners were appearing in the same way. There would have been something ridiculous about it, if it had not been so real.
For the most part, the prisoners had been breached from dugouts which had no exit through galleries after the Germans had been held fast by the barrage. It was either a case of coming out at once or being bombed to death in their holes; so they came out.
"A live prisoner would be of more use to his fatherland one day than a dead one, even though he had no more chance to fight again than a rabbit held up by the ears," as one of the German prisoners said.
"More use to yourself, too," remarked his captor.
"That had occurred to me, also," admitted the German.
During the filing out of the different bags of prisoners two incidents passed before my eye with a realism that would have been worth a small fortune to a motion picture man if equally dramatic ones had not been posed. A German sprang out of the trench, evidently either of a mind to resist or else in a panic, and dropped behind one of the piles of chalk thrown up in the process of excavation. A British soldier went after him and he held up his hands and was dispatched to join one of the groups. Another who sought cover in the same way was of different temperament, or perhaps resistance was inspired by the fact that he had a bomb. He threw it at a British soldier who seemed to dodge it and drop on all fours, the bomb bursting behind him. Bombs then came from all directions at the German. There was no time to parley; he had made his choice and must pay the price. He rolled over after the smoke had risen from the explosions and then remained a still green blot against the chalk. A British soldier bent over the figure in a hasty examination and then sprang into the trench, where evidently he was needed.
"The Germans are very slow with their shell fire," said Howell in the course of his ejaculations, as he watched the operations.
Answering barrages, including a visitation to our own position which was completely exposed, were in order. Howell himself had been knocked over by a shell here during the last attack. One explanation given later by a German officer for the tardiness of the German guns was that the staff had thought the British too stupid to attack from that direction, which pleased Howell as showing the advantage of racial reputation as an aid to strategy.
However, the German artillery was not altogether unresponsive. It was putting some "krumps" into the neighborhood of the British first line and one of the bands of prisoners ran into the burst of a five-point-nine. Ran is the word, for they were going as fast as they could to get beyond their own curtain of fire, which experience told them would soon be due. I saw this lot submerged in the spout of smoke and dust but did not see how many if any were hit, as the sound of a machine gun drew my attention across the dead grass of the old No Man's Land to the German—I should say the former German—first-line trench where an Englishman had his machine gun on theparadosand was sweeping the field across to the German second-line trench. Perhaps some of the Germans who had run away from the barrage at the start had been hiding in shell-craters or had shown signs of moving or there were targets elsewhere.
So far so good, as Howell remarked. That supposedly impregnable German fortification that had repulsed the first British attempt had been taken as easily as if it were a boy's snow fort, thanks to the patent curtain of fire and the skill that had been developed by battle lessons. It was retribution for the men who had fallen in vain on July 1st. Howell was not thinking of that, but of the second objective in the afternoon's plan. By this time not more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed since the first charge had "gone over the lid." Out of the cut in the welt of chalk the line of helmets rose again and England started across the field toward the German second-line trench, which was really a part of the main first-line fortification on the slope, in the same manner as toward the first.
What about their protecting barrage? My eyes had been so intently occupied that my ears had been uncommunicative and in a start of glad surprise I realized that the same infernal sweep of shells was going overhead and farther up on the Ridge fireflies were flashing out of the mantle of smoke that blanketed the second line. Now the background better absorbed the khaki tint and the figures of the men became more and more hazy until they disappeared altogether as the flashes in front of them ceased. Howell had to translate from the signals results which I could not visually verify. One by one items of news appeared in rocket flashes through the gathering haze which began to obscure the slope itself.
"I think we have everything that we expected to take this afternoon," said Howell, at length. "The Germans are very slow to respond. I think we rather took them by surprise."
They had not even begun shelling their old first line, which they ought to have known was now in British possession and which they must have had registered, as a matter of course; or possibly their own intelligence was poor and they had no real information of what had been proceeding on the slope under the clouds of smoke, or their wires had been cut and their messengers killed by shell fire. This was certain, that the British in the first-line German trench had a choice lot of dugouts in good condition for shelter, as the patent barrage does not smash in the enemy's homes, only closes the doors with curtains of death.
"I hope you're improving your dugouts," British soldiers would call out across No Man's Land, "as that is all the better for us when we take them!"
We stayed on till Howell's expert eye had had its fill of details, with no burst of shells to interfere with our comfort; though by the rules we ought to have had a good "strafing," which was another reminder of my debt to the German for his consideration to the American correspondent at the British front.
"What do you think of our patent barrage, now?" said the artillery general returning from his post of observation.
"Wonderful!" was all that one could say.
"A good show!" said Howell.
The rejoicing of both was better expressed in their eyes than in words. Good news, too, for the corps commander smoking his pipe and waiting, and for every battalion engaged—oh, particularly for the battalions!
"Congratulations!" The exclamation was passed back and forth as we met other officers on our way to brigade headquarters in a dugout on the hillside, where Howell's felicitations to the happy brigadier on the way that his men had gone in were followed by suggestions and a discussion about future plans, which I left to them while I had a look through the brigadier's telescope at Thiepval Ridge under the patterns of shell fire of average days, which proved that the Germans were making no attempt at a counter-attack to recover lost ground. I imagined that the German staff was dumfounded to hear that their redoubtable old first line could possibly have been taken with so little fireworks.
It was when I came to the guns on our return that I felt an awe which I wanted to translate into appreciation. They were firing slowly now or not firing at all, and the idle gunners were lounging about. They had not seen their own curtain of fire or the infantry charge; they had been as detached from the action as the crew of a battleship turret. It was their accuracy and their coördination with the infantry and the infantry's coördination with the barrage that had expressed better than volumes of reports the possibilities of the offensive with waves of men advancing behind waves of shell fire, which was applied in the taking of Douaumont later and must be the solution of the problem of a decision on the Western front.
Above the communication trenches the steel helmets of the British and the gray fatigue caps of German prisoners were bobbing toward the rear and at the casualty clearing station the doctor said, "Very light!" in answer to the question about losses. The prisoners were in unusually good fettle even for men safe out of shell fire; many had no chalk on their clothes to indicate a struggle. They had been sitting in their dugouts and walked out when an Englishman appeared at the door. Yes, they said that they had been caught just before relief, and the relief had been carried out in an unexpected fashion. If they must be taken they, too, liked the patent barrage.
"I'll let you know when there's to be another show," said Howell, as we parted at corps headquarters; but none could ever surpass this one in its success or its opportunity of intimate observation.
This was the last time I saw him. A few days later, on one of his tours to study the ground for an attack, he was killed by a shell. Army custom permits the mention of his name because he is dead. He was a steadfast friend, an able soldier, an upright, kindly, high-minded gentleman; and when I was asked, not by the lady who had never kept up her interest so long in anything as in this war, but by another, if living at the front is a big strain, the answer is in the word that comes that a man whom you have just seen in the fulness of life and strength is gone.
What is Canada fighting for?—The Kaiser has brought Canadians together—The land of immense distances—Canada's unfaltering spirit—Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and sentimentally—Ypres salient mud—Canadians invented the trench raid—A wrestling fight in the mud—Germans "try it on" the Canadians—"The limit" in artillery fire—Maple Leaf spirit—Baseball talk on the firing line—A good sprinkling of Americans.
What is Canada fighting for?—The Kaiser has brought Canadians together—The land of immense distances—Canada's unfaltering spirit—Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and sentimentally—Ypres salient mud—Canadians invented the trench raid—A wrestling fight in the mud—Germans "try it on" the Canadians—"The limit" in artillery fire—Maple Leaf spirit—Baseball talk on the firing line—A good sprinkling of Americans.
One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking of Courcelette.
When I was home in the winter of 1915-16, for the first time the border between the United States and Canada drew a line in sharp contrasts. The newspapers in Canada had their casualty lists, parents were giving their sons and wives their husbands to go three thousand miles to endure hardship and risk death for a cause which to them had no qualifications of a philosophic internationalism. Everything was distinct. Sacrifice and fortitude, life and death, and the simple meaning words were masters of the vocabulary.
Some people might ask why Canada should be pouring out her blood in Europe; what had Flanders to do with her? England was fighting to save her island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what was Canada fighting for? As I understood it, she was fighting for Canada. A blow had been struck against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic, and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back.
She had had no great formative war. Pardeburg was a kind of expedition of brave men, like the taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep into the consciousness of the average Canadian, who knew only that some neighbor of his had been in South Africa. Our own formative war was the Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought brother. The Revolution made a mold which, perhaps, instead of being impressed upon succeeding generations of immigrants may have only given a veneer to them. A war may be necessary to make them molten for another shaping.
No country wanted war less than Canada, but when war came its flame made Canada molten with Canadian patriotism. As George III. brought the Carolinas and Massachusetts together, so the Kaiser has brought the Canadian provinces together. The men from that cultivated, rolling country of Southern Ontario, from New Brunswick and the plains and the coast and a quota from the neat farms of Quebec have met face to face, not on railroad trains, not through representatives in Parliament or in convention, but in billets and trenches. Whatever Canada is, she is not small. She is particularly the land of immense distances; her breadth is greater than that of the United States. All of the great territorial expanse of Canada in its manhood, in the thoughts of those at home, was centered in a few square miles of Flanders.
I was in Canada when only the first division had had its trial and recruiting was at full blast; and again when three hundred and fifty thousand had joined the colors and Canada, now feeling the full measure of loss of life, seemed unfaltering, which was the more remarkable in a new country where livelihood is easy to gain and Opportunity knocks at the door of youth if he has only the energy to take her by the hand and go her way. I may add that not all the youth about Toronto or any other town who gave as their reason for not enlisting that they were American citizens actually were. They were not "tooproudto fight," whatever other reason they had, for they had no pride; and if honest Quakers they would not have given a lying excuse.
Out in France I heard talk about this Canadian brigade being better than that one, and that an Eastern Canada man wanted no leading from a Western Canada man, and that not all who were winning military crosses were hardy frontiersmen but some were lawyers and clerks in Montreal or Toronto—or should I put Toronto first, or perhaps Ottawa or Winnipeg—and more talk expressive of the rivalry which generals say is good for spirit of corps. Moose Jaw Street was across from Halifax Avenue and Vancouver Road from Hamilton Place in the same community.
As I was not connected with any part of Canada, the Canadians, with their Maple Leaf emblem, were all Canadians to me; men across the border which we pass in coming and going without change of language or steam-heated cars or iced-water tanks. Some Canadians think that the United States with its more than a hundred millions may feel patronizing toward their eight millions, when after Courcelette if a Canadian had patronized the United States I should not have felt offended. I have even heard some fools say that the two countries might yet go to war, which shows how absurd some men have to be in order to attract attention. All of this way of thinking on both sides should be placed on a raft in the middle of Lake Erie and supplied with bombs to fight it out among themselves under a curtain of fire; and their relatives ought to feel a deep relief after the excursion steamers that came from Toronto, Cleveland and Buffalo to see the show had returned home.
To listen to certain narrators you might think that it was the Allies who always got the worst of it in the Ypres salient, but the German did not like the salient any better than they. I never met anybody who did like it. German prisoners said that German soldiers regarded it as a sentence of death to be sent to the salient. There are many kinds of mud and then there is Ypres salient mud, which is all kinds together with a Belgian admixture. I sometimes thought that the hellish outbreaks by both sides in this region were due to the reason which might have made Job run amuck if all the temper he had stored up should have broken out in a storm.
This is certain, that the Canadians took their share in the buffets in the mud, not through any staff calculation but partly through German favoritism and the workings of German psychology. Consider that the first volunteer troops to be put in the battle line in France weeks before any of Kitchener's Army was the first Canadian division, in answer to its own request for action, which is sufficient soldierly tribute of a commander to Canadian valor! That proud first division, after it had been well mud-soaked and had its hand in, was caught in the gas attack. It refused to yield when it was only human to yield, and stood resolute in the fumes between the Germans and success and even counter-attacked. Moreover, it was Canadians who introduced the trench raid.
If the Canadians did not particularly love the Germans, do you see any reason why the Germans should love the Canadians? It was unpleasant to suffer repulse by troops from an unmilitary, new country. Besides, German psychology reasoned that if Canadians at the front were made to suffer heavy losses the men at home would be discouraged from enlisting. Why not? What had Canada to gain by coming to fight in France? It does not appear an illogical hypothesis until you know the Canadians.
However, it must not be understood that other battalions, brigades and divisions, English and Scotch, did not suffer as heavily as the Canadians. They did; and do not forget that in the area which has seen the hardest, bloodiest, meanest, nastiest, ghastliest fighting in the history of the world the Germans, too, have had their full share of losses. The truth is that if any normal man was stuck in the mud of the Ypres salient and another wanted his place he would say, "Take it! I'm only trying to get out! We've got equally bad morasses in the Upper Yukon;" and retire to a hill and set up a machine gun.
When a Canadian officer was asked if he had organized some trenches that his battalion had taken his reply, "How can you organize pea soup?" filled a long-felt want in expression to characterize the nature of trench-making in that kind of terrain. Yet in that sea of slimy and infected mush men have fought for the possession of cubic feet of the mixture as if it had the qualities of Balm of Gilead—which was also logical. What appears most illogical to the outsider is sometimes most logical in war. It was a fight for mastery, and mastery is the first step in a war of frontal positions.
Many lessons the Canadians had to learn about organization and staff work, about details of discipline which make for homogeneity of action, and the divisions that came to join the first one learned their lessons in the Ypres salient school, which gave hard but lasting tuition. I was away when at St. Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient can provide. The time was winter, when chill water filled the shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian. There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this, holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the offensive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. The Canadians proved that they could be stubborn and that their soldiers, even if they had not had the directing system of an army staff that had prepared for forty years, with two years of experience could act on their own in resisting as well as in attacking. "Our men! our men!" the officers would say. That was it: Canada's men, learning tactics in face of German tactics and holding their own!
When all was peaceable up and down the line, with the Grand Offensive a month away, the Germans once more "tried it on" the Canadians in the Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the positions were all in favor of the Germans with room to plant two guns to one around the bulging British line. For many days they had been quietly registering as they massed their artillery for their last serious effort during the season of 1916 in the north.
Anything done to the Canadians always came close home to me; and news of this attack and of its ferocity to anyone knowing the positions was bound to carry apprehension, lasting only until we learned that the Canadians were already counter-attacking, which set your pulse tingling and little joy-bells ringing in your head. It meant, too, that the Germans could not have developed any offensive that would be serious to the situation as a whole at that moment, in the midst of preparations for the Somme. Nothing could be seen of the fight, even had one known that it was coming, in that flat region where everyone has to follow a communication trench with only the sky directly overhead visible.
There was an epic quality in the story of what happened as you heard it from the survivors. It was an average quiet morning in the first-line trenches when the German hurricane broke from all sides; but first-line trenches is not the right phrase, for all the protection that could be made was layers of sandbags laboriously filled and piled to a thickness sufficient to stop a bullet at short range.
What luxury in security were the dugouts of the Somme hills compared to the protection that could be provided here! When the first series of bursts announced the storm you could not descend a flight of steps to a cavern whose roof was impenetrable even by five-hundred-pound shells. Little houses of sandbags with corrugated tin roofs, in some instances level with the earth, which any direct hit could "do in" were the best that generous army resources could permit. High explosive shells must turn such breastworks into rags and heaps of earth. There was nothing to shoot at if a man tried to stick to the parapet, for fresh troops fully equipped for their task back in the German trenches waited on demolition of the Canadian breastworks before advancing under their own barrage. Shrapnel sent down its showers, while the trench walls were opened in great gaps and tossed heavenward. Officers clambered about in the midst of the spouts of dust and smoke over the piles and around the craters, trying to keep in touch with their men, when it was a case of every man taking what cover he could.
"The limit!" as the men said. "The absolute limit in an artillery concentration!"
But they did not go—not until they had orders. This was their kind of discipline under fire; they "stayed on the job." One group charged out beyond the swath of fire to meet the Germans in the open and there fought to the death in expression of characteristic initiative. When word was passed to retire, some grudgingly held on to fight the outnumbering Germans in the midst of the débris and escaped only by passing through the German barrage placed between the first and second line to cover the German advance on the second. The supports themselves under the carefully arranged pattern of shell fire held as the rallying-points of the survivors, who found the communication trenches so badly broken that it was as well to keep in the open. Little knots of men with their defenses crushed held from the instinctive sense of individual stubbornness.
To tell the whole story of that day as of many other days where a few battalions were engaged, giving its fair due to each group in the struggle, is not for a correspondent who had to cover the length of the battle line and sees the whole as an example of Maple Leaf spirit. The rest is for battalion historians, who will find themselves puzzled about an action where there was little range of vision and this obscured by shell-smoke and the preoccupation of each man trying to keep cover and do his own part to the death.
In the farmhouses afterward, as groups of officers tried to assemble their experiences, I had the feeling of being in touch with the proof of all that I had seen in Canada months previously. Losses had been heavy for the battalions engaged though not for the Canadian corps as a whole, no heavier than British battalions or the Germans had suffered in the salient. Canada happened to get the blow this time.
The men, after a night's sleep and writing home that they were safe and how comrades had died, might wander about the roads or make holiday as they chose. They were not casual about the fight, but outspoken and frank, Canadian fashion. They realized what they had been through and spoke of their luck in having survived. From the fields came the cry of, "Leave that to me!" as a fly rose from the bat, or, "Out on first!" as men took a rest from shell-curves and high explosives with baseball curves and hot liners between the bases, which was very homelike there in Flanders. Which of the players was American one could not tell by voice or looks, for the climate along the border makes a type of complexion and even of features with the second generation which is readily distinguished from the English type.
"What part of Canada do you come from?" asked an officer of a private.
"Out west, sir!"
"What part of the west?"
"'Way out west, sir!"
"An officer is asking you. Be definite."
"Well, the State of Washington, sir."
There was a good sprinkling of Americans in the battle, including officers; but on the baseball field and the battlefield they were a part of the whole, performing their task in a way that left no doubt of their quality. Whether the spirit of adventure or the principle at stake had brought her battalions to Flanders, Canada had proved that she could be stubborn. She was to have her chance to prove that she could be quick.
The New Army Irish—Irish wit—And Irish courage—Pompous Prussian Guard officer—The British Guards and their characteristics—Who invented the tank?—The great secret—Combination of an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car and a traveling circus—Something really new on the front—Gas attacks—A tank in the road—A moving "strong point"—Making an army laugh—Suspense for the inmates of the untried tanks.
The New Army Irish—Irish wit—And Irish courage—Pompous Prussian Guard officer—The British Guards and their characteristics—Who invented the tank?—The great secret—Combination of an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car and a traveling circus—Something really new on the front—Gas attacks—A tank in the road—A moving "strong point"—Making an army laugh—Suspense for the inmates of the untried tanks.
The situation on the Ridge was where we left it in a previous chapter with all except a few parts of it held, enough for a jumping-off place at all points for the sweep down into the valley toward Bapaume. In the grim preliminary business of piecemeal gains which should make possible an operation over a six-mile front on Sept. 15th, which was the first general attack since July 14th, the part that the Irish battalions played deserves notice, where possibly the action of the tried and sturdy English regiments on their flanks need not be mentioned, as being characteristic of the work they had been doing for months.
They were the New Army Irish, all volunteers, men who had enlisted to fight against Germany when their countrymen were largely disaffected, which requires more initiative than to join the colors when it is the universal passion of the community. Many stories were told of this Irish division. If there are ten Irishmen among a hundred soldiers the stories have a way of being about the ten Irishmen.
I like that one of the Connaught man who, on his first day in the trenches, was set to digging out the dirt that had been filled into a trench by a shell-burst. Along came another shell before he was half through his task; the burst of a second knocked him over and doubled the quantity of earth before him. When he picked himself up he went to the captain and threw down his spade, saying:
"Captain, I can't finish that job without help. They're gaining on me!"
Some people thought that the Sinn Fein movement which had lately broken out in the Dublin riots would make the new Irish battalions lukewarm in any action. They would go in but without putting spirit into their attack. Other skeptics questioned if the Irish temperament which was well suited to dashing charges would adapt itself to the matter-of-fact necessities of the Somme fighting. Their commander, however, had no doubts; and the army had none when the test was made.
Through Guillemont, that wicked resort of machine guns, which had been as severely hammered by shell fire after it had repulsed British attacks as any village on the Somme, the Irish swept in good order, cleaning up dugouts and taking prisoners on the way with all the skill of veterans and a full relish of the exploit, and then forward, as a well-linked part of a successful battle line, to the sunken road which was the second objective.
"I thought we were to take a village, Captain," said one of the men, after they were established in the sunken road. "What are we stopping here for?"
"We have taken it. You passed through it—that grimy patch yonder"—which was Guillemont's streets and houses mixed in ruins five hundred yards to the rear.
"You're sure, Captain?"
"Quite!"
"Well, then, I'd not like to be the drunken man that tried to find his keyhole in that town!"
It was a pity, perhaps, that the Irish who assisted in the taking of Ginchy, which completed the needful mastery of the Ridge for British purposes, could not have taken part in the drive that was to follow. We had looked forward to this drive as the reward of a down hill run after the patient labor of wrenching our way up hill. Even the Germans, who had suffered appalling losses in trying to hold the Ridge, must have been relieved that they no longer had to fight against the inevitable.
Again the clans were gathering and again there ran through the army the anticipation which came from the preparation for a great blow. The Canadians were appearing in billets back of the front. If in no other way, I should have known of their presence by their habit of moving about roads and fields getting acquainted with their surroundings and finding out if apples were ripe. For other portions of the country it was a little unfair that these generous and well-paid spenders should take the place of the opulent Australians in villages where small boys already had hordes of pennies and shopkeepers were hastening to replenish their stocks to be equal to their opportunities.
At last the Guards, too, were to have their turn, but not to go in against the Prussian Guard, which those with a sense of histrionic fitness desired. When a Prussian Guard officer had been taken at Contalmaison he had said, "The Prussian Guard feels that it is surrendering to a foe worthy of its steel when it yields to superior numbers of the English Guard!" or words to that effect according to reports, only to receive the answer that his captors were English factory hands and the like of the New Army, whose officers excused themselves, in the circumstances, for their identity as politely as they could.
Grenadiers, Coldstreams, Scottish, or Irish, the Guards were the Guards, England's crack regiments, the officers of each wearing their buttons in a distinctive way and the tall privates saluting with the distinctive Guards' salute. In the Guards the old spirit of gaiety in face of danger survived. Their officers out in shell-craters under curtains of fire joked one another with an aristocratic, genial sangfroid, the slender man who had a nine-inch crater boasting of his luck over the thickset man who tried to accommodate himself to a five-inch, while a colonel blew his hunting-horn in the charge, which the Guards made in a manner worthy of tradition.
Though the English would have been glad to go against the Prussian Guard with bayonet or bomb or a free-for-all, army commanders in these days are not signaling to the enemy, "Let us have a go between your Guards and our Guards!" but are putting crack regiments and line regiments in a battle line to a common task, where the only criterion is success.
The presence of the Guards, however, yielded interest to another new arrival on the Somme front. When the plan for a style of armored motor car which would cross shell-craters and trenches was laid before an eminent general at the War Office, what he wrote in dismissing it from further consideration might have been more blasphemous if he could have spared the time to be anything but satirically brief. Such conservatives probably have prevented many improvements from materializing, and probably they have also saved the world from many futile creations which would only have wasted time and material.
Happily both for geniuses and fools, who all, in the long run, let us hope, receive their just deserts, there is no downing an idea in a free country where continued knocking at doors and waiting in hallways eventually secure it a trial. Then, if it succeeds, the fellow who thought that the conception was original with him finds his claims disputed from all points of the compass. If it fails, the poor thing goes to a fatherless grave.
I should like to say that I was the originator of the tank—one of the originators. In generous mood, I am willing to share honors with rivals too numerous to mention. Haven't I also looked across No Man's Land toward the enemy's parapet? Whoever has must have conjectured about a machine that would take frontal positions with less loss of life than is usual and would solve the problem of breaking the solid line of the Western front. The possibility has haunted every general, every soldier.
Some sort of armadillo or caterpillar which would resist bullet fire was the most obvious suggestion, but when practical construction was considered, the dreamer was brought down from the empyrean, where the aeroplane is at home, to the forge and the lathe, where grimy machinists are the pilots of a matter-of-fact world. Application was the thing. I found myself so poor at it that I did not even pass on my plan to the staff, which had already considered a few thousand plans. Ericsson conceiving a gun in a revolving turret was not so great a man as Ericsson making the monitor a practicable engine of war.
To Lieutenant-Colonel Swinton, of the Engineers, was given the task of transforming blue-print plans into reality. There was no certainty that he would succeed, but the War Office, when it had need for every foundry and every skilled finger in the land, was enterprising enough to give him a chance. He and thousands of workmen spent months at this most secret business. If one German spy had access to one workman, then the Germans might know what was coming. Nobody since Ericsson had a busier time than Swinton without telling anybody what he was doing. The whisperers knew that some diabolical surprise was under way and they would whisper about it. No censor regulations can reach them. Sometimes the tribe was given false information in great confidence in order to keep it too occupied to pass on the true.
The new monster was called a tank because it was not like a tank; yet it seemed to me as much like a tank as like anything else. As a tank is a receptacle for a liquid, it was a name that ought to mask a new type of armored motor car as successfully as any name could. Flower pot would have been too wide of the mark. A tank might carry a new kind of gas or a burning liquid to cook or frizzle the adversary.
Considering the size of the beast, concealment seemed about as difficult as for a suburban cottager to keep the fact that he had an elephant on the premises from his next-door neighbor; but the British Army has become so used to slipping ships across the channel in face of submarine danger that nobody is surprised at anything that appears at the front unheralded.
One day the curtain rose, and the finished product of all the experiments and testing appeared at the British front. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were now in the secret. "Have you seen the tanks?" was the question up and down the line. All editors were inventing their own type of tank. Though I have patted one on the shoulder in a familiar way, as I might stroke the family cat, it neither kicked nor bit me. Though I have been inside of one, I am not supposed to know at this writing anything about its construction. Unquestionably the tank resembles an armadillo, a caterpillar, a diplodocus, a motor car, and a traveling circus. It has more feet than a caterpillar, and they have steel toenails which take it over the ground; its hide is more resistant than an armadillo's, and its beauty of form would make the diplodocus jealous. No pianist was ever more temperamental; no tortoise ever more phlegmatic.
In summer heat, when dust clouds hung thick on the roads behind the shell clouds of the fields, when the ceaseless battle had been going on for two months and a half, the soldiers had their interest stimulated by a mechanical novelty just before a general attack. Two years of war had cumulatively desensitized them to thrills. New batteries moving into position were only so many more guns. Fresh battalions marching to the front were only more infantry, all of the same pattern, equipped in the same way, moving with the same fixed step. Machine gun rattles had become as commonplace as the sound of creaking caisson wheels. Gas shells, lachrymatory shells andFlammenwerferwere as old-fashioned as high explosives and shrapnel. Bombing encounters in saps had no variation. The ruins of the village taken to-day could not be told from the one taken yesterday except by its location on the map. Even the aeroplanes had not lately developed any sensational departures from habit. One paid little more attention to them than a gondolier pays to the pigeons of St. Mark's. Curtains of fire all looked alike. There was no new way of being killed—nothing to break the ghastly monotony of charges and counter-charges.
All the brains of Europe had been busy for two years inventing new forms of destruction, yet no genius had found any sinuous creature that would creep into dugouts with a sting for which there was no antidote. Everybody was engaged in killing, yet nobody was able to "kill to his satisfaction," as the Kentucky colonel said. The reliable methods were the same as of old and as I have mentioned elsewhere: projectiles propelled by powder, whether from long-necked naval guns at twenty thousand yards, or short-necked howitzers at five thousand yards, or rifles and machine guns at twenty-five hundred yards, or trench mortars coughing balls of explosives for one thousand yards.
True, the gas attack at Ypres had been an innovation. It was not a discovery; merely an application of ghastliness which had been considered too horrible for use. As a surprise it had been successful—once. The defense answered with gas masks, which made it still more important that soldiers should not be absent-minded and leave any of their kit out of reach. The same amount of energy put into projectiles would have caused more casualties. Meanwhile, no staff of any army, making its elaborate plans in the use of proved weapons, could be certain that the enemy had not under way, in this age of invention which has given us the wireless, some new weapon which would be irresistible.
Was the tank this revolutionary wonder? Its sponsors had no such hope. England went on building guns and pouring out shells, cartridges and bombs. At best, the tanks were another application of an old, established form of killing in vogue with both Daniel Boone and Napoleon's army—bullets.
The first time that I saw a tank, the way that the monster was blocking a road gorged with transport had something of the ludicrousness of, say, a pliocene monster weighing fifty tons which had nonchalantly lain down at Piccadilly Circus when the traffic was densest. Only the motor-truck drivers and battalions which were halted some distance away minded the delay. Those near by were sufficiently entertained by the spectacle which stopped them. They gathered around the tank and gaped and grinned.
The tank's driver was a brown-skinned, dark-haired Englishman, with a face of oriental stolidity. Questions were shot at him, but he would not even say whether his beast would stand without hitching or not; whether it lived on hay, talcum powder, or the stuff that bombs are made of; or what was the nature of its inwards, or which was the head and which the tail, or if when it seemed to be backing it was really going forward.
By the confession of some white lettering on its body, it was officially one of His Majesty's land ships. It no more occurred to anyone to suggest that it move on and clear the road than to argue with a bulldog which confronts you on a path. I imagined that the feelings of the young officer who was its skipper must have been much the same as those of a man acting as his own chauffeur and having a breakdown on a holiday in a section of town where the population was as dense as it was curious in the early days of motoring. For months he had been living a cloistered life to keep his friends from knowing what he was doing, as he worked to master the eccentricities of his untried steed, his life and the lives of his crew depending upon this mastery. Now he had stepped from behind the curtain of military secrecy into the full blaze of staring, inquiring publicity.
The tank's inclination was entirely reptilian. Its body hugged the earth in order to expose as little surface as possible to the enemy's fire; it was mottled like a toad in patches of coloring to add to its low visibility, and there was no more hop in it than in the Gila monster.
The reason of its being was obvious. Its hide being proof against the bullets of machine guns and rifles, it was a moving "strong point" which could go against the enemy's fixed strong points, where machine guns were emplaced to mow down infantry charges, with its own machine guns. Only now it gave no sign of moving. As a mechanical product it was no more remarkable than a steam shovel. The wonder was in the part that it was about to play. A steam shovel is a labor-saving, and this a soldier-saving, device.
For the moment it seemed a leviathan dead weight in the path of traffic. If it could not move of itself, the only way for traffic to pass was to build a road around it. Then there was a rumbling noise within its body which sounded like some unnatural gasoline engine, and it hitched itself around with the ponderosity of a canal boat being warped into a dock and proceeded on its journey to take its appointed place in the battle line.
Did the Germans know that the tanks were building? I think that they had some inkling a few weeks before the tanks' appearance that something of the sort was under construction. There was a report, too, of a German tank which was not ready in time to meet the British. Some German prisoners said that their first intimation of this new affliction was when the tanks appeared out of the morning mist, bearing down on the trenches; others said that German sausage observation balloons had seen something resembling giant turtles moving across the fields up to the British lines and had given warning to the infantry to be on the lookout.
Thus, something new had come into the war, deepening the thrill of curiosity and intensifying the suspense before an attack. The world, its appetite for novelty fed by the press, wanted to know all about the tanks; but instead of the expected mechanical details, censorship would permit only vague references to the tanks' habits and psychology, and the tanks were really strong on psychology—subjectively and objectively. It was the objective result in psychology that counted: the effect on the fighting men. Human imagination immediately characterized them as living things; monstrous comrades of infantry in attack.
Blessed is the man, machine, or incident that will make any army laugh after over two months of battle. Individuals were always laughing over incidents; but here hundreds of thousands of men were to see a new style of animal perform elephantine tricks. The price of admission to the theater was the risk of a charge in their company, and the prospect gave increased zest to battalions taking their place for next day's action. What would happen to the tanks? What would they do to the Germans?
The staff, which had carefully calculated their uses and limitations, had no thought that the tanks would go to Berlin. They were simply a new auxiliary. Probably the average soldier was skeptical of their efficiency; but his skepticism did not interfere with his curiosity. He wanted to see the beast in action.
Christopher Columbus crossing uncharted seas did not undertake a more daring journey than the skippers of the tanks. The cavalryman who charges the enemy's guns in an impulse knows only a few minutes of suspense. A torpedo destroyer bent on coming within torpedo range in face of blasts from a cruiser's guns, the aviator closing in on an enemy's plane, have the delirium of purpose excited by speed. But the tanks are not rapid. They are ponderous and relatively slow. Columbus had already been to sea in ships. The aviator and the commander of a destroyer know their steeds and have precedent to go by, while the skippers of the tanks had none. They went forth with a new kind of ship on a new kind of sea, whose waves were shell-craters, whose tempests sudden concentrations of shell fire.
The Germans might have full knowledge of the ships' character and await their appearance with forms of destruction adapted to the purpose. All was speculation and uncertainty. Officers and crew were sealed up in a steel box, the sport of destiny. For months they had been preparing for this day, the crowning experiment and test, and all seemed of a type carefully chosen for their part, soldiers who had turned land sailors, cool and phlegmatic like the monsters which they directed. Each one having given himself up to fate, the rest was easy in these days of war's superexaltation, which makes men appear perfectly normal when death hovers near. Not one would have changed places with any infantryman. Already they hadesprit de corps. They belonged to an exclusive set of warriors.
Lumberingly dipping in and out of shell-craters, which sometimes half concealed the tanks like ships in a choppy sea, rumbling and wrenching, they appeared out of the morning mist in face of the Germans who put up their heads and began working their machine guns after the usual artillery curtain of fire had lifted.