During the two years that followed the battles of the Somme I recorded in my daily despatches, republished in book form (“The Struggle in Flanders” and “The Way to Victory”), the narrative of that continuous conflict in which the British forces on the western front were at death-grips with the German monster where now one side and then the other heaved themselves upon their adversary and struggled for the knock-out blow, until at last, after staggering losses on both sides, the enemy was broken to bits in the last combined attack by British, Belgian, French, and American armies. There is no need for me to retell all that history in detail, and I am glad to know that there is nothing I need alter in the record of events which I wrote as they happened, because they have not been falsified by any new evidence; and those detailed descriptions of mine stand true in fact and in the emotion of the hours that passed, while masses of men were slaughtered in the fields of Armageddon.
But now, looking back upon those last two years of the war as an eye-witness of many tragic and heroic things, I see the frightful drama of them as a whole and as one act was related to another, and as the plot which seemed so tangled and confused, led by inevitable stages, not under the control of any field-marshal or chief of staff, to the climax in which empires crashed and exhausted nations looked round upon the ruin which followed defeat and victory. I see also, as in one picture, the colossal scale of that human struggle in that Armageddon of our civilization, which at the time one reckoned only by each day's success or failure, each day's slaughter on that side or the other. One may add up the whole sum according to the bookkeeping of Fate, by double-entry, credit and debit, profit and loss. One may set our attacks in the battles of Flanders against the strength of the German defense, and say our losses of three to one (as Ludendorff reckons them, and as many of us guessed) were in our favor, because we could afford the difference of exchange and the enemy could not put so many human counters into the pool for the final “kitty” in this gamble with life and death. One may balance the German offensive in March of '18 with the weight that was piling up against them by the entry of the Americans. One may also see now, very clearly, the paramount importance of the human factor in this arithmetic of war, the morale of men being of greater influence than generalship, though dependent on it, the spirit of peoples being as vital to success as the mechanical efficiency of the war-machine; and above all, one is now able to observe how each side blundered on in a blind, desperate way, sacrificing masses of human life without a clear vision of the consequences, until at last one side blundered more than another and was lost. It will be impossible to pretend in history that our High Command, or any other, foresaw the thread of plot as it was unraveled to the end, and so arranged its plan that events happened according to design. The events of March, 1918, were not foreseen nor prevented by French or British. The ability of our generals was not imaginative nor inventive, but limited to the piling up of men and munitions, always more men and more munitions, against positions of enormous strength and overcoming obstacles by sheer weight of flesh and blood and high explosives. They were not cunning so far as I could see, nor in the judgment of the men under their command, but simple and straightforward gentlemen who said “once more unto the breach,” and sent up new battering-rams by brigades and divisions. There was no evidence that I could find of high directing brains choosing the weakest spot in the enemy's armor and piercing it with a sharp sword, or avoiding a direct assault against the enemy's most formidable positions and leaping upon him from some unguarded way. Perhaps that was impossible in the conditions of modern warfare and the limitations of the British front until the arrival of the tanks, which, for a long time, were wasted in the impassable bogs of Flanders, where their steel skeletons still lie rusting as a proof of heroic efforts vainly used. Possible or not, and rare genius alone could prove it one way or another, it appeared to the onlooker, as well as to the soldier who carried out commands that our method of warfare was to search the map for a place which was strongest in the enemy's lines, most difficult to attack, most powerfully defended, and then after due advertisement, not to take an unfair advantage of the enemy, to launch the assault. That had always been the English way and that was our way in many battles of the great war, which were won (unless they were lost) by the sheer valor of men who at great cost smashed their way through all obstructions.
The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled; inventing the concrete blockhouse or “pill-box” for a forward defensive zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in order to lessen their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for a time); scattering their men in organized shell-craters in order to distract our barrage fire; using the “elastic system of defense” with frightful success against Nivelle's attack in the Champagne; creating the system of assault of “infiltration” which broke the Italian lines at Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we may set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to victory, but the German High Command blundered atrociously in all the larger calculations of war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the risk of adding the greatest power in the world—in numbers of men and in potential energy—to their list of enemies at a time when their own man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation, of course, was great. The British naval blockade was causing severe suffering by food shortage to the German people and denying them access to raw material which they needed for the machinery of war.
The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly menace to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the British navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities. By those miscalculations they lost the war in the long run, and by other errors they made their loss more certain.
One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them into gulfs of ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold-blooded cruelty of Ludendorff's Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of millions of men upon a gambling chance of victory with the hazards weighted against him, as he admits. Writing of January, 1917, he says: “A collapse on the part of Russia was by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, not reckoned upon by any one... Failing the U-boat campaign we reckoned with the collapse of the Quadruple Alliance during 1917.” Yet with that enormous risk visible ahead, Ludendorff continued to play the grand jeu, the great game, and did not advise any surrender of imperial ambitions in order to obtain a peace for his people, and was furious with the Majority party in the Reichstag for preparing a peace resolution. The collapse of Russia inspired him with new hopes of victory in the west, and again he prepared to sacrifice masses of men in the slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this time fatally. His time-table was out of gear. The U—boat war had failed. American manhood was pouring into France, and German soldiers on the Russian front had been infected with ideas most dangerous to German discipline and the “will to win.” At the end, as at the beginning, the German war lords failed to understand the psychology of human nature as they had failed to understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great Britain, and of America. One of the most important admissions in history is made by Ludendorff when he writes:
“Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was through a combination of innumerable circumstances.”
So the web of fate was spun, and men who thought they were directing the destiny of the world were merely caught in those woven threads like puppets tied to strings and made to dance. It was the old Dance of Death which has happened before in the folly of mankind.
During the German retreat to their Hindenburg line we saw the full ruthlessness of war as never before on the western front, in the laying waste of a beautiful countryside, not by rational fighting, but by carefully organized destruction. Ludendorff claims, quite justly, that it was in accordance with the laws of war. That is true. It is only that our laws of war are not justified by any code of humanity above that of primitive savages. “The decision to retreat,” he says, “was not reached without a painful struggle. It implied a confession of weakness that was bound to raise the morale of the enemy and to lower our own. But as it was necessary for military reasons we had no choice. It had to be carried out... The whole movement was a brilliant performance... The retirement proved in a high degree remunerative.”
I saw the brilliant performance in its operation. I went into beautiful little towns like Peronne, where the houses were being gutted by smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them, fall into chaotic heaps of masonry. I wandered through the ruins of old French chateaux, once very stately in their terraced gardens, now a litter of brickwork, broken statuary, and twisted iron—work above open vaults where not even the dead had been left to lie in peace. I saw the little old fruit-trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had to be bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy's retreat.
There was a queer sense of illusion as one traveled through this desolation. At a short distance many of the villages seemed to stand as before the war. One expected to find inhabitants there. But upon close approach one saw that each house was but an empty shell blown out from cellar to roof, and one wandered through the streets of the ruins in a silence that was broken only by the sound of one's own voice or by a few shells crashing into the gutted houses. The enemy was in the next village, or the next but one, with a few field-guns and a rear-guard of machine-gunners.
In most villages, in many of his dugouts, and by contraptions with objects lying amid the litter, he had left “booby traps” to blow our men to bits if they knocked a wire, or stirred an old boot, or picked up a fountain-pen, or walked too often over a board where beneath acid was eating through a metal plate to a high-explosive charge. I little knew when I walked round the tower of the town hall of Bapaume that in another week, with the enemy far away, it would go up in dust and ashes. Only a few of our men were killed or blinded by these monkey-tricks. Our engineers found most of them before they were touched off, but one went down dugouts or into ruined houses with a sense of imminent danger. All through the devastated region one walked with an uncanny feeling of an evil spirit left behind by masses of men whose bodies had gone away. It exuded from scraps of old clothing, it was in the stench of the dugouts and in the ruins they had made.
In some few villages there were living people left behind, some hundreds in Nesle and Roye, and, all told, some thousands. They had been driven in from the other villages burning around them, their own villages, whose devastation they wept to see. I met these people who had lived under German rule and talked with many of them—old women, wrinkled like dried-up apples, young women waxen of skin, hollow-eyed, with sharp cheekbones, old peasant farmers and the gamekeepers of French chateaux, and young boys and girls pinched by years of hunger that was not quite starvation. It was from these people that I learned a good deal about the psychology of German soldiers during the battles of the Somme. They told me of the terror of these men at the increasing fury of our gun-fire, of their desertion and revolt to escape the slaughter, and of their rage against the “Great People” who used them for gun-fodder. Habitually many of them talked of the war as the “Great Swindle.” These French civilians hated the Germans in the mass with a cold, deadly hatred. They spoke with shrill passion at the thought of German discipline, fines, punishments, requisitions, which they had suffered in these years. The hope of vengeance was like water to parched throats. Yet I noticed that nearly every one of these people had something good to say about some German soldier who had been billeted with them. “He was a good-natured fellow. He chopped wood for me and gave the children his own bread. He wept when he told me that the village was to be destroyed.” Even some of the German officers had deplored this destruction. “The world will have a right to call us barbarians,” said one of them in Ham. “But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot. It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of war.”
On the whole it seemed they had not misused the women. I heard no tales of actual atrocity, though some of brutal passion. But many women shrugged their shoulders when I questioned them about this and said: “They had no need to use violence in their way of love—making. There were many volunteers.”
They rubbed their thumbs and fingers together as though touching money and said, “You understand?”
I understood when I went to a convent in Amiens and saw a crowd of young mothers with flaxen-haired babies, just arrived from the liberated districts. “All those are the children of German fathers,” said the old Reverend Mother. “That is the worst tragedy of war. How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”
Eighteen months later, or thereabouts, I went into a house in Cologne, where a British outpost was on the Hohenzollern bridge. There was a babies' creche in an upper room, and a German lady was tending thirty little ones whose chorus of “Guten Tag! Guten Tag!” was like the quacking of ducks.
“After to-morrow there will be no more milk for them,” she said.
“And then?” I asked.
“And then many of them will die.”
She wept a little. I thought of those other babies in Amiens, and of the old Reverend Mother.
“How will God punish all this? Alas! it is the innocent who suffer for the guilty.”
Of those things General Ludendorff does not write in his Memoirs, which deal with the strategy and machinery of war.
Sir Douglas Haig was not misled into the error of following up the German retreat, across that devastated country, with masses of men. He sent forward outposts to keep in touch with the German rear-guards and prepared to deliver big blows at the Vimy Ridge and the lines round Arras. This new battle by British troops was dictated by French strategy rather than by ours. General Nivelle, the new generalissimo, was organizing a great offensive in the Champagne and desired the British army to strike first and keep on striking in order to engage and exhaust German divisions until he was ready to launch his own legions. The “secret” of his preparations was known by every officer in the French army and by Hindenburg and his staff, who prepared a new method of defense to meet it. The French officers with whom I talked were supremely confident of success. “We shall go through,” they said. “It is certain. Anybody who thinks otherwise is a traitor who betrays his country by the poison of pessimism. Nivelle will deal the death—blow.” So spoke an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins, and a friend in the infantry of the line, over a cup of coffee in an estaminet crammed with other French soldiers who were on their way to the Champagne front.
Nivelle did not launch his offensive until April 16th, seven days after the British had captured the heights of Vimy and gone far to the east of Arras. Hindenburg was ready. He adopted his “elastic system of defense,” which consisted in withdrawing the main body of his troops beyond the range of the French barrage fire, leaving only a few outposts to camouflage the withdrawal and be sacrificed for the sake of the others (those German outposts must have disliked their martyrdom under orders, and I doubt whether they, poor devils, were exhilarated by the thought of their heroic service). He also withdrew the full power of his artillery beyond the range of French counter-battery work and to such a distance that when it was the German turn to fire the French infantry would be beyond the effective protection of their own guns. They were to be allowed an easy walk through to their death-trap. That is what happened. The French infantry, advancing with masses of black troops in the Colonial Corps in the front-line of assault, all exultant and inspired by a belief in victory, swept through the forward zone of the German defenses, astonished, and then disconcerted by the scarcity of Germans, until an annihilating barrage fire dropped upon them and smashed their human waves. From French officers and nurses I heard appalling tales of this tragedy. The death—wail of the black troops froze the blood of Frenchmen with horror. Their own losses were immense in a bloody shambles. I was told by French officers that their losses on the first day of battle were 150,000 casualties, and these figures were generally believed. They were not so bad as that, though terrible. Semi-official figures state that the operations which lasted from April 16th to April 25th cost France 28,000 killed on the field of battle, 5,000 who died of wounds in hospital, 4,000 prisoners, and 80,000 wounded. General Nivelle's offensive was called off, and French officers who had said, “We shall break through... It is certain,” now said: “We came up against a bec de gaz. As you English would say, we 'got it in the neck.' It is a great misfortune.”
The battle of Arras, in which the British army was engaged, began on April 9th, an Easter Sunday, when there was a gale of sleet and snow. From ground near the old city of Arras I saw the preliminary bombardment when the Vimy Ridge was blasted by a hurricane of fire and the German lines beyond Arras were tossed up in earth and flame. From one of old Vauban's earthworks outside the walls I saw lines of our men going up in assault beyond the suburbs of Blangy and St.-Laurent to Roclincourt, through a veil of sleet and smoke. Our gun-fire was immense and devastating, and the first blow that fell upon the enemy was overpowering. The Vimy Ridge was captured from end to end by the Canadians on the left and the 51st Division of Highlanders on the right. By the afternoon the entire living German population, more than seven thousand in the tunnels of Vimy, were down below in the valley on our side of the lines, and on the ridge were many of their dead as I saw them afterward horribly mangled by shell-fire in the upheaved earth. The Highland Division, commanded by General Harper—“Uncle Harper,” he was called—had done as well as the Canadians, though they had less honor, and took as many prisoners. H.D. was their divisional sign as I saw it stenciled on many ruined walls throughout the war. “Well, General,” said a Scottish sergeant, “they don't call us Harper's Duds any more!”... On the right English county troops of the 12th Division, 3d Division, and others, the 15th (Scottish) and the 36th (London) had broken through, deeply and widely, capturing many men and guns after hard fighting round machine-gun redoubts. That night masses of German prisoners suffered terribly from a blizzard in the barbed-wire cages at Etrun, by Arras, where Julius Caesar had his camp for a year in other days of history. They herded together with their bodies bent to the storm, each man sheltering his fellow and giving a little human warmth. All night through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: “It is cold! It is cold!” And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.
Ludendorff admits the severity of that defeat.
“The battle near Arras on April 9th formed a bad beginning to the capital fighting during this year.
“April 10th and the succeeding days were critical days. A breach twelve thousand to fifteen thousand yards wide and as much as six thousand yards and more in depth is not a thing to be mended without more ado. It takes a good deal to repair the inordinate wastage of men and guns as well as munitions that results from such a breach. It was the business of the Supreme Command to provide reserves on a large scale. But in view of the troops available, and of the war situation, it was simply not possible to hold a second division in readiness behind each division that might, perhaps, be about to drop out. A day like April 9th upset all calculations. It was a matter of days before a new front could be formed and consolidated. Even after the troops were ultimately in line the issue of the crisis depended, as always in such cases, very materially upon whether the enemy followed up his initial success with a fresh attack and by fresh successes made it difficult for us to create a firm front. In view of the weakening of the line that inevitably resulted, such successes were only too easy to achieve.
“From April 10th onward the English attacked in the breach in great strength, but after all not in the grand manner; they extended their attack on both wings, especially to the southward as far as Bullecourt. On April 11th they gained Monchy, while we during the night before the 12th evacuated the Vimy heights. April 23d and 28th, and also May 3d, were again days of heavy, pitched battle. In between there was some bitter local fighting. The struggle continued, we delivered minor successful counter-attacks, and on the other hand lost ground slightly at various points.”
I remember many pictures of that fighting round Arras in the days that followed the first day. I remember the sinister beauty of the city itself, when there was a surging traffic of men and guns through its ruined streets in spite of long-range shells which came crashing into the houses. Our soldiers, in their steel hats and goatskin coats, looked like medieval men-at-arms. The Highlanders who crowded Arras had their pipe-bands there and they played in the Petite Place, and the skirl of the pipes shattered against the gables of old houses. There were tunnels beneath Arras through which our men advanced to the German lines, and I went along them when one line of men was going into battle and another was coming back, wounded, some of them blind, bloody, vomiting with the fumes of gas in their lungs—their steel hats clinking as they groped past one another. In vaults each side of these passages men played cards on barrels, to the light of candles stuck in bottles, or slept until their turn to fight, with gas-masks for their pillows. Outside the Citadel of Arras, built by Vauban under Louis XIV, there were long queues of wounded men taking their turn to the surgeons who were working in a deep crypt with a high-vaulted roof. One day there were three thousand of them, silent, patient, muddy, blood-stained. Blind boys or men with smashed faces swathed in bloody rags groped forward to the dark passage leading to the vault, led by comrades. On the grass outside lay men with leg wounds and stomach wounds. The way past the station to the Arras-Cambrai road was a death-trap for our transport and I saw the bodies of horses and men horribly mangled there. Dead horses were thick on each side of an avenue of trees on the southern side of the city, lying in their blood and bowels. The traffic policeman on “point duty” on the Arras-Cambrai road had an impassive face under his steel helmet, as though in Piccadilly Circus; only turned his head a little at the scream of a shell which plunged through the gable of a corner house above him. There was a Pioneer battalion along the road out to Observatory Ridge, which was a German target. They were mending the road beyond the last trench, through which our men had smashed their way. They were busy with bricks and shovels, only stopping to stare at shells plowing holes in the fields on each side of them. When I came back one morning a number of them lay covered with blankets, as though asleep. They were dead, but their comrades worked on grimly, with no joy of labor in their sweat.
Monchy Hill was the key position, high above the valley of the Scarpe. I saw it first when there was a white village there, hardly touched by fire, and afterward when there was no village. I was in the village below Observatory Ridge on the morning of April 11th when cavalry was massed on that ground, waiting for orders to go into action. The headquarters of the cavalry division was in a ditch covered by planks, and the cavalry generals and their staffs sat huddled together with maps over their knees. “I am afraid the general is busy for the moment,” said a young staff-officer on top of the ditch. He looked about the fields and said, “It's very unhealthy here.” I agreed with him. The bodies of many young soldiers lay about. Five-point-nines (5.9's) were coming over in a haphazard way. It was no ground for cavalry. But some squadrons of the 10th Hussars, Essex Yeomanry, and the Blues were ordered to take Monchy, and rode up the hill in a flurry of snow and were seen by German gunners and slashed by shrapnel. Most of their horses were killed in the village or outside it, and the men suffered many casualties, including their general—Bulkely Johnson—whose body I saw carried back on a stretcher to the ruin of Thilloy, where crumps were bursting. It is an astonishing thing that two withered old French women stayed in the village all through the fighting. When our troops rode in these women came running forward, frightened and crying “Camarades!” as though in fear of the enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy and held up their scraggy old faces to be kissed by these troopers. Afterward Monchy was filled with a fury of shell-fire and the troopers crawled out from the ruins, leaving the village on the hill to be attacked and captured again by our infantry of the 15th and 37th Divisions, who were also badly hammered.
Heroic folly! The cavalry in reserve below Observatory Hill stood to their horses, staring up at a German airplane which came overhead, careless of our “Archies.” The eye of the German pilot must have widened at the sight of that mass of men and horses. He carried back glad tidings to the guns.
One of the cavalry officers spoke to me.
“You look ill.”
“No, I'm all right. Only cold.”
The officer himself looked worn and haggard after a night in the open.
“Do you think the Germans will get their range as far as this? I'm nervous about the men and the horses. We've been here for hours, and it seems no good.”
I did not remind him that the airplane was undoubtedly the herald of long-range shells. They came within a few minutes. Some men and horses were killed. I was with a Highland officer and we took cover in a ditch not more than breast high. Shells were bursting damnably close, scattering us with dirt.
“Let's strike away from the road,” said Major Schiach. “They always tape it out.”
We struck across country, back to Arras, glad to get there... other men had to stay.
The battles to the east of Arras that went before the capture of Monchy and followed it were hard, nagging actions along the valley of the Scarpe, which formed a glacis, where our men were terribly exposed to machine—gun fire, and suffered heavily day after day, week after week, for no object apparent to our battalion officers and men, who did not know that they were doing team-work for the French. The Londoners of the 56th Division made a record advance through Neuville-Vitasse to Henin and Heninel, and broke a switch-line of the Hindenburg system across the little Cojeul River by Wancourt. There was a fatal attack in the dark on May 3d, when East Kents and Surreys and Londoners saw a gray dawn come, revealing the enemy between them and our main line, and had to hack their way through if they could, There were many who could not, and even divisional generals were embittered by these needless losses and by the hard driving of their men, saying fierce things about our High Command.
Their language was mild compared with that of some of our young officers. I remember one I met near Henin. He was one of a group of three, all gunner officers who were looking about for better gun positions not so clearly visible to the enemy, who was in two little woods—the Bois de Sart and Bois Vert—which stared down upon them like green eyes. Some of their guns had been destroyed, many of their horses killed; some of their men. A few minutes before our meeting a shell had crashed into a bath close to their hut, where men were washing themselves. The explosion filled the bath with blood and bits of flesh. The younger officer stared at me under the tilt forward of his steel hat and said, “Hullo, Gibbs!” I had played chess with him at Groom's Cafe in Fleet Street in days before the war. I went back to his hut and had tea with him, close to that bath, hoping that we should not be cut up with the cake. There were noises “off,” as they say in stage directions, which were enormously disconcerting to one's peace of mind, and not very far off. I had heard before some hard words about our generalship and staff-work, but never anything so passionate, so violent, as from that gunner officer. His view of the business was summed up in the word “murder.” He raged against the impossible orders sent down from headquarters, against the brutality with which men were left in the line week after week, and against the monstrous, abominable futility of all our so-called strategy. His nerves were in rags, as I could see by the way in which his hand shook when he lighted one cigarette after another. His spirit was in a flame of revolt against the misery of his sleeplessness, filth, and imminent peril of death. Every shell that burst near Henin sent a shudder through him. I stayed an hour in his hut, and then went away toward Neuville-Vitasse with harassing fire following along the way. I looked back many times to the valley, and to the ridges where the enemy lived above it, invisible but deadly. The sun was setting and there was a tawny glamour in the sky, and a mystical beauty over the landscape despite the desert that war had made there, leaving only white ruins and slaughtered trees where once there were good villages with church spires rising out of sheltering woods. The German gunners were doing their evening hate. Crumps were bursting heavily again amid our gun positions.
Heninel was not a choice spot. There were other places of extreme unhealthfulness where our men had fought their way up to the Hindenburg line, or, as the Germans called it, the Siegfried line. Croisille and Cherisy were targets of German guns, and I saw them ravaging among the ruins, and dodged them. But our men, who lived close to these places, stayed there too long to dodge them always. They were inhabitants, not visitors. The Australians settled down in front of Bullecourt, captured it after many desperate fights, which left them with a bitter grudge against tanks which had failed them and some English troops who were held up on the left while they went forward and were slaughtered. The 4th Australian Division lost three thousand men in an experimental attack directed by the Fifth Army. They made their gun emplacements in the Noreuil Valley, the valley of death as they called it, and Australian gunners made little slit trenches and scuttled into them when the Germans ranged on their batteries, blowing gun spokes and wheels and breech-blocks into the air. Queant, the bastion of the Hindenburg line, stared straight down the valley, and it was evil ground, as I knew when I went walking there with another war correspondent and an Australian officer who at a great pace led us round about, amid 5.9's, and debouched a little to see one of our ammunition-dumps exploding like a Brock's Benefit, and chattered brightly under “woolly bears” which made a rending tumult above our heads. I think he enjoyed his afternoon out from staff-work in the headquarters huts. Afterward I was told that he was mad, but I think he was only brave. I hated those hours, but put on the mask that royalty wears when it takes an intelligent interest in factory-work.
The streams of wounded poured down into the casualty clearing stations day by day, week by week, and I saw the crowded Butchers' Shops of war, where busy surgeons lopped at limbs and plugged men's wounds.
Yet in those days, as before and afterward, as at the beginning and as at the end, the spirits of British soldiers kept high unless their bodies were laid low. Between battles they enjoyed their spells of rest behind the lines. In that early summer of '17 there was laughter in Arras, lots of fun in spite of high velocities, the music of massed pipers and brass bands, jolly comradeship in billets with paneled walls upon which perhaps Robespierre's shadow had fallen in the candle-light before the Revolution, when he was the good young man of Arras.
As a guest of the Gordons, of the 15th Division, I listened to the pipers who marched round the table and stood behind the colonel's chair and mine, and played the martial music of Scotland, until something seemed to break in my soul and my ear-drums. I introduced a French friend to the mess, and as a guest of honor he sat next to the colonel, and the eight pipers played behind his chair. He went pale, deadly white, and presently swooned off his chair... and the Gordons thought it the finest tribute to their pipes!
The officers danced reels in stocking feet with challenging cries, Gaelic exhortations, with fine grace and passion, though they were tangled sometimes in the maze... many of them fell in the fields outside or in the bogs of Flanders.
On the western side of Arras there were field sports by London men, and Surreys, Buffs, Sussex, Norfolks, Suffolks, and Devons. They played cricket between their turns in the line, lived in the sunshine of the day, and did not look forward to the morrow. At such times one found no trace of war's agony in their faces or their eyes nor in the quality of their laughter.
My dwelling-place at that time, with other war correspondents, was in an old white chateau between St.-Pol and Hesdin, from which we motored out to the line, Arras way or Vimy way, for those walks in Queer Street. The contrast of our retreat with that Armageddon beyond was profound and bewildering. Behind the old white house were winding walks through little woods beside the stream which Henry crossed on his way to Agincourt; tapestried in early spring with bluebells and daffodils and all the flowers that Ronsard wove into his verse in the springtime of France. Birds sang their love-songs in the thickets. The tits twittered fearfully at the laugh of the jay. All that beauty was like a sharp pain at one's heart after hearing the close tumult of the guns and trudging over the blasted fields of war, in the routine of our task, week by week, month by month.
“This makes for madness,” said a friend of mine, a musician surprised to find himself a soldier. “In the morning we see boys with their heads blown off”—that morning beyond the Point du Jour and Thelus we had passed a group of headless boys, and another coming up stared at them with a silly smile and said, “They've copped it all right!” and went on to the same risk; and we had crouched below mounds of earth when shells had scattered dirt over us and scared us horribly, so that we felt a little sick in the stomach—“and in the afternoon we walk through this garden where the birds are singing... There is no sense in it. It's just midsummer madness!”
But only one of us went really mad and tried to cut his throat, and died. One of the best, as I knew him at his best.
The battles of the Third Army beyond Arras petered out and on June 7th there was the battle of Messines and Wytschaete when the Second Army revealed its mastery of organization and detail. It was the beginning of a vastly ambitious scheme to capture the whole line of ridges through Flanders, of which this was the southern hook, and then to liberate the Belgian coast as far inland as Bruges by a combined sea-and-land attack with shoregoing tanks, directed by the Fourth Army. This first blow at the Messines Ridge was completely and wonderfully successful, due to the explosion of seventeen enormous mines under the German positions, followed by an attack “in depth,” divisions passing through each other, or “leap-frogging,” as it was called, to the final objectives against an enemy demoralized by the earthquake of the explosions.
For two years there had been fierce underground fighting at Hill 60 and elsewhere, when our tunnelers saw the Germans had listened to one another's workings, racing to strike through first to their enemies' galleries and touch off their high-explosive charges. Our miners, aided by the magnificent work of Australian and Canadian tunnelers, had beaten the enemy into sheer terror of their method of fighting and they had abandoned it, believing that we had also. But we did not, as they found to their cost.
I had seen the working of the tunnelers up by Hill 70 and elsewhere. I had gone into the darkness of the tunnels, crouching low, striking my steel hat with sharp, spine-jarring knocks against the low beams overhead, coming into galleries where one could stand upright and walk at ease in electric light, hearing the vibrant hum of great engines, the murmur of men's voices in dark crypts, seeing numbers of men sleeping on bunks in the gloom of caverns close beneath the German lines, and listening through a queer little instrument called a microphone, by which I heard the scuffle of German feet in German galleries a thousand yards away, the dropping of a pick or shovel, the knocking out of German pipes against charcoal stoves. It was by that listening instrument, more perfect than the enemy's, that we had beaten him, and by the grim determination of those underground men of ours, whose skin was the color of the chalk in which they worked, who coughed in the dampness of the caves, and who packed high explosives at the shaft-heads—hundreds of tons of it—for the moment when a button should be touched far away, and an electric current would pass down a wire, and the enemy and his works would be blown into dust.
That moment came at Hill 60 and sixteen other places below the Wytschaete and Messines Ridge at three-thirty on the morning of June 7th, after a quiet night of war, when a few of our batteries had fired in a desultory way and the enemy had sent over some flocks of gas-shells, and before the dawn I heard the cocks crow on Kemmel Hill. I saw the seventeen mines go up, and earth and flame gush out of them as though the fires of hell had risen. A terrible sight, as the work of men against their fellow—creatures... It was the signal for seven hundred and fifty of our heavy guns and two thousand of our field—guns to open fire, and behind a moving wall of bursting shells English, Irish, and New Zealand soldiers moved forward in dense waves. It was almost a “walk-over.” Only here and there groups of Germans served their machine-guns to the death. Most of the living were stupefied amid their dead in the upheaved trenches, slashed woods, and deepest dugouts. I walked to the edge of the mine-craters and stared into their great gulfs, wondering how many German bodies had been engulfed there. The following day I walked through Wytschaete Wood to the ruins of the Hospice on the ridge. In 1914 some of our cavalry had passed this way when the Hospice was a big red-brick building with wings and outhouses and a large community of nuns and children. Through my glasses I had often seen its ruins from Kemmel Hill and the Scherpenberg. Now nothing was left but a pile of broken bricks, not very high. Our losses were comparatively small, though some brave men had died, including Major Willie Redmond, whose death in Wytschaete Wood was heard with grief in Ireland.
Ludendorff admits the severity of the blow:
“The moral effect of the explosions was simply staggering... The 7th of June cost us dear, and, owing to the success of the enemy attack, the price we paid was very heavy. Here, too, it was many days before the front was again secure. The British army did not press its advantage; apparently it only intended to improve its position for the launching of the great Flanders offensive. It thereupon resumed operations between the old Arras battlefield and also between La Bassee and Lens. The object of the enemy was to wear us down and distract our attention from Ypres.”
That was true. The Canadians made heavy attacks at Lens, some of which I saw from ground beyond Notre Dame de Lorette and the Vimy Ridge and the enemy country by Grenay, when those men besieged a long chain of mining villages which girdled Lens itself, where every house was a machine-gun fort above deep tunnels. I saw them after desperate struggles, covered in clay, parched with thirst, gassed, wounded, but indomitable. Lens was the Troy of the Canadian Corps and the English troops of the First Army, and it was only owing to other battles they were called upon to fight in Flanders that they had to leave it at last uncaptured, for the enemy to escape.
All this was subsidiary to the great offensive in Flanders, with its ambitious objects. But when the battles of Flanders began the year was getting past its middle age, and events on other fronts had upset the strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked him when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.
I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun emplacements at Malo-les—Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged in sand—dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes. Our artillery positions were mapped out.
“Three shots to one, sir,” said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, “that's the stuff to give them!”
But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division, cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a fury of fire.
At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new poison-gas—mustard gas—which raised blisters and burned men's bodies where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to “put the wind up.” Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.