From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 23

THE AGONY OF ARMENTIRES

SEPTEMBER 15

The harvests of France and Flanders have been gathered in, and already the plough, driven by men too old to fight or boys too small and young, or by peasant women whose men are somewhere near St.-Quentin or Verdun, is turning up the stubble in the fields and making a brown landscape where three weeks ago it was all gold and bronze.

The trees are turning brown also, deepening to a reddish tint in all the woods between Boulogne and the battlefields, where there are only dead trees. Round about Poperinghe the trailing hops have been pulled down from their poles, already stripped in places by last month's gale, and the sticks are all bare. Outside the wooden huts built on the edge of war by refugees from Ypres and sh.e.l.l-broken villages, Flemish women sit with the hops in their laps and in great baskets beside them, and British soldiers on the march with dry throats exchange remarks about the good beer which they may never have the luck to drink. White cloud-mountains which turn black and threaten a deluge between bursts of sunshine are banked up above the russet foliage and the brown earth and the old black windmills which wave their arms across the landscape, and in the wind there is a smell of moisture and mist, and the first faint sniff of rotting leaves. It is the autumn touch--the autumn touch of a war in which some of us have seen four harvests gathered into French barns and four winters come. It makes one feel a bit sad, that thought.

It puts an autumn touch for a second or two into the souls of men coming back from leave as I came back with some of them two days ago.

By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot go anywhere near the lines without seeing that aerial activity which has become intense and fierce lately. Yesterday I saw a great flight of our aeroplanes over the dead town of Armentires. There were between twenty and thirty of them making their way over the German lines, and the enemy hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft guns got to work savagely and bursts of black shrapnel filled the sky all about those steady wings, but did not bring them down. He hated other aircraft watching over his lines--a long line of kite-balloons, "cl.u.s.tered like grapes," as some one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as white as snow when the sun touched them, and made tempting targets for long-range guns. Some German gunners registered on one of them nearest to Armentires, and I saw a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it that it seemed like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute demonstration by our observers in the basket. The drone of our aeroplanes and the reports of German anti-aircraft guns made the only noise in Armentires--that and the sound of two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the streets of that town which is dead.

It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of which all life has gone, and queer to me especially in Armentires, because I knew it not long ago when there were many women and girls about its streets, and when one could take one's choice of tea-shops--though only eighteen hundred yards away from the German line--and get an excellent little dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have one's hair cut and a shampoo to the musical accompaniment of field-batteries outside the town, and buy most of the things a man wants in the simple life of war (except peace) in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen--women too brave and too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the enemy's line as though it were eighteen miles. Armentires was a modern little manufacturing town for lace and thread, with neat red-brick houses kept by well-to-do people who liked good comfortable furniture, and put a piano into their front parlour and a little marble Venus and other knick-knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good taste above the mere sordid interest of money-making.

For a long time in the war that town has been known to British soldiers who have pa.s.sed it on their way to Plug Street as "Armentears." They made friends with some of the girls in the tea-shops, and said "Hallo, granny! Tray bong!" to old ladies who sold them picture post cards. Now it is a town of tears to any people who once lived there. The tea-shops have been smashed to bits and the women and the girls have gone, unless their bodies lie in the cellars beneath the ruins. The agony of Armentires began at the end of June, when the enemy first began to bombard it with systematic violence, and though there is no life left in it the broken houses are still battered by more sh.e.l.ls when the enemy's gunners have nothing else to do. When I walked through its streets yesterday I was the witness of the horror that had pa.s.sed. The German bombardment began quite suddenly one night, and the old women and the girls and the children were in their beds. They rushed down into their cellars, not for the first time, because during nearly three years of war stray sh.e.l.ls had often come into the town. But never like this.

These were not random sh.e.l.ls, scattered here and there. They came with a steady and frightful violence into every part of the town, sweeping down street after street, blowing houses to dust, knocking the fronts off the shops, playing fantastic, horrible tricks of choosing and leaving, as sh.e.l.l-fire does in any town of this size. There were gas-sh.e.l.ls among the high explosives, and their poison filtered down into the cellars. A fire broke out in one of the squares beyond the old church of St.-Vaast, and the houses were gutted by flames, which licked high above their roofless walls.

The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the church of St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins--great blocks of masonry hurled from its dome and b.u.t.tresses amidst a ma.s.s of broken gla.s.s.

Inside there is a tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos among the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the great organ have been flung out of their framework, but curiously the side altars, with the figures of apostles and saints, and the central figure of the Sacred Heart, are hardly touched, and stand unscathed amidst this great destruction. There is nothing new in all this. For three years I have been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it has the grim interest of recent history, and Armentires is the scene of a tragedy to its civilian population which makes one's heart ache with a new revolt against this monstrous cruelty of war upon the innocent and the helpless.

It was easy to see what had happened during those days and nights of terror some weeks ago. I looked into the blown-out fronts of little shops and houses, and saw how everything had been abandoned in that rush of women and children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the rooms were intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, with its cash-box on the bar counter, and games such as soldiers love--dominoes and darts, and quoits and bagatelle, set out as though for an evening's entertainment.

Here was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the shelves, though most of the house was blown across the street. I looked through a hole in the wall to a drawing-room, with a piano, standing amid a litter of broken furniture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the sofa and chairs.

But it was in the cellars that the pitiful drama had been--in those cellars down which I peered wondering whether any poor bodies lay there still. The sh.e.l.ls had pierced down to some of the women hiding in them.

Poison-gas came to choke some of them. Rescue parties of our R.A.M.C.

went into Armentires immediately to get the poor creatures away, and risked their lives a score of times on each journey they made. It is an amazing thing that even then, in spite of their terror and their agony and their wounds, many of the old women could hardly be made to leave the town, and clung desperately to their homes, though these had fallen down on top of them.

Outside Armentires yesterday I met one of the R.A.M.C. lads who had helped in this rescue work--he has been given a Military Medal for it--and he told me of his trouble with two old ladies when things were at their worst. Neither had a rag of clothing on except the blankets he wrapped round them as they lay on stretchers; but when his attention wandered from them, owing to sh.e.l.ls which burst close to the ambulance, one of these old dames scrambled up and ran off naked down the street.

He went after her, and on his return found that the other old lady had given him the slip.

He had astounding experiences, this Wess.e.x boy who is an expert in bandaging wounds, and through many days of dreadfulness and many nights he worked in Armentires under heavy fire, and did not turn a hair. He was such a Mark Tapley that when everything was falling about him and h.e.l.l was let loose he became more and more cheerful and refused to take things seriously.

"I don't think I ever laughed so much," he told me yesterday. "I don't know how it was, but I couldn't help seeing the comical side of it all, in spite of the ghastly sights." I suppose this boy's sense of humour was touched by the monstrous idiocy of the sh.e.l.l-fire, which produced effects like those on a music-hall stage when the funny man breaks all the crockery and brings the roof down over his head. He laughed like anything when he was sh.e.l.led out of his makeshift dressing-station on one side of the street, and had to establish his quarters on the other side of another street.

"How's it going, my lad!" asked his officer, who came to visit the aid post.

"Well, sir," he answered, "it's rather hotter than the last place, except for direct hits."

He laughed "like anything" again when a sh.e.l.l came through the kitchen and smashed up the stove, and failed to kill an old lady, already covered with bruises but very talkative. He laughed again when they had to pack up traps in a hurry, with the stiff body of a small dead child on the top of the kit and a barrage down the street.

"This is the funniest old show I ever did see," was the comment of the boy from Wess.e.x, and certainly, when one comes to think of it, it is a funny thing that such things should happen in this civilized world of ours and in this Christian age. But the boy from Wess.e.x, and others like him, did not let their sense of humour get the better of their pity or their work of rescue. They crawled out and dragged in the bodies of dead or wounded people.

Down below in the cellars was a crowd of poor people, mostly women and girls, and when the sh.e.l.l-fire was at its height their wailing and their prayers were rather troublesome to the Wess.e.x boy and his comrades upstairs bandaging the wounded. The R.A.M.C. men, at most deadly risk to themselves, managed to clear most of the cellars, carrying out the people on shutters, and taking them away in ambulances to hospitals. To one of these casualty clearing-stations was brought a boy of nineteen, who had been ga.s.sed. He was a life-long paralytic and wizened like an old man, and deaf and dumb. n.o.body knew where he had come from or to whom he belonged, but he had one creature faithful to him. It was a small dog, who came on the stretcher with him, sitting on his chest. It watched close to him when he lay in the hospital, and went away with him, sitting on his chest again, when he was sent farther away to another clearing-station. This dog's fidelity to the paralysed boy, who was deaf and dumb and ga.s.sed, seems to men who have seen many sights of war and this agony in Armentires the most pitiful thing they know.

Yesterday, apart from the knocking of anti-aircraft guns and the drone of our planes, it was all quiet there, and I walked through the silent streets over the broken bricks and gla.s.s, and was startled by the utter death of the town. For this quietude and ruin of a place that one has seen full of life gives one a sinister sensation, and one is frightened by one's loneliness.

XV

THE BATTLE OF MENIN ROAD

SEPTEMBER 20

Our troops attacked this morning before six o'clock on a wide front north and south of the Ypres-Menin road, and have gained important ground all along the line. It is ground from which during the past six weeks there has been that heroic and desperate fighting which I have described as best I could in my daily messages, giving even at the best only a vague idea of the difficulties encountered by those men of ours who made great sacrifices in great endeavours. It is the ground which in the centre rises up through the sinister woodlands of Glencorse Copse and Inverness Wood to the high ground of Polygon Wood and the spurs of the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, which form the enemy's long defensive barrier to the east of the Ypres salient. Until that high land was taken progress was difficult for our troops on the left across the Steenbeek, as the enemy's guns could still hold commanding positions. The ground over which our men have swept this morning had been a.s.saulted again and again by troops who ignored their losses, and attacked with a most desperate and glorious courage, yet failed to hold what they gained for a time, because their final goal was attained with weakened forces after most fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y fighting. The Empire knows who those men were--the old English county regiments, who never fought more gallantly; the Scots, who only let go of their forward positions under overwhelming pressure and annihilating fire; the Irish divisions, who suffered the most supreme ordeal, and earned new and undying honour by the way they endured the fire of many guns for many days. As long as history lasts, the name of these woods, from which most of the trees have been swept, and of these bogs and marshes which lie about them, will be linked with the memory of those brave battalions who fought through them again and again. They are not less to be honoured than those who with the same courage, just as splendid, attacked once more, over the same tracks, past the same death-traps, and achieved success. By different methods, by learning from what the first men had suffered, this last attack has not as yet been high in cost, and we hold what the enemy has used all his strength and cunning to prevent us getting. He used much cunning and poured up great reserves of men and guns to smash our a.s.saulting lines.

For the first time on July 31 we came up against his new and fully prepared system of defence, and discovered the power of it. Abandoning the old trench system which we could knock to pieces with artillery, he made his forward positions without any definite line, and built a large number of concrete blockhouses, so arranged in depth that they defended each other by enfilade fire, and so strong that nothing but a direct hit from one of our heavier sh.e.l.ls would damage it. And a direct hit is very difficult on a small mark like one of those concrete houses, holding about ten to twenty men at a minimum, and fifty to sixty in their largest. These little garrisons were mostly machine-gunners and picked men specially trained for outpost work, and they could inflict severe damage on an advancing battalion, so that the forward lines pa.s.sing through and beyond them would be spent and weak. Then behind in reserve lay the German "Stosstruppen," specially trained also for counter-attacks, which were launched in strong striking forces against our advanced lines after all their struggle and loss. Those blockhouses proved formidable things--hard nuts to crack, as the soldiers said who came up against them. There are scores of them whose names will be remembered through a lifetime by men of many battalions, and they cost the lives of many brave men. Beck House and Borry Farm belong to Irish history. Wurst Farm and Winnipeg, Bremen Redoubt and Gallipoli, Iberian and Delva Farm, are strongholds round which many desperate little battles, led by young subalterns or sergeants, have taken place on the last day of July and on many days since. English and Scots have taken turns in attacking and defending such places as Fitzclarence Farm, Northampton Farm, and Black Watch Corner in the dreadful region of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood. To-day the hard nut of the concrete blockhouse has been cracked by a new method of attack and by a new a.s.sault, planned with great forethought, and achieved so far with high success.

Among the troops engaged on the 2nd Army front were the Australians and South-Africans, Welsh and Scottish battalions, and many of the old English regiments, including the Cheshires, Warwicks, Worcesters, Staffords, Wiltshires, Gloucesters, Berkshires, Oxford and Bucks, York and Lancashires, Sherwood Foresters, and Rifle Brigade. The Divisions to which they belonged were, from north to south, the 2nd Australians, 1st Australians, the 23rd and 41st (with the 21st and 23rd in reserve), the 39th, the 19th, the 30th, 14th, and 8th.

I should like to give the full details of the preparations which have made this success possible and the methods by which some at least of the terrors of the blockhouse have been laid low, but it cannot yet be done, and it is enough now that good results have been attained. One thing was against us as usual last night. After several fine days the weather turned bad again, and last night many men must have looked up at the sky, groaned, and said, "Just our luck." At half-past ten it began to rain heavily, and all through the night there was a steady drizzle. It was awful to think of that ground about the woodlands, already full of water-holes and bogs, becoming more and more of a quagmire as the time drew near when our men have to rise from the mud and follow the barrage across the craters. All through the night our heavy guns were slogging, and through the dark wet mist there was the blurred light of their flashes. Before the dawn a high wind was raging at thirty miles an hour across Flanders, and heavy water-logged clouds were only 400 feet above the earth. How could our airmen see? When the attack began they could not see even when they flew as low as 200 feet. They could see nothing but smoke, which clung low to the battlefields, and they could only guess the whereabouts of German batteries. Later, when some progress had been made at most points of the attacking line, the sky cleared a little, blue s.p.a.ces showed through the black storm-clouds, and there were gleams of sun striking aslant the mists.

This sky on the salient was a strange vision, and I have seen nothing like it since the war began. It was filled with little black specks like midges, but each midge was a British aeroplane flying over the enemy's lines. The enemy tried to clear the air of them, and his anti-aircraft guns were firing wildly, so that all about them were puffs of black shrapnel. Behind, closely cl.u.s.tered, were our kite-balloons, like snow-clouds where they were caught by the light, staring down over the battle, and in wide semicircles about the salient our heavy guns were firing ceaselessly with dull, enormous hammer-strokes, followed by the shrill cry of travelling sh.e.l.ls making the barrage before our men, and having blockhouses for their targets and building walls of flying steel between the enemy and our attacking troops. In the near distance were the strafed woods of old battle-grounds like the Wytschaete Ridge and Messines, with their naked gallows-trees all blurred in the mist.

Our men had lain out all night in the rain before the attack at something before six. They were wet through to the skin, but it is curious that some of them whom I saw to-day were surprised to hear it had been raining hard. They had other things to think about. But some of them did not think at all. Tired out in mind and body under the big nervous strain which is there, though they may be unconscious of it, they slept. "I was wakened by a friend just before we went over," said one of them. The anxiety of the officers was intense for the hours to pa.s.s before the enemy should get a hint of the movement. It seemed that in one part of the line he did guess that something was in the wind and in the mist. This was on the line facing Glencorse Wood. An hour or two before the attack he put over a heavy barrage, but most of it missed the heads of the battalions. There were many casualties, but the men stood firm, never budging, and making no sound. They all thought that some of their comrades must have been badly caught, but, as far as I can find, it did not do great damage.

All along the line the experience of the fighting was broadly the same.

Apart from local details and difficulties, the ground was not quite so bad as had been expected, though bad enough, being greasy and boggy after the rain, but not impa.s.sable. The sh.e.l.l-holes were water-logged, and they were dangerously deep for badly wounded men who might fall in, but for the others there was generally a way round over ground which would hold, and our a.s.saulting waves who led the advance were lightly clad, and could go at a fair pace after the barrage. "I saw wounded men fall in the sh.e.l.l-holes," said a Warwickshire lad to-day, "and G.o.d knows how they got out again, unless the stretcher-bearers came up quick, as most of them did; but as for me, I had lain in a sh.e.l.l-hole all night up to the waist in mud, and I was careful to keep out of them." The barrage ahead of them was terrific--the most appalling fence of sh.e.l.ls that has ever been placed before advancing troops in this war. All our men describe it as wonderful. "Beautiful" is the word they use, because they know what it means in safety to them.

In the direction of Polygon Wood the plan of attack seems to have worked like clockwork. The Australians moved forward behind the barrage stage by stage, through Westhoek and Nonne Boschen, and across the Hanebeek stream on their left, with hardly a check, in spite of the German blockhouses scattered over this country. In those blockhouses the small garrisons of picked troops had been demoralized, as any human beings would be, by the enormous sh.e.l.l-fire which had been flung around them.

Some, but not all, it seems, of the blockhouses had been smashed, and in those still standing the German machine-gunners got their weapons to work with a burst or two of fire, but then, seeing our troops upon them, were seized with fear, and made signs of surrender. At nine o'clock this morning the good news came back that the Australians were right through Glencorse Wood. Later messages showed that our troops were fighting their way into Polygon Wood. They swept over the strong points at Black Watch Corner, Northampton Farm, and Carlisle Farm. There was stiff fighting round a blockhouse called Anzac Corner, east of the Hanebeek stream, and it was necessary to organize two flank attacks and work round it before the enemy machine-gun fire could be silenced by bombs.

In another case near here the enemy came out of a blockhouse ready to attack, but when they saw our men swarming up, they lost heart and held up their hands. It is difficult to know how many prisoners were taken here in these woods and strong points. The men's estimates vary enormously, some speaking of scores and others of hundreds.

All this time the enemy's artillery reply was not exceptionally heavy, and, though it was prompt to come after the first SOS signals went up from his lines, it was erratic and varied very much in the success of our counter-battery work, which all through the night and for days past has been smothering his guns. South of the attack in Glencorse Copse and Polygon Wood the a.s.sault in Inverness Copse and Shrewsbury Forest, across the bog-lands round the Dumbarton Lakes, was made by English battalions, including the Queen's, the East and West Kents, the Northumberland Fusiliers, Sherwood Foresters, the King's Royal Rifles, and the West Riding battalions. It was the vilest ground, low-lying and flooded, and strewn with broken trees and choked with undergrowth, but the troops here kept up a good pace, and flung themselves upon the blockhouses which stood in their way. At an early hour our men were reported to be on a ridge south-east of Inverness Copse and going strong towards Veldhoek. The enemy's barrage came down too late, and one officer, who was wounded by a sh.e.l.l-splinter, led his men, 160 of them, to their first position with only nine casualties.

Most of our losses to-day were from machine-gun fire out of the blockhouses, and that varied very much at different parts of the line.

There was some trouble at Het Pappotje Farm in this way, where a party of German machine-gunners put up a desperate resistance, shutting themselves in behind steel doors before they were routed out by a bombing fight. Southward from a strong point called Groenenburg, or "Green Bug" Farm, to Opaque Wood by the Ypres-Comines Ca.n.a.l, the attack by the Cheshires, Wiltshires, Warwicks, Staffords, and Gloucesters was successful, though the enemy still holds out up to the time I write in Hessian Wood, where he is defending himself in a group of blockhouses against the Welsh Regiment and Royal Welsh Fusiliers.

I have dealt so far with the centre of the attack, and I know very little as to the fighting on the north by the 5th Army, except that the Highlanders, London Territorials, Lancashire and Liverpool battalions, and Scots and South-Africans have swept past a whole system of blockhouses, like Beck House and Borry Farm, running up through Gallipoli, Kansas Cross, and Wurst Farm, across the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. All through the morning our lightly wounded men came filtering down to the safer places in the Ypres salient and then to the quiet fields behind, and they were in grand spirits in spite of the mud which caked them and the smart of their wounds. Some of them were brought down on the trolley trains, which go almost as far as the battle-line, and some in open buses, and some by German prisoners, but there were many Germans among the wounded--some of them with very ghastly wounds, and these took their place with ours and mingled with them in the dressing-stations, and were given the same treatment. Our wounded told some strange tales of their experiences, but there was no moan among them, whatever they had suffered.

One man of the Cheshires described to me how he saw a German officer run out of a dug-out, which had been a blockhouse blown in at each end by our heavy sh.e.l.l-fire, and make for another one which still stood intact.

With some of his comrades, our man chased him, and there was a great fight in the second blockhouse before the survivors surrendered, among them the officer, who gave to my friend a big china pipe and a case full of cigars as souvenirs. He was killed afterwards by one of his own men, who sniped him as he was walking back to our lines. In another strong point there was a great and terrible fight. The Prussian garrison refused to surrender, and a party of ours fought them until they were destroyed. "It was more lively than Wytschaete," said a man who was in this fight. "It was less tame-like, and the Fritzes put up a better show." They fought hard round Prince's House and Jarrock's Farm and Pioneer House, not far from Hollebeke Chteau.

The prisoners I saw to-day were shaken men. Most of them were young fellows of twenty-one, belonging to the 1916 cla.s.s, and there were none of the youngest boys among them. But they were white-faced and haggard, and looked like men who had pa.s.sed through a great terror, which indeed was their fate. They belonged mostly to the 207th Prussian Division, and had suffered before the battle from our great sh.e.l.l-fire, which had caused many casualties among their reliefs and ration parties. Many other prisoners belonged to the 121st Division. I can only give this glimpse or two of the crowded scenes and the many details of to-day's battle. To-morrow there will be time perhaps to write more, giving a deeper insight into this day of good success, which is cheering after so much desperate fighting--over the same fields, although never to so far a goal.

SEPTEMBER 21

In spite of many German counter-attacks yesterday and many vain and costly attempts to counter-attack to-day, we hold all the ground gained by our men yesterday, except at one or two strong points, after their victorious progress. This morning when I went again among the men who have been fighting--there was a blue sky over the rags and tatters of the City of Ypres, and behind the tall, solitary tree-stumps on the ridge that goes up to Polygon Wood by way of Glencorse Copse, and all the air was filled with the song of many aeroplanes--all that I learned yesterday about the battle was made more certain by the narratives of these young soldiers, who are proud and glad of what they call a real good show. The wounded men walking down over the wide stretch of fields, which are still under gun-fire, weak with loss of blood, suffering the first pain of their wounds, and shaken by their experiences under sh.e.l.ls and machine-gun fire, spoke with a quiet enthusiasm of the day's success, and said "It was easy" behind such a colossal barrage as our guns rolled in front of them. Some of them in their eagerness went too fast for the barrage in order to chase the enemy, and I have met Australians here and there and some men of the Welsh Regiment, who fought farther south, wounded because they ran in front of the barrage-lines, and were caught in our sh.e.l.l-splinters. But that was a rare episode, and along the whole line of attack the men followed the moving walls of sh.e.l.ls, vast sh.e.l.ls that fling up ma.s.ses of earth like suburban villas, and the smaller sh.e.l.ls that fell like confetti, all glinting in the wet mist, and felt sure that the enemy in front of them, would have lost all his fight when they reached his hiding-places, if any lived. Many Germans died on that ground, so that the sh.e.l.l-holes between the blockhouses are wet graves in which their bodies lie, and many of the blockhouses which resisted so long in former attacks are smashed, or at least so battered that the garrisons inside were dazed and demoralized by the fearful hammering at their walls.

There was a broad belt of death across that mile deep of woods and ridges and barren fields, but here and there, as I have already told, men stayed alive in the concrete houses and fought with their machine-guns to the last, and even kept sniping from sh.e.l.l-holes in which they had escaped, up to the time our troops reached them. They were brave men, most of them, for it needs great courage to show any fighting spirit after such a fury of gun-fire, and 50 per cent. of our prisoners are wounded, as I have seen myself, and the others are haggard and spent after their frightful adventure. An hour or two ago I met a column of them on the road, marching down slowly through a ruined village, and staring hollow-eyed at all the movement of our troops, at all the transport behind our lines, at all our whistling, busy Tommies, who glance back at them without any malice now that the battle is over.

In a dressing-station a young wounded German sprang to his feet as I came in, and said, "Good day, sir," very politely, but the pallor of his face was that of a dead man. The German officers who are prisoners show the same kind of eagerness to salute, which is a rare thing for them, and I hear that they do not disguise that yesterday was a day of great defeat for themselves, and of great victory for us. The completeness and quickness of it staggered them, and they speak of our barrage-fire as an awful phenomenon that has undone all their plans and destroyed the new method of defence which they believed could save them to the end. As wounded men or prisoners they see things darkly, and we should be deep in folly if we believed that all the enemy's strength of resistance is destroyed. But at least this is clear after yesterday, that the new German method of holding his lines lightly by small garrisons in blockhouses, with reserves behind for counter-attacks, has broken down, and by reverting to the old system of strong front lines he would suffer again as he suffered in the Somme under the ferocity of our artillery.

The German officers have hard words to say about their Higher Command which has led them into this tragedy, and their own pride is broken.

Yesterday the reserve divisions, which were brought up in buses and then a.s.sembled in places near our new front, to be flung against our advanced lines, had a dreadful time, and must have suffered great losses. After the rain of the night and the mist of the morning, the weather cleared in time for our airmen to go out reconnoitring, as I saw them in swarms in yesterday's sky, and they were quick to report the ma.s.sing of the enemy. Our guns were quick to fire at these human targets. These counter-attacks developed several times against the English and Highland troops, who were fighting across the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, north-west of the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, at a place called the Schreiboom, north of Langemarck. Some of the Rifle Brigade and King's Royal Rifles, with other light-infantry troops, failed at first to get a certain trench, and very hard fighting took place during the day in a pocket with desperate courage. At the same time the Highlanders south of them were fighting very hard also round about the blockhouses by Rose House, Pheasant Farm, and Quebec Farm beyond the Pilkem Ridge, into which I looked a week or two ago, when things were quiet on the line. The Highlanders were driven back for a while, and the enemy's counter-attacks were made in strong force at about ten o'clock in the morning, and several times later. But they were broken up each time by the rifle-fire of the Scottish troops, and by our field-batteries.

Large numbers of the enemy were killed here in our first attack and afterwards. Besides the artillery, a heavy bombardment was made before the men went out by trench-mortars, which raked a small area of sh.e.l.l-holes so thoroughly that the German snipers in them were destroyed, and an important trench was taken by the Scots with hardly any casualties. A good deal more than 100,000 rounds of sh.e.l.ls must have gone over from the guns before the battle, and afterwards the German storm troops who tried to recover the ground were smothered with fire.