How the tanks attacked—A tank walking up the main Street of a village—Effect on the Germans—Prussian colonel surrenders to a tank—Tanks against trees—The tank in High Wood—The famous Crème de Menthe—Demolishing a sugar factory—Germans take the tanks seriously—Differences of opinion regarding tanks—Wandering tanks—German attack on a stranded tank—Prehistoric turtles—Saving twenty-five thousand casualties.
How the tanks attacked—A tank walking up the main Street of a village—Effect on the Germans—Prussian colonel surrenders to a tank—Tanks against trees—The tank in High Wood—The famous Crème de Menthe—Demolishing a sugar factory—Germans take the tanks seriously—Differences of opinion regarding tanks—Wandering tanks—German attack on a stranded tank—Prehistoric turtles—Saving twenty-five thousand casualties.
With the reverse slope of the Ridge to conceal their approach to the battle line, the tanks squatting among the men at regular intervals over a six-mile front awaiting the cue of zero for the attack at dawn and the mist still holding to cover both tanks and men, the great Somme stage was set in a manner worthy of the début of the new monsters.
A tactical system of coördinated action had been worked out for the infantry and the untried auxiliary, which only experienced soldiers could have applied with success. According to the nature of the positions in front, the tanks were set definite objectives or left to find their own objectives. They might move on located machine gun positions or answer a hurry call for help from the infantry. Ahead of them was a belt of open field between them and the villages whose capture was to be the consummation of the day's work. While observers were straining their eyes to follow the progress of the tanks and seeing but little, corps headquarters eagerly awaited news of the most picturesque experiment of the war, which might prove ridiculous, or be a wonderful success, or simply come up to expectations.
No more thrilling message was ever brought by an aeroplane than that which said that a tank was "walking" up the main street of Flers surrounded by cheering British soldiers, who were in possession of the village. "Walking" was the word officially given; and very much walking, indeed, the tank must have seemed to the aviator in his swift flight. An eagle looked down on a tortoise which had a serpent's sting. This tank, having attended to its work on the way, passed on through Flers bearing a sign: "Extra Special! Great Hun Victory!" Beyond Flers it found itself alongside a battery of German field guns and blazed bullets into the amazed and helpless gunners.
The enemy may have heard of the tanks, but meeting them was a different matter. After he had fought shells, bullets, bombs, grenades, mortars, bayonets and gas, the tank was the straw that broke the camel's back of many a German. A steel armadillo laying its bulk across a trench and sweeping it on both sides with machine guns brought the familiar complaint that this was not fighting according to rules in a war which ceased to have rules after the bombing of civilian populations, the sinking of theLusitania, and the gas attack at Ypres. It depends on whose ox is gored. There is a lot of difference between seeing the enemy slaughtered by some new device and being slaughtered by one yourself. No wonder that German prisoners who had escaped alive from a trench filled with dead, when they saw a tank on the road as they passed to the rear threw up their hands with a guttural: "Mein Gott! There is another! There is no fighting that! This is not war; it is butchery!" Yes, it was butchery—and butchery is war these days. Wasn't it so always? And as a British officer remarked to the protestants:
"The tank is entirely in keeping with Hague rules, being only armor, machinery and machine guns."
Germans surrendered to a tank in bodies after they saw the hopelessness of turning their own machine gun and rifle fire upon that steel hide. Why not? Nothing takes the fight out of anyone like finding that his blows go into the air and the other fellow's go home. There seemed a strange loss of dignity when a Prussian colonel delivered himself to a tank, which took him on board and eventually handed him over to an infantry guard; but the skipper of the tank enjoyed it if the colonel did not.
The surprising thing was how few casualties there were among the crews of the tanks, who went out prepared to die and found themselves safe in their armored shells after the day's fight was over, whether their ships had gone across a line of German trenches, developed engine trouble, or temporarily foundered in shell-holes. Bullets had merely made steel-bright flecks on the tanks' paint and shrapnel had equally failed to penetrate the armor.
Among the imaginary tributes paid to the tank's powers is that it "eats" trees—that is to say, it can cut its way through a wood—and that it can knock down a stone wall. As it has no teeth it cannot masticate timber. All that it accomplishes must be done by ramming or by lifting up its weight to crush an obstacle. A small tree or a weak wall yields before its mass.
As foresters, the tanks had a stiff task in High Wood, where the Germans had held to the upper corner with their nests of machine guns which the preliminary bombardment of British artillery had not silenced and they began their murderous song immediately the British charge started. They commanded the front and the flanks if the men continued to advance and therefore might make a break in the whole movement, which was precisely the object of the desperate resistance that had preserved this strong point at any cost against the rushes of British bombers, trench mortars and artillery shells for two months.
Soldiers are not expected to undertake the impossible. Nobody who is sane will leap into a furnace with a cup of water to put out the fire. Only a battalion commander who is a fool will refuse, in face of concentrated machine gun fire, to stop the charge.
"Leave it to me!" was the unspoken message communicated to the infantry by the sight of that careening, dipping, clambering, steel body as it rumbled toward the miniature fortress. And the infantry, as it saw the tank's machine guns blazing, left it to the tank, and, working its way to the right, kept in touch with the general line of attack, confident that no enemy would be left behind to fire into their backs. Thus, a handful of men capable, with their bullet sprays, of holding up a thousand men found the tables turned on them by another handful manning a tank. They were simply "done in," as the tank officer put it. Safe behind his armor, he had them no less at his mercy than a submarine has a merchant ship. Even if unarmed, a tank could take care of an isolated machine gun position by sitting on it.
One of the most famous tanks was Crème de Menthe. She had a good press agent and also made good. She seemed to like sugar. At least, her glorious exploit was in a sugar factory, a huge building of brick with a tall brick chimney which had been brought down by shell fire. Underneath the whole were immense dugouts still intact where German machine gunners lay low, like Br'er Rabbit, as usual, while the shells of the artillery preparation were falling, and came out to turn on the bullet spray as the British infantry approached. British do the same against German attacks; only in the battle of the Somme the British had been always attacking, always taking machine gun positions.
Crème de Menthe, chosen comrade of the Canadians on their way to the taking of Courcelette, was also at home among débris. The Canadians saw that she was as she moved toward it with the glee of a sea lion toward a school of fish. She did not go dodging warily, peering around corners with a view to seeing the enemy before she was seen. Whatever else a tank is, it is not a crafty boy scout. It is brazenly and nonchalantly public in its methods, like a steam roller coming down the street into a parade without regard to the rules of the road. Externally it is not temperamental. It does not bother to follow the driveway or mind the "Keep Off the Grass" sign when it goes up to the entrance of a dugout.
And Crème de Menthe took the sugar factory and a lot of prisoners. "Why not?" as one of the Canadians said. "Who wouldn't surrender when a beast of that kind came up to the door? It was enough to make a man who had drunk only light Munich beer wonder if he had 'got 'em!'"
Prisoners were a good deal of bother to the tanks. Perhaps future tanks will be provided with pockets for carrying prisoners. But the future of tanks is wrapped in mystery at the present.
This is not taking them seriously, you may say. In that case, I am only reflecting the feelings of the army. Even if the tanks had taken Bapaume or gone to the Kaiser's headquarters, the army would have laughed at them. It was the Germans who took the tanks seriously; and the more seriously the Germans took the tanks the more the British laughed.
"Of all the double-dyed, ridiculous things, was the way that Crème de Menthe person took the sugar factory!" said a Canadian, who broke into a roar at the recollection of the monster's antics. "Good old girl, Crème de Menthe! Ought to retire her for life and let her sit up on her haunches in a café and sip her favorite tipple out of barrel with a garden hose for a straw—which would be about her size."
However, there was a variation of opinions among soldiers about tanks drawn from personal experience, when life and death form opinions, of the way it had acted as an auxiliary to their part of the line. A tank that conquered machine-gun positions and enfiladed trenches was an heroic comrade surrounded by a saga of glorious anecdotes. One which became stalled and failed in its enterprise called for satirical comment which was applied to all.
We did not personify machine guns, or those monstrous, gloomy, big howitzers with their gaping maws, or other weapons; but every man in the army personified the tanks. Two or three tanks, I should have remarked, did start for Berlin, without waiting for the infantry. The temptation was strong. All they had to do was to keep on moving. When Germans scuttling for cover were the only thing that the skippers could see, they realized that they were in the wrong pew, or, in strictly military language, that they had got beyond their "tactical objective."
Having left most of their ammunition where they thought that it would do the most good in the German lines, these wanderers hitched themselves around and waddled back to their own people. For a tank is an auxiliary, not an army, or an army staff, or a curtain of fire, and must coöperate with the infantry or it may be in the enemy's lines to stay. There was one tank which found itself out of gasoline and surrounded by Germans. It could move neither way, but could still work its guns. Marooned on a hostile shore, it would have to yield when the crew ran out of food.
The Germans charged the beast, and got under its guns, pounded at the door, tried to bomb and pry it open with bayonets and crawled over the top looking for dents in the armor with the rage of hornets, but in vain. They could not harm the crew inside and the crew could not harm them.
"A noisy lot!" said the tank's skipper.
Tactical objective be—British soldiers went to the rescue of their tank. Secure inside their shell, the commander and crew awaited the result of the fight. After the Germans were driven away, someone went for a can of gasoline, which gave the beast the breath of life to retreat to its "correct tactical position."
Even if it had not been recovered at the time, the British would have regained possession with their next advance; for the Germans had no way of taking a tank to the rear. There are no tractors powerful enough to draw one across the shell-craters. It can be moved only by its own power, and with its engine out of order it becomes a fixture on the landscape. Stranded tanks have an appearance of Brobdingnagian helplessness. They are fair targets for revenge by a concentration of German artillery fire; yet when half hidden in a gigantic shell-hole which they could not navigate they are a small target and, their tint melting into the earth, are hard to locate.
Seen through the glasses, disregarding ordinary roads and traveled routes, the tanks' slatey backs seemed like prehistoric turtles whose natural habitat is shell-mauled earth. They were the last word in the business of modern war, symbolic of its satire and the old strife between projectile and armor, offensive and defensive. If two tanks were to meet in a duel, would they try to ram each other after ineffectually rapping each other with their machine guns?
"I hope that it knows where it is going!" exclaimed a brigadier-general, as he watched one approach his dugout across an abandoned trench, leaning over a little as it dipped into the edge of a shell-crater some fifteen feet in diameter with its sureness of footing on a rainy day when a pedestrian slipped at every step.
There was no indication of any guiding human intelligence, let alone human hand, directing it; and, so far as one could tell, it might have mistaken the general's underground quarters for a storage station where it could assuage its thirst for gasoline or a blacksmith's shop where it could have a bent steel claw straightened. When, finally, it stopped at his threshold, the general expressed his relief that it had not tried to come down the steps. A door like that of a battleship turret opened, and out of the cramped interior where space for crew and machinery is so nicely calculated came the skipper, who saluted and reported that his ship awaited orders for the next cruise.
Soon the sight of tanks became part of the routine of existence, and interest in watching an advance centered on the infantry which they supported in a charge; for only by its action could you judge whether or not machine gun fire had developed and, later, whether or not the tanks were silencing it. The human element was still supreme, its movement and its losses in life the criterion of success and failure, with an eternal thrill that no machine can arouse. If the tanks had accomplished nothing more than they did in the two great September attacks they would have been well worth while. I think that they saved twenty-five thousand casualties, which would have been the additional cost of gaining the ground won by unassisted infantry action. When machines manned by a few men can take the place of many battalions in this fashion they exemplify the essential principle of doing the enemy a maximum of damage with a minimum to your own forces.
Canada's first offensive—The "surprise party"—Over nasty ground—Canada's hour—Germans amazed—Business of the Canadians to "get there"—Two difficult villages—Canadians make new rules—Canada's green soldiers accomplish an unheard of feat—Attacking on their nerve—The last burst—Fewer Canadians than Germans, but—"Mopping up"—Rounding up the captives—An aristocratic German and a democratic Canadian—French-Canadians—Thirteen counter-attacks beaten—Quickness and adaptability—Canada's soldiers make good.
Canada's first offensive—The "surprise party"—Over nasty ground—Canada's hour—Germans amazed—Business of the Canadians to "get there"—Two difficult villages—Canadians make new rules—Canada's green soldiers accomplish an unheard of feat—Attacking on their nerve—The last burst—Fewer Canadians than Germans, but—"Mopping up"—Rounding up the captives—An aristocratic German and a democratic Canadian—French-Canadians—Thirteen counter-attacks beaten—Quickness and adaptability—Canada's soldiers make good.
The tanks having received their theatric due, we come to other results of Sept. 14th when the resistance of the right was stiff and Canada had her turn of fortune in sharing in the brilliant success on the left.
It was the Canadians' first offensive. They knew that the eyes of the army were upon them. Not only for themselves, after parrying blows throughout their experience at the front, but in the name of other battalions that had endured the remorseless grind of the Ypres salient they were to strike the blows of retribution. The answer as to how they would charge was written in faces clear-cut by the same climate that gave them their nervous alertness.
On that ugly part of the Ridge where no stable trench could be made under the vengeful German artillery fire and small numbers were shrewdly distributed in shell-craters and such small ditches as could be maintained, they crept out in the darkness a few days before the attack to "take over" from the Australians and familiarize themselves with this tempest-torn farming land which still heaved under tornadoes of shells. The men from the faraway island continent had provided the jumping-off place and the men from this side of the Pacific and the equator were to do the jumping, which meant a kind of overseas monopoly of Pozières Ridge.
The Germans still hated the idea of yielding all the crest that stared down on them and hid the slope beyond which had once been theirs. They would try again to recover some of it, but chose a time for their effort which was proof enough that they did not know that a general attack was coming. Just before dawn, with zero at dawn, when the Canadians were forming on the reverse slope for their charge, the Germans laden with bombs made theirs and secured a footing in the thin front line among the shell-craters and, grim shadows in the night lighted by bursts of bombs and shells, struggled as they have on many similar occasions.
Then came the "surprise party." Not far away the Canadian charge waited on the tick of the second which was to release the six-mile line of infantry and the tanks.
"We were certainly keyed up," as one of the men said. "It was up to us all right, now."
Breasting the tape in their readiness for the word, the dry air of North America with its champagne exhilaration was in their lungs whipping their red corpuscles. They had but one thought and that was to "get there." No smooth drill-ground for that charge, but earth broken with shell-craters as thick as holes in a pepper-box cover! A man might stumble into one, but he must get up and go on. One fellow who twisted his ankle found it swollen out of all shape when the charge was over. If he had given it such a turn at home he would not have attempted to move but would have called for a cab or assistance. Under the spell of action he did not even know that he was hurt.
It was Canada's hour; all the months of drill at home, all the dreams on board the transport of charges to come, all the dull monotony of billets, all the slimy vigil of trenches, all the labor of preparation come to a head for every individual. Such was the impulse of the tidal wave which broke over the crest upon the astounded Germans who had gained a footing in the trench, engulfing them in as dramatic an episode as ever occurred on the Somme front.
"Give yourselves up and be quick about it! We've business elsewhere!" said the officers.
Yes, they had business with the German first-line trench when the artillery curtain lifted, where few Germans were found, most of them having been in the charge. The survivors here put up their hands before they put up their heads from shelter and soon were on their way back to the rear in the company of the others.
"I guess we had the first batch of prisoners to reach an inclosure on the morning of the 14th," said one Canadian. "We had a start with some coming into our own front line to be captured."
On the left Mouquet Farm, which, with its unsurpassed dugouts and warrens surrounded by isolated machine gun posts, had repulsed previous attacks, could not resist the determined onslaught which will share glory, when history is written, with the storming of Courcelette. Down hill beside the Bapaume Road swept the right and center, with shell-craters still thick but growing fewer as the wave came out into open fields in face of the ruins of the sugar factory, with the tank Crème de Menthe ready to do her part. She did not take care of all the machine guns; the infantry attended to at least one, I know. The German artillery turned on curtains of fire, but in one case the Canadians were not there when the curtain was laid to bar their path. They had been too rapid for the Germans. No matter what obstacle the Germans put in the way the business of the Canadians was to "get there"—and they "got there." The line marked on their map from the Bapaume Road to the east of the sugar factory as their objective was theirs. In front of them was the village of Courcelette and in front of the British line linked up on their right was Martinpuich.
Spades now! Dig as hard as you have charged in order to hold the freshly won position, with "there" become "here" and the Ridge at your backs! The London song of "The Byng Boys are Here," which gave the name of the Byng Boys to the Canadians after General Byng took command of their corps, had a most realistic application.
With the news from the right of the six-mile front that of a continuing fierce struggle, word from the left had the definite note of success. Was General Byng pleased with his Byng Boys? Was his superior, the army commander, pleased with the Canadians? They had done the trick and this is the thing that counts on such occasions; but when you take trenches and fields, however great the gain of ground, they lack the concrete symbol of victory which a village possesses.
And ahead were Courcelette and Martinpuich, both only partially demolished by shell fire and in nowise properly softened according to the usual requirements for capitulation, with their cellars doubtless heavily reinforced as dugouts. Officers studying the villages through their glasses believed that they could be taken. Why not try? To try required nerve, when it was against all tactical experience to rush on to a new objective over such a broad front without taking time for elaborate artillery preparation. General Byng, who believed in his men and understood their initiative, their "get there" quality, was ready to advance and so was the corps commander of the British in front of Martinpuich. Sir Douglas Haig gave consent.
"Up and at them!" then, with fresh battalions hurried up so rapidly that they had hardly time to deploy, but answering the order for action with the spirit of men who have been stalled in trenches and liked the new experience of stretching their legs. With a taste of victory, nothing could stop these highstrung reserves, except the things that kill and wound. The first charge had succeeded and the second must succeed.
German guns had done the customary thing by laying barrages back of the new line across the field and shelling the crest of the Ridge to prevent supports from coming up. It was quite correct form for the German commander to consider the ceremony of the day over. The enemy had taken his objective. Of course, he would not try for another immediately. Meanwhile, his tenure of new line must be made as costly as possible. But this time the enemy did not act according to rules. He made some new ones.
The reserve battalions which were to undertake the storming of the village had gone over the ground under the barrages and were up to the first objective, and when through the new line occupied by the men who made the first charge they could begin their own charge. As barrages are intermittent, one commander had his men lie down behind one until it had ceased. Again, after waiting on another for a while he decided that he might be late in keeping his engagement in Courcelette and gave the order to go through, which, as one soldier said, "we did in a hundred-yard dash sprinting a double quick—good reason why!" When the fresh wave passed the fellows in the new line the winners of the first objective called, "Go to it!" "You'll do it!" "Hurrah for Canada!" and added touches of characteristic dry humor which shell fire makes a little drier, such as a request to engage seats for the theatre at Courcelette that evening.
Consider that these battalions which were to take Courcelette had to march about two miles under shell fire, part of the way over ground that was spongy earth cut by shell-craters, before they could begin their charge and that they were undertaking an innovation in tactics, and you have only half an understanding of their task. Their officers were men out of civil life in every kind of occupation, learning their war in the Ypres salient stalemate, and now they were to have the severest possible test in directing their units in an advance.
There had been no time to lay out pattern plans for each company's course in this second rush according to map details, which is so important against modern defenses. The officers did not know where machine guns were hidden; they were uncertain of the strength of the enemy who had had all day to prepare for the onslaught on his bastions in the village. It was pitched battle conditions against set defenses. Under curtains of fire, with the concentration heavy at one point and weak at another, with machine gun or sniping fire developing in some areas, with the smoke and the noise, with trenches to cross, the business of keeping a wave of men in line of attack for a long distance—difficult enough in a manoeuver—was possible only when the initiative and an understanding of the necessities of the situation exist in the soldiers themselves. If one part of the line was not up, if a section was being buffeted by salvos of shells, the officers had to meet the emergency; and officers as well as men were falling, companies being left with a single officer or with only a "non-com" in charge. Unless a man was down he knew that his business was to "get there" and his direction was straight ahead in line with the men on his right and left.
With dead and wounded scattered over the field behind them, all who could stand on their feet, including officers and men knocked over and buried by shells and with wounds of arms and heads and even legs which made them hobble, reached the edge of the village on time and lay down to await the lifting of the fire of their own guns before the final rush.
After charging such a distance and paying the toll of casualties exacted they enjoyed a breathing space, a few minutes in which to steady their thoughts for the big thing before, "lean for the hunt," they sprang up to be in for the fray with the burst of the last shells from their guns. They knew what to do. It had been drilled into them; they had talked it and dreamed it in billets when routine became humdrum, these men with practical minds who understood the essentials of their task.
There were fewer Canadians charging through the streets than there were Germans in the village at that moment. The Canadians did not know it, but if they had it would have made no difference, such was their spirit. Secure in their dugouts from bombardment, the first that the Germans, in their systematized confidence that the enemy would not try for a second objective that day, knew of the presence of the Canadians was when the attackers were at the door and a St. Lawrence River incisiveness was calling on the occupants to come out as they were prisoners—which proves the advantage of being quick. The second wave was left to "mop up" while the first wave passed on through the village to nail down the prize by digging new trenches. Thus, they had their second objective, though on the left of the line where the action had been against a part of the old first-line system of trenches progress had been slow and fighting bitter.
The Canadians who had to "mop up" had the "time of their lives" and some ticklish moments. What a scene! Germans in clean uniforms coming out of their dugouts blinking in surprise at their undoing and in disgust, resentment and suppressed rage! Canadians, dust-covered from shell-bursts, eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in the midst of shouts of congratulation and directions to prisoners among the ruins, and the German commander so angered by the loss of the village that he began pouring in shells on Germans and Canadians at the same time! Two colonels were among the captured, a regimental and a battalion commander. The senior was a baron—one cannot leave him out of any narrative—and inclined to bear himself with patrician contempt toward the Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons in his situation with every Canadian more or less of a king that day. When he tried to start his men into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the result that the uprising was nipped in the bud and the baron was shot through the leg, leaving him still "fractious and patronizing." Then the little colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself.
One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian. No other Canadian battalion will deny them the glory that they won that day, and it must have been irritating to the German baron to surrender superior numbers to the stocky type that we see in New England factory towns and on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the battalion, the frontiersmen, thecourrier de bois, having been mostly killed in the salient. Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked him how he felt after he received the clout from a shell-fragment, remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache!
"You have the military cross!" I said.
"Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria Cross!" he replied, saluting. Talk about "the spirit that quickeneth!"
Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naïve unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding, "'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had taken hold of them as it had of the rest of Canada they would not have been found wanting.
"'I golly!" they had to fight from the very fact that there were only a few to strike for old France and for the martial honor of Quebec. And they held all they took as sturdily as the other Canadian battalion in front of the village when the Germans awakened to revenge for the loss of Courcelette.
From start to finish of that great day it had been quickness that counted; quickness to realize opportunities; alertness of individual action in "mopping up" after the village was taken; prompt adaptability to situations which is the gift of the men of a new country; and that individual confidence of the Canadian once he was not tied to a trench and might let his initiative have full play, man to man, which is not a thing of drill or training but of inheritance and environment. On the right, Martinpuich was taken by the British and also held.
It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, mud-spattered, but in the joy of having made good when their turn came, and in a way that was an exemplification of Canadian character in every detail. "Heap good!" I suppose that big Sioux Indian, looking as natural seated in a trench in his imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange business, but high explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion.
With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of theFleur-de-lis. Officers and men of every walk of life called to a new occupation, a democracy out of the west submitting to discipline had been inured and trained to a new life of risk and comradeship and sacrifice for a cause. It will seem strange to be out of khaki and to go to the office, or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn; "but," as one man said, "we'll manage to adapt ourselves to it without spending nights in a mud hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs over the fence in order to make the change gradual."
High and low visibilities—Low Visibility a pro-German—High Visibility and his harvest smile—Thirty villages taken by the British—The 25th of September—The Road of the Entente—Twelve miles of artillery fire—Two villages taken—Combles—British and French meet in a captured village—English stubbornness—Dugouts holding a thousand men—Capture of Thiepval.
High and low visibilities—Low Visibility a pro-German—High Visibility and his harvest smile—Thirty villages taken by the British—The 25th of September—The Road of the Entente—Twelve miles of artillery fire—Two villages taken—Combles—British and French meet in a captured village—English stubbornness—Dugouts holding a thousand men—Capture of Thiepval.
Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the "zero" of an attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.
Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his element in the Ypres salient in midwinter, delighted in rain, mist, fog and thick summer haze—anything that prevented observers from seeing the burst of shells, transformed shell-craters into miniature lakes and fields into mire to founder charges, and stalled guns.
High Visibility was as merry as his wicked brother was dour. He sent the sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of particles enabling observers to see shell-bursts at long range, and favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire—the patron saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona where you could carry on an offensive the year around.
During September his was a glad harvest smile which revealed figures on the chalk welts a mile away as clearly as if within a stone's throw under the glasses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined villages in sharp outlines. He was your companion now when you might walk up the Ridge and, standing among shell-craters still as a frozen sea where but lately an inferno had raged, look out across the fields toward new lines of shell fire and newly won villages on lower levels. He helped to make the month of September when he was most needed the most successful month of the offensive, with its second great attack on the 25th turning the table of losses entirely against the Germans and bringing many guests to the prisoners' inclosures.
These were days that were rich with results, days of harvest, indeed, when the ceaseless fighting on the Ridge and the iron resolution of a commander had its reward; when advances gathered in villages till the British had taken thirty and the French, with fresh efforts after their own chipping away at strong points, also had jumping-off places for longer drives as they swung in with their right on the Somme in combination with British attacks.
The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. The scene recalled the splendor of the storming of Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory of the panorama—glorious to the observer in this instance when he thought only of the spectacle, in a moment of oblivion to the hard work of preparation and the savage work of execution. Our route to a point of observation for the attack which was at midday took us along the Road of the Entente, as I called it, where French battalions marched with British battalions, stately British motor trucks mixed with the lighter French vehicles, and Gaul sat resting on one side of the road and Briton on the other as German prisoners went by, and there was a mingling of blue and khaki which are both of low visibility against the landscape yet as distinct as the characters of the two races, each with its own way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplishing its purpose.
Just under the slope where we sat the British guns linked up with the French. To the northward the British were visible right away past Ginchy and Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the Somme. We were almost midway of a twelve-mile stretch of row upon row of flashes of many calibers, the French more distinct at the foot of a slope fearlessly in the open like the British, a long machine-loom of gunnery with some monsters far back sending up great clouds of black smoke from Mt. St. Quentin which hid our view of Péronne.
Now it was all together for the guns in the preliminary whirlwind, withsoixante-quinzesahead sparkling up and down like the flashes of an automatic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat of sound in the valley, and the 120's near by doing their best, too, with their wicked crashes, while the ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming, curling smoke. The units of the two armies might have been wired to a single switchboard with heartbeats under blue and khaki jackets timed together in the final expression ofentente cordialebecomeentente furieuse.
The sunlight had the golden kindness of September and good Brother High Visibility seemed to make it a personal matter to-day against the Kaiser. Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was the gleam of the empty shells dropping out of the breach of thesoixante-quinzeas the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded shells going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild grass and weeds, which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war's landmarks.
The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of shell-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quantity to the French. They did not like that stretch of five hundred yards behind a slope where they thought that the most troublesome batteries were, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the flashes from the bursting jackets until a wall of mist hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines was tearing up fresh craters with high explosives back of other gun positions, and between the columns of smoke we saw the French gunners going on unconcerned by this plowing of the landscape which was not disturbing them.
Far off on the plain where a British ammunition train was visible the German loosed more anger, whipping the fields into geysers; but the caissons moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for the next station without the Germans being aware that their target was gone. A British battery advancing at another point evidently was not in view of the Germans two thousand yards away, though good Brother High Visibility gave our glasses the outline of the horses at five thousand yards.
Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were shooting at, with suspense at one point and at another the joy of the observer who sees the one who is "it" in blind man's buff missing his quarry. Some shrapnel searching a road in front and a scream overhead indicated a parcel of high explosives for a village at the rear. In Morval where houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the glasses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a shell but prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned afterward.
Reserves were filing along a road between the tiers of guns, helmets on the backs of heads French fashion when there is no fire, with the easy marching stride of the French and figures disappeared and reappeared on the slope as they advanced. Wounded were coming along the winding gray streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy of prisoners passed led by a French guard whose attitude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of "See who's here and see what I've got!" Not far away was a French private at a telephone.
"It goes well!" he said. "Rancourt is taken and we are advancing on Frégicourt. Combles is a ripe plum."
All the while Combles had been an oasis in the shell fire, the one place that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English. They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no responsive thrill.
Combles was a village and a large village, its size perhaps accounting for the importance associated with it when it had almost none in a military sense. Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches. This town nestling in a bowl was not worth the expenditure of much ammunition when what the Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French troops to gain was the hills around it. Rancourt was the other side of Combles, which explains the plum simile.
The picturesque thing was that the British troops were working up on one side of Combles and the French on the other side; and the next morning after the British had gathered in some escaping Germans who seemed to have lost their way, the blue and the khaki met in the main street without indulging in formal ceremonies and exchanged a "Good morning!" and "Bon jour!" and "Here we are! Voyla! Quee pawnsays-vous!" and "Ça va bien! Oh, yais, I tink so!" and found big piles of shells and other munitions which the Germans could not take away and cellars with many wounded who had been brought in from the hills—and that was all there was to it: a march in and look around, when for glory's sake, at least, the victors ought to have delivered congratulatory addresses. But tired soldiers will not do that sort of thing. I shall not say that they are spoiling pictures for the Salon, for there are incidents enough to keep painters going for a thousand years; which ought to be one reason for not having a war for another thousand!
As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate of the correspondents this time—they really were not conducting the war for us—did not inform us of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages and trenches after they were over the Ridge while High Visibility had Low Visibility shut up in the guardhouse. Besides, the British were so near Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances that its taking was only another step forward, one of savage fighting, however, in the same kind of operations that I have described in the chapter on "Watching a Charge." The débris beaten into dust had been so scattered that one could not tell where the village began or ended, but the smudge was a symbol to the army no less than to the British public—a symbol of the boasted impregnability of the first-line German fortifications which had resisted the attack of July 1st—and its capture a reward of English stubbornness appealing to the race which is not unconscious of the characteristic that has carried its tongue and dominion over the world.
Point was given, too, by the enormous dugouts, surpassing previous exhibits, capable of holding a garrison of a thousand men and a hospital which, under the bursts of huge shells of the months of British bombardment, had been safe under ground. The hospital was equipped with excellent medical apparatus as well as anæsthetics manufactured in Germany, of which the British were somewhat short. The German battalion that held the place had been associated with the work of preparing its defenses and were practically either all taken prisoner or killed, so far as could be learned. They had sworn that they would never lose Thiepval; but the deeper the dugouts the farther upstairs men inside have to climb in order to get to the door before the enemy, who arrives at the threshold as the whirlwind barrage lifts.
As I have said, Thiepval was not on the very crest of the Ridge and on the summit the same elaborate works had been built to hold this high ground. We watched other attacks under curtains of fire as the British pressed on. Sometimes we could see the Germans moving out in the open from their dugouts at the base of the hill in St. Pierre Divion and driven to cover as the British guns sniped at them with shrapnel. Resistlessly the British infantry under its covering barrages kept on till the crest and all its dugouts and galleries were gained, thus breaking back the old first-line fortifications stage by stage and forcing the German into the open, where he must dig anew on equal terms.
The capture of Thiepval did not mean that its ruins were to have any rest from shells, for the German guns had their turn. They seemed fond of sending up spouts from a little pond in the foreground, which had no effect except to shower passing soldiers with dirty water. However much the pond was beaten it was still there; and I was struck by the fact that this was a costly and unsuccessful system of drainage for such an efficient people as the Germans to apply.
Sixty miles an hour to meet General Joffre—Joffre somewhat like Grant—Two figures which France will remember for all time—Joffre and Castelnau—Two very old friends—At Verdun—What Napoleon and Wellington might have thought—A staff whose feet and mind never dragged—The hero of Douaumont, General Nivelle—Simplicity—Men who believe in giving blows—A true soldier—A prized photograph of Joffre—The drama of Douaumont—General Mangin, corps commander at Verdun—An eye that said "Attack!"—A five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps—The old fortress town, Verdun—The effort of Colossus—Germany's high water mark—Thrifty fighters, the French—Germany good enough to win against Rumania, but not at Verdun.
Sixty miles an hour to meet General Joffre—Joffre somewhat like Grant—Two figures which France will remember for all time—Joffre and Castelnau—Two very old friends—At Verdun—What Napoleon and Wellington might have thought—A staff whose feet and mind never dragged—The hero of Douaumont, General Nivelle—Simplicity—Men who believe in giving blows—A true soldier—A prized photograph of Joffre—The drama of Douaumont—General Mangin, corps commander at Verdun—An eye that said "Attack!"—A five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps—The old fortress town, Verdun—The effort of Colossus—Germany's high water mark—Thrifty fighters, the French—Germany good enough to win against Rumania, but not at Verdun.
That spirited friend Lieutenant T., at home in an English or a French mess or walking arm-in-arm with thepoilusof his old battalion, required quick stepping to keep up with him when we were not in his devil of a motor car that carried me on a flying visit to the French lines before I started for home and did not fail even when sixty miles an hour were required to keep the appointment with General Joffre—which we did, to the minute.
Many people have told of sitting across the table in his private office from the victor of the Marne; and it was when he was seated and began to talk that you appreciated the power of the man, with his great head and its mass of white hair and the calm, largely-molded features, who could give his orders when the fate of France was at stake and then retire to rest for the night knowing that his part was done for the day and the rest was with the army. In common with all men when experience and responsibility have ripened their talents, though lacking in the gift of formal speech-making, as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of a great national era.
In view of changes which were to come, another glimpse that I had of him in the French headquarters town which was not by appointment is peculiarly memorable. When I was out strolling I saw on the other side of the street two figures which all France knew and will know for all time. Whatever vicissitudes of politics, whatever campaigns ensue, whatever changes come in the world after the war, Joffre's victory at the Marne and Castelnau's victory in Lorraine, which was its complement in masterly tactics, make their niches in the national Pantheon secure.
The two old friends, comrades of army life long before fame came to them one summer month, Commander-in-Chief and Chief of Staff, were taking their regular afternoon promenade—Joffre in his familiar short, black coat which made his figure the burlier, his walk affected by the rheumatism in his legs, though he certainly had no rheumatism in his head, and Castelnau erect and slight of figure, his slimness heightened by his long, blue overcoat—chatting as they walked slowly, and behind them followed a sturdy guard in plain clothes at a distance of a few paces, carrying two cushions. Joffre stopped and turned with a "you-don't-say-so" gesture and a toss of his head at something that Castelnau had told him.
Very likely they were not talking of the war; indeed, most likely it was about friends in their army world, for both have a good wit, a keen and amiable understanding of human nature. At all events, they were enjoying themselves. So they passed on into the woods, followed by the guard who would place their cushions on their favorite seat, and the two who had been lieutenants and captains and colonels together would continue their airing and their chat until they returned to the business of directing their millions of men.
It was raining in this darkened French village near Verdun and a passing battalion went dripping by, automobiles sent out sprays of muddy water from their tires, and over in the crowded inclosures the German prisoners taken at Douaumont stood in the mud waiting to be entrained. Occasionally a soldier or an officer came out of a doorway that sent forth a stream of light, and upstairs in the municipal building where we went to pay our respects to the general commanding the army that had won the victory which had thrilled France as none had since the Marne, we found that it was the regular hour for his staff to report. They reported standing in the midst of tables and maps and standing received their orders. In future, when I see the big room with its mahogany table and fat armchairs reserved for directors' meetings I shall recall equally important conferences in the affairs of a nation that were held under simpler auspices.
This conference seemed in keeping with the atmosphere of the place: nobody in any flurry of haste and nobody wasting time. One after another the officers reported; and whatever their ages, for some would have seemed young for great responsibilities two years before, they were men going about their business alert, self-possessed, reflective of the character of their leader as staffs always are, men whose feet and whose minds never dragged. When they spoke to anybody politeness was the lubricant of prompt exchange of thought, a noiseless, eight-cylinder, hundred-horse-power sort of staff. If the little Corsican could have looked on, if he could have seen the taking of Douaumont, or if Wellington could have seen the taking of the Ridge, I think that they would have been well satisfied—and somewhat jealous to find that military talent was so widespread.
The man who came out of the staff-room would have won his marshal's baton in Napoleon's day, I suppose, though he was out of keeping with those showy times. I did not then know that he was to be Commander-in-Chief; only that all France thrilled with his name, which time will forever associate with Douaumont. At once you felt the dynamic quality under his agreeable manner and knew that General Nivelle did things swiftly and quietly, without wasteful expenditure of reserve force, which he could call upon when needed by turning on the current.
There was a stranger come to call; it was a rainy night; we had better not drive back to the hotel at Bar-le-Duc, he suggested, but find a billet in town, which was hospitality not to be imposed upon when one could see how limited quarters were in this small village. Some day I suppose a plaque will be put up on the door of that small house, with its narrow hall and plain hat-rack and the sitting-room turned into a dining-room, saying that General (perhaps it will be Marshal) Nivelle lived here during the battle of Verdun. It is a fine gift, simplicity. Some great men, or those who are called great, lack it; but nothing is so attractive in any man. No sentry at the door, no servant to open it. You simply went in, hung up your cap and took off your raincoat.
Hundreds of staffs were sitting down to the same kind of dinner with a choice of red or white wine and the menu was that of an average French household. I recall this and other staff dinners, in contrast to costly plate and rich food in a house where a gold Croesus with diamond eyes and necklace should have been on the mantelpiece as the household god, with the thought that even war is a good thing if it centers ambition on objects other than individual gain. Without knowing it, Joffre, Castelnau, Foch, Pétain, Nivelle and others were the richest men in France.
A colonel when the war began, in the sifting by Father Joffre to find real leaders by the criterion of success General Nivelle had risen to command an army. Wherever he was in charge he got the upper hand of the enemy. All that he and his officers said reflected one spirit—that of the offensive. They were men who believed in giving blows. A nation looking for a man who could win victories said, "Here he is!" when its people read thecommuniquéabout Douaumont one morning. He had been going his way, doing the tasks in hand according to his own method, and at one of the stations fame found him. Soldiers have their philosophy and these days when it includes fame, probably fame never comes. This time it came to a soldier without any of the showy qualities that fame used to prefer, one who, I should say, was quite unaffected by it owing to a greater interest in his work; a man without powerful influence to urge his promotion. If you had met him before the war he would have impressed you with his kindly features, well-shaped head and vitality, and if you know soldiers you would have known that he was highly trained in his profession. His staff was a family, but the kind of family where every member has telepathic connection with its head; I could not imagine that any officer who had not would be at home in the little dining-room. Readiness of perception and quickness of action in intelligent obedience were inherent.
Over in his office in the municipal building where we went after dinner the general took something wrapped in tissue paper out of a drawer and from his manner, had he been a collector, I should have known that it was some rare treasure. When he undid the paper I saw a photograph of General Joffre autographed with a sentiment for the occasion.
"He gave it to me for Douaumont!" said General Nivelle, a touch of pride in his voice—the only sign of pride that I noticed.
There spoke the soldier to whom praise from his chief was the best praise and more valued than any other encomium.
When I spoke of Douaumont he drew out the map and showed me his order of the day, which had a soldierly brevity that made words keen-edged tools. The attacking force rushed up overnight and appeared as a regulated tidal wave of men, their pace timed under cover of curtains of fire which they hugged close, then over the German trenches and on into the fort. Six thousand prisoners and forty-five hundred French casualties! It was this dramatic, this complete and unequivocal success that had captured the imagination of France, but he was not dramatic in telling it. He made it a military evolution on a piece of paper; though when he put his pencil down on Douaumont and held it fast there for a moment, saying, "And that is all for the present!" the pencil seemed to turn into steel.
All for the present! And the future? That of the army of France was to be in his hands. He had the supreme task. He would approach it as he had approached all other tasks.
You had only to look at General Mangin commanding the corps before Verdun to know that attack was not alone a system but a gospel with him. Five stripes on his arm for wounds, all won in colonial work, sun-browned, swart, with a strong, abutting chin which might have been a fit point for Nivelle's pencil, an eye that said "Attack!" and could twinkle with the wisdom of many campaigns!
"General Joffre sat in that chair two hours before the advance," he said, with the same respectful awe that other generals had exhibited toward the Commander-in-Chief.
The time had come for the old leader, grown weary, to go; for the younger men of the school which the war has produced, with its curtains of fire and wave attacks, to take his place. But the younger ones in the confidence of their system could look on the old leader while he lived as the great, indomitable figure of the critical stages of the war.
A man of iron, Mangin, with a breadth of chest in keeping with his chin, who could bear the strain of command which had brought down many generals from sheer physical incapacity. Month after month this chin had stood out against German drives, all the while wanting to be in its natural element of the offensive. His resolute, outright solution of problems by human ratios would fit him into any age or any climate. He was at home leading a punitive expedition or in the complicated business of Verdun. Whether he was using a broadsword or a curtain of fire he proposed to strike his enemy early and hard and keep on striking. In the course of talking with him I spoke of the contention that in some cases in modern war men could be too brave.
"Rarely!" he replied, a single word which had the emphasis of both that jaw and that shrewd, piercing eye.
"What is the best time to go out to the front?" I asked the general.
"Five o'clock in the morning!"
The officer who escorted me did not think anything of getting up at that hour. Mangin's is a five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps.
Shall I describe that town on the banks of the Meuse which has been described many times? Or that citadel built by Vauban, with dynamos and electric light in its underground chambers and passages, its hospitals, shops, stores and barrack room, so safe under its walls and roof of masonry that the Germans presciently did not waste their shells on it but turned them with particular vengeance on the picturesque old houses along the river bank, neglecting the barracks purposely in view of their usefulness to the conquerors when Mecca was theirs. There must be something sacred to a Frenchman in the citadel which held life secure and in the ruins which bore their share of the blows upon this old fortress town in the lap of the hills, looking out toward hills which had been the real defense.
Interest quickened on the way to the Verdun front as you came to the slopes covered with torn and fallen trees, where the Germans laid their far-reaching curtains of fire to catch the French reserves struggling through mud and shell-craters on those February and March days to the relief of the front line. Only when you have known the life of an army in action in winter in such a climate can you appreciate the will that drove men forward to the attack and the will of the defenders against outnumbering guns, having to yield, point by point, with shrewd thrift, small bands of men in exposed places making desperate resistance against torrents of shells.
Verdun was German valor at its best and German gunnery at its mightiest, the effort of Colossus shut in a ring of steel to force a decision; and the high-water mark of German persistence was where you stood on the edge of the area of mounds that shells had heaped and craters that shells had scooped by the concentration of fire on Fort Souville. A few Germans in the charge reached here, but none returned. The survivors entered Verdun, the French will tell you with a shrug, as prisoners. Down the bare slope with its dead grass blotched by craters the eye travels and then up another slope to a crest which you see as a cumulus of shell-tossed earth under an occasional shell-burst. That is Douaumont, whose taking cost the Germans such prolonged and bloody effort and aroused the Kaiser to a florid outburst of laudation of his Brandenburgers who, by its capture, had, as Germany then thought, brought France to her death-gasp.
On that hill German prestige and system reached their zenith; and the answer eight months later was Frenchélanwhich, in two hours, with the swiftness and instinctive cohesion of democracy drilled and embattled and asking no spur from an autocrat, swept the Germans off the summit. From other charges I could visualize the precise and spirited movement of those blue figures under waves of shell fire in an attack which was the triumphant example of the latest style of offensive against frontal positions. There was no Kaiser to burst into rhetoric to thank General Nivelle, who had his reward in an autographed photograph from Father Joffre; and the men of that charge had theirs in the gratitude of a people.
Fort Vaux, on another crest at the right, was still in German hands, but that, too, was to be regained with the next rush. Yes, it was good to be at Verdun after Douaumont had been retaken, standing where you would have been in range of a German sniper a week before. Turning as on a pivot, you could identify through the glasses all the positions whose names are engraved on the French mind. Not high these circling hills, the keystone of a military arch, but taken together it was clear how, in this as in other wars, they were nature's bastion at the edge of the plain that lay a misty line in the distance.
Either in front or to the rear of Souville toward Verdun the surprising thing was how few soldiers you saw and how little transport within range of German guns; which impressed you with the elastic system of the French, who are there and are not there. Let an attack by the Germans develop and soldiers would spring out of the earth and the valleys echo with the thunder of guns. A thrifty people, the French.
When studying those hills that had seen the greatest German offensive after I had seen the offensive on the Somme, I thought of all that the summer had meant on the Western front, beginning with Douaumont lost and ending with Douaumont regained and the sweep over the conquered Ridge; and I thought of another general, Sir Douglas Haig, who had had to train his legions, begin with bricks and mortar to make a house under shell fire and, day by day, with his confidence in "the spirit that quickeneth" as the great asset, had wrought with patient, far-seeing skill a force in being which had never ceased attacking and drawing in German divisions to hold the line that those German divisions were meant to break.
Von Falkenhayn was gone from power; the Crown Prince who thirsted for war had had his fill and said that war was an "idiocy." It was the sentiment of the German trenches which put von Falkenhayn out; the silent ballots of that most sensitive of all public opinion, casting its votes with the degree of its disposition to stand fire, which no officer can control by mere orders.
With the Verdun offensive over, the German soldiers struggling on the Ridge had a revelation which was translated into a feeling that censorship could not stifle of the failure of the campaign to crush France. They called for the man who had won victories and the Kaiser gave them von Hindenburg, whom fortune favored when he sent armies inspirited by his leadership against amateur soldiers in veteran confidence, while the weather had stopped the Allied offensive in the West.
Imagine Lee's men returning from Gettysburg to be confronted by inexperienced home militia and their cry, "The Yanks have given us a rough time of it, but you fellows get out of the way!" Such was the feeling of that German Army as it went southward; not the army that it was, but quite good enough an army to win against Rumania with the system that had failed at Verdun.