From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 25

The Australian advance across the racecourse of Polygon Wood and northward across the spur to below Zonnebeke Chteau was steady and successful. There was a regular chain of blockhouses on the way, but there again the old black magic of the pill-box failed. The men rallied inside them, many of them being Poles of the 49th Regiment, who hate the Prussians in a fierce way and ask us to kill as many as possible for their sake. Most of them were quick and glad to surrender. A platoon of them were taken in some wooden dug-outs below the high mound of Polygon Wood, that old b.u.t.te which is supposed to be the burial-place of a prehistoric chief, though by the Australians it is believed to be the observation-post of Sir Douglas Haig in 1914.

The enemy's gun-fire was heavy over part of the ground, and there was a nest of machine-guns along a road which gave some trouble, but in the main attack the losses of the Australians were not heavy up to the time they gained the last objective. It was our aircraft which brought back the first news of the Anzacs on the racecourse in Polygon Wood, and later they had reached the farthest goal, where prisoners were surrendering freely. On the left of their front the Australians were quite satisfied with their position. On the right they had great anxiety because of the check to the troops below them. At one time it was found advisable for the Australians to swing back their flank a little in order to avoid its exposure. But the Australians are full of confidence and are sure that they can handle any counter-attack which may be launched against them. It has been a hard day for all our men, especially for those who bore the brunt of the enemy's fire, and I believe will be counted as one of the biggest days of fighting in this war. Its decision is of vital importance to the enemy and to ourselves, and so far it is in our favour.

XVII

THE BATTLE OF POLYGON WOOD

SEPTEMBER 27

The battle which began yesterday morning, after a whole day of counter-attacking by the enemy, in great numbers and by great gun-fire, lasted until nightfall, and, as I told yesterday, did not pa.s.s without anxious hours for those in command, and trying hours for some of our fighting men.

From the left above Zonnebeke down to the Australian front on the heights of the Polygon Wood Racecourse the advance was made with fair ease through the blockhouse system and without severe losses, as they are reckoned in modern warfare, in spite of difficult bits of ground and the usual snags, as our men call them, in the way of unexpected machine-gun fire, odd bits of trench to which small groups of Germans clung stubbornly, dirty swamps which some of our men could not cross quickly enough to keep up with the barrage, and danger zones upon which the enemy heaped his explosives.

There were incidents enough for individual men to be remembered for a lifetime, hairbreadth escapes, tight corners in which men died after acts of fine heroism, and strong points like Hill 40, on the left of the ruins of Zonnebeke, around which some of our troops struggled with fortune.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Ypres salient]

Apart from local vicissitudes here and there during those first hours of the battle it became clear by midday, or before, that from the extreme left of the attack down to the vicinity of Cameron House, on the right of the Australians, the general success of the day was good. The critical situation was on the right of the 4th and 5th Australians, and involving their right because of the enemy's violent pressure on British troops there during the previous day, and again when our new attack started, so that their line had been somewhat forced back and the Australian right flank was exposed.

Hour after hour reports coming from this part of the field were read with some anxiety when it was known how heavily some of our battalions were engaged. This menace to our right wing was averted by the courage of men of the Middles.e.x and Surrey Regiments of the 33rd Division, with Argylls and Sutherlands and Scottish Rifles, and by the quick, skillful, and generous help of the Australian troops on their left. It is an episode of the battle which will one day be an historic memory when all the details are told. I can only tell them briefly and in outline.

After terrific sh.e.l.ling, on Tuesday last, the enemy launched an attack at six o'clock against our line by Carlisle Farm and Black Watch Corner, south of Polygon Wood, and forced some of our English troops to fall back towards Lone House and the dirty little swamp of the Reutelbeek.

These boys of Middles.e.x and Surrey suffered severely. For some time it was all they could do to hold out, and the enemy was still pressing. A body of Scottish Rifles was sent up to support them, and by a most brave counter-thrust under great gun-fire restored part of the line, so that it was strong enough to keep back any advancing wave of Germans by rifle and machine-gun fire.

Another body of men, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, held out on exposed ground, isolated from the main line, and threatened with being cut off by the enemy's a.s.sault troops. Sir Douglas Haig has mentioned them specially in his message yesterday, and they deserve great honour for the heroic way in which they held on to this ground for many hours that day and night under hara.s.sing fire from coal-boxes, or 59's, which threatened to wipe out their whole strength. Yesterday they had strength and spirit left to renew the attack, and to make another attempt to get back the lost ground into which the enemy had driven a wedge.

At the same time the Australians had realized the dangerous situation which exposed their right flank, and they directed a body of their own troops to strike southward in order to thrust back the German outposts.

Those Australian troops shared the peril of their comrades on the right, and withstood the same tornado of sh.e.l.ling which was flung over all the ground here; but in spite of heroic sacrifice did not at first wholly relieve the position of the Australian right, which remained exposed. After the great attack by the Anzacs in the morning their line was thrust right out beyond Cameron House, but the English and Scottish troops of the 33rd Division, who had also gone forward in the new attack south of them, were again met by a most deadly barrage-fire and checked at a critical time. I was with some of the Australians yesterday when all this was happening, and when there was cause for worry. They were unruffled, and did not lose confidence for a moment.

"Give us two hours," said one of them who had a right to speak, "and we will make everything as sound as a bell." In those two hours they drew back their flank to get into line on a curve going back towards Lone House, and established defensive posts which would hold off any attack likely to be launched against them.

"It is hard luck on the English boys down there," said the Australians, "but they have had a bad gruelling, and they will come along in spite of it. There is not an Australian in France who doesn't know how the Tommy-Boys fought on the 20th, and that will do for us."

The "Tommy-Boys," as the Australians call them, fought as they have fought in three years of great battles, and in spite of the ordeal through which they had pa.s.sed--and it was not a light one--they saved the situation on that ground below Polygon Wood, and made it too dangerous and too costly for the enemy to stay. Early this morning the survivors of the Germans who had thrust a wedge between our lines past Cameron House crawled out again and our line was straightened.

How the Australians established themselves on Polygon Wood Racecourse and beyond the big mound called the b.u.t.te I told in my message yesterday. Farther north the Leicesters, Notts and Derbys, Royal Scots, Gordons, and King's Own of the 59th and 3rd Divisions had attacked north of the Ypres-Roulers railway, running at right angles to the Langemarck-Zonnebeke road. On that road, barring the way, was the station of Zonnebeke, now a ma.s.s of wreckage, fortified with machine-gun redoubts, and farther south the ruins of Zonnebeke church and village. Across the road was the Windmill Cabaret, an old inn which has been blown off the map on the high ground of Hill 40, which rises gradually to a hump a hundred yards or so north of the station. It was bad ground to attack, and strewn with little blockhouses of the new type, though they are still called pill-boxes after an older and smaller type. The blockhouses did not give much trouble. Our new form of barrage, the most frightful combination of high explosives and shrapnel that has yet appeared in war, rolled backwards and forwards about them, so that the garrisons huddled inside until our men nipped behind them and thrust rifles or bombs through the machine-gun loopholes, if they had not previously escaped to sh.e.l.l-craters around where they might have more chance of escape.

And here I might say in pa.s.sing that the enemy has already modified his methods of holding the blockhouses, and while only a few men remain inside, distributes the rest of the garrison in sh.e.l.l-holes on either side, with their machine-guns in the organized craters. Some of them were found by our men, and though many of them had been killed by our gun-fire, others remained shooting and sniping until they were routed out.

The worst part of the ground on this line of attack was around a blockhouse called Bostin Farm, where there was a dismal, stinking swamp so impa.s.sable that the Royal Scots, Scottish Fusiliers, and East Yorks of the 3rd Division who tried to make their way through it lost touch with the barrage, which rolled ahead of them, and had to work round and up towards Hill 40. Here they came under machine-gun fire, and although some men forced their way up the slope of the knoll on which the Windmill Cabaret stood, they did not quite reach the crest.

Meanwhile men of the Gordons, Suffolks, and Welsh Fusiliers were attacking round about Zonnebeke, where the ground was swept by machine-gun bullets, and seized the ruin of the church and the outskirts of the station yard. There was heavy sh.e.l.ling from the enemy all day, which caused the line to fall back a little, and at six o'clock yesterday evening the enemy launched two counter-attacks from Zonnebeke and another around Hill 40. Half an hour later the Royal Scots and Royal Scottish Fusiliers moved forward to thrust the enemy back, and at exactly the same time another counter-attack of his advanced in their direction. Each body of men were protected by barrage-lines of heavy sh.e.l.l-fire, and our sh.e.l.ls and the German sh.e.l.ls mingled and burst together in a wide belt of fury, and sometimes neither side could cross it.

Farther north South Midland men did well. They advanced from Zevenkote on the right and Schuler Farm on the left to Van Isackere Farm and Dochy Farm and other blockhouses on each side of the high road between Langemarck and Zonnebeke with hardly a check. They found many of the blockhouses badly damaged after the heavy fire that had been poured on each one of them, and if they were not damaged the men inside were so nerve-shaken that they were eager to surrender. Apparently they had not expected the attack to follow the hurricane bombardment, because there had been other shoots of this kind before, and they made no real attempt to get their machine-guns into action. It was from the slopes of the Gravenstafel and the Abraham Heights beyond that machine-gun fire fell upon the Midland men, and the enemy's guns were shooting down the gullies between these ridges. But the ground in this part of our attack yesterday was taken without grave trouble and without great losses.

Most of the prisoners taken on this ground were Saxons, and those I have seen marching down to a captivity which they prefer to the field of battle are men of a good physique, and smart, soldierly look. It is astonishing how quickly they recover from the effect of bombardment and the great horror of battle as soon as they get beyond the range of sh.e.l.l-fire. But they are gloomy and disheartened. The officers especially acknowledge that things are going badly for Germany, and say that there is, for the time at least until the new cla.s.s is ready, a dearth of men of fighting age, so that the drafts they get are miserable and unfit. They are overwhelmed with the thought of the monstrous gun-power which we have brought against them to counteract their own artillery, which once had the mastery, and they are struck by the audacity of our air service.

Certainly our flying men have been doing all in their power to make life intolerable on the German side of the lines. I have already described how they went out on Tuesday night and broke up the columns of men marching to attack us. One of these birds found a different kind of prey. It was opposite the Australian front where a team of German gunners were getting a gun away. Our airman flew low over the heads of the gunners and played his machine-gun on to them and dropped bombs. He smashed up the gun-limber and laid out the gunners, and the gun remains there still, with the bodies of men and horses around it. To-day out beyond Ypres I saw flights of our men going out again beyond the German lines for that battle in the air which has never ceased since the battle of Flanders two months ago.

The weather is still in our favour, and there is a blue sky to-day and a soft, golden light over all this Flemish countryside where our troops go marching up to the lines with their bands playing, or lie resting in the hop-fields on the way. That old place of horror, the Yser Ca.n.a.l, reflected the blue above, and in the air there was that sense of peace which belongs to the golden days of autumn. But the guns were loud, and the flight of their sh.e.l.ls went crying through the sky.

OCTOBER 2

Through the haze which lies low over Flanders, though above there is still a blue sky, the noise of great gun-fire goes on, rising and falling in gusts, and, like the beat of surf to people who live by the sea, it is the constant sound in men's ears, not disturbing their work unless they are close enough to suffer from the power behind the thunder-strokes. The trees are yellowing into crinkled gold, and there is the touch and smell of autumn in the night air, and the orchards of France are heavy with fruit. Wonderful weather, the soldiers say. The artillery battle is endless, and on both sides is intense and widespread. It was followed yesterday by five German counter-attacks, which did not reach our lines. In a very desperate way the enemy is trying to push us back from positions which are essential to the strength of his defence. All his guns are at work. Is it the last phase of the war? Does the enemy know that he must win or lose all? Our men have that hope in their hearts, and fight more grimly and with higher spirit because of it. The success of the last two battles has deepened the hope, and men come back from the line, back to the rest-billets, with the old conviction newly revived that at last they have the enemy down and under and very near hopelessness. In the rest-billets are the men who come back. They come marching back along the dusty roads from the fire-swept zone, first across ground pitted with new-made sh.e.l.l-holes, with the howl of sh.e.l.ls overhead, and then through broken villages on the edge of the battlefields, and then through standing villages where only a gap or two shows where a haphazard sh.e.l.l has gone, and then at last to the clean, sweet country which no high explosives reach, unless a hostile airman comes over with his bombs.

In any old billet in Flanders one hears the tale of battle told by men who were there, and it is worth while, as yesterday, when I sat down at table with the officers of a battalion of Suffolks in a Flemish farmhouse. The men were camped outside, and as I pa.s.sed I liked the look of these lads, who had just come out of one of the stiffest fights of the war. They looked amazingly fresh after one night's rest, and they stood in groups telling their yarns in the good old dialect of their county, laughing as though it had all been a joke, though it was more than a joke with death on the prowl.

"Your men look fit," I said to the colonel of the Suffolks, and he smiled as though he liked my words, and said, "You couldn't get their tails down with a crowbar. It was a good show, and that makes all the difference. They have been telling the Australian boys that you have only got to make a face at the Hun and he puts his hands up. They knocked the stuffing out of the enemy."

Inside the farmhouse there was the battalion mess, at one long table and one short, because it was felt better for all the officers to be together instead of splitting up into company messes. I looked down the rows of faces, these clean-cut English faces, and was glad of the luck which had brought so many of these young officers back again. They told the tale of the battle, and each of them had some detail to add, because that was his part of the show, and it was his platoon, and they had left the fighting-line the night before. They spoke as though all the things had happened long ago, and they laughed loudly at episodes of gruesome interest and belonging to those humours of war which are not to be written.

There was a thick mist when they went away at dawn, so dense that they could not see the line of our barrage ahead, though it was a deep belt of bursting sh.e.l.ls. They had been told to follow close, and they were eager to get on. They went too fast, some of them almost incredibly fast, over the sh.e.l.l-craters, and round them, and into them, and out of them again, stumbling, running, scrambling, not turning to look when any comrade fell.

"I was on the last position three-quarters of an hour before the barrage pa.s.sed," said a young officer of the Suffolks. He spoke the words as if telling something rather commonplace, but he knew that I knew the meaning of what he said, a frightful and extraordinary thing, for with his platoon he had gone ahead of our storm of fire and had to wait until it reached and then pa.s.sed them. Some of their losses were because of that, and yet they might have been greater if they had been slower because the enemy was caught before they could guess that our men were near. They put up no fight in the pill-boxes, those little houses of concrete which stank horribly because of the filth in them, and from the sh.e.l.l-craters where snipers and machine-gunners lay men rose in terror at the sight of the brown men about them, and ran this way and that like poor frightened beasts, or stood shaking in an ague of fear. Some ran towards their own lines with their hands up, shouting "Kamerad,"

believing they were running our way. They were so unready for attack that the snipers had the safety-clip on their rifle-barrels, and others were without ammunition.

In one sh.e.l.l-hole was an English-speaking German. "I saved him," said one of the young Suffolk officers. "He was a downhearted fellow, and said he was fed up with the war and wanted nothing but peace."

Near another sh.e.l.l-hole was a German who looked dead. He looked as if he had been dead for a long time, but an English corporal who pa.s.sed close to this body saw a hand stretch out for a bayonet within reach, and the man raised himself to strike. Like a man who sees a snake with his fangs out, the corporal whipped round, grabbed the German's bayonet and ran him through. The way to the last objective was easy on the whole, and the enemy was on the run with our men after them until they were ordered to stop and dig in. The hardest time came afterwards, as it nearly always comes when the ground gained had to be held for three more days and nights without the excitement of attack and under heavy fire. That is when the courage of men is most tried, as this battalion found. The enemy had time to pull themselves together. The German gunners adapted their range to the new positions and sh.e.l.led fiercely across the ways of approach, and scattered 59's everywhere. It was rifle-fire for the Suffolk men all the time. They had not troubled to bring up a great many bombs, for the rifle has come into its own again, now that the old trench warfare is gone for a time, or all time, and with rifle-fire and machine-gun fire they broke down the German counter-attacks and caught parties of Germans who showed themselves on the slopes of the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, and sniped incessantly. They used a prodigious quant.i.ty of small-arms ammunition, and the carriers risked their lives every step of the way to get it up to them. They fired 30,000 rounds and then 16,000 more. There was one officer who spent all his time sniping from a little patch of ground that had once been a garden. He lay behind a heaped ruin and used his field-gla.s.ses to watch the slopes of rising ground on his left, where human ants were crawling. Every now and then he fired and picked off an ant until his score reached fifty. German planes came flying over our troops to get their line, flying very low, so that their wings were not a tree's height above the sh.e.l.l-craters, and our boys lay doggo not to give themselves away. Some of the hostile planes were red-bellied, and others which came searching the ground were big, porpoise-like planes. They dropped signal-lights and directed the fire of the 59's. A private of the Suffolks, lying low but watchful, saw a light rise from the ground as one of these machines came over, and it was answered from the aeroplane. "That's queer," he thought; "dirty work in that sh.e.l.l-hole." He crept out to the sh.e.l.l-hole from which the signal had come, and found three German soldiers there with rockets.

They tried to kill him, but it was they who died, and our man brought back their rifles and kit as souvenirs.

More rifle ammunition was wanted as the time pa.s.sed, and the carriers took frightful risks to bring it. The drums of the Suffolks did well that day as carriers and stretcher-bearers, pa.s.sing up and down through the barrage-fire, and there was a private who guided a party with small-arms ammunition--ten thousand rounds of it--to the forward troops, with big sh.e.l.ls bursting over the ground. Twice he was buried by sh.e.l.l-bursts, which flung the earth over him, but on the way back he helped to carry a wounded man 800 yards to the regimental aid post under hot fire. He was a cool-headed and gallant-hearted fellow, and went up again as a volunteer to the forward positions, and on the same night crawled out on a patrol with a young lieutenant to reconnoitre a position on the left which was still in German hands. From farther left, on rising ground, the Germans sprinkled machine-gun fire over the battalion support lines, and the earth was spitting with those bullets.

But in their own lines the German soldiers were moving about with Red Cross flags picking up their wounded, and they did not fire at our stretcher-bearers, apart from the barrage-fire of 59's through which they had to make their way. Only once did they play a bad trick. Under the Red Cross flag some stretcher-bearers went into a pill-box which had been abandoned, and shortly after machine-gun fire came from it. That is the kind of thing which makes men see red.

XVIII

ABRAHAM HEIGHTS AND BEYOND

OCTOBER 4

Another great battle has opened to-day, and in a wide attack from the ground we captured on September 26, north and south of the Polygon Wood crest, our troops have advanced upon the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, and have reached the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, which crown a western spur of the ridge, and Broodseinde, which is the high point and keystone of the enemy's defence lines beyond Zonnebeke. South of that they are fighting between Cameron House and Becelaere, across the Reutelbeek and its swampy ground, and down beyond Polderhoek to the south end of the Menin road. The divisions engaged, from north to south, were the 29th, 4th, 11th, 48th, New Zealand, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st Australians.

This morning I saw hundreds of prisoners trailing back across the battlefield, and crowds of them within the barbed-wire enclosures set apart for them behind our lines. Our lightly wounded men coming down the tracks for walking wounded speak, in spite of their blood and bandages, of a smashing blow dealt against the enemy and of complete victory. "We have him beat," say the men, and they are sure of this, sure of his enormous losses and of his broken spirit, although the fighting has been b.l.o.o.d.y because of the great gun-fire through which our men have had to pa.s.s. It has been a strange and terrible battle--terrible, I mean, in its great conflict of guns and men--and the enemy, if all goes well with us, may have to remember it as a turning-point in the history of this war, the point that has turned against him with a sharp and deadly edge.

For, realizing his great peril if we strengthened our hold on the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, and knowing that we intended that--all signs showed him that, and all our pressure on these positions--he prepared an attack against us in great strength in order to regain the ground he lost on September 26, or, if not that, then so to damage us that our advance would be checked until the weather choked us in the mud again. His small counter-attacks, or rather his local counter-attacks, for they were not weak, had failed. Even his persistent hammering at the right wing by Cameron House, below Polygon Wood, had failed to bite deeply into our line, though for a time on September 25 it had been a cause of grave anxiety to us and made the battle next day more difficult and critical.

But these attacks had failed in their purpose, and now the German High Command decided for a big blow, and it was to be delivered at seven o'clock this morning. It was a day and an hour too late. Our battle was fixed for an hour before his.

And so it happened that our men had to pa.s.s through a German barrage to follow their own, a barrage which fell upon them before they leapt up to the a.s.sault, and it happened also most terribly for the enemy that our men were not stopped, but went through that zone of sh.e.l.ls, and on the other side behind our barrage swept over the German a.s.sault troops and annihilated their plan of attack.... They did not attack. Their defence even was broken. As our lines of fire crept forward they reached and broke the second and third waves of the men who had been meant to attack, caught them in their support and reserve positions, and we can only guess what the slaughter has been. It is a slaughter in which five German divisions are involved.

This battle of ours, which looks like one of the greatest victories we have had in the war, was being prepared on a big scale as soon as the last was fought and won. No words of mine can give more than a hint of what those preparations meant in the scene of war. For several days past the roads to the Front have been choked with columns of men marching forward, column after column of glorious men, hard and fit, and hammering a rhythm on the roads with the beat of their feet, and whistling and singing, in tune and out of tune, with the fifes and drums far ahead of them. Always, night and day, there was the sound of this music, always in the stillness of these moonlight nights the thud, thud of those tramping feet, always, along any track that led towards the salient, the vision of these battalions led forward by young officers with their trench sticks swinging and a look of pride in their eyes because of the fellows behind them. Their steel helmets flashed blue in the sun so that a column of them seen from a distance was like a blue stream winding between the hop-fields, or the broken ruins of old villages, or the litter of captured ground. With them and alongside of them went the tide of transport--lorries, wagons, London buses, pack-mules, guns and limbers, and the black old cookers with their trailing smoke. Everywhere there has been a fever of work, Tommies, "c.h.i.n.kies," coloured men piling up mountains of ammunition to feed the guns. Under sh.e.l.l-fire, bracketing the roads on which they worked, pioneers carried on the tracks, put down new lengths of duck-board, laid new rails. The enemy's artillery came howling over to search out all this work, which had been seen by aeroplanes, and at night flocks of planes came out in the light of the moon to drop bombs on the men and the work. Now and again they made lucky hits--got a dump and sent it flaming up in a great torch, killed horses in the wagon-lines or labouring up with the transport, laid out groups of men, smashed a train or a truck; but the work went on, never checked, never stopping in its steady flow of energy up to the lines, and the valour of all these labourers was great and steady in preparing for to-day. Knowing the purpose of it all, the deadly purpose, the scene of activity by any siding filled one with a kind of fear. It was so prodigious, so vastly schemed. I pa.s.sed a dump yesterday, and again to-day, in the waste ground on the old battlefield near Ypres and saw the sh.e.l.ls for our field-batteries being unloaded. There were thousands of sh.e.l.ls, brand-new from the factories at home, all bright and glistening and laid out in piles. The guns were greedy. Here was food for a monstrous appet.i.te. We watched all this--the faces of the men going up so bright-eyed, so splendid in their youth, so gay, and all these sh.e.l.ls and guns and materials of war, and all this movement which surged about us and caught us up like straws in its tide, and then we looked at the sky and smelt the wind, and studied a milky ring which formed about the moon. Rain was coming. If only it would come lightly or hold another day or two--one night at least.