It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was “immune” from shell-fire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite—not knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of G.H.Q.
“Why the hell don't we get a word?” he asked. “Haven't we done as well as anybody, died as much?”
I promised to do what I could—which was nothing—to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in self-revelation.
“I have a mystical power,” he said. “Nothing will ever hit me as long as I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal Spirit, as I am.”
He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that astonished me. I envied him his particular “kink.” I wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake... He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it worried him.
There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed, although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being the reverse side of the argument.
I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug—out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, sturdy, gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags, walked on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the “crumps” that were bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one's head into trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent that I should meet “old Thom,” afterward in command of the battalion. He had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of Jocks were digging a support trench—digging with a kind of rhythmic movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his steel hat on the back of his head—a handsome, laughing figure. He did not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again.
“It was a narrow shave,” he said. “A beastly shell covered me with a ton of earth... Have a cigarette, won't you?”
We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and said: “Jolly weather, isn't it? What do you think of our little show?” Not one of them gave a glance at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat them. “Well, good morning! Must get on with the job.” There was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so near to death. They seemed to like it... They did not really like it. They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a little “fey.” He was annoyed with three of his officers who had come back late from three days' Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go into the line again under special orders. What about the store of bombs, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns?
The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as though to say: “What does the old man mean? Is this true?” One of them became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his eyes. Another said, “Hell!” in a whisper. The adjutant answered the colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the colonel's face anxiously.
“Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?”
The colonel laughed.
“Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training.”
The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the “old man's” leg-pulling... No, it was clear they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.
In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic—among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne.
“Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. “England is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!”
“But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others.
“It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said kind-hearted fishwives.
Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they did well—though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the top—and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit—steel helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags—with which other troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in the cover they made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown to bits. There was no “glory” in their job, only filth and blood, but they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow—the jester of them all—whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of “glory.” He advocated a trade—unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his head in the earth with shells bursting around him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. “Oh,” said that five-foot hero, “there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war. What's human life? What's the value of one man's throat? We're trained up as murderers—I don't dislike it, mind you—and after the war we sha'n't get out of the habit of it. It'll come nat'ral like!”
He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group of comrades who roared with laughter and said: “Go it, Bill! That's the stuff!” Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from water on the brain... Many of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod, “You can go... You. ..You....” The Bantam Division ceased to exist.
They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A Bantam died—of disease (“and he would,” said General Haldane)—and a comrade came to see his corpse.
“Shut ze door ven you come out,” said the old woman of his billet. “Fermez la porte, mon vieux.”
The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much moved by grief.
“I've seed poor Bill,” he said.
“As-tu ferme la porte?” said the old woman, anxiously.
The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.
“C'est a cause du chat!” said the old woman. “Ze cat, Monsieur, 'e 'ave 'ad your friend in ze passage tree time already to-day. Trois fois!”
Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size.
They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.
“Water!” they cried. “Water! For Christ's sake, water!”
There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and he was a dead shot.
But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright, fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pass. He passed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well water for men in agony.
During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded, bestial men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the mass they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry in the prison-camps and established their own discipline, and gave very little trouble if well handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect English, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most because it was easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others, and I found among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them. The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had done, and almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win. Their sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same inclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as inferior beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I remember that in the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry officers and would not mix with them. One of them paced up and down all night alone, and all next day, stiff in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many officers of infantry regiments.
Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of battle was out of their eyes, with a good—natured kindness that astonished the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German water-bottles at considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. “Here, hold my rifle, Fritz,” said one of our men, getting down from a truck-train to greet a friend.
An officer standing by took notice of this.
“Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your prisoners?”
Our man was astonished.
“Lor' bless you, sir, they don't want no guarding. They're glad to be took. They guard themselves.”
“Your men are extraordinary,” a German officer told me. “They asked me whether I would care to go down at once or wait till the barrage had passed.”
He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his comfort. It was in the early days of the Somme fighting, and crowds of our men stood on the banks above a sunken road, watching the prisoners coming down. This officer who spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted to see it and handle it.
“Will they give it back again?” he asked, nervously, fumbling at the ribbon.
“Certainly,” I assured him.
He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who passed it from one to the other and then back to the owner.
“Your men are extraordinary,” he said. “They are wonderful.”
One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when that place was smoking with shell-bursts. An English soldier was on each side of him, and each man carried a hand-bag, while this black-bearded giant chatted with them.
It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and spoke to one of the men.
“Who's this? Why do you carry his bags?”
“Oh, we're giving him special privileges,” said the man. “He stayed behind to look after our wounded. Said his job was to look after wounded, whoever they were. So there he's been, in a dugout bandaging our lads; and no joke, either. It's hell up there. We're glad to get out of it.”
I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. He discussed the philosophy of the war simply and with what seemed like sincerity.
“This war!” he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. “We go on killing one another-to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death and will be impoverished for long years. We Germans thought it was a war for Kultur—our civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur, against religion, against all civilization.”
“How will it end?” I asked him.
“I see no end to it,” he answered. “It is the suicide of nations. Germany is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?”
I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no end of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleeding to death?
The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of September—six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time. The Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm, where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was unceasing slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound of forsaken brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and smoke.
Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the last word in frightfulness. The intensity of the shell-fire under which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their wounded told me that it had broken their nerve. They would never fight again without a sense of horror.
“Our men are more highly strung than the English,” said one Australian officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in their fiber.
They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by yard, and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh. In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozieres now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the slopes below. Many English boys of the Sussex, West Kents, Surrey, and Warwick regiments, in the 18th Division, died at their side, not less patient in sacrifice, not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and 56th Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the way to Martinpuich, and Eaucourt l'Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and Longueval, and Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that name of the Iron Division, and not by any easy heroism. Every division in the British army took its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was duly blooded, at a cost of 25 per cent. and sometimes 50 per cent. of their fighting strength. The Canadians took up the struggle at Courcelette and captured it in a fierce and bloody battle. The Australians worked up on the right of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny Thilloy. On the far left the fortress of Thiepval had fallen at last after repeated and frightful assaults, which I watched from ditches close enough to see our infantry—Wiltshires and Worcesters of the 25th Division—trudging through infernal fire. And then at last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, mass-heroism, desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed, the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from Bullecourt to St.-Quentin.
The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage, not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth below Loupart Wood, in one mass, and eight hundred of them were German. I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell in the slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong and awful.
But our men who had escaped death and shell-shock kept their sanity through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept—oh, marvelous!—their spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought out trophies like men at a country fair... I remember an Australian colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle... Next day, though shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian boys set up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the “Coo-ee Theater.”
The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch of country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French villages and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut down, and the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their lead. It was the enemy's first retreat on the western front, and that ferocious fighting of the British troops had smashed the strongest defenses ever built in war, and our raw recruits had broken the most famous regiments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up their enemy with a sense of excitement because it seemed so much like victory and the end of war.
When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the 56th (London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through that evil place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called “Funky Villas”), and, stumbling over the shell-craters and broken trenches and dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and branchless trees, came into the open country to our outpost line. I met there a friendly sergeant who surprised me by referring in a casual way to a little old book of mine.
“This place,” he said, glancing at me, “is a strange Street of Adventure.”
It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was among a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a bloody fight at a place called The Hairpin.
A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was born.
“I just wanted to ask you,” he said, “whether Katharine married Frank?”
The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me his own Street of Adventure.
“I belong to Toc-emmas,” he said (meaning trench—mortars), “and my officers would be very pleased if you would have a look at their latest stunt. We've got a 9.2 mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the infantry. It's never been done before and we're going to blow old Fritz out of Kite Copse.”
I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and we fell in with a young officer also on his way to Pigeon Wood. He was in a merry mood, in spite of harassing fire round about and the occasional howl of a 5.9. He kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground and laughing at something that seemed to tickle his sense of humor.
“See that?” he said. “That's old Charlie Lowndes's work.”
At another pit in upheaved earth he said: “That's Charlie Lowndes again... Old Charlie gave 'em hell. He's a topping chap. You must meet him... My God! look at that!”
He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an unusually large crater.
“Who is Charlie?” I asked. “Where can I find him?”
“Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He's as pleased as Punch at having got beyond the infantry. First time it has ever been done. Took a bit of doing, too, with the largest size of Toc-emma.”
We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild chaos, and, guided by the officer and sergeant, I dived down into a deep dugout just captured from the Germans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite Copse.
“What cheer, Charlie!” shouted the young officer.
“Hullo, fellow-my-lad!... Come in. We're getting gloriously binged on a rare find of German brandy.”
“Topping and I've brought a visitor.”
Capt. Charles Lowndes—“dear old Charlie”—received us most politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled walls fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match.
“This is a nice little home in hell,” said Charles. “At any moment, of course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down here, and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an unlimited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to the gaiety of indecent minds there is a complete outfit of ladies' clothing in a neighboring dugout. Funny fellows those German officers. Take a pew, won't you? and have a drink. Orderly!”
He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-water.
We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own brandy and soda-water, out of his own mugs, sitting on his own chairs at his own table, and “dear old Charlie,” who was a little etoile, as afterward I became, with a sense of deep satisfaction (the noise of shells seemed more remote), discoursed on war, which he hated, German psychology, trench-mortar barrages (they had simply blown the Boche out of Gommecourt), and his particular fancy stunt of stealing a march on the infantry, who, said Captain Lowndes, are “laps behind.” Other officers crowded into the dugout. One of them said: “You must come round to mine. It's a blasted palace,” and I went round later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so often from shell-bursts that he thought the average of luck was up and he was bound to get “done in” before long.
Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with noble generosity. There was much laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of the wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way. Late in the afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-flung outpost of our line, and wished them luck. A few shells crashed through the wood as I left, but I was disdainful of them after that admirable brandy. It was a long walk back to “Funky Villas,” not without the interest of arithmetical calculations about the odds of luck in harassing fire, but a thousand yards or so from Pigeon Wood I looked back and saw that the enemy had begun to “take notice.” Heavy shells were smashing through the trees there ferociously. I hoped my friends were safe in their dugouts again....
And I thought of the laughter and gallant spirit of the young men, after five months of the greatest battles in the history of the world. It seemed to me wonderful.
I have described what happened on our side of the lines, our fearful losses, the stream of wounded that came back day by day, the “Butchers' Shops,” the agony in men's souls, the shell-shock cases, the welter and bewilderment of battle, the shelling of our own troops, the lack of communication between fighting units and the command, the filth and stench of the hideous shambles which were our battlefields. But to complete the picture of that human conflict in the Somme I must now tell what happened on the German side of the lines, as I was able to piece the tale together from German prisoners with whom I talked, German letters which I found in their abandoned dugouts, and documents which fell into the hands of our staff—officers.
Our men were at least inspirited by the knowledge that they were beating their enemy back, in spite of their own bloody losses. The Germans had not even that source of comfort, for whatever it might be worth under barrage fire. The mistakes of our generalship, the inefficiency of our staff-work, were not greater than the blunderings of the German High Command, and their problem was more difficult than ours because of the weakness of their reserves, owing to enormous preoccupation on the Russian front. The agony of their men was greater than ours.
To understand the German situation it must be remembered that from January to May, 1916, the German command on the western front was concentrating all its energy and available strength in man-power and gun—power upon the attack of Verdun. The Crown Prince had staked his reputation upon that adventure, which he believed would end in the capture of the strongest French fortress and the destruction of the French armies. He demanded men and more men, until every unit that could be spared from other fronts of the line had been thrown into that furnace. Divisions were called in from other theaters of war, and increased the strength on the western front to a total of about one hundred and thirty divisions.
But the months passed and Verdun still held out above piles of German corpses on its slopes, and in June Germany looked east and saw a great menace. The Russian offensive was becoming violent. German generals on the Russian fronts sent desperate messages for help. “Send us more men,” they said, and from the western front four divisions containing thirty-nine battalions were sent to them.
They must have been sent grudgingly, for now another menace threatened the enemy, and it was ours. The British armies were getting ready to strike. In spite of Verdun, France still had men enough—-withdrawn from that part of the line in which they had been relieved by the British—-to co-operate in a new attack.
It was our offensive that the German command feared most, for they had no exact knowledge of our strength or of the quality of our new troops. They knew that our army had grown prodigiously since the assault on Loos, nearly a year before.
They had heard of the Canadian reinforcements, and the coming of the Australians, and the steady increase of recruiting in England, and month by month they had heard the louder roar of our guns along the line, and had seen their destructive effect spreading and becoming more terrible. They knew of the steady, quiet concentration of batteries and divisions on the west and south of the Ancre.
The German command expected a heavy blow and, prepared for it, but as yet had no knowledge of the driving force behind it. What confidence they had of being able to resist the British attack was based upon the wonderful strength of the lines which they had been digging and fortifying since the autumn of the first year of war—“impregnable positions,” they had called them—the inexperience of our troops, their own immense quantity of machine-guns, the courage and skill of their gunners, and their profound belief in the superiority of German generalship.
In order to prevent espionage during the coming struggle, and to conceal the movement of troops and guns, they ordered the civil populations to be removed from villages close behind their positions, drew cordons of military police across the country, picketed crossroads, and established a network of counter espionage to prevent any leakage of information.
To inspire the German troops with a spirit of martial fervor (not easily aroused to fever pitch after the bloody losses before Verdun) Orders of the Day were issued to the battalions counseling them to hold fast against the hated English, who stood foremost in the way of peace (that was the gist of a manifesto by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, which I found in a dugout at Montauban), and promising them a speedy ending to the war.
Great stores of material and munitions were concentrated at rail-heads and dumps ready to be sent up to the firing-lines, and the perfection of German organization may well have seemed flawless—before the attack began.
When they began they found that in “heavies” and in expenditure of high explosives they were outclassed.
They were startled, too, by the skill and accuracy of the British gunners, whom they had scorned as “amateurs,” and by the daring of our airmen, who flew over their lines with the utmost audacity, “spotting” for the guns, and registering on batteries, communication trenches, crossroads, rail-heads, and every vital point of organization in the German war-machine working opposite the British lines north and south of the Ancre.
Even before the British infantry had left their trenches at dawn on July 1st, German officers behind the firing—lines saw with anxiety that all the organization which had worked so smoothly in times of ordinary trench—warfare was now working only in a hazardous way under a deadly storm of shells.
Food and supplies of all kinds could not be sent up to front-line trenches without many casualties, and sometimes could not be sent up at all. Telephone wires were cut, and communications broken between the front and headquarters staffs. Staff-officers sent up to report were killed on the way to the lines. Troops moving forward from reserve areas came under heavy fire and lost many men before arriving in the support trenches.
Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, sitting aloof from all this in personal safety, must have known before July 1st that his resources in men and material would be strained to the uttermost by the British attack, but he could take a broader view than men closer to the scene of battle, and taking into account the courage of his troops (he had no need to doubt that), the immense strength of their positions, dug and tunneled beyond the power of high explosives, the number of his machine-guns, the concentration of his artillery, and the rawness of the British troops, he could count up the possible cost and believe that in spite of a heavy price to pay there would be no break in his lines.
At 7.30 A.M. on July 1st the British infantry, as I have told, left their trenches and attacked on the right angle down from Gommecourt, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, and La Boisselle, and eastward from Fricourt, below Mametz and Montauban. For a week the German troops—Bavarians and Prussians—had been crouching in their dugouts, listening to the ceaseless crashing of the British “drum-fire.” In places like Beaumont Hamel, the men down in the deep tunnels—some of them large enough to hold a battalion and a half—were safe as long as they stayed there. But to get in or out was death. Trenches disappeared into a sea of shell-craters, and the men holding them—for some men had to stay on duty there—were blown to fragments.
Many of the shallower dugouts were smashed in by heavy shells, and officers and men lay dead there as I saw them lying on the first days of July, in Fricourt and Mametz and Montauban. The living men kept their courage, but below ground, under that tumult of bursting shells, and wrote pitiful letters to their people at home describing the horror of those hours.
“We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote one of them. “Nothing comes to us. No letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches it is terrible. To-morrow evening it will be seven days since this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces.”
Thirst was one of their tortures. In many of the tunneled shelters there was food enough, but the water could not be sent up. The German soldiers were maddened by thirst. When rain fell many of them crawled out and drank filthy water mixed with yellow shell-sulphur, and then were killed by high explosives. Other men crept out, careless of death, but compelled to drink. They crouched over the bodies of the men who lay above, or in, the shell-holes, and lapped up the puddles and then crawled down again if they were not hit.
When our infantry attacked at Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval they were received by waves of machine-gun bullets fired by men who, in spite of the ordeal of our seven days' bombardment, came out into the open now, at the moment of attack which they knew through their periscopes was coming. They brought their guns above the shell-craters of their destroyed trenches under our barrage and served them. They ran forward even into No Man's Land, and planted their machine-guns there, and swept down our men as they charged. Over their heads the German gunners flung a frightful barrage, plowing gaps in the ranks of our men.
On the left, by Gommecourt and Beaumont Hamel, the British attack failed, as I have told, but southward the “impregnable” lines were smashed by a tide of British soldiers as sand castles are overwhelmed by the waves. Our men swept up to Fricourt, struck straight up to Montauban on the right, captured it, and flung a loop round Mametz village.
For the German generals, receiving their reports with great difficulty because runners were killed and telephones broken, the question was: “How will these British troops fight in the open after their first assault? How will our men stand between the first line and the second?”
As far as the German troops were concerned, there were no signs of cowardice, or “low morale” as we called it more kindly, in those early days of the struggle. They fought with a desperate courage, holding on to positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them and when our men were getting near to them, making us pay a heavy price for every little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all serving their machine-guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a wonderful obstinacy, until they were killed or captured. But fresh waves of British soldiers followed those who were checked or broken.
After the first week of battle the German General Staff had learned the truth about the qualities of those British “New Armies” which had been mocked and caricatured in German comic papers. They learned that these “amateur soldiers” had the qualities of the finest troops in the world—not only extreme valor, but skill and cunning, not only a great power of endurance under the heaviest fire, but a spirit of attack which was terrible in its effect. They were fierce bayonet fighters. Once having gained a bit of earth or a ruined village, nothing would budge them unless they could be blasted out by gun-fire. General Sixt von Arnim put down some candid notes in his report to Prince Rupprecht.
“The English infantry shows great dash in attack, a factor to which immense confidence in its overwhelming artillery greatly contributes. .. It has shown great tenacity in defense. This was especially noticeable in the case of small parties, which, when once established with machine-guns in the corner of a wood or a group of houses, were very difficult to drive out.”
The German losses were piling up. The agony of the German troops under our shell-fire was reaching unnatural limits of torture. The early prisoners I saw—Prussians and Bavarians of the 14th Reserve Corps—were nerve-broken, and told frightful stories of the way in which their regiments had been cut to pieces. The German generals had to fill up the gaps, to put new barriers of men against the waves of British infantry. They flung new troops into the line, called up hurriedly from reserve depots.
Now, for the first time, their staff-work showed signs of disorder and demoralization. When the Prussian Guards Reserves were brought up from Valenciennes to counter—attack at Contalmaison they were sent on to the battlefield without maps or local guides, and walked straight into our barrage. A whole battalion was cut to pieces and many others suffered frightful things. Some of the prisoners told me that they had lost three-quarters of their number in casualties, and our troops advanced over heaps of killed and wounded.
The 122d Bavarian Regiment in Contalmaison was among those which suffered horribly. Owing to our ceaseless gun-fire, they could get no food-supplies and no water. The dugouts were crowded, so that they had to take turns to get into these shelters, and outside our shells were bursting over every yard of ground.
“Those who went outside,” a prisoner told me, “were killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their turn to die, most likely. At last most of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.” That is one little picture in a great panorama of bloodshed.
The German command was not thinking much about the human suffering of its troops. It was thinking of the next defensive line upon which they would have to fall back if the pressure of the British offensive could be maintained—the Longueval-Bazentin-Pozires line. It was getting nervous. Owing to the enormous efforts made in the Verdun offensive, the supplies of ammunition were not adequate to the enormous demand.
The German gunners were trying to compete with the British in continuity of bombardments and the shells were running short. Guns were wearing out under this incessant strain, and it was difficult to replace them. General von Gallwitz received reports of “an alarmingly large number of bursts in the bore, particularly in field-guns.”
General von Arnim complained that “reserve supplies of ammunition were only available in very small quantities.” The German telephone system proved “totally inadequate in consequence of the development which the fighting took.” The German air service was surprisingly weak, and the British airmen had established temporary mastery.
“The numerical superiority of the enemy's airmen,” noted General von Arnim, “and the fact that their machines were better made, became disagreeably apparent to us, particularly in their direction of the enemy's artillery fire and in bomb-dropping.”
On July 15th the British troops broke the German second line at Longueval and the Bazentins, and inflicted great losses upon the enemy, who fought with their usual courage until the British bayonets were among them.
A day or two later the fortress of Ovillers fell, and the remnants of the garrison—one hundred and fifty strong—after a desperate and gallant resistance in ditches and tunnels, where they had fought to the last, surrendered with honor.
Then began the long battle of the woods—Devil's Wood, High Wood, Trones Wood—continued through August with most fierce and bloody fighting, which ended in our favor and forced the enemy back, gradually but steadily, in spite of the terrific bombardments which filled those woods with shell-fire and the constant counter-attacks delivered by the Germans.
“Counter-attack!” came the order from the German staff, and battalions of men marched out obediently to certain death, sometimes with incredible folly on the part of their commanding officers, who ordered these attacks to be made without the slightest chance of success.
I saw an example of that at close range during a battle at Falfemont Farm, near Guillemont. Our men had advanced from Wedge Wood, and I watched them from a trench just south of this, to which I had gone at a great pace over shell-craters and broken wire, with a young observing officer who had been detailed to report back to the guns. (Old “Falstaff,” whose songs and stories had filled the tent under the Red Cross with laughter, toiled after us gallantly, but grunting and sweating under the sun like his prototype, until we lost him in our hurry.) Presently a body of Germans came out of a copse called Leuze Wood, on rising ground, faced round among the thin, slashed trees of Falfemont, and advanced toward our men, shoulder to shoulder, like a solid bar. It was sheer suicide. I saw our men get their machineguns into action, and the right side of the living bar frittered away, and then the whole line fell into the scorched grass. Another line followed. They were tall men, and did not falter as they came forward, but it seemed to me they walked like men conscious of going to death. They died. The simile is outworn, but it was exactly as though some invisible scythe had mown them down.
In all the letters written during those weeks of fighting and captured by us from dead or living men there was one cry of agony and horror.
“I stood on the brink of the most terrible days of my life,” wrote one of them. “They were those of the battle of the Somme. It began with a night attack on August 13th and 14th. The attack lasted till the evening of the 18th, when the English wrote on our bodies in letters of blood, 'It is all over with you.' A handful of half-mad, wretched creatures, worn out in body and mind, were all that was left of a whole battalion. We were that handful.”
The losses of many of the German battalions were staggering (yet not greater than our own), and by the middle of August the morale of the troops was severely shaken. The 117th Division by Pozires suffered very heavily. The 11th Reserve and 157th Regiments each lost nearly three-quarters of their effectives. The 9th Reserve Corps had also lost heavily. The 9th Reserve Jager Battalion lost about three-quarters, the 84th Reserve and 86th Reserve over half. On August 10th the 16th Division had six battalions in reserve.
By August 19th, owing to the large number of casualties, the greater part of those reserves had been absorbed into the front and support trenches, leaving as available reserves two exhausted battalions.
The weakness of the division and the absolute necessity of reinforcing it led to the 15th Reserve Infantry Regiment (2d Guards Division) being brought up to strengthen the right flank in the Leipzig salient. This regiment had suffered casualties to the extent of over 50 percent west of Pozires during the middle of July, and showed no eagerness to return to the fight. These are but a few examples of what was happening along the whole of the German front on the Somme.
It became apparent by the end of August that the enemy was in trouble to find fresh troops to relieve his exhausted divisions, and that the wastage was faster than the arrival of new men. It was noticeable that he left divisions in the line until incapable of further effort rather than relieving them earlier so that after resting they might again be brought on to the battlefield. The only conclusion to be drawn from this was that the enemy had not sufficient formations available to make the necessary reliefs.
In July three of these exhausted divisions were sent to the east, their place being taken by two new divisions, and in August three more exhausted divisions were sent to Russia, eight new divisions coming to the Somme front. The British and French offensive was drawing in all the German reserves and draining them of their life's blood.
“We entrained at Savigny,” wrote a man of one of these regiments, “and at once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath—the Somme.”
In many letters this phrase was used. The Somme was called the “Bath of Blood” by the German troops who waded across its shell-craters and in the ditches which were heaped with their dead. But what I have described is only the beginning of the battle, and the bath was to be filled deeper in the months that followed.