The name (that “blood-bath”) and the news of battle could not be hidden from the people of Germany, who had already been chilled with horror by the losses at Verdun, nor from the soldiers of reserve regiments quartered in French and Belgian towns like Valenciennes, St. Quentin, Cambrai, Lille, Bruges, and as far back as Brussels, waiting to go to the front, nor from the civil population of those towns, held for two years by their enemy—these blond young men who lived in their houses, marched down their streets, and made love to their women.
The news was brought down from the Somme front by Red Cross trains, arriving in endless succession, and packed with maimed and mangled men. German military policemen formed cordons round the railway stations, pushed back civilians who came to stare with somber eyes at these blanketed bundles of living flesh, but when the ambulances rumbled through the streets toward the hospitals—long processions of them, with the soles of men's boots turned up over the stretchers on which they lay quiet and stiff—the tale was told, though no word was spoken.
The tale of defeat, of great losses, of grave and increasing anxiety, was told clearly enough—as I read in captured letters—by the faces of German officers who went about in these towns behind the lines with gloomy looks, and whose tempers, never of the sweetest, became irritable and unbearable, so that the soldiers hated them for all this cursing and bullying. A certain battalion commander had a nervous breakdown because he had to meet his colonel in the morning.
“He is dying with fear and anxiety,” wrote one of his comrades.
Other men, not battalion commanders, were even more afraid of their superior officers, upon whom this bad news from the Somme had an evil effect.
The bad news was spread by divisions taken out of the line and sent back to rest. The men reported that their battalions had been cut to pieces. Some of their regiments had lost three-quarters of their strength. They described the frightful effect of the British artillery—the smashed trenches, the shell-crater, the horror.
It was not good for the morale of men who were just going up there to take their turn.
The man who was afraid of his colonel “sits all day long writing home, with the picture of his wife and children before his eyes.” He was afraid of other things.
Bavarian soldiers quarreled with Prussians, accused them (unjustly) of shirking the Somme battlefields and leaving the Bavarians to go to the blood-bath.
“All the Bavarian troops are being sent to the Somme (this much is certain, you can see no Prussians there), and this in spite of the losses the 1st Bavarian Corps suffered recently at Verdun! And how we did suffer!... It appears that we are in for another turn—at least the 5th Bavarian Division. Everybody has been talking about it for a long time. To the devil with it! Every Bavarian regiment is being sent into it, and it's a swindle.”
It was in no cheerful mood that men went away to the Somme battlefields. Those battalions of gray-clad men entrained without any of the old enthusiasm with which they had gone to earlier battles. Their gloom was noticed by the officers.
“Sing, you sheeps' heads, sing!” they shouted.
They were compelled to sing, by order.
“In the afternoon,” wrote a man of the 18th Reserve Division, “we had to go out again; we were to learn to sing. The greater part did not join in, and the song went feebly. Then we had to march round in a circle and sing, and that went no better. After that we had an hour off, and on the way back to billets we were to sing 'Deutschland uber Alles,' but this broke down completely. One never hears songs of the Fatherland any more.”
They were silent, grave-eyed men who marched through the streets of French and Belgian towns to be entrained for the Somme front, for they had forebodings of the fate before them. Yet none of their forebodings were equal in intensity of fear to the frightful reality into which they were flung.
The journey to the Somme front, on the German side, was a way of terror, ugliness, and death. Not all the imagination of morbid minds searching obscenely for foulness and blood in the great, deep pits of human agony could surpass these scenes along the way to the German lines round Courcelette and Flers, Gueudecourt, Morval, and Lesboeufs.
Many times, long before a German battalion had arrived near the trenches, it was but a collection of nerve—broken men bemoaning losses already suffered far behind the lines and filled with hideous apprehension. For British long-range guns were hurling high explosives into distant villages, barraging crossroads, reaching out to rail-heads and ammunition-dumps, while British airmen were on bombing flights over railway stations and rest-billets and highroads down which the German troops came marching at Cambrai, Bapaume, in the valley between Irles and Warlencourt, at Ligny-Thilloy, Busigny, and many other places on the lines of route.
German soldiers arriving one morning at Cambrai by train found themselves under the fire of a single airplane which flew very low and dropped bombs. They exploded with heavy crashes, and one bomb hit the first carriage behind the engine, killing and wounding several men. A second bomb hit the station buildings, and there was a clatter of broken glass, the rending of wood, and the fall of bricks. All lights went out, and the German soldiers groped about in the darkness amid the splinters of glass and the fallen bricks, searching for the wounded by the sound of their groans. It was but one scene along the way to that blood-bath through which they had to wade to the trenches of the Somme.
Flights of British airplanes circled over the villages on the way. At Grevilliers, in August, eleven 112-16 bombs fell in the market square, so that the center of the village collapsed in a state of ruin, burying soldiers billeted there. Every day the British airmen paid these visits, meeting the Germans far up the roads on their way to the Somme, and swooping over them like a flying death. Even on the march in open country the German soldiers tramping silently along—not singing in spite of orders—were bombed and shot at by these British aviators, who flew down very low, pouring out streams of machine-gun bullets. The Germans lost their nerve at such times, and scattered into the ditches, falling over one another, struck and cursed by their Unteroffizieren, and leaving their dead and wounded in the roadway.
As the roads went nearer to the battlefields they were choked with the traffic of war, with artillery and transport wagons and horse ambulances, and always thousands of gray men marching up to the lines, or back from them, exhausted and broken after many days in the fires of hell up there. Officers sat on their horses by the roadside, directing all the traffic with the usual swearing and cursing, and rode alongside the transport wagons and the troops, urging them forward at a quicker pace because of stern orders received from headquarters demanding quicker movement. The reserves, it seemed, were desperately wanted up in the lines. The English were attacking again. .. God alone knew what was happening. Regiments had lost their way. Wounded were pouring back. Officers had gone mad. Into the midst of all this turmoil shells fell—shells from long-range guns. Transport wagons were blown to bits. The bodies and fragments of artillery horses lay all over the roads. Men lay dead or bleeding under the debris of gun-wheels and broken bricks. Above all the noise of this confusion and death in the night the hard, stern voices of German officers rang out, and German discipline prevailed, and men marched on to greater perils.
They were in the shell-zone now, and sometimes a regiment on the march was tracked all along the way by British gun-fire directed from airplanes and captive balloons. It was the fate of a captured officer I met who had detrained at Bapaume for the trenches at Contalmaison.
At Bapaume his battalion was hit by fragments of twelve-inch shells. Nearer to the line they came under the fire of eight-inch and six-inch shells. Four-point-sevens (4.7's) found them somewhere by Bazentin. At Contalmaison they marched into a barrage, and here the officer was taken prisoner. Of his battalion there were few men left.
It was so with the 3d Jager Battalion, ordered up hurriedly to make a counter-attack near Flers. They suffered so heavily on the way to the trenches that no attack could be made. The stretcher-bearers had all the work to do.
The way up to the trenches became more tragic as every kilometer was passed, until the stench of corruption was wafted on the wind, so that men were sickened, and tried not to breathe, and marched hurriedly to get on the lee side of its foulness. They walked now through places which had once been villages, but were sinister ruins where death lay in wait for German soldiers.
“It seems queer to me,” wrote one of them, “that whole villages close to the front look as flattened as a child's toy run over by a steam-roller. Not one stone remains on another. The streets are one line of shell—holes. Add to that the thunder of the guns, and you will see with what feelings we come into the line—into trenches where for months shells of all caliber have rained... Flers is a scrap heap.”
Again and again men lost their way up to the lines. The reliefs could only be made at night lest they should be discovered by British airmen and British gunners, and even if these German soldiers had trench maps the guidance was but little good when many trenches had been smashed in and only shell-craters could be found.
“In the front line of Flers,” wrote one of these Germans, “the men were only occupying shell-holes. Behind there was the intense smell of putrefaction which filled the trench—almost unbearably. The corpses lie either quite insufficiently covered with earth on the edge of the trench or quite close under the bottom of the trench, so that the earth lets the stench through. In some places bodies lie quite uncovered in a trench recess, and no one seems to trouble about them. One sees horrible pictures—here an arm, here a foot, here a head, sticking out of the earth. And these are all German soldiers-heroes!
“Not far from us, at the entrance to a dugout, nine men were buried, of whom three were dead. All along the trench men kept on getting buried. What had been a perfect trench a few hours before was in parts completely blown in... The men are getting weaker. It is impossible to hold out any longer. Losses can no longer be reckoned accurately. Without a doubt many of our people are killed.”
That is only one out of thousands of such gruesome pictures, true as the death they described, true to the pictures on our side of the line as on their side, which went back to German homes during the battles of the Somme. Those German soldiers were great letter-writers, and men sitting in wet ditches, in “fox-holes,” as they called their dugouts, “up to my waist in mud,” as one of them described, scribbled pitiful things which they hoped might reach their people at home, as a voice from the dead. For they had had little hope of escape from the blood—bath. “When you get this I shall be a corpse,” wrote one of them, and one finds the same foreboding in many of these documents.
Even the lucky ones who could get some cover from the incessant bombardment by English guns began to lose their nerves after a day or two. They were always in fear of British infantry sweeping upon them suddenly behind the Trommelfeuer, rushing their dugouts with bombs and bayonets. Sentries became “jumpy,” and signaled attacks when there were no attacks. The gas—alarm was sounded constantly by the clang of a bell in the trench, and men put on their heavy gas-masks and sat in them until they were nearly stifled.
Here is a little picture of life in a German dugout near the British lines, written by a man now dead:
“The telephone bell rings. 'Are you there? Yes, here's Nau's battalion.' 'Good. That is all.' Then that ceases, and now the wire is in again perhaps for the twenty-fifth or thirtieth time. Thus the night is interrupted, and now they come, alarm messages, one after the other, each more terrifying than the other, of enormous losses through the bombs and shells of the enemy, of huge masses of troops advancing upon us, of all possible possibilities, such as a train broken down, and we are tortured by all the terrors that the mind can invent. Our nerves quiver. We clench our teeth. None of us can forget the horrors of the night.”
Heavy rain fell and the dugouts became wet and filthy.
“Our sleeping-places were full of water. We had to try and bail out the trenches with cooking-dishes. I lay down in the water with G-. We were to have worked on dugouts, but not a soul could do any more. Only a few sections got coffee. Mine got nothing at all. I was frozen in every limb, poured the water out of my boots, and lay down again.”
Our men suffered exactly the same things, but did not write about them.
The German generals and their staffs could not be quite indifferent to all this welter of human suffering among their troops, in spite of the cold, scientific spirit with which they regarded the problem of war. The agony of the individual soldier would not trouble them. There is no war without agony. But the psychology of masses of men had to be considered, because it affects the efficiency of the machine.
The German General Staff on the western front was becoming seriously alarmed by the declining morale of its infantry under the increasing strain of the British attacks, and adopted stern measures to cure it. But it could not hope to cure the heaps of German dead who were lying on the battlefields, nor the maimed men who were being carried back to the dressing stations, nor to bring back the prisoners taken in droves by the French and British troops.
Before the attack on the Flers line, the capture of Thiepval, and the German debacle at Beaumont Hamel, in November, the enemy's command was already filled with a grave anxiety at the enormous losses of its fighting strength; was compelled to adopt new expedients for increasing the number of its divisions. It was forced to withdraw troops badly needed on other fronts, and the successive shocks of the British offensive reached as far as Germany itself, so that the whole of its recruiting system had to be revised to fill up the gaps torn out of the German ranks.
All through July and August the enemy's troops fought with wonderful and stubborn courage, defending every bit of broken woodland, every heap of bricks that was once a village, every line of trenches smashed by heavy shell-fire, with obstinacy.
It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute, and inspired sometimes with the courage of despair, which was hardly less dangerous than the courage of hope.
The Australians who struggled to get the high ground at Pozieres did not have an easy task. The enemy made many counter-attacks against them. All the ground thereabouts was, as I have said, so smashed that the earth became finely powdered, and it was the arena of bloody fighting at close quarters which did not last a day or two, but many weeks. Mouquet Farm was like the phoenix which rose again out of its ashes. In its tunneled ways German soldiers hid and came out to fight our men in the rear long after the site of the farm was in our hands.
But the German troops were fighting what they knew to be a losing battle. They were fighting rear-guard actions, trying to gain time for the hasty digging of ditches behind them, trying to sell their lives at the highest price.
They lived not only under incessant gun-fire, gradually weakening their nerve-power, working a physical as well as a moral change in them, but in constant terror of British attacks.
They could never be sure of safety at any hour of the day or night, even in their deepest dugouts. The British varied their times of attack. At dawn, at noon, when the sun was reddening in the west, just before the dusk, in pitch darkness, even, the steady, regular bombardment that had never ceased all through the days and nights would concentrate into the great tumult of sudden drum-fire, and presently waves of men—English or Scottish or Irish, Australians or Canadians—would be sweeping on to them and over them, rummaging down into the dugouts with bombs and bayonets, gathering up prisoners, quick to kill if men were not quick to surrender.
In this way Thiepval was encircled so that the garrison there—the 180th Regiment, who had held it for two years—knew that they were doomed. In this way Guillemont and Ginchy fell, so that in the first place hardly a man out of two thousand men escaped to tell the tale of horror in German lines, and in the second place there was no long fight against the Irish, who stormed it in a wild, fierce rush which even machine-guns could not check. The German General Staff was getting flurried, grabbing at battalions from other parts of the line, disorganizing its divisions under the urgent need of flinging in men to stop this rot in the lines, ordering counter-attacks which were without any chance of success, so that thin waves of men came out into the open, as I saw them several times, to be swept down by scythes of bullets which cut them clean to the earth. Before September 15th they hoped that the British offensive was wearing itself out. It seemed to them at least doubtful that after the struggle of two and a half months the British troops could still have spirit and strength enough to fling themselves against new lines.
But the machinery of their defense was crumbling. Many of their guns had worn out, and could not be replaced quickly enough. Many batteries had been knocked out in their emplacements along the line of Bazentin and Longueval before the artillery was drawn back to Grand-court and a new line of safety. Battalion commanders clamored for greater supplies of hand-grenades, intrenching-tools, trench-mortars, signal rockets, and all kinds of fighting material enormously in excess of all previous requirements.
The difficulties of dealing with the wounded, who littered the battlefields and choked the roads with the traffic of ambulances, became increasingly severe, owing to the dearth of horses for transport and the longer range of British guns which had been brought far forward.
The German General Staff studied its next lines of defense away through Courcelette, Martinpuich, Lesboeufs, Morval, and Combles, and they did not look too good, but with luck and the courage of German soldiers, and the exhaustion—surely those fellows were exhausted!—of British troops—good enough.
On September 15th the German command had another shock when the whole line of the British troops on the Somme front south of the Ancre rose out of their trenches and swept over the German defenses in a tide.
Those defenses broke hopelessly, and the waves dashed through. Here and there, as on the German left at Morval and Lesboeufs, the bulwarks stood for a time, but the British pressed against them and round them. On the German right, below the little river of the Ancre, Courcelette fell, and Martinpuich, and at last, as I have written, High Wood, which the Germans desired to hold at all costs, and had held against incessant attacks by great concentration of artillery, was captured and left behind by the London men. A new engine of war had come as a demoralizing influence among German troops, spreading terror among them on the first day out of the tanks. For the first time the Germans were outwitted in inventions of destruction; they who had been foremost in all engines of death. It was the moment of real panic in the German lines—a panic reaching back from the troops to the High Command.
Ten days later, on September 25th, when the British made a new advance—all this time the French were pressing forward, too, on our right by Roye—Combles was evacuated without a fight and with a litter of dead in its streets; Gueudecourt, Lesboeufs, and Morval were lost by the Germans; and a day later Thiepval, the greatest fortress position next to Beaumont Hamel, fell, with all its garrison taken prisoners.
They were black days in the German headquarters, where staff-officers heard the news over their telephones and sent stern orders to artillery commanders and divisional generals, and after dictating new instructions that certain trench systems must be held at whatever price, heard that already they were lost.
It was at this time that the morale of the German troops on the Somme front showed most signs of breaking. In spite of all their courage, the ordeal had been too hideous for them, and in spite of all their discipline, the iron discipline of the German soldier, they were on the edge of revolt. The intimate and undoubted facts of this break in the morale of the enemy's troops during this period reveal a pitiful picture of human agony.
“We are now fighting on the Somme with the English,” wrote a man of the 17th Bavarian Regiment. “You can no longer call it war. It is mere murder. We are at the focal-point of the present battle in Foureaux Wood (near Guillemont). All my previous experiences in this war—the slaughter at Ypres and the battle in the gravel-pit at Hulluch—are the purest child's play compared with this massacre, and that is much too mild a description. I hardly think they will bring us into the fight again, for we are in a very bad way.”
“From September 12th to 27th we were on the Somme,” wrote a man of the 10th Bavarians, “and my regiment had fifteen hundred casualties.”
A detailed picture of the German losses under our bombardment was given in the diary of an officer captured in a trench near Flers, and dated September 22d.
“The four days ending September 4th, spent in the trenches, were characterized by a continual enemy bombardment that did not abate for a single instant. The enemy had registered on our trenches with light, as well as medium and heavy, batteries, notwithstanding that he had no direct observation from his trenches, which lie on the other side of the summit. His registering was done by his excellent air service, which renders perfect reports of everything observed.
“During the first day, for instance, whenever the slightest movement was visible in our trenches during the presence, as is usually the case, of enemy aircraft flying as low as three and four hundred yards, a heavy bombardment of the particular section took place. The very heavy losses during the first day brought about the resolution to evacuate the trenches during the daytime. Only a small garrison was left, the remainder withdrawing to a part of the line on the left of the Martinpuich-Pozieres road.
“The signal for a bombardment by 'heavies' was given by the English airplanes. On the first day we tried to fire by platoons on the airplanes, but a second airplane retaliated by dropping bombs and firing his machine-gun at our troops. Our own airmen appeared only once for a short time behind our lines.
“While many airplanes are observing from early morning till late at night, our own hardly ever venture near. The opinion is that our trenches cannot protect troops during a barrage of the shortest duration, owing to lack of dugouts.
“The enemy understands how to prevent, with his terrible barrage, the bringing up of building material, and even how to hinder the work itself. The consequence is that our trenches are always ready for an assault on his part. Our artillery, which does occasionally put a heavy barrage on the enemy trenches at a great expense of ammunition, cannot cause similar destruction to him. He can bring his building material up, can repair his trenches as well as build new ones, can bring up rations and ammunition, and remove the wounded.
“The continual barrage on our lines of communication makes it very difficult for us to ration and relieve our troops, to supply water, ammunition, and building material, to evacuate wounded, and causes heavy losses. This and the lack of protection from artillery fire and the weather, the lack of hot meals, the continual necessity of lying still in the same place, the danger of being buried, the long time the wounded have to remain in the trenches, and chiefly the terrible effect of the machine—and heavy-artillery fire, controlled by an excellent air service, has a most demoralizing effect on the troops.
“Only with the greatest difficulty could the men be persuaded to stay in the trenches under those conditions.”
There were some who could not be persuaded to stay if they could see any chance of deserting or malingering. For the first time on our front the German officers could not trust the courage of their men, nor their loyalty, nor their sense of discipline. All this horror of men blown to bits over living men, of trenches heaped with dead and dying, was stronger than courage, stronger than loyalty, stronger than discipline. A moral rot was threatening to bring the German troops on the Somme front to disaster.
Large numbers of men reported sick and tried by every kind of trick to be sent back to base hospitals.
In the 4th Bavarian Division desertions were frequent, and several times whole bodies of men refused to go forward into the front line. The morale of men in the 393d Regiment, taken at Courcelette, seemed to be very weak. One of the prisoners declared that they gave themselves up without firing a shot, because they could trust the English not to kill them.
The platoon commander had gone away, and the prisoner was ordered to alarm the platoon in case of attack, but did not do so on purpose. They did not shoot with rifles or machine-guns and did not throw bombs.
Many of the German officers were as demoralized as the men, shirking their posts in the trenches, shamming sickness, and even leading the way to surrender. Prisoners of the 351st Regiment, which lost thirteen hundred men in fifteen days, told of officers who had refused to take their men up to the front-line, and of whole companies who had declined to move when ordered to do so. An officer of the 74th Landwehr Regiment is said by prisoners to have told his men during our preliminary bombardment to surrender as soon as we attacked.
A German regimental order says: “I must state with the greatest regret that the regiment, during this change of position, had to take notice of the sad fact that men of four of the companies, inspired by shameful cowardice, left their companies on their own initiative and did not move into line.”
Another order contains the same fact, and a warning of what punishment may be meted out:
“Proofs are multiplying of men leaving the position without permission and hiding at the rear. It is our duty... each at his post—to deal with this fact with energy and success.”
Many Bavarians complained that their officers did not accompany them into the trenches, but went down to the hospitals with imaginary diseases. In any case there was a great deal of real sickness, mental and physical. The ranks were depleted by men suffering from fever, pleurisy, jaundice, and stomach complaints of all kinds, twisted up with rheumatism after lying in waterlogged holes, lamed for life by bad cases of trench-foot, and nerve-broken so that they could do nothing but weep.
The nervous cases were the worst and in greatest number. Many men went raving mad. The shell-shock victims clawed at their mouths unceasingly, or lay motionless like corpses with staring eyes, or trembled in every limb, moaning miserably and afflicted with a great terror.
To the Germans (barely less to British troops) the Somme battlefields were not only shambles, but a territory which the devil claimed as his own for the torture of men's brains and souls before they died in the furnace fires. A spirit of revolt against all this crept into the minds of men who retained their sanity—a revolt against the people who had ordained this vast outrage against God and humanity.
Into German letters there crept bitter, burning words against “the millionaires—who grow rich out of the war,” against the high people who live in comfort behind the lines. Letters from home inflamed these thoughts.
It was not good reading for men under shell-fire.
“It seems that you soldiers fight so that official stay-at-homes can treat us as female criminals. Tell me, dear husband, are you a criminal when you fight in the trenches, or why do people treat women and children here as such?...
“For the poor here it is terrible, and yet the rich, the gilded ones, the bloated aristocrats, gobble up everything in front of our very eyes... All soldiers—friend and foe—ought to throw down their weapons and go on strike, so that this war which enslaves the people more than ever may cease.”
Thousands of letters, all in this strain, were reaching the German soldiers on the Somme, and they did not strengthen the morale of men already victims of terror and despair.
Behind the lines deserters were shot in batches. To those in front came Orders of the Day warning them, exhorting them, commanding them to hold fast.
“To the hesitating and faint-hearted in the regiment,” says one of these Orders, “I would say the following:
“What the Englishman can do the German can do also. Or if, on the other hand, the Englishman really is a better and superior being, he would be quite justified in his aim as regards this war, viz., the extermination of the German. There is a further point to be noted: this is the first time we have been in the line on the Somme, and what is more, we are there at a time when things are more calm. The English regiments opposing us have been in the firing-line for the second, and in some cases even the third, time. Heads up and play the man!”
It was easy to write such documents. It was more difficult to bring up reserves of men and ammunition. The German command was harder pressed by the end of September.
From July 1st to September 8th, according to trustworthy information, fifty-three German divisions in all were engaged against the Allies on the Somme battlefront. Out of these fourteen were still in the line on September 8th.
Twenty-eight had been withdrawn, broken and exhausted, to quieter areas. Eleven more had been withdrawn to rest-billets. Under the Allies' artillery fire and infantry attacks the average life of a German division as a unit fit for service on the Somme was nineteen days. More than two new German divisions had to be brought into the front-line every week since the end of June, to replace those smashed in the process of resisting the Allied attack. In November it was reckoned by competent observers in the field that well over one hundred and twenty German divisions had been passed through the ordeal of the Somme, this number including those which have appeared there more than once.
By September 25th, when the British troops made another attack, the morale of the German troops was reaching its lowest ebb. Except on their right, at Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt, they were far beyond the great system of protective dugouts which had given them a sense of safety before July 1st. Their second and third lines of defense had been carried, and they were existing in shell-craters and trenches hastily scraped up under ceaseless artillery fire.
The horrors of the battlefield were piled up to heights of agony and terror. Living men dwelt among the unburied dead, made their way to the front-lines over heaps of corpses, breathed in the smell of human corruption and had always in their ears the cries of the wounded they could not rescue. They wrote these things in tragic letters—thousands of them—which never reached their homes in Germany, but lay in their captured ditches.
“The number of dead lying about is awful. One stumbles over them.”
“The stench of the dead lying round us is unbearable.”
“We are no longer men here. We are worse than beasts.”
“It is hell let loose.”... “It is horrible.”... “We've lived in misery.”
“If the dear ones at home could see all this perhaps there would be a change. But they are never told.”
“The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad.”
Poor, pitiful letters, out of their cries of agony one gets to the real truth of war-the “glory” and the “splendor” of it preached by the German philosophers and British Jingoes, who upheld it as the great strengthening tonic for their race, and as the noblest experience of men. Every line these German soldiers wrote might have been written by one of ours; from both sides of the shifting lines there was the same death and the same hell.
Behind the lines the German General Staff, counting up the losses of battalions and divisions who staggered out weakly, performed juggling tricks with what reserves it could lay its hands on, and flung up stray units to relieve the poor wretches in the trenches. Many of those reliefs lost their way in going up, and came up late, already shattered by the shell-fire through which they passed.
“Our position,” wrote a German infantry officer, “was, of course, quite different from what we had been told. Our company alone relieved a whole battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men weakened by casualties.
“The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was, or whether any of our own troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our support position until six o'clock this evening. The English are four hundred yards away, by the windmill over the hill.”
One German soldier wrote that the British “seem to relieve their infantry very quickly, while the German commands work on the principle of relieving only in the direst need, and leaving the divisions in as long as possible.”
Another wrote that:
“The leadership of the divisions really fell through. For the most part we did not get orders, and the regiment had to manage as best it could. If orders arrived they generally came too late or were dealt out 'from the green table' without knowledge of the conditions in front, so that to carry them out was impossible.”
All this was a sign of demoralization, not only among the troops who were doing the fighting and the suffering, but among the organizing generals behind, who were directing the operations. The continual hammer-strokes of the British and French armies on the Somme battlefields strained the German war-machine on the western front almost to breaking-point.
It seemed as though a real debacle might happen, and that they would be forced to effect a general retreat—a withdrawal more or less at ease or a retirement under pressure from the enemy....
But they had luck—astonishing luck. At the very time when the morale of the German soldiers was lowest and when the strain on the High Command was greatest the weather turned in their favor and gave them just the breathing-space they desperately needed. Rain fell heavily in the middle of October, autumn mists prevented airplane activity and artillery-work, and the ground became a quagmire, so that the British troops found it difficult to get up their supplies for a new advance.
The Germans were able in this respite to bring up new divisions, fresh and strong enough to make heavy counter—attacks in the Stuff and Schwaben and Regina trenches, and to hold the lines more securely for a time, while great digging was done farther back at Bapaume and the next line of defense. Successive weeks of bad weather and our own tragic losses checked the impetus of the British and French driving power, and the Germans were able to reorganize and reform.
As I have said, the shock of our offensive reached as far as Germany, and caused a complete reorganization in the system of obtaining reserves of man-power. The process of “combing out,” as we call it, was pursued with astounding ruthlessness, and German mothers, already stricken with the loss of their elder sons, raised cries of despair when the youngest born were also seized—boys of eighteen belonging to the 1918 class.
The whole of the 1917 class had joined the depots in March and May of this year, receiving a three months' training before being transferred to the field-recruit depots in June and July. About the middle of July the first large drafts joined their units and made their appearance at the front, and soon after the beginning of our offensive at least half this class was in the front-line regiments. The massacre of the boys had begun.
Then older men, men beyond middle age, who correspond to the French Territorial class, exempted from fighting service and kept on lines of communication, were also called to the front, and whole garrisons of these gray heads were removed from German towns to fill up the ranks.
“The view is held here,” wrote a German soldier of the Somme, “that the Higher Command intends gradually to have more and more Landsturm battalions (men of the oldest reserves) trained in trench warfare for a few weeks, as we have been, according to the quality of the men, and thus to secure by degrees a body of troops on which it can count in an emergency.”
In the month of November the German High Command believed that the British attacks were definitely at an end, “having broken down,” as they claimed, “in mud and blood,” but another shock came to them when once more British troops—the 51st Highland Division and the 63d Naval Division—left their trenches, in fog and snow, and captured the strongest fortress position on the enemy's front, at Beaumont Hamel, bringing back over six thousand prisoners. It was after that they began their retreat.
These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil there which was also his enemy—the evil of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch—word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its “make-up” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by the revolt of its people—not until then—there must be a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier—poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war—as many of them are now talking—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil's trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.