The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to enfilade our lines of attack. The natural strength of his position along the ridges, which were like a great bony hand outstretched through Flanders, with streams or “beeks,” as they are called, flowing in the valleys which ran between the fingers of that clawlike range, were strengthened by chains of little concrete forts or “pill-boxes,” as our soldiers called them, so arranged that they could defend one another by enfilade machine-gun fire. These were held by garrisons of machine—gunners of proved resolution, whose duty was to break up our waves of attack until, even if successful in gaining ground, only small bodies of survivors would be in a position to resist the counter-attacks launched by German divisions farther back. The strength of the pill—boxes made of concrete two inches thick resisted everything but the direct hit of heavy shells, and they were not easy targets at long range. The garrisons within them fought often with the utmost courage, even when surrounded, and again and again this method of defense proved terribly effective against the desperate heroic assaults of British infantry.
What our men had suffered in earlier battles was surpassed by what they were now called upon to endure. All the agonies of war which I have attempted to describe were piled up in those fields of Flanders. There was nothing missing in the list of war's abominations. A few days after the battle began the rains began, and hardly ceased for four months. Night after night the skies opened and let down steady torrents, which turned all that country into one great bog of slime. Those little rivers or “beeks,” which ran between the knobby fingers of the clawlike range of ridges, were blown out of their channels and slopped over into broad swamps. The hurricanes of artillery fire which our gunners poured upon the enemy positions for twenty miles in depth churned up deep shell-craters which intermingled and made pits which the rains and floods filled to the brim. The only way of walking was by “duck-boards,” tracks laid down across the bogs under enemy fire, smashed up day by day, laid down again under cover of darkness. Along a duckboard walk men must march in single file, and if one of our men, heavily laden in his fighting-kit, stumbled on those greasy boards (as all of them stumbled at every few yards) and fell off, he sank up to his knees, often up to his waist, sometimes up to his neck, in mud and water. If he were wounded when he fell, and darkness was about him, he could only cry to God or his pals, for he was helpless otherwise. One of our divisions of Lancashire men—the 66th—took eleven hours in making three miles or so out of Ypres across that ground on their way to attack, and then, in spite of their exhaustion, attacked. Yet week after week, month after month, our masses of men, almost every division in the British army at one time or another, struggled on through that Slough of Despond, capturing ridge after ridge, until the heights at Passchendaele were stormed and won, though even then the Germans clung to Staden and Westroosebeeke when all our efforts came to a dead halt, and that Belgian coast attack was never launched.
Sir Douglas Haig thinks that some of the descriptions of that six months' horror were “exaggerated.” As a man who knows something of the value of words, and who saw many of those battle scenes in Flanders, and went out from Ypres many times during those months to the Westhoek Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge, to the Frezenburg and Inverness Copse and Glencourse Wood, and beyond to Polygon Wood and Passchendaele, where his dead lay in the swamps and round the pill-boxes, and where tanks that had wallowed into the mire were shot into scrap-iron by German gun-fire (thirty were knocked out by direct hits on the first day of battle), and where our own guns were being flung up by the harassing fire of heavy shells, I say now that nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and that no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished.
They were months of ghastly endurance to gunners when batteries sank up to their axles as I saw them often while they fired almost unceasingly for days and nights without sleep, and were living targets of shells which burst about them. They were months of battle in which our men advanced through slime into slime, under the slash of machine-gun bullets, shrapnel, and high explosives, wet to the skin, chilled to the bone, plastered up to the eyes in mud, with a dreadful way back for walking wounded, and but little chance sometimes for wounded who could not walk. The losses in many of these battles amounted almost to annihilation to many battalions, and whole divisions lost as much as 50 per cent of their strength after a few days in action, before they were “relieved.” Those were dreadful losses. Napoleon said that no body of men could lose more than 25 per cent of their fighting strength in an action without being broken in spirit. Our men lost double that, and more than double, but kept their courage, though in some cases they lost their hope.
The 55th Division of Lancashire men, in their attacks on a line of pill-boxes called Plum Farm, Schuler Farm, and Square Farm, below the Gravenstafel Spur, lost 3,840 men in casualties out of 6,049. Those were not uncommon losses. They were usual losses. One day's fighting in Flanders (on October 4th) cost the British army ten thousand casualties, and they were considered “light” by the Higher Command in relation to the objects achieved.
General Harper of the 51st (Highland) Division told me that in his opinion the official communiques and the war correspondents' articles gave only one side of the picture of war and were too glowing in their optimism. (I did not tell him that my articles were accused of being black in pessimism, pervading gloom.) “We tell the public,” he said, “that an enemy division has been 'shattered.' That is true. But so is mine. One of my brigades has lost eighty-seven officers and two thousand men since the spring.” He protested that there was not enough liaison between the fighting-officers and the Higher Command, and could not blame them for their hatred of “the Staff.”
The story of the two Irish divisions—the 36th Ulster; and 16th (Nationalist)—in their fighting on August 16th is black in tragedy. They were left in the line for sixteen days before the battle and were shelled and gassed incessantly as they crouched in wet ditches. Every day groups of men were blown to bits, until the ditches were bloody and the living lay by the corpses of their comrades. Every day scores of wounded crawled back through the bogs, if they had the strength to crawl. Before the attack on August 16th the Ulster Division had lost nearly two thousand men. Then they attacked and lost two thousand more, and over one hundred officers. The 16th Division lost as many men before the attack and more officers. The 8th Dublins had been annihilated in holding the line. On the night before the battle hundreds of men were gassed. Then their comrades attacked and lost over two thousand more, and one hundred and sixty—two officers. All the ground below two knolls of earth called Hill 35 and Hill 37, which were defended by German pill-boxes called Pond Farm and Gallipoli, Beck House and Borry Farm, became an Irish shambles. In spite of their dreadful losses the survivors in the Irish battalion went forward to the assault with desperate valor on the morning of August 16th, surrounded the pill-boxes, stormed them through blasts of machine-gun fire, and toward the end of the day small bodies of these men had gained a footing on the objectives which they had been asked to capture, but were then too weak to resist German counter-attacks. The 7th and 8th Royal Irish Fusiliers had been almost exterminated in their efforts to dislodge the enemy from Hill 37. They lost seventeen officers out of twenty-one, and 64 per cent of their men. One company of four officers and one hundred men, ordered to capture the concrete fort known as Borry Farm, at all cost, lost four officers and seventy men. The 9th Dublins lost fifteen officers out of seventeen, and 66 per cent of their men.
The two Irish divisions were broken to bits, and their brigadiers called it murder. They were violent in their denunciation of the Fifth Army for having put their men into the attack after those thirteen days of heavy shelling, and after the battle they complained that they were cast aside like old shoes, no care being taken for the comfort of the men who had survived. No motor-lorries were sent to meet them and bring them down, but they had to tramp back, exhausted and dazed. The remnants of the 16th Division, the poor, despairing remnants, were sent, without rest or baths, straight into the line again, down south.
I found a general opinion among officers and men, not only of the Irish Division, under the command of the Fifth Army, that they had been the victims of atrocious staff-work, tragic in its consequences. From what I saw of some of the Fifth Army staff-officers I was of the same opinion. Some of these young gentlemen, and some of the elderly officers, were arrogant and supercilious without revealing any symptoms of intelligence. If they had wisdom it was deeply camouflaged by an air of inefficiency. If they had knowledge they hid it as a secret of their own. General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army in Flanders, and afterward north and south of St.-Quentin, where the enemy broke through, was extremely courteous, of most amiable character, with a high sense of duty. But in Flanders, if not personally responsible for many tragic happenings, he was badly served by some of his subordinates; and battalion officers and divisional staffs raged against the whole of the Fifth Army organization, or lack of organization, with an extreme passion of speech.
“You must be glad to leave Flanders,” I said to a group of officers trekking toward the Cambrai salient.
One of them answered, violently: “God be thanked we are leaving the Fifth Army area!”
In an earlier chapter of this book I have already paid a tribute to the Second Army, and especially to Sir John Harington, its chief of staff. There was a thoroughness of method, a minute attention to detail, a care for the comfort and spirit of the men throughout the Second Army staff which did at least inspire the troops with the belief that whatever they did in the fighting-lines had been prepared, and would be supported, with every possible help that organization could provide. That belief was founded not upon fine words spoken on parade, but by strenuous work, a driving zeal, and the fine intelligence of a chief of staff whose brain was like a high-power engine.
I remember a historic little scene in the Second Army headquarters at Cassel, in a room where many of the great battles had been planned, when Sir John Harington made the dramatic announcement that Sir Herbert Plumer, and he, as General Plumer's chief of staff, had been ordered to Italy—in the middle of a battle—to report on the situation which had become so grave there. He expressed his regret that he should have to leave Flanders without completing all his plans, but was glad that Passchendaele had been captured before his going.
In front of him was the map of the great range from Wytschaete to Staden, and he laid his hand upon it and smiled and said: “I often used to think how much of that range we should get this year. Now it is nearly all ours.” He thanked the war correspondents for all their articles, which had been very helpful to the army, and said how glad he had been to have our co-operation.
“It was my ambition,” he said, speaking with some emotion, “to make cordial relations between battalion officers and the staff, and to get rid of that criticism (sometimes just) which has been directed against the staff. The Second Army has been able to show the fighting soldiers that the success of a battle depends greatly on efficient staff work, and has inspired them with confidence in the preparations and organization behind the lines.”
Yet it seemed to me, in my pessimism, and seems to me still, in my memory of all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent, that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's chance of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.
Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff has described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls “terrific,” inflicting “enormous loss” upon his armies and increasing his anxiety at the “reduction of our fighting strength.”
“Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but continually, and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by the hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and—only too often—it was the mass that won.
“What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!
“The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a hero's death.
“And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.
“October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base. He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it against Poelcapelle, Passchendaele, Becelaere, Gheluvelt, and Zandvoorde; at very many points he dented the line. It seemed as if he would charge down the wall; but, although a slight tremor passed through its foundation, the wall held. The impressions that I continued to receive were extremely grave. Tactically everything had been done; the fore field was good. Our artillery practice had materially improved. Behind nearly every fighting—division there stood a second, as rear wave. In the third line, too, there were still reserves. We knew that the wear and tear of the enemy's forces was high. But we also knew that the enemy was extraordinarily strong and, what was equally important, possessed extraordinary will-power.”
That was the impression of the cold brain directing the machinery of war from German headquarters. More human and more tragic is a letter of an unknown German officer which we found among hundreds of others, telling the same tale, in the mud of the battlefield:
“If it were not for the men who have been spared me on this fierce day and are lying around me, and looking timidly at me, I should shed hot and bitter tears over the terrors that have menaced me during these hours. On the morning of September 18th my dugout containing seventeen men was shot to pieces over our heads. I am the only one who withstood the maddening bombardment of three days and still survives. You cannot imagine the frightful mental torments I have undergone in those few hours. After crawling out through the bleeding remnants of my comrades, and through the smoke and debris, wandering and running in the midst of the raging gun-fire in search of a refuge, I am now awaiting death at any moment. You do not know what Flanders means. Flanders means endless human endurance. Flanders means blood and scraps of human bodies. Flanders means heroic courage and faithfulness even unto death.”
To British and to Germans it meant the same.
During the four and a half months of that fighting the war correspondents were billeted in the old town of Cassel, where, perched on a hill which looks over a wide stretch of Flanders, through our glasses we could see the sand-dunes beyond Dunkirk and with the naked eyes the whole vista of the battle-line round Ypres and in the wide curve all the countryside lying between Aire and Hazebrouck and Notre Dame de Lorette. My billet was in a monastery for old priests, on the eastern edge of the town, and at night my window was lighted by distant shell-fire, and I gazed out to a sky of darkness rent by vivid flashes, bursts of red flame, and rockets rising high. The priests used to tap at my door when I came back from the battlefields all muddy, with a slime-plastered face, writing furiously, and an old padre used to plague me like that, saying:
“What news? It goes well, eh? Not too well, perhaps! Alas! it is a slaughter on both sides.”
“It is all your fault,” I said once, chaffingly, to get rid of him. “You do not pray enough.”
He grasped my wrist with his skinny old hand.
“Monsieur,” he whispered, “after eighty years I nearly lose my faith in God. That is terrible, is it not? Why does not God give us victory? Alas! perhaps we have sinned too much!”
One needed great faith for courage then, and my courage (never much to boast about) ebbed low those days, when I agonized over our losses and saw the suffering of our men and those foul swamps where the bodies of our boys lay in pools of slime, vividly colored by the metallic vapors of high explosives, beside the gashed tree-stumps; and the mangled corpses of Germans who had died outside their pill-boxes; and when I saw dead horses on the roads out of Ypres, and transport drivers dead beside their broken wagons, and officers of ours with the look of doomed men, nerve-shaken, soul-stricken, in captured blockhouses, where I took a nip of whisky with them now and then before they attacked again; and groups of dazed prisoners coming down the tracks through their own harrowing fire; and always, always, streams of wounded by tens of thousands.
There was an old mill-house near Vlamertinghe, beyond Goldfish Chateau, which was made into a casualty clearing station, and scores of times when I passed it I saw it crowded with the “walking wounded,” who had trudged down from the fighting-line, taking eleven hours, fourteen hours sometimes, to get so far. They were no longer “cheerful” like the gay lads who came lightly wounded out of earlier battles, glad of life, excited by their luck. They were silent, shivering, stricken men; boys in age, but old and weary in the knowledge of war. The slime of the battlefields had engulfed them. Their clothes were plastered to their bodies. Their faces and hands were coated with that whitish clay. Their steel hats and rifles were caked with it. Their eyes, brooding, were strangely alive in those corpselike figures of mud who huddled round charcoal stoves or sat motionless on wooden forms, waiting for ambulances. Yet they were stark in spirit still.
“Only the mud beat us,” they said. Man after man said that.
“We should have gone much farther except for the mud.”
Along the Menin road there were wayside dressing stations for wounded, with surgeons at work, and I saw the same scenes there. They were not beyond the danger zone. Doctors and orderlies were killed by long-range shells. Wounded were wounded again or finished off. Some ambulances were blown to bits. A colonel who had been standing in talk with a doctor was killed halfway through a sentence.
There was never a day in which Ypres was not shelled by long-range high velocities which came howling overhead as I heard them scores of times in passing through those ruins with gas-mask at the alert, according to orders, and steel hat strapped on, and a deadly sense of nostalgia because of what was happening in the fields of horror that lay beyond. Yet to the soldier farther up the Menin road Ypres was sanctuary and God's heaven.
The little old town of Cassel on the hill—where once a Duke of York marched up and then marched down again—was beyond shell-range, though the enemy tried to reach it and dropped twelve-inch shells (which make holes deep enough to bury a coach and horses) round its base. There is an inn there—the Hotel du Sauvage—which belongs now to English history, and Scottish and Irish and Welsh and Australian and Canadian. It was the last place along the road to Ypres where men who loved life could get a dinner sitting with their knees below a table-cloth, with candle-light glinting in glasses, while outside the windows the flickering fires of death told them how short might be their tarrying in the good places of the world. This was a good place where the blinds were pulled down by Madame, who understood. Behind the desk was Mademoiselle Suzanne, “a dainty rogue in porcelain,” with wonderfully bright eyes and just a little greeting of a smile for any young officer who looked her way trying to get that greeting, because it was ever so long since he had seen a pretty face and might be ever so long again. Sometimes it was a smile met in the mirror against the wall, to which Suzanne looked to touch her curls and see, like the Lady of Shalott, the pictures of life that passed. A man would tilt his chair to get that angle of vision. Outside, on these nights of war, it was often blusterous, very dark, wet with heavy rain. The door opened, and other officers came in with waterproofs sagging round their legs and top-boots muddy to the tags, abashed because they made pools of water on polished boards.
“Pardon, Madame.”
“Ca ne fait rien, Monsieur.”
There was a klip-klop of horses' hoofs in the yard. I thought of D'Artagnan and the Musketeers who might have ridden into this very yard, strode into this very room, on their way to Dunkirk or Calais. Madame played the piano remarkably well, classical music of all kinds, and any accompaniment to any song. Our young officers sang. Some of them touched the piano with a loving touch and said, “Ye gods, a piano again!” and played old melodies or merry ragtime. Before Passchendaele was taken a Canadian boy brought a fiddle with him, and played last of all, after other tunes, “The Long, Long Trail,” which his comrades sang.
“Come and play to us again,” said Madame.
“If I come back,” said the boy.
He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel.
From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants and children were killed with them. For some strange reason Cassel itself was never bombed.
“We are a nest of spies,” said some of the inhabitants, but others had faith in a miraculous statue, and still others in Sir Herbert Plumer.
Once when a big shell burst very close I looked at Mademoiselle Suzanne behind the desk. She did not show fear by the flicker of an eyelid, though officers in the room were startled.
“Vous n'avez pas peur, meme de la mort?” (“You are not afraid, even of death?”) I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Je m'en fiche de la mort!” (“I don't care a damn for death!”)
The Hotel du Sauvage was a pleasant rendezvous, but barred for a time to young gentlemen of the air force, who lingered too long there sometimes and were noisy. It was barred to all officers for certain hours of the day without special permits from the A.P.M., who made trouble in granting them. Three Scottish officers rode down into Cassel. They had ridden down from hell-fire to sit at a table covered with a table-cloth, and drink tea in a room again. They were refused permission, and their language to me about the A.P.M. was unprintable. They desired his blood and bones. They raised their hands to heaven to send down wrath upon all skunks dwelling behind the lines in luxury and denying any kind of comfort to fighting-men. They included the P.M. in their rage, and all staff-officers from Cassel to Boulogne, and away back to Whitehall.
To cheer up the war correspondents' mess when we assembled at night after miserable days, and when in the darkness gusts of wind and rain clouted the window-panes and distant gun-fire rumbled, or bombs were falling in near villages, telling of peasant girls killed in their beds and soldiers mangled in wayside burns, we had the company sometimes of an officer (a black-eyed fellow) who told merry little tales of executions and prison happenings at which he assisted in the course of his duty.
I remember one about a young officer sentenced to death for cowardice (there were quite a number of lads like that). He was blindfolded by a gas-mask fixed on the wrong way round, and pinioned, and tied to a post. The firing—party lost their nerve and their shots were wild. The boy was only wounded, and screamed in his mask, and the A.P.M. had to shoot him twice with his revolver before he died.
That was only one of many little anecdotes told by a gentleman who seemed to like his job and to enjoy these reminiscences.
The battles of Flanders ended with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians, and that year's fighting on the western front cost us 800,000 casualties, and though we had dealt the enemy heavy blows from which he reeled back, the drain upon our man-power was too great for what was to happen next year, and our men were too sorely tried. For the first time the British army lost its spirit of optimism, and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men with whom I came in touch. They saw no ending of the war, and nothing except continuous slaughter, such as that in Flanders.
Our men were not mythical heroes exalted by the gods above the limitations of nature. They were human beings, with wives and children, or mothers and sisters, whom they desired to see again. They hated this war. Death had no allurement for them, except now and then as an escape from intolerable life under fire. They would have been superhuman if they had not revolted in spirit, though still faithful to discipline, against the foul conditions of warfare in the swamps, where, in spite of all they had, in that four months or so of fighting, achieved the greatest effort of human courage and endurance ever done by masses of men in obedience to command.
At the end of those battles happened that surprising, audacious adventure in the Cambrai salient organized by the Third Army under General Byng, when on November 20, 1917, squadrons of tanks broke through the Hindenburg line, and infantry streamed through the breach, captured hundreds of guns, ten thousand prisoners, many villages and ridges, and gave a monstrous shock to the German High Command.
The audacity of the adventure lay in the poverty of manpower with which it was attempted and supported. The divisions engaged had all been through the grinding mill of Flanders and were tired men. The artillery was made up largely of those batteries which had been axle—deep in Flanders mud. It was clearly understood by General Byng and Gen. Louis Vaughan, his chief of staff, that Sir Douglas Haig could not afford to give them strong reserves to exploit any success they might gain by surprise or to defend the captured ground against certain counter-attacks. It was to be a surprise assault by tanks and infantry, with the hope that the cavalry corps might find its gap at last and sweep round Cambrai before the enemy could recover and reorganize. With other correspondents I saw Gen. Louis Vaughan, who expounded the scheme before it was launched. That charming man, with his professional manner, sweetness of speech, gentleness of voice and gesture, like an Oxford don analyzing the war correspondence of Xenophon, made no secret of the economy with which the operation would have to be made.
“We must cut our coat according to our cloth,” he said.
The whole idea was to seize only as much ground as the initial success could gain, and not to press if resistance became strong. It was a gamble, with a chance of luck. The cavalry might do nothing, or score a big triumph. All depended on the surprise of the tanks. If they were discovered before the assault the whole adventure would fail at the start.
They had been brought up secretly by night, four hundred of them, with supply-tanks for ammunition and petrol lying hidden in woods by day. So the artillery and infantry and cavalry had been concentrated also. The enemy believed himself secure in his Hindenburg line, which had been constructed behind broad hedges of barbed wire with such wide ditches that no tank could cross.
How, then, would tanks cross? Ah, that was a little trick which would surprise the Germans mightily. Each tank would advance through the early morning mists with a bridge on its nose. The bridge was really a big “fascine,” or bundle of fagots about a yard and a half in diameter, and controlled by a lever and chain from the interior of the tank. Having plowed through the barbed wire and reached the edge of the Hindenburg trench, the tank would drop the fascine into the center of the ditch, stretch out its long body, reach the bundle of fagots, find support on it, and use it as a stepping-stone to the other side. Very simple in idea and effect!
So it happened, and the mists favored us, as I saw on the morning of the attack at a little place called Beaumont, near Villers Pluich. The enemy was completely surprised, caught at breakfast in his dugouts, rounded up in batches. The tanks went away through the breach they had made, with the infantry swarming round them, and captured Havrincourt, Hermies, Ribecourt, Gouzeaucourt, Masnieres, and Marcoing, and a wide stretch of country forming a cup or amphitheater below a series of low ridges south of Bourlon Wood, where the ground rose again.
It was a spectacular battle, such as we had never seen before, and during the following days, when our troops worked up to Bourlon Wood and through the intervening villages of Anneux, Graincourt, Containg, and Fontaine Notre Dame, I saw tanks going into action and cruising about like landships, with cavalry patrols riding over open ground, airplanes flying low over German territory, and masses of infantry beyond all trench-lines, and streams of liberated civilians trudging through the lines from Marcoing. The enemy was demoralized the first day and made only slight resistance. The chief losses of the tanks were due to a German major of artillery who served his own guns and knocked out a baker's dozen of these monsters as they crawled over the Flesquieres Ridge. I saw them lying there with the blood and bones of their pilots and crews within their steel walls. It was a Highland soldier who checked the German major.
“You're a brave man,” he said, “but you've got to dee,” and ran him through the stomach with his bayonet. It was this check at the Flesquieres Ridge, followed by the breaking of a bridge at Masnieres under the weight of a tank and the holding of a trench-line called the Rumilly switch by a battalion of Germans who raced to it from Cambrai before our men could capture it, which thwarted the plans of the cavalry. Our cavalry generals were in consultation at their headquarters, too far back to take immediate advantage of the situation. They waited for the capture of the Rumilly switch, and held up masses of cavalry whom I saw riding through the village of Ribecourt, with excitement and exaltation, because they thought that at last their chance had come. Finally orders were given to cancel all previous plans to advance. Only one squadron, belonging to the Canadian Fort Garry Horse in General Seely's division, failed to receive the order (their colonel rode after them, but his horse slipped and fell before he caught them up), and it was their day of heroic folly. They rode fast and made their way through a gap in the wire cut by the troopers, and came under rifle and machine-gun fire, which wounded the captain and several men.
The command was carried on by a young lieutenant, who rode with his men until they reached the camouflaged road southeast of the village of Rumilly, where they went through in sections under the fire of the enemy hidden in the banks. Here they came up against a battery of field-guns, one of which fired point-blank at them. They charged the battery, putting the guns out of action and killing some of the gunners. Those who were not destroyed surrendered, and the prisoners were left to be sent back by the supports. The squadron then dealt with the German infantry in the neighborhood. Some of them fled, while some were killed or surrendered. All these operations were done at a gallop under fire from flanking blockhouses. The squadron then slowed down to a walk and took up a position in a sunken road one kilometer east of Rumilly. Darkness crept down upon them, and gradually they were surrounded by German infantry with machine-guns, so that they were in great danger of capture or destruction. Only five of their horses remained unhit, and the lieutenant in command decided that they must endeavor to cut their way through and get back. The horses were stampeded in the direction of the enemy in order to draw the machine-gun fire, and while these riderless horses galloped wildly out of one end of the sunken road, the officer and his surviving troopers escaped from the other end. On the way back they encountered four bodies of the enemy, whom they attacked and routed. On one occasion their escape was due to the cunning of another young lieutenant, who spoke German and held conversations with the enemy in the darkness, deceiving them as to the identity of his force until they were able to take the German troops by surprise and hack a way through. This lieutenant was hit in the face by a bullet, and when he arrived back in Masnieres with his men in advance of the rear-guard he was only able to make his report before falling in a state of collapse.
Other small bodies of cavalry—among them the 8th Dragoons and 5th Hussars—had wild, heroic adventures in the Cambrai salient, where they rode under blasts of machine-gun fire and rounded up prisoners in the ruined villages of Noyelles and Fontaine Notre Dame. Some of them went into the Folie Wood nearby and met seven German officers strolling about the glades, as though no war was on. They took them prisoners, but had to release some of them later, as they could not be bothered with them. Later they came across six ammunition—wagons and destroyed them. In the heart of the wood was one of the German divisional headquarters, and one of our cavalry officers dismounted and approached the cottage stealthily, and looked through the windows. Inside was a party of German officers seated at a table, with beer mugs in front of them, apparently unconscious of any danger near them. Our officer fired his revolver through the windows and then, like a schoolboy who has thrown a stone, ran away as hard as he could and joined his troop. Youthful folly of gallant hearts!
After the enemy's surprise his resistance stiffened and he held the village of Fontaine Notre Dame, and Bourlon Wood, on the hill above, with strong rear-guards. Very quickly, too, he brought new batteries into action, and things became unpleasant in fields and villages where our men, as I saw them on those days, hunted around for souvenirs in German dugouts and found field-glasses, automatic pistols, and other good booty.
It seemed to me that the plan as outlined by Gen. Louis Vaughan, not to exploit success farther than justified by the initial surprise, was abandoned for a time. A brigade of Guards was put in to attack Fontaine Notre Dame, and suffered heavily from machine-gun fire before taking it. The 62d (Yorkshire) Division lost many good men in Bourlon Village and Bourlon Wood, into which the enemy poured gas-shells and high explosives.
Then on November 30th the Germans, under the direction of General von Marwitz, came back upon us with a tiger's pounce, in a surprise attack which we ought to have anticipated. I happened to be on the way to Gouzeaucourt early that morning, and, going through the village of Fins, next to it, I saw men straggling back in some disorder, and gun-teams wedged in a dense traffic moving in what seemed to me the wrong direction.
“I don't know what to do,” said a young gunner officer. “My battery has been captured and I can't get into touch with the brigade.”
“What has happened?” I asked.
He looked at me in surprise.
“Don't you know? The enemy has broken through.”
“Broken through where?”
The gunner officer pointed down the road.
“At the present moment he's in Gouzeaucourt.”
I went northward, and saw that places like Hermies and Havrincourt, which had been peaceful spots for a few days, were under heavy fire. Bourlon Wood beyond was a fiery furnace. Hell had broken out again and things looked bad. There was a general packing up of dumps and field hospitals and heavy batteries. In Gouzeaucourt and other places our divisional and brigade headquarters were caught napping. Officers were in their pajamas or in their baths when they heard the snap of machine-gun bullets. I saw the Guards go forward to Gouzeaucourt for a counter-attack. They came along munching apples and whistling, as though on peace maneuvers. Next day, after they had gained back Gouzeaucourt, I saw many of them wounded, lying under tarpaulins, all dirty and bloody.
The Germans had adopted our own way of attack. They had assembled masses of troops secretly, moving them forward by night under the cover of woods, so that our air scouts saw no movement by day. Our line was weakly held along the front—the 55th Division, thinned out by losses, was holding a line of thirteen thousand yards, three times as much as any troops can hold, in safety—and the German storm-troops, after a short, terrific bombardment, broke through to a distance of five miles.
Our tired men, who had gained the first victory, fought heroic rear-guard actions back from Masnieres and Marcoing, and back from Bourlon Wood on the northern side of the salient. They made the enemy pay a high price in blood for the success of his counter-attack, but we lost many thousands of brave fellows, and the joy bells which had rung in London on November 20th became sad and ironical music in the hearts of our disappointed people.
So ended 1917, our black year; and in the spring of 1918, after all the losses of that year, our armies on the western front were threatened by the greatest menace that had ever drawn near to them, and the British Empire was in jeopardy.
In the autumn of 1917 the Italian disaster of Caporetto had happened, and Sir Herbert Plumer, with his chief of staff, Sir John Harington, and many staff-officers of the Second Army, had, as I have told, been sent to Italy with some of our best divisions, so weakening Sir Douglas Haig's command. At that very time, also, after the bloody losses in Flanders, the French government and General Headquarters brought severe pressure upon the British War Council to take over a greater length of line in France, in order to release some of the older classes of the French army who had been under arms since 1914. We yielded to that pressure and Sir Douglas Haig extended his lines north and south of St.-Quentin, where the Fifth Army, under General Gough, was intrusted with the defense.
I went over all that new ground of ours, out from Noyon to Chaulny and Barisis and the floods of the Oise by La Fere; out from Ham to Holmon Forest and Francilly and the Epine de Dullon, and the Fort de Liez by St.-Quentin; and from Peronne to Hargicourt and Jeancourt and La Verguier. It was a pleasant country, with living trees and green fields not annihilated by shell-fire, though with the naked eye I could see the scarred walls of St.-Quentin cathedral, and the villages near the frontlines had been damaged in the usual way. It was dead quiet there for miles, except for short bursts of harassing fire now and then, and odd shells here and there, and bursts of black shrapnel in the blue sky of mild days.
“Paradise, after Flanders!” said our men, but I knew that there was a great movement of troops westward from Russia, and wondered how long this paradise would last.
I looked about for trench systems, support lines, and did not see them, and wondered what our defense would be if the enemy attacked here in great strength. Our army seemed wonderfully thinned out. There were few men to be seen in our outpost line or in reserve. It was all strangely quiet. Alarmingly quiet.
Yet, pleasant for the time being. I had a brother commanding a battery along the railway line south of St.-Quentin. I went to see him, and we had a picnic meal on a little hill staring straight toward St.-Quentin cathedral. One of his junior officers set the gramophone going. The colonel of the artillery brigade came jogging up on his horse and called out, “Fine morning, and a pretty spot!” The infantry divisions were cheerful. “Like a rest-cure!” they said. They had sports almost within sight of the German lines. I saw a boxing-match in an Irish battalion, and while two fellows hammered each other I glanced away from them to winding, wavy lines of chalk on the opposite hillsides, and wondered what was happening behind them in that quietude.
“What do you think about this German offensive?” I asked the general of a London division (General Gorringe of the 47th) standing on a wagon and watching a tug-of—war. From that place also we could see the German positions.
“G.H.Q. has got the wind-up,” he said. “It is all bluff.”
General Hall, temporarily commanding the Irish Division, was of the same opinion, and took some pains to explain the folly of thinking the Germans would attack. Yet day after day, week after week, the Intelligence reports were full of evidence of immense movements of troops westward, of intensive training of German divisions in back areas, of new hospitals, ammunition-dumps, airplanes, battery positions. There was overwhelming evidence as to the enemy's intentions. Intelligence officers took me on one side and said: “England ought to know. The people ought to be prepared. All this is very serious. We shall be 'up against it.'” G.H.Q. was convinced. On February 23d the war correspondents published articles summarizing the evidence, pointing out the gravity of the menace, and they were passed by the censorship. But England was not scared. Dances were in full swing in London. Little ladies laughed as usual, light-hearted. Flanders had made no difference to national optimism, though the hospitals were crowded with blind and maimed and shell-shocked.
“I am skeptical of the German offensive” said Mr. Bonar Law.
Nobody believed the war correspondents. Nobody ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our liberty of the pen.
They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the world—our world, as we knew it—with our liberties and power. For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One laughed, but the specter echoed one's laughter and said, “Wait!” The mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one's spirit in the woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German “Archies.” But the specter chilled one's blood at the reminder of vast masses of field-gray men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war—D'Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the journey's end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said between them, “Ah, les sacres Boches!.. . If only I could fight again!”
I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pass to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair. We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I brought my brother to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We dined well, slept well.
“Noyon is a good spot,” he said. “I shall come here again when you give me a lift.”
A few days later my brother was firing at masses of Germans with open sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of that battery. When I next passed through Noyon shells were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.
So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.
Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words which froze my blood.
“We may have to give ground,” he said, “if the enemy attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that.”
“The crossings of the Somme... Amiens!”
Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities.
All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history again.
They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new method of “infiltration” which had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at Caporetto.
It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in masses at a great pace with immense machine—gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in the mass, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.
I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence of panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune's wheel by many officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.
The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had slipped and they were caught by German shell-fire and German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their homes like the first fugitives. I saw old women coming down lanes where 5.9's were bursting and where our gunners were getting into action. I saw young mothers packing their babies and their bundles into perambulators while shells came hurtling over the thatched roofs of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats looking down upon a wide sweep of battle, and saw many little farmsteads on fire and Bailleul one torch of flame and smoke.
There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse, the Kaiser's cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and friends. Then his body was borne down the hill at night and buried secretly by a parish priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know the whereabouts of his cousin's grave, the priest to whom his message was conveyed said, “Tell the Kaiser he shall know when the German armies have departed from Belgium and when reparation has been made for all their evil deeds.” It was the prior who told me that story and who described to me how the British cavalry had forged their way up the hill. He showed me the scars of bullets on the walls and the windows from which the monks looked out upon the battle.
“All that is a wonderful memory,” said the prior. “Thanks to the English, we are safe and beyond the range of German shells.”
I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German shells. An eight—inch shell had just smashed into the prior's parlor. Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had fled by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The Ulster gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did not stay there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.
From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They did not weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a little family in Robecq whom I packed into my car when shells began to fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in her arms, and a mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a wood some miles away. She was gay and smiling when she said, “Au revoir et merci!” A few days later the cottage and the wood were behind the German lines.
The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who had been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of Cheshires, Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and others, who fought “with their backs to the wall,” as Sir Douglas Haig demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were worn thin, was heroic and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of their horses), followed by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind our thin brown line. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve, but had to hold them until other plans were developed—the Crown Prince's plan against the French, and the attack on Arras.
The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions—the Iron Division and the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and Guards on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We had a breathing—space while heavy blows fell against the French and against three British divisions who had been sent to hold “a quiet sector” on their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames, struck right and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne again, and threatened Paris.
Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of his counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions went with them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th English. The flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles, was massed behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American marines and infantry were given their first big job to do. What happened all the world knows. The Crown Prince's army was attacked on both flanks and in the center, and was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.