From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 15

They have used up incredible numbers of sh.e.l.ls. The gunners of one division alone fired 180,000 sh.e.l.ls with their field-batteries, and over 46,000 with their heavies. On the same scale has been the ammunition expenditure of all other groups of guns.

An historic scene took place after our troops had gained the high ground of Wytschaete and Messines. An order pa.s.sed along to all the batteries.

Gun horses were standing by. They were harnessed to the guns. The limbers of the field-batteries lined up. Then half-way through the battle the old gun positions were abandoned, after two and a half years of stationary warfare in the salient, searched every day of that time by German sh.e.l.ls fired by direct observation from that ground just taken.

The drivers urged on their horses. They drove at a gallop past old screens, and out of camouflaged places where men had walked stealthily, and dashed up the slopes. The infantry stood by to let them pa.s.s, and from thousands of men, these dusty, hot, parched soldiers of ours, who were waiting to go forward in support of the first waves of a.s.saulting troops, there rose a great following cheer, which swept along the track of the gunners, and went with them up the ridge, where they unlimbered and got into action again for the second phase of the fighting down the farther slopes.

As scouts of the gunners, as their watchers and signallers, were the boys of the Royal Flying Corps. I said yesterday that they were uplifted with a kind of intoxication of enthusiasm. A youthful madness took possession of them. Those squadrons which I saw flying overhead while it was still dark on Thursday morning did daredevil, reckless, almost incredible things. They flew as men inspired by pa.s.sion and a fierce joy of battle. They were hunters seeking their prey. They were Berserkers of the air, determined to kill though they should be killed, to scatter death among the enemy, to destroy him in the air and on the earth, to smite him in his body and in his works and in his soul by a terror of him. This may seem language of exaggeration, the silly fantasy of a writing-man careless of the exact truth. It is less than the truth, and the sober facts are wild things. Early on June 7 they were up and away, as I described them, pa.s.sing overhead on that fateful morning before the crimson feather clouds appeared over the battlefield. They flew above German railway stations far behind the lines, and dropped tons of explosives, blowing up rolling stock, smas.h.i.+ng rails and bridges. They attacked German aerodromes, flying low to the level of the sheds and spattering them with machine-gun bullets so that no German airmen came out of them that day. One man's flight, told in his own dry words, is like the wild nightmare of an airman's dream. He flew to a German aerodrome and circled round. A German machine-gun spat out bullets at him. The airman saw it, swooped over it, and fired at the gunner. He saw his bullets. .h.i.t the gun. The man ceased fire, screamed, and ran for cover. Then our airman flew off, chased trains and fired into their windows. He flew over small bodies of troops on the march, swooped, fired, and scattered them. Afterwards he met a convoy going to Comines, and he circled over their heads, hardly higher than their heads, and fired into them. Near Warneton he came upon troops ma.s.sing for a counter-attack, and made a new attack, inflicting casualties and making them run in all directions.

One of our flying men attacked and silenced four machine-gun teams in a strong emplacement. Others cleared trenches of German soldiers, who scuttled like rabbits into their dug-outs. They fired everything they carried at anything which would kill the enemy or destroy his material.

Having used up all his Lewis-gun ammunition upon marching troops, one lad fired his Very-lights, his signal-rockets, at the next group of men he saw. They flew at field-gunners and put them to flight, at heavy guns crawling along the roads on caterpillar wheels, at transport wagons, motor-lorries, and one motor-car, whose pa.s.sengers, if they live, will never forget that sudden rush of wings four feet overhead, with a spasm of bullets about them. The aeroplane was so low that the pilot thought he would crash into the motor-car, but he just planed clear of it as the driver steered it sharply into a ditch, where it overturned with its five occupants. The airman went on his journey, scattered 500 infantry and returned home after a long flight never higher than 500 feet above the ground.

Meanwhile during the progress of the battle our air squadrons appointed for artillery observation work were all over the enemy's batteries, signalling to our gunners and sending back "O.K." flashes when our counter-battery work was effective. There were an amazing number of "O.K.'s." One air squadron alone helped a group of heavies to silence seventy-two batteries. Everywhere over the battle-ground our air scouts were out and about, watching the progress of infantry, speaking to them by signals, picking up their answers, flying back to headquarters with certain information; so that the direction of the battle was helped enormously by this quick intelligence. It was a day of triumph for the Royal Flying Corps, and for all those boys with wings on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, who, after their day's flight, come down to the French estaminets to rattle ragtime on untuned pianos, and give glad eyes to any pretty girl about, and fling themselves into the joy of life which they risk so lightly.

In this battle of Messines there was not any body of our men who did not spend all their strength and take all risks with a kind of pa.s.sionate exultation of spirit. The Manchester men dug a six-foot deep trench-line to our new front on the ridge, beating all records. Flinging off tunics and s.h.i.+rts so that they were naked to the waist, New-Zealanders who took Messines dug as inspired diggers, fast and furiously, and before next day had dawned had two long, deep trenches as secure defences against German counter-attacks.

The stretcher-bearers, the water-carriers, the transport men with their pack-mules went up through sh.e.l.l-fire as I saw them yesterday, and never tired. The stretcher-bearers were heroic fellows, as in every battle from which I have seen them coming back with their burdens across the cratered ground of dreadful fields such as that of Wytschaete and Messines, still sh.e.l.led heavily by the enemy, whose fury at losing that long-held ground is proved by his bombardment of their ruins--the red brick-heap of Wytschaete Chteau, the black tree-stumps which is all that is left of Messines.

Our casualties remain light, as figures of losses go in this war and in proportion to the greatness of this battle. My own estimates, based upon what I can hear of the losses of different bodies of troops engaged, work out at something like 10,000 for the day of battle. It is less than a fifth of what I should have reckoned to be the cost of this capture of Messines Ridge, and gives the lie to German claims. It is one of the greatest and cheapest achievements of British arms throughout this war, though the loss of so many gallant men is sad enough, G.o.d knows, and for the enemy it is as hard a blow as our taking of the Vimy Ridge two months ago, when he was staggered by his loss.

IV

THE EFFECT OF THE BLOW

JUNE 11

The effect of our capture of Messines and Wytschaete has been such a stunning blow on the enemy that he has not as yet made any attempt at counter-attacking on a big scale. The rapid advance of our men below the farther slopes of the ridge and the rush forward of our guns made it impossible for him to rally his supporting troops quickly, and as the hours pa.s.s it becomes more impossible for him to storm his way back. His early attempts to a.s.semble troops in the Warneton neighbourhood were annihilated instantly by enormous sh.e.l.l-fire directed by the new observation we had gained at Messines, and during the past twenty-four hours, up to the time I write, he shows no further sign of asking for trouble, but is obviously engaged in reorganizing his forces, demoralized by defeat, and getting his guns into safer positions. Many of his guns lie battered and buried about the battlefield, and some of his batteries, put out of action by our bombardment, remain between our new lines and his, but so covered by our fire that he has a poor chance of getting them away. His losses in guns, trench-mortars and machine-guns must be alarming to him, for I have no doubt at all, after seeing the frightful effect of our bombardment, that these were destroyed on a great scale, so that the number of our trophies will not at all represent his actual loss in weapons and material of war.

That is the human mechanical side of things. More horrible to the unfortunate soldiers of the German army is the devilish punishment inflicted upon them during the past ten days, culminating on that day of battle when every weapon for the slaughter of men, from the heaviest of high explosives to boiling oil and gas-sh.e.l.ls, was let loose upon them in one wild tempest of destruction, which blew them out of the earth and off the earth, and frizzled them and blinded them, and choked them and mutilated them, and made them mad.

One German boy, who looked not more than fifteen years of age--a child--was found yesterday lying in a sh.e.l.l-hole by the side of a dead man who had been shot through the temple, and he was a gibbering idiot through fear. Not the only one. German officers say that many of their men went raving mad under the strain of our bombardment, and tried to kill their comrades or themselves, or fell into an ague of terror, clawing their mouths, with all the symptoms of the worst sh.e.l.l-shock.

Many of our prisoners believe they were betrayed, and were sacrificed coldly and deliberately by their higher command. Before the battle an order of the day was issued to them, telling them to hold out if surrounded and fight their way back with the bayonet, because behind them would be fresh divisions ready to support immediate counter-attacks. Those fresh divisions never appeared. We know that they had no chance of getting near our lines because of our far-reaching fire, and the work of our aircraft--and the men of Messines and Wytschaete and all the ground south of St.-Eloi were cut off and captured, if they did not die. After our first a.s.saults, the enemy, panic-stricken, were more concerned in getting away their guns than in protecting their troops, and they were left to our mercy.

Walking about those monstrous mine-craters which we tore out of the earth at dawn on June 7, and across the old German lines beyond St.-Eloi on the left of our attack, southwards by Wytschaete and the lower slopes of Messines, to-day, as after the morning of battle, I pitied any human souls who had to suffer what these German soldiers must have suffered in the agony of fear before death came to many of them. All this wide area of country is blasted and harrowed and holed with monstrous pits. There was at least one great sh.e.l.l to every nine yards, and at 200 yards its flying steel has a killing power. No idea of it all can be conveyed by many words describing this upheaval of sand-bags and barricades and trenches and redoubts, and this sieve of earth, pitted by countless sh.e.l.l-craters. All the woods where the Germans lived--Oaten Wood and Damstra.s.se Wood and Ravine Wood, down to Wytschaete Wood and h.e.l.l Wood--are but gaunt stumps sticking out of ash-grey heaps of earth.

German dead lie here and there in batches or in rows as they were shot down by enfilade fire, but I have seen very few bodies, for the most of them were buried in the upheaved earth, as one can tell by the foul vapours which creep out from the smashed trenches, where the deep dug-outs have collapsed and tunnels have fallen in, so that all this battle-ground is a graveyard of men, buried as they died or before they died.

Three men escaped by some wild freak of chance from a mine-crater under the Mound by St.-Eloi. I stood on the lip of it to-day, high above its shelving sides, and find it hard to believe that any living thing could have escaped from its upheaval. But the Germans had many dug-outs in the old craters which existed here before this last one was blown, and after that ferocious fighting a year ago, when we lost this ground. One of those dug-outs remained firm when our mine was touched off four days ago, and out of its mouth crept, two days later, three haggard men, still shaking and dazed, who had been deep in the ground when all about them was hurled sky-high, with a rush of gas and flame and a monstrous uproar. They were unscathed, except in their souls, where terror lived.

By my side to-day, as I looked down into this pit of h.e.l.l, stood a man who had worked for a year in the making of it--an Australian officer of engineers. He stood smoking his pipe on the edge of the sh.e.l.l-crater, and said in a cheerful way, "It is good to be in the fresh air again."

The fresh air did not seem to me very good there this morning. It was filled with abominable noise, which is a menace of death--the savage whine of German shrapnel flung about between the Bluff and St.-Eloi in a haphazard way, and heavy crumps searching for our batteries in their new positions, and our sh.e.l.ls whistling over in long flights. Hideous sounds in a ghastly scene which filled me with nausea, so that I wanted not to linger there.

But I understood this Australian's craving for open-air life, even such open air as this, when he told me that he had been working underground for nearly two years in the dark saps pierced under the German lines, and running very close to German saps nosing their way, and sometimes breaking through, to ours, so that the men clawed at each other's throats in these tunnels and beat each other to death with picks and shovels, or were blown to bits by mine explosions. It was always a race for time to blow up the charges, and sometimes the enemy was first, and sometimes we were, and once the enemy in a great attack against the Canadians got in and blew up our shafts and sapheads and cut off our tunnellers. That Australian officer was one of those. For forty-eight hours he was buried alive, and had to dig his way out. So now after his job was done he likes the open-air life.

"No more underground work for me after this war," he said. "I've had enough of it."

The German ground hereabouts was taken by those troops of ours whose fighting across the Damstra.s.se and in Ravine Wood I described yesterday.

Through them went another body of troops--the troops of the 24th Division--whose fortunes I have described in other battles, including some Leinster lads who have a padre for their hero, and English county troops who knew the look of Vimy Ridge before the Canadians reached the crest of it. They had to make the final a.s.sault to the farthest line of attack, pa.s.sing through ma.s.ses of men who had taken the first lines. All this was rehea.r.s.ed in fields behind the battle-ground so thoroughly that the men could have gone forward blindfold. It all went like clockwork, and though the enemy fought hard on that last line beyond the Damstra.s.se by Rose Wood and Bug Wood, one post holding out with machine-guns, our men captured it with few casualties. They took 300 prisoners that day, with six field-guns, and their spirit is high after victory. Next morning the Irish padre was seen sitting outside a sh.e.l.l-hole with a clean white collar and white socks with his boots off. "Well done, boys!" he said, and they were glad to see him there.

All our men were wonderfully inspired by a belief in the guns, so that they walked close behind a frightful barrage. Each body of troops vied with other regiments in a friendly rivalry. There was a race between the South and North Irish as to whether a green flag or an orange should be planted first above the ruins of Wytschaete. I don't know which won, but both flags flew there when the crest had been gained.

V

LOOKING BACKWARD

JUNE 12

"The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price."

This sentence stands out as an absolute command in the German order issued to their troops before the battle which they knew was coming. The words are peremptory, among promises of artillery support and immediate counter-attacks from divisions behind the first-line troops, which would be read now as a hollow mockery by those men who are our prisoners, captured in crowds from their welter of mined and cratered earth. While half-way through the battle their artillery tried to drag their field-guns back to something like safety in the wake of heavy guns, which even before the battle had been withdrawn to the farthest possible range of action, though forward observing officers tried to conceal this from the infantry by coming to their usual posts. The battle is over.

Messines Ridge, which was not to be ours at any price, is ours at a price which our Army thinks very cheap--though many brave men paid for it with their lives--and our outposts are pus.h.i.+ng forward towards Warneton, far beyond the farther slopes, after an enemy retiring upon that place. Only our men who have fought in the Ypres salient know the full meaning of that order. "The enemy must not get the Messines Ridge at any price."

The Messines Ridge was our curse, and the loss of it to the enemy means a great relief to that curse by straightening out the salient south of Hooge, and robbing the enemy of direct observation over our ground and forcing his guns farther back.

From Messines and Wytschaete he had absolute observation of a wide tract of country in which our men lived and died--how complete an observation I did not realize until after this battle, when standing in Wytschaete Wood and on the Mound by St.-Eloi, and on the ground rising up to Messines, I looked back, and saw every detail of our old territory laid out like a relief map brightly coloured. "My G.o.d," said an officer by my side, "it's a wonder they allowed us to live at all." He had fought in the old days in the salient, had lived like a hunted animal there, hiding in holes from the monstrous birds of prey screeching and roaring overhead in search of human flesh. Before us now, looking as the Germans used to look, we saw all this countryside, which is a field of honour, where our youth has fallen in great numbers, a great graveyard of gallant boyhood. The enemy could see every movement of our men, unless they moved underground, or under the cover of foliage on Kemmel Hill and its leafy lanes, or behind the camouflage screens which run along the roadways, or between the gaps in the ruined villages. Startlingly clear were the red roofs of d.i.c.kebusch and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses, into which for two years and a half the enemy has flung big sh.e.l.ls, and the church tower of Kemmel, where the graves are opened by sh.e.l.l-fire and old bones laid bare. The roads to Voormezeele and Vierstraat, through which I went yesterday, are still under the old spell of horror, and all those obscene ruins of decent Flemish hamlets.

Southward one saw Neuve-Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street Wood, where bullets snapped between the branches about Piccadilly Circus and down the Strand and across to Somerset House, and where at Hyde Park Corner I first heard the voice of "Percy," a high-velocity fellow, who kills you with a quick pounce. German eyes staring from Wytschaete and Messines, making little marks on big maps, talking to their gunners over telephone wires, and registering roads and cross-roads, field-tracks, camps, billets, farmhouses tucked into little groups of trees through which their red roofs gleamed, watching through telescopes for small parties of British soldiers or single figures in a flowered tapestry of fields between the winding hummocks of sand-bag parapets, had all this ground of ours at the mercy of their guns, and that was not merciful.

Day by day two years ago I used to see d.i.c.kebusch in clouds of smoke, and hated to go through the place. They sh.e.l.led separate farmhouses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They sh.e.l.led the roads down which our transports came at night, and communication-trenches up which our men moved to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dug-outs foolishly frail against their frightful 59's, which in early days we could only answer with a few pip-squeaks. Yet by some extraordinary freak, not certainly by any kind of charity, for that does not belong to war, there were places they failed to sh.e.l.l, though they were clearly visible--little groups of Flemish cottages with flaming red tiles, a big old house here or there with pointed roofs rising above a screen of poplar-trees, fields still cultivated, as I saw them yesterday, by old Flemish women who bent over the beetroots and hung out was.h.i.+ng under German eyes and German guns, and went up and down with plough-horses close to our gun-positions, and sold bad beer to English soldiers glad of any kind of beer in places where death was imminent and where, as they drank, the gla.s.s might be smashed out of their hand by a flying scythe or a yard of wall.

"Why do you stay here?" I asked an old woman in Plug Street village a year and a half ago. Four children played about her, though at the time sh.e.l.ls were whining overhead and cras.h.i.+ng but half a field away. "It is my home," she said, and thought that a good enough answer.

"How about the children?" I asked, and she said, "It's their home, and we earn a little money."

Even when this last battle began those peasants still remained encircled by our batteries and with German crumps falling about their fields; blear-eyed old men gazed up to the sky, watched the flame-bursts of the mines, then turned to their earth again; and the battle itself was heralded at dawn by the crowing of c.o.c.ks in little farmsteads somewhere down by Kemmel. Chanticleer sounded the battle-charge with his clarion note, as in old dawns when English and French knights were drawn in line of battle.

An officer who was with me in Wytschaete Wood, looked down at these old places where he had lived in the menace of death, and remembered his escapes; that time when the back of his dug-out was. .h.i.t by a huge sh.e.l.l as he sat in his pyjamas, smoking a cigarette; and that other time when his servant was buried alive quite close to him, and the nights and days under constant sh.e.l.l-fire. But these little homesteads in or about the salient are few in their strange escape, and elsewhere there is not a building which stands unpierced or in more than a fragment of ruin.

Young officers of ours lived within these ruins wondering whether it would be this day or next, now, as they spoke, or in the silence that followed, that some beastly sh.e.l.l would burst through and tear down the Kirchner prints which they had pinned to broken timbers, and smash the bits of mirror they used for shaving-gla.s.ses and lay them out in the wreckage. When he goes home on leave and sits at his own hearthside these dream-pictures come back to him with their old horror, as to thousands of men who have fought in the salient, like those London boys I met one night in Ypres cooking cocoa under sh.e.l.l-fire, like those King's Royal Riflemen I saw going up to a counter-attack after the first attack by "flammenwerfer," and the padre who went up to the ca.n.a.l bank at night and found five dead men in a Red Cross hut and not a soul alive about him, and the Canadians who fought through a storm of sh.e.l.ls in Maple Copse.

The horror of that salient in its old evil days lives in its sinister place-names: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street, Dead Dog Farm, and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi, Stinking Farm, and Suicide Corner, and Sh.e.l.l-Trap Barn. I pa.s.sed by some of these places and felt cold in remembrance of all the evil of them. Boys of ours have been smashed in all these ill-famed spots. Every bit of ruin here is the scene of foul tragedy to young life. To these places women will come to weep when the war is done, and the stones will be memorials of brave hearts who came here in the darkness with just a glance at the lights in the sky and a word of "Carry on, men," before they fell.

VI

THE AUSTRALIANS AT MESSINES

JUNE 17

The sun is fierce and hot over Flanders, giving great splendour to this June of war, but baking our troops brown and dry. Up in the battle-line thirst is a cruel demon in that shadowless land of craters, where the earth itself is parched and cracked, and where there is a white, blinding glare.

On the day of the Messines battle water went up quickly, with two lemons for each man, "to help them through the barrage," according to a young staff officer with a bright sense of humour at the mess-table. But there was never too much, and in some places not enough for the wounded men, whose thirst was like a fire, and yet not greedy, poor chaps, if there was only a little to go round.