From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 4

Just outside Bapaume, on the south-east side, is an old citadel built centuries ago and now overgrown with fir-trees which would have given a great field of fire to German machine-gunners, and I went afterwards into snipers' posts, and stood at the entrance of tunnels and bomb-proof shelters, not going down or touching any of the litter about because of the danger lurking there in dark entries and in innocent-looking wires and implements. There was a great litter everywhere, for the German soldiers had left behind large numbers of long-handled bombs and thousands of cartridges, and many tools and implements.

Before getting into Bapaume I crossed the railway line from Arras, through Biefvillers, which was now on fire. They had torn up the rails here, but there was still the track, and the signal-boxes and signs in German.

Im Bahnhof Nur 10 Km.

That is to say, the speed of trains was to be only 10 kilometres an hour into the station.

Another signboard directed the way for "Vieh" and "Pferde" (cattle and horses), and everywhere there were notice-boards to trenches and dug-outs:

Nach 1 Stellung Fr zwei Offizieren

As I entered Bapaume I noticed first, if my memory serves, the Htel de Commerce, with "garage" painted on a sh.e.l.l-broken wall, and immediately facing me an old wooden house with a shoot for flour. Many of the houses had collapsed as though built of cards, with all their roofs level with the ground. Others were cut in half, showing all their rooms and landings, and others were gutted in ways familiar to English people after Zeppelin raids. Higher up on the right, as I have said, rows of red-brick villas were burnt out, and smoke was rising in steady volumes from this quarter of the town. The church, a white stone building, was also smouldering. There were no Germans in the town, unless men are still hiding there. The only living inhabitant was a little kitten which ran across the square and was captured by our patrols, who now have it as a pet.

There were other men living early in the morning, but they are now dead.

It was a company of German machine-gunners who held out as the last rear-guard. They fired heavily at our men, but were quickly overpowered.

The first message that came back from the entering troops was laconic:

"While entering Bapaume we came across a party the whole of which was accounted for. The mopping-up of Bapaume is now complete."

I did not stay very long in the town. It was not a health resort. High explosives were crumping every part of the town, and the buildings were falling. Pip-squeaks were flung about horribly, and when I came out with the General and another officer a flush of them came yelling at us and burst very close, flinging up the ground only a few yards away. The roadway of "pav" had been hurled up in huge chumps of stone, and shrapnel was again breaking to the right of us. I struck across country eastwards to see the promised land, and on the way to the near ridge turned and stared back at Bapaume in the glow of the sunset. Ours at last!

The fires were still burning in the other villages, and it was such a scene of war as I saw first when Dixmude was a flaming torch and Pervyse was alight in the beginning of the world-conflict.... At about half-past nine that night the enemy fired several quick rounds from his field-batteries. Then there was a strange silence, unbroken by any sh.e.l.l-fire. The Germans had fired their last shot in the battles of the Somme.

X

THE RESCUE OF p.r.o.nNE

MARCH 18

To-day at 7 A.M. a battalion of the Royal Warwicks of the 48th Division entered p.r.o.nne.

Standing alone that statement would be sensational enough. The French fought for p.r.o.nne desperately through more than two years of war, and now it is the luck of the British troops to enter it, as yesterday we entered Bapaume, after a short action with the enemy's rear-guards. But the news does not stand alone. The whole of the old German line south of Arras, strong as one vast fortress, built by the labour of millions of men, dug and tunnelled and cemented and timbered, with thousands of machine-gun redoubts, with an immense maze of trenches, protected by forests of barbed wire, had slipped away as though by a landslide, and the enemy is in rapid retreat to new lines some miles away. As he goes he is laying fire and waste to the countryside. North-east of Bapaume, into which I went yesterday with our troops, and west of p.r.o.nne, scores of villages are burning. One of them, larger than a village, the town of Athies, is a flaming torch visible for miles around. Others are smouldering ruins, from which volumes of smoke are rolling up into the clear blue sky. Of all this great tract of France, which the enemy has been forced to abandon to avoid the menace of combined attack, there is no beauty left, and no homesteads, nor farms, but only black ruins and devastation everywhere. The enemy is adopting the full cruelty of war's malignancy. He has fouled the wells in his wake, so that if our soldiers' horses should drink there they will die. Over the water-ways he has burnt his bridges. Cross-roads have been mined, opening up enormous craters like those I saw yesterday outside Bapaume.

High-explosive traps have been placed in the way of our patrols, to scatter them in fragments if they lack caution.

It is impossible to give our exact line at the present moment. We have no exact line. Village after village has fallen into our hands since midday yesterday. Our cavalry patrols are over the hills and far away.

Our infantry patrols are pus.h.i.+ng forward unto new territory, so that only aeroplanes know the exact whereabouts. As one aviator has reported:

"Our men are lighting fires and taking their dinners at places off the map. They are going into pubs which have been burnt out to find beer which is not there."

North and east of Bapaume our patrols have gone beyond the villages of Rocquenes, Bancourt, Favreuil, and Sapignies. Intelligence officers riding out on bicycles to these places were scared to find themselves so lonely, and believed that the enemy must be close at hand. But the enemy was still farther off. Our cavalry, working up past Logeast Wood, penetrated east of Acheit-le-Grand and turned the German line of Behagnies-Ytres.

Much farther south, in the neighbourhood of Nesle, French and British cavalry patrols came into touch to-day, and one of our aviators reports that he saw French civilians waving flags and cheering them.

The Germans have a cavalry screen behind their rear-guards. They were seen yesterday north of Bapaume and southwards beyond Roye. And some of them were chased by a British airman at a place called Ennemain. He swooped low like an albatross, and brought a man off his horse by a machine-gun bullet. Others stampeded from this terrible bird.

This morning our troops were through Eterpigny beyond Barleux, and found the villages of Misery and Marchelepot. There was some fighting last night and this morning in the neighbourhood of p.r.o.nne. The enemy had snipers and machine-gunners about, and kept some of their batteries back until the last possible moment, flinging 59's and smaller sh.e.l.ls over our side of the lines, and firing heavily until about ten o'clock. Then the gun-fire ceased, and there was not a shot. His guns were going back along the dark roads, his rear-guards moved away, leaving behind them their great defensive works of the Bapaume Ridge, and burning villages.

MARCH 19

Refusing to give battle, the enemy has retired still farther over open country east of Bapaume, and our cavalry patrols are in touch with his mounted rear-guards. The exact location is vague, as the movement continues, and our cavalry is in small units, moving cautiously between a large number of burning villages, which are everywhere alight. Small parties of the enemy were encountered last night in the open near Ytres and Berthincourt, and some snipers in an omnibus opened fire upon a cavalry patrol, and were scattered by an aeroplane which swooped low, sweeping them with machine-gun bullets.

South of the Somme our cavalry got in touch with German cavalry at Rouy and with German cyclists at Potte. All the bridges have been destroyed to cover the enemy's retreat, as at Rouy and Breuil, and all the wells have been filled with filth and rubbish.

It is a most extraordinary experience to follow up through this abandoned country from which the enemy has fled, as I have found to-day in tramping through the district of p.r.o.nne and into that deserted and destroyed town. A few weeks ago I went a journey to the new lines we had taken over from the French south of the Somme. Then it was under the full blast of sh.e.l.l-fire, and not a day pa.s.sed without the enemy flinging high explosives into the ruined villages of Herbcourt, Estres, Flaucourt, and Biaches. From Mont-St.-Quentin, on the flank of p.r.o.nne, he had the observation of all our ground, so that it was horrible to see that hill staring down on one, and by daylight in the open country one moved always under the menace of death. To-day that menace had gone. The evil spell had lifted, and we moved freely in the sight of Mont-St.-Quentin, unafraid and with a strange sense of safety.

He had gone from there yesterday morning, and, at the same time, had crept away from the trenches at Biaches, and across his wooden bridges to p.r.o.nne, and out of this town to the open country, hurrying through the night to escape from our pursuit.

I went down into Biaches, a wild chaos of trenches and dug-outs and ruin, and pa.s.sed through the front line held by our troops until about 6.30 yesterday morning, and went with difficulty through the German barbed wire still uncut, so that we were tangled and caught in it. Then I pa.s.sed into the old German lines, and went across the wooden causeway built by them over the marshes down to the bank of the Somme. On the other side of the river loop I saw for the first time p.r.o.nne, taken by the enemy in the autumn of 1914, and fought for furiously by the French, who regained it for a while and lost it again. It was dead quiet over there. No sh.e.l.l burst over it, but a little smoke rolled above its houses. From that distance, the broad river's width, it did not look much destroyed. It was only afterwards that I saw how much. Several wooden bridges spanned the Somme, and I tried two of these to get across, but there were great gaps which I could not jump. Before leaving the enemy had broken them and tried to hide the damage from the view of our airmen by putting up straw screens. All the trees in the marshes had been slashed by our sh.e.l.l-fire. Empty barrels floated in the water with broken boats, and the old barge, called Notre Dame d'Amiens, was blown in half. Snipers' posts had been built, outfacing our lines, and German ammunition and bombs and coiled wire and a great litter of timber lay about.

I managed at last to get into p.r.o.nne by a wide curve through the Faubourg de Paris, over the piled stones of a broken bridge with planks across the gaps put there by our soldiers so that the enemy could be followed in pursuit. He had been careful to check us as long as possible, though it was not very long, for an hour after his going the Royal Warwicks and some Londoners marched unto the Grande Place. Down the Faubourg de Paris all the trees had been cut down, so that they had crashed across the street, making a great barricade. Before going, firebrands had been at work, setting alight all the houses not already smashed by sh.e.l.l-fire. They were burning, when I pa.s.sed them, so fiercely that the hot breath of the flames was upon my face. Even now it was possible to see that p.r.o.nne had once been a little town of old-world dignity and charm. Frontages of some of these gutted houses were richly carved in Renaissance style, among them being the ruins of the Palais de Justice and the Htel de Ville and the Maison Munic.i.p.ale.

Here and there along the Rue St.-Fursy and in the Grande Place was an old French mansion built before the Revolution, now just a skeleton of broken brickwork and timber. Though many houses were still standing enough to see they were houses, there was hardly one that had escaped the wrath of war. It was pitiful to see here and there old signs, showing the life of the town in peace, such as the "Librairie Nouvelle,"

the "Teinturerie Parisienne" belonging to Mme. Poitevineau, the Notary's house, full of legal books and papers scattered on a charred floor beneath a gaping roof, a shop for "articles de cha.s.se" kept by one Monsieur Bourdin. Those signboards, reminding one of p.r.o.nne before the war, were side by side with other signboards showing the way of German life until 6.30 yesterday morning. At the entrance to the town is a notice: "Durchgang bei Tage streng Verboten."

Most houses are labelled, "Keller fr 60 Mann." At the entrance to a dug-out below the town hall is the notice, "Verwundete und Kranke" (For wounded and sick). The only inhabitants of the Grande Place were a big black cat, looking sick and sorry for itself, and a dummy figure dressed as a French Zouave, sprawling below the pedestal of a statue to Catherine de Poix, heroine of the siege of 1870. The statue had been taken away, like that of Faidherbe in the square of Bapaume. On top of the pedestal had been laid the dummy figure in French uniform, but our soldiers removed it. p.r.o.nne was a dead town, like Ypres, like Bapaume, like all those villages in the wake of the German retreat. Over its old fortifications, built by Vauban, and over its marshes wild duck are flying.

PART II

ON THE TRAIL OF THE ENEMY

I

THE MAKING OF NO MAN'S LAND

MARCH 21

For several days now I have been going with our advancing troops into towns, villages, and country abandoned by the enemy in his retreat. It has been a strange adventure, fantastic as a dream, yet with the tragedy of reality. The fantasy is in crossing over No Man's Land into the German lines, getting through his wire, and pa.s.sing through trenches inhabited by his soldiers until a day or two ago, travelling over roads and fields down which his guns and transport went, and going into streets and houses in which there are signs of his recent occupation. He has ruined all his roads, opening vast craters in them, and broken all his bridges, but our men have been wonderfully quick in making a way over these gaps, and this morning I motored over the German trenches at Roye, zigzagging over this maze of ditches and dug-outs by bridges of planks before getting to the roads behind his line.

After pa.s.sing the area of sh.e.l.l-fire on our side and his, the field of sh.e.l.l-craters, the smashed barns and houses and churches, the tattered tree-trunks, the wide belts of barbed wire, one comes to country where gra.s.s grows again, and where the fields are smooth and rolling, and where the woods will be clothed with foliage when spring comes to the world again--country strange and beautiful to a man like myself, who has been wandering through all the filth and frightfulness of the Somme battlefields. German sentry-boxes still stand at the cross-roads. German notice-boards stare at one from cottage walls, or where the villages begin. Thousands of coils of barbed wire lie about in heaps, for the enemy relied a great deal upon this means of defence, and in many places are piles of sh.e.l.ls which he has not removed. Gun-pits and machine-gun emplacements, screens to hide his roads from view, observation-posts built in tall trees, remain as signs of his military life a mile or two back from his front lines, but behind the trenches are the towns and villages in which he had his rest billets, and it is in these places that one sees the spirit and temper of the men whom we are fighting. The enemy has spared nothing on the way of his retreat. He has destroyed every village in his abandonment with a systematic and detailed destruction. Not only in Bapaume and in p.r.o.nne has he blown up, or burnt, all the houses which were untouched by sh.e.l.l-fire, but in scores of villages he has laid waste the cottages of the peasants, and all their farms and all their orchards. At Rthonvillers this morning, to name only one village out of many, I saw how each house was marked with a white cross before it was gutted with fire. The Cross of Christ was used to mark the work of the Devil.

In Bapaume and p.r.o.nne, in Roye and Nesle and Liancourt, and all these places over a wide area, German soldiers not only blew out the fronts of houses, but with picks and axes smashed mirrors and furniture and picture-frames. As a friend of mine said, a cheap-jack would not give fourpence for anything left in p.r.o.nne, and that is true, also, of Bapaume. There is nothing but filth in those two towns; family portraits have been kicked into the gutters. I saw a picture of three children in Bapaume, and it was smeared with filth in the writing of a dirty word.

The black bonnets of old women who once lived in those houses lie about the rubbish-heaps, and by some strange, pitiful freak are almost the only signs left of the inhabitants who lived here before the Germans wrecked their houses. The enemy has left nothing that would be good for dwelling or for food. Into the wells he has pitched filth so that the people may not drink.

But that is not the greatest tragedy I have seen. The ruins of houses are bad to see when done deliberately, even when sh.e.l.l-fire has spared them in the war zone. But worse than that is the ruin of women and children and living flesh. I saw that ruin to-day in Roye and Nesle. I was at first rejoiced to see how the first inhabitants were liberated after being so long in hostile lines. I approached them with a queer sense of excitement, eager to speak with them, but instantly when I saw those women and children in the streets, and staring at me out of windows, I was struck with a chill of horror. The women's faces were dead faces, sallow and mask-like, and branded with the memory of great agonies. The children were white and thin--so thin that their cheek-bones protruded. Hunger and fear had been with them too long.

The Mayor of Nesle told me that after the first entry of the Germans on August 29, 1914, and after the first brutalities, the soldiers had behaved well, generally speaking. They were well disciplined, and lived on good terms with the people, as far as possible. Probably he tells the truth fairly, and I believe him. But the women with whom I spoke were pa.s.sionate and hysterical, and told me other stories. I believe them too. Because these women, who are French, had to live with the men who were killing their husbands and brothers, and that is a great horror.

They had to submit to the daily moods of men who were sometimes sulky and sometimes drunk. The officers were often drunk. They had to see their children go hungry, for though the Germans gave them potatoes, sometimes they took away the hens, so that there were no eggs, and the cows, so that there was no milk, and the children suffered and were thin. On October 5, 1914, the Kaiser came to Nesle with an escort of five motor-cars, and the soldiers lined the square and cheered him; but the women and children stared and were silent, and hated those white-haired men with the spiked hats. During the battles of the Somme many wounded pa.s.sed through the town, and others came with awful stories of slaughter and fierce words against the English. Once twenty men of the 173rd Regiment came in. They were half mad, weeping and cursing, and said they were the sole survivors of their regiment.