From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 27

"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire boy. "They ran so hard I couldn't catch them with my bayonet. Then a bullet came and went slick through my head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire boy by the smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull.

The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and they bear out what I have heard from their officers elsewhere. There were numbers of German soldiers who lay about in sh.e.l.l-holes after our barrage had pa.s.sed over their lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers and men as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last supreme courage of the human beast at bay. There was one of these who lay under the wreckage of an aeroplane, and from that cover he shot some of our men at close range; but because there were many bullets flying about, and sh.e.l.ls bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was not discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the Warwicks who saw him first, and just in time. The German had his rifle raised at ten yards range, but the sergeant whipped round and shot him before he could turn.

Some of these men were discovered after the general fighting was over, and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who went with his Divisional General to see the captured ground next day. The General, who is a quick walker, went ahead over the sh.e.l.l-craters, and the A.D.C.

suddenly saw two Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the General from one of the deep holes.

"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling for his revolver. But when he came up he heard the General telling two wounded Germans that the English had won a very great victory, and that if they were good boys he would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down.

All over the battlefield there were queer little human episodes thrust for a minute or two into the great grim drama of this advance by British and Overseas troops up the heights of the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, where thousands of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them were caught by the rolling storm of sh.e.l.ls which smashed the earth about them and mingled them with its clods. One tragic glimpse like this was on the Australian way up to the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole position, after a body of those Australians had marched many miles through the night over appalling ground under scattered sh.e.l.l-fire, and were only in their place of attack half an hour before it started. The story of that night march is in itself a little epic, but that is not the episode I mean. The Australians drew close to one of the blockhouses, and the sound of their cheering must have been heard by the Germans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just pa.s.sed and its line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went travelling ahead.

Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen men or so came running, and the Australians shortened their bayonets. From the centre of the group a voice shouted out in English, "I am a Middles.e.x man, don't shoot. I am an Englishman." The man who called had his hands up, in sign of surrender, like the German soldiers.

"It's a spy," said an Australian. "Kill the blighter." The English voice again rang out: "I'm English." And English he was. It was a man of the Middles.e.x Regiment who had been captured on patrol some days before. The Germans had taken him into their blockhouse, and because of our gun-fire they could not get out of it, and kept him there. He was well treated, and his captors shared their food with him, but the awful moment came to him when the drum-fire pa.s.sed and he knew that unless he held his hands high he would be killed by our own troops.

The New-Zealanders had many fights on the way up to the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, and one thing that surprised them was the number of pill-boxes and blockhouses inhabited by the enemy close to their own lines. They believed that the foremost ones had been deserted. But it must not be forgotten that running all through the narrative of this battle is the thwarted plan of the enemy to attack us in strength the same morning and at nearly the same hour. For that reason he had thrust little groups of men into advanced posts and into these most forward blockhouses with orders to hold them at all costs until the attacking divisions should reach and pa.s.s them. And for that reason, as we know, the enemy's guns laid down a heavy barrage over our lines half an hour before our attack started.

The New-Zealanders did not escape this sh.e.l.ling, and their brigadiers were under the strain of intense anxiety, not knowing in their dug-outs, over which the enemy's fire pa.s.sed, whether their boys were so cut up that a successful a.s.sault would be impossible. As it happened, the New-Zealanders were not seriously hurt nor thrown into disorder. When the moment came they went away in waves, with the spirit of a pack of hounds on a good hunting morning. As fierce as that and as wild as that.

They had not gone more than a few yards before they had fifty prisoners.

This was at a blockhouse just outside the New Zealand a.s.sembly line.

There was no fight there, but the garrison surrendered as soon as our men were round their shelter. The Hanebeek stream flows this way, but it was no longer within its bounds. Our gun-fire had smashed up its track, and all about was a swamp made deeper by the rains.

The New Zealand lads had a devil of a time in getting across and through. Some of them stuck up to the knees and others fell into sh.e.l.l-holes, deep in mud, as far as their belts. "Give us a hand, Jack,"

came a shout from one man, and the answer was, "Hang on to my rifle, Tom." Men with the solid ground under their feet hauled out others in the slough, and all that was a great risk of time while the barrage was travelling slowly on with its protecting screen of sh.e.l.ls.

The only chance of life in these battles is to keep close to the barrage, risking the shorts, for if it once pa.s.ses and leaves any enemy there with a machine-gun, there is certain death for many men. The New Zealand boys nearly lost that wall of sh.e.l.ls because of the mud, but somehow or other managed to scramble on over 800 yards in time enough to catch it up. Many blockhouses yielded up their batches of prisoners, who were told to get back and give no trouble. The first fight for a blockhouse took place at Van Meulen Farm, just outside the New-Zealanders' first objective. The barrage went ahead and sat down--as one of the officers put it, though the sitting down of a barrage is a queer simile for that monstrous eruption of explosive force. From Van Meulen Farm came the swish of machine-gun bullets, and New Zealand boys began to drop. They were held up for half an hour until the "leap-frog"

battalions--that is to say, the men who were to pa.s.s through the first waves to the next objective--came up to help.

It was a New Zealand captain, beloved by all his men for his gallantry and generous-hearted ways, who led the rush of Lewis-gunners and bombers and riflemen. He fell dead with a machine-gun bullet in his heart, but with a cry of rage because of this great loss the other men ran on each side of the blockhouse and stormed it.

On the left of the New-Zealanders' line, one of their battalions could see Germans firing from concrete houses on the slopes of the Gravenstafel, and although they had to lose the barrage, which was sweeping ahead again, they covered that ground and went straight for those places under sharp fire. Some of them worked round the concrete walls and hauled out more prisoners. "Get back, there," they shouted, but there was hardly a New-Zealander who would go back with them to act as escort. So it happened that a brigadier, getting out of his dug-out to see what was happening to his men away there over the slopes, received the first news of success from batches of Germans who came marching in company formation under the command of their own officers, and without escort. That was how I saw many of them coming back on another part of the field. From the Abraham Heights there was a steady stream of machine-gun fire until the New-Zealanders had climbed them and routed out the enemy from their dug-outs, which were not screened by our barrage so that they were able to fire. Only the great gallantry of high-spirited young men could have done that, and it is an episode which proved the quality of New Zealand troops on that morning of the battle, so keen to do well, so reckless of the cost. On Abraham Heights a lot of prisoners were taken and joined the long trail that hurried back through miles of scattered sh.e.l.l-fire from their own guns.

The next resistance was at the blockhouse called Berlin, and the New-Zealanders are proud of having taken that place, because of its name, which they will write on their scroll of honour. It is not an Imperial place. It is a row of dirty concrete pill-boxes above a deep cave, on the pattern of the old type of dug-outs. But it was a strong fortress for German machine-gunners, and they defended it stubbornly. It was a five minutes' job. Stokes mortars were brought up and fired thirty rounds in two minutes, and then, with a yell, the New-Zealanders rushed the position on both sides and flung pea-bombs through the back door, until part of the garrison streamed out shouting their word of surrender. The other men were dead inside. A battalion commander and his staff were taken prisoners in another farm, and the New-Zealanders drank soda-water and smoked high-cla.s.s cigarettes which they found in this place, where the German officers were well provided. After that refreshment they went on to Berlin Wood, where there were several pill-boxes hidden among the fallen trees and mud-heaps. They had to make their way through a machine-gun barrage, and platoon commanders a.s.sembled their Lewis-gunners and riflemen to attack the house in detail. From one of them a German officer directed the fire, and when the gun was silenced inside came out with another and fired round the corner of the wall until our men rushed upon him. Even then he raised his revolver as though to shoot a sergeant, who was closest to him, but he was killed by a bayonet-thrust.

At other parts of the line our English boys were fighting hard and with equal courage, and some of them against greater fire. It was on the right that the enemy's gun-fire was most fierce, and our old English county regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions--Devons and Staffords, Surreys and Kents, Lincolns with Scottish Borderers, Northumberland Fusiliers, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry--opposite Gheluvelt and Polderhoek and the Reutelbeek had to endure some bad hours. I have already mentioned in earlier messages how the enemy made ceaseless thrusts against this right flank of our attacking front, driving a wedge in for a time, so that our men had to fall back a little and form a decisive flank. It is known now that they were misled somewhat by some isolated groups of the enemy who held out in pill-boxes behind Cameron House. When these were cleared out our line swept forward again and established itself on the far side of that wood. Our men hold the outer houses of Gheluvelt.

The whole of the fighting here was made very difficult by the swamps of the Reutelbeek, worse even than those of the Hanebeek, through which the New-Zealanders crossed, and our English boys were bogged as they tried to cross. But they fought forward doggedly, and by sheer valour safeguarded our right wing in the hardest part of the battle. Meanwhile, far on the north in the district of the Sehreiboom astride the Thourout railway, Scottish and Irish troops were fighting on a small front but on an heroic scale. It was the Dublin Fusiliers who fought most recklessly.

They had begged to go first into this battle, and they went all out with a wild and exultant spirit. The ground in front of them was a mud-pit, and they had to swing round to get beyond it. They did not wait for the barrage. They did not halt on their final objective, but still went away into the blue, chasing the enemy and uplifted with a strange fierce enthusiasm until they were called back to the line we wanted to hold.

They excelled themselves that morning, and could not be held back after the word "Go!"

XX

THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

OCTOBER 9

Another battle was fought and another advance was made by our troops to-day with the French, in a great a.s.sault on their left. Our Allies gained about 1200 yards of ground in two strides, captured some hundreds of prisoners and many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombardments which have preceded it. The Allied troops are within a few hundred yards of that forest of which Marlborough spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst Forest holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards in depth along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres-Gheluvelt road. The enemy has suffered big losses again. Two new divisions just brought into the line--the 227th straight from Rheims only getting into the line at three o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia--have received a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three other divisions--the 16th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Division--have been hard hit and are now bleeding from many wounds and have given many prisoners from their ranks into our hands.

How was this thing done? How did we have any success to-day when even the most optimistic men were preyed upon last night by horrid doubts?

Our troops, we know, are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked to do which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death to do.

But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless in the morning except to men who had weighed all the chances, who had all the evidence in their hands--evidence, I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength and spirit--and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go!" to the start of this new battle.

It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily after heavy rains. The wind howled and raged across Flanders with long, sinister wailings as it gathered speed and raced over the fields. Heavy storm-clouds hiding the moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came down, drenching all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks, making ponds about them where they stood. And it was cold, with a coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of the wind, and there was no glimmer of light in the darkness. To those of us who know the crater-land of the battlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone stumbling through it, picking their way between the sh.e.l.l-holes in daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might have seemed impossible that great bodies of troops could go forward in a.s.sault over such country and win any kind of success in such conditions. That they did so is a proof, one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our troops have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal laws of life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they will face them and grapple with them, and, if the spirit and flesh of man can do it, overcome the impossible itself. This battle seems to me as wonderful as anything we have done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division captured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More wonderful even than that, because on a greater scale and in more foul weather.

This morning I have been among the Lancashire and West Riding men of the 66th and 49th Divisions who lay out last night before the attack, which followed the first gleams of dawn to-day, and who marched up--no, they did not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in the attack.

These men I met had come back wounded. Only in the worst days of the Somme have I seen such figures. They were plastered from head to foot in wet mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like the hands and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of sacking round their legs, and this was stuck on them with clots of mud. Their belts and tunics were covered with a thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and their hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who had been buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke to them I found that some of them had been buried alive and unburied while they still had life. They told me this simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A sh.e.l.l burst close," said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the neck." "Do you mean up to the neck?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, up to the neck." There were many like that, and others, without being flung down by a sh.e.l.l-burst or buried in its crater, fell up to their waists in sh.e.l.l-holes and up to their armpits, and sank in water and mud.

A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France.

They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division.

It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep sh.e.l.l-hole and disappeared.

"Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For G.o.d's sake give me a hand, old lad."

There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a yard or two."

So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying to work across the sh.e.l.l-holes.

"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in.

'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the cold. But somehow we got on."

Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying out in the sh.e.l.l-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high in water.

Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the night, and big sh.e.l.ls were coming over. Thirty men were killed or wounded with one sh.e.l.l, and others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers--the splendid stretcher-bearers--came up to search for them.

The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink,"

said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."

Some of them had rum served out to them. They were the lucky ones, for it gave them a little warmth. But others could not get a drop.

One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met him this morning, had a pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I had a jar of rum in my pack," he said, "and the boys said to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first objective. We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped my pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!'"

They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold and hungry and exhausted after a dreadful night, and they gained their objective and routed the enemy, and sent back many prisoners. I marvel at them, and will salute them if ever I meet them in the world when the war is done.

There were a number of German blockhouses in front of them, beyond Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel. These were Yetta House and Augustus House and Heine House on the way to Tober Copse and Friesland Copse just outside their line of a.s.sault. On their left there was a blockhouse called Peter Pan, though no little mother Wendy would tell stories to her boys there, and instead of Peter Pan's c.o.c.kcrow there was the wail of a wounded man. Beyond that little house of death were Wolfe Copse and Wolfe Farm, from which the fire of German machine-guns came swishing in streams of bullets. There was no yard of ground without a sh.e.l.l-hole. They were linked together like the holes in a honeycomb, and the German troops, very thick because of their new method of defence--very dense in the support lines though the front line was more lightly held--were scattered about in these craters. Large numbers were killed and wounded when our barrage stormed over them, but numbers crouching in old craters were left alive, and as the barrage pa.s.sed they rose and came streaming over in small batches, with their hands high--came to meet our men, hoping for mercy. Many prisoners were made before the first objective was reached, and after that by harder fighting. Some of the men in sh.e.l.l-holes, wet like our men and cold like our men, decided to keep fighting, and fired their rifles as our lads struggled forward. The boy who lost his rum-jar met three of these men in a sh.e.l.l-hole, and he threw a bomb at them, and said, "This is to pay back for the gas you gave me a month ago."

A little farther on there was another German in a sh.e.l.l-hole. He was a boy of sixteen or so, and he raised his rifle at the lad of the rum-jar, who flung the bayonet on one side by a sudden blow, but not quick enough to escape a wound in the arm. "I couldn't kill him," said the Lancashire lad; "he looked such a kid, like my young brother, so I took him prisoner and sent him down."

Not all the prisoners who were taken came down behind our lines. The enemy was barraging the ground heavily, and many of their own men were killed, and some of our stretcher-bearers, as they came down with the wounded. Up in the leafless and shattered trees on the battlefield were Germans with machine-guns, and German riflemen who sniped our men as they pa.s.sed. Many of these were shot up in the trees and came crashing down. Up on the left of the attack, where our troops were in liaison with the French, the enemy were taken prisoners in great numbers, officers as well as men, and the hostile bombardment was not so heavy as on the right, so that the casualties seem to have been light there. In spite of the frightful ground all the objectives were taken, so that our line has drawn close to Houthulst Forest.

There was heavy fighting by the Worcesters of the 29th Division at a place called Pascal Farm, and a lot of concrete dug-outs on the Langemarck-Houthulst road gave trouble with their machine-guns. Adler Farm, just outside our old line, somewhat south of that, also held out a while, but was mastered, and opened the way to the second objective, which on the right carried the attack through Poelcappelle. Here there was hard fighting, by the Lancashire Fusiliers, South Staffords, and Yorkshires of the 11th, and the German garrison put up a desperate resistance in the brewery of Poelcappelle. On the right there has been grim fighting again in the old neighbourhood of Polderhoek Chteau, but on either side of it our troops of the 5th Division have made good progress, in spite of intense and concentrated fire from many heavy batteries. The enemy has again had a great blow, and has lost large numbers of men--dead, wounded, and captured. That our troops could do this after such a night and over such foul ground must seem to the German High Command like some black art.

OCTOBER 10

In my message yesterday I described the appalling condition of the ground and of the weather through which our men floundered in their a.s.sault towards Houthulst Forest and Pa.s.schendaele. That is the theme of this battle, as it is told by all the men who have been through its swamps and fire, and it is a marvel that any success could have been gained. Where we succeeded--and we took a great deal of ground and many prisoners--it was due to the sheer courage of the men, who refused to be beaten by even the most desperate conditions of exhaustion and difficulty; and where we failed, or at least did not succeed, in making full progress or holding all the first gains, it was because courage itself was of no avail against the powers of nature, which were in league that night with the enemy's guns.