From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 3

"No wonder old Fritz left in a hurry," said the young officer who had achieved this record. He chuckled at the thought of it, and as he went through Gommecourt with me pointed out with pride the "top-hole" effect of all our gun-fire. To him, as a gunner, all this destruction was a good sight. He stopped in front of a hole big enough to bury a country cottage, and said, "That was done by old Charley's 945 trench-mortar.

Some hole, what?"

"Looks as if some German officer had had to walk home," said the trench-mortar officer, who was a humorous fellow, as he glanced at a shattered motor-car.

So many of the young officers of ours are humorous fellows, and I am bound to say that I never met a merrier party than a little lot I found at a spot called Pigeon Wood, far beyond Gommecourt, where the enemy flings sh.e.l.ls most of the day and night, so that it is a litter of broken twigs and branches.

A sergeant-major took me up there and introduced me to his officers.

"This is the real Street of Adventure," he said, "though it's a long way from Fleet Street"--which I thought was pretty good for a sergeant-major met in a casual way on a field of battle. It appeared that there was to be a trench-mortar "stunt" in half an hour or so, and he wanted me to see "the fun." Through the driving snow we went into the bit of wood, trampling over the broken twigs and stepping aside from sh.e.l.l-holes, and because of the nasty noises about--I hear no music in the song of the sh.e.l.l--I was glad when the sergeant-major went down the entrance of a dug-out and called out for the officer.

It was one of the deep German dug-outs thirty or forty feet down, and very dark on the way. In the room below, nicely panelled, were the merry grigs I had come to meet, and in less than a minute they had made me welcome, and in less than five I was sitting on a German chair at a German table, drinking German soda-water out of German gla.s.ses, with a party of English boys 500 yards from the German outposts over the way.

They told me how they had brought their trench-mortar up. It was an absolute record, and they were as proud and pleased as schoolboys who have won a game. They roared with laughter at the story of the senior officer chased by two Boches, and roared again when the captain sent round to the "chemist's shop" next door for some more soda-water and a bottle of whisky. They had found thousands of bottles of soda-water, and thousands of bombs and other things left behind in a hurry, including a complete change of woman's clothing, now being worn by one of our Tommies badly in need of clean linen.

"This dug-out is all right," said one of the younger officers, "but you come and see mine. It's absolutely priceless."

It was one of the best specimens of German architecture I have ever seen on a battlefield. It was not only panelled but papered. It was furnished elegantly with a washhand-stand and a gilded mirror and German coloured prints--and not all our sh.e.l.ls could touch it, because of its depth below the ground. ... I saw the trench-mortar "stunt," which flung up volcanoes in the German ground by Kite Copse, and stood out in the snow with a party of men who had nothing between them and the enemy but a narrow stretch of sh.e.l.l-broken earth, and went away from the wood just as the enemy began sh.e.l.ling it again, and sat down under the bank with one of the officers when the enemy "bracketed" the road back with whiz-bangs, and stopped on the way to take a cup of tea in another dug-out, and to make friends with other men who were following up the enemy, and moving into German apartments for a night or so, before they go farther on, with that keen and spirited courage which is the only good thing in this war. They are mostly boys--I am a Rip Van Winkle to them--and with the heart of boyhood they take deadly risks lightly and make a good joke of a bad business, and are very frightened sometimes and make a joke of that, and are great soldiers though they were never meant for the trade. The enemy is falling back still, but these boys of ours are catching him up, and are quick in pursuit, in spite of the foul ground and the foul weather and the barrage of his guns.

VIII

WHY THE ENEMY WITHDREW

MARCH 3

The weather is still favourable to the enemy in his plan of withdrawal.

Yesterday there was over all the battlefields such a solid fog, after a night of frost which condensed the earth's moisture, that one could not see fifty yards ahead. Our airmen, if they had thought it worth while mounting, would have stared down into this white mist and seen nothing else. Our gunners had to fire "off the map" at a time when direct observation would have been most valuable. I do not remember to have seen anything so uncanny on this front as the effect of our men moving in this heavy wet darkness like legions of shadows looming up in a grey way, and then blotted out. The fog clung to them, dripped from the rims of their steel helmets, made their breath like steam. The s.h.a.ggy coats of horses and mules plastered with heavy streaks of mud were all damp with little beads of moisture as white as h.o.a.r-frost.

Nothing so far in this German movement has been sensational except the fact itself. Fantastic stories about gas-sh.e.l.ls, battles, and great slaughter in the capture of the enemy's positions are merely conjured up by people who know nothing of the truth.

The truth is simple and stark. The enemy decided to withdraw, and made his plans to withdraw with careful thought for detail in order to frustrate any preparations we might have made to deal him the famous knock-out blow and in order to save his man-power, not only by escaping this great slaughter which was drawing near upon him as the weeks pa.s.sed, but by shortening his line and so liberating a number of divisions for offensive and defensive purposes. He timed this strategical withdrawal well. He made use of the hard frost for the movement of men and guns and material, and withdrew the last men from his strongholds on the old line just as the thaw set in, so that the ground lapsed into quagmire more fearful than before the days of the long frost, and pursuit for our men and our guns and our material was doubly difficult. He destroyed what he could not take away, and left very little behind. He fired many of his dug-outs, and left only a few snipers and a few machine-gunners in sh.e.l.l-holes and strong posts to hold up our patrols while the next body of rear-guard outposts fell back behind the barbed wire in front of the series of diagonal trench lines which defend the way to Bapaume. In Gommecourt our troops found only one living man, and he was half dead and quite blind. He had been wounded twenty-four hours previously by a bomb from one of our scouts and had crawled back into a dug-out. It is astounding, but, I believe, quite true, that he knew nothing about the abandonment of Gommecourt, even when it had been achieved. He would not believe it when our men told him. He had lain in his earth-hole wondering at the silence, believing himself deaf as well as blind, except that he could hear the crash of sh.e.l.ls. He was frightened because he could hear no movement of his fellow-soldiers.

The German scheme is undoubtedly to delay our advance as much as possible and at the cheapest price to himself, so that much time may have elapsed (while his submarines are still at work, and his diplomats, and his propaganda) before we come up to him with all our weight of men and metal upon the real lines to which he is falling back. By belts of barbed wire between the lines of retirement, down past Loupart Wood, and then past Grevillers and Achiet, and outside Bapaume, as well as by strong bodies of picked troops holding on to these positions until the last moment before death or capture or escape, and by ma.s.sing guns eastward of Bapaume in order to impede our pursuit by long-range fire from his "heavies," and to hold the pivot while his troops swing back in this slow and gradual way, he hopes to make things easy for himself and d.a.m.nably difficult for us.

MARCH 12

Loupart Wood, a high belt of trees, thick and black against the sky, is the storm-centre of the battle line on this part of the front. Our guns were busy with it, flinging sh.e.l.ls into its network of naked branches.

The sh.e.l.l-bursts were white against its blackness, and the chalky soil in front of it was tossed up in spraying fountains. From the enemy's side high explosives were dropping over Miraumont, and Irles was being heavily bombarded. It was like a day in the first battles of the Somme, and brought back to me old memories of frightfulness. Behind me were the Somme battlefields, one vast landscape of the abomination of desolation strewn still with the litter of great conflict, with thousands of unexploded sh.e.l.ls lying squat in mud, and hideously tormented out of all semblance of earth's sweet beauty by millions of sh.e.l.l-holes and the yawning chasms of mine-craters, and the chaos of innumerable trenches dug deep and then smashed by the fury of heavy guns. That is an old picture which I have described, or failed to describe, a score of times when over this mangled earth, yard by yard, from one ruin to another, from one copse of broken woodland to another group of black gallows which were trees, our men went fighting, so that here is the graveyard of gallant youth, and the Field of Honour which is sacred to the soul of our race. It was the old picture, but into it came to-day as yesterday new men of ours who are carrying on the tale to whatever ending it may have. They came through mud and in mud and with mud. The heavy horses of the gunners and transport men were all whitened with the wet chalk to the ears. Mules were ridiculous, like amphibious creatures who had come up out of the slime to stare with wicked eyes at what men are doing with the earth's surface. Eight-inch guns were wallowing in bogs from which their shiny snouts thrust up, belching forth flame. Over the wide, white, barren stretch of h.e.l.l which we call the battlefield their monstrous sh.e.l.ls went howling after the full-throated roars which clouted one's ear-drums like blows from a hammer. And between the guns, and in front of the guns, and past the guns went our marching men, our mud men, with wet steel helmets, with gobs of mud on their faces, with clods of mud growing monstrously upon their boots at every step.

A grim old war, fantastic in its contrasts and in its stage properties!

Once when I heard the chimes of midnight in Covent Garden and stood drinking at a coffee-stall by Paul's Church I never guessed I should find such a place of wayside refreshment, such a house on wheels, in the middle of Armageddon. But there it was to-day, a coffee-stall bang in the middle of the battlefield, and there, asking for a "mug o'

thick," stood a crowd of English soldiers, worse scarecrows than the night birds of the London slums and more in need of warmth for body and soul. Not far away, well under sh.e.l.l-fire, was a London omnibus, and as a mate in evil days, a Tank.

The rain came down in a thick drizzle. Loupart Wood disappeared like a ghost picture. Irles was blotted out. Our eight-inch sh.e.l.ls went howling out of a cotton-wool mist. Our men went marching with their steel hats down against the beat of the rain. It was a wintry scene again--but on the moist air there was a faint scent not of winter--a smell of wet earth sweeter than the acrid stench of the battlefields. It was the breath of spring coming with its promise of life. And with its promise of death.

The enemy is still holding out in Achiet-le-Pet.i.t and Bucquoy, though I believe his residence there is not for long. From what I saw to-day watching our bombardment of the line to which he has retreated, it seems certain that he will be compelled to leave in a hurry, just as he left Loupart Wood the night before last.

As I went over the battlefields to-day it was made visible to me that the enemy has suffered most devilish torments in the ground from which he is now retreating. All north of Courcelette, up by Miraumont and Pys, and below Loupart Wood, this wild chaos--all so upturned by sh.e.l.l-fire that one's gorge rises at the sight of such obscene mangling of our mother earth--is strewn with bodies of dead German soldiers. They lie grey wet lumps of death over a great stretch of ground, many of them half buried by their comrades or by high explosives. Most of them are stark above the soil with their eye-sockets to the sky. I stood to-day in a ravine to which the Regina Trench leads between Pys and Miraumont, and not any morbid vision of an absinthe-maddened dream of h.e.l.l could be more fearful than what I stared at standing there, with the rain beating on me across the battlefield, and the roar of guns on every side, and the long rushing whistles of heavy sh.e.l.ls in flight over Loupart Wood.

The place was a shambles of German troops. They had had machine-gun emplacements here, and deep dug-outs under cover of earth-banks. But our guns had found them out and poured fire upon them. All this garrison had been killed and cut to pieces before or after death. Their bodies or their fragments lay in every shape and shapelessness of death, in puddles of broken trenches or on the edge of deep ponds in sh.e.l.l-craters. The water was vivid green about them, or red as blood, with the colour of high-explosive gases. Mask-like faces, with holes for eyes, seemed to stare back at me as I stared at them, not with any curiosity in this sight of death--for it is not new to me--but counting their numbers and reckoning the sum of all these things who a little time ago were living men. Some of our dead lay among them, but out of 850 lying hereabouts, 700 were German soldiers.

Our gun-fire, continued to-day as yesterday, leaves nothing alive or whole when it is concentrated on a place like this, deliberate in smashing it. Here it had flung up machine-gun emplacements and made rubbish-heaps of their casemates and guns. It had broken hundreds of rifles into matchwood, and flung up the kit of men from deep dug-outs, littering earth with their pouches and helmets and bits of clothing.

Where I stood was only one patch of ground on a wide battlefield. It is all like that, though elsewhere the dead are not so thickly cl.u.s.tered.

For miles it is all pitted with ten-feet craters intermingling and leaving not a yard of earth untouched. It is one great obscenity, killing for all time the legend of war's glory and romance. Over it to-day went a brave man on his mission. He was not a soldier, though he had a steel hat on his head and a khaki uniform. He was a padre who, with a fellow-officer and a few men, is following up the fighting men, burying those who fall, our own and the enemy's. He collects their ident.i.ty discs and marks their graves. For weeks he has done this, and, though he is sickened, he goes on with a grim zeal, searching out the new dead, directing the digging of new graves, covering up Germans who lie so thick. He waved his hand to me as he went up to Loupart Wood, and I saluted him as a man of fine enthusiasm and good courage in the abomination of desolation which is our battle-ground.

The secret of the German retreat is here on this ground. To save themselves from another such shambles they are falling back to new lines, where they hope to be safer from our ma.s.sed artillery. But as I saw to-day our gun-fire is following them closely and forcing them back at a harder pace, and killing them as they go. The horror of war is still close at their heels, and will never end till the war ends, though that may be long, O Lord! from now.

IX

THE AUSTRALIANS ENTER BAPAUME

MARCH 17

To-day quite early in the morning our Australian troops entered Bapaume.

Achiet-le-Pet.i.t and Biefvillers also fell into our hands and the enemy is in retreat across the plains below the Bapaume Ridge.

I had the honour of going into Bapaume myself this morning, and the luck to come out again, and now, sitting down to tell the history of this day--one of the great days in this war--I feel something of the old thrill that came to all of us when the enemy fell back from the Marne and retreated to the Aisne.

Bapaume is ours after a short, sharp fight with its last rear-guard post. I don't know how much this will mean to people at home, to whom the town is just a name, familiar only because of its repet.i.tion in dispatches. To us out here it means enormous things--above all, the completion or result of a great series of battles, in which many of our best gave their lives so that our troops could attain the ridge across which they went to-day, and hold the town which is the gateway to the plains beyond. For this the Canadians fought through Courcelette, where many of their poor bodies lie even now in the broken ground. For this the Australians struggled with most grim heroism on the high plateau of Pozires, which bears upon every yard of its soil the signs of the most frightful strife that mankind has known in all the history of warfare.

For another stage on the road to Bapaume London regiments went up to Eaucourt-l'Abbaye, and the Gordons stormed the white mound of the b.u.t.te de Warlencourt. For the capture of Bapaume our patrols with machine-guns and trench-mortars, and our gunners with their batteries, have pushed on through the day and night during recent weeks, gaining La Barque and Ligny and Thilloy, not sleeping night after night, not resting, so that beards have grown on young chins, and the eyes of these men look glazed and dead except for the fire that lights up in them when there is another bit of work to do. For this, thousands of British soldiers have laboured like ants--it is all like a monstrous ant-heap in commotion--carrying up material of war, building roads over quagmires, laying down railroads under sh.e.l.l-fire, plugging up sh.e.l.l-craters with bricks and stone so that the horse transport can follow, and the guns get forward and the way be made smooth for the fall of Bapaume.... So Bapaume is ours. Years ago, and months ago, and weeks ago, I have travelled the road towards Bapaume from Amiens to Albert, from that city of the Falling Virgin, past the vast mine-crater of La Boisselle to Pozires and beyond, and always I and comrades of mine have glanced sideways and smiled grimly at the milestones which said so many kilometres to Bapaume--and yet a world of strife to go. Now those stones will not stare up at us with irony. There is no longer a point on the road where one has to halt lest one should die. To-day I walked past the milestones--ten, seven, four, three, one--and then into Bapaume, and did not die, though to tell the truth death missed me only a yard or two. I have had many strange and memorable walks in war, but none more wonderful than this, for really it was a strange way this road to Bapaume, with all the tragedy and all the courage of this warfare, and all the ugly spirit of it on every side. I walked through the highway of our greatest battles up from Pozires, past Courcelette, with Martinpuich to the right, past the ruins of Destremont Farm, and into the ruins of Le Sars. Thence the road struck straight towards Bapaume, with the grey pyramid of the b.u.t.te de Warlencourt on one side and the frightful turmoil of Warlencourt village on the other. I did not walk alone along this way through the litter of many battles, through its muck and stench and corruption under a fair blue sky, with wisps of white cloud above and the glitter of spring sunshine over all the white leprous landscape of these fields. Australian soldiers were going the same way--towards Bapaume. Some of them wore sprigs of shamrock in their b.u.t.tonholes, and I remembered it was St. Patrick's Day. Some of them were gunners, and some were pioneers, and some were Generals and high officers, and they had the look of victory upon them and were talking cheerily about the great news of the day. It was in the neighbourhood of a haunted-looking place called "La Coupe-gueule," which means Cut-throat, once I imagine a farmstead or estaminet, that the road became the scene of very recent warfare--a few hours old or a few minutes. One is very quick to read how old the signs are by the look of the earth, by smells and sounds, by little, sure, alarming signs. Dead horses lay about--newly dead. Sh.e.l.l-craters with clean sides pock-marked the earth ten feet deep. Aeroplanes had crashed down, one of them a few minutes ago. A car came along and I saw a young pilot lying back wounded, with another officer smoking a cigarette, grave-eyed and pallid. Pools of red mud were on either side of the road, or in the middle of it. Everywhere in neighbouring ground hidden batteries were firing ceaselessly, the long sixty-pounders making sharp reports that stunned one's ears, the field-guns firing rapidly with sharp knocks. Up in the blue sky there was other gunning. Flights of our aeroplanes were up singing with a loud, deep, humming music as of monstrous bees. Our "Archies" were strafing a German plane, venturesome over our country.

High up in the blue was the rattle of machine-gun fire. Down from Bapaume came a procession of stretcher-bearers with wounded comrades shoulder high, borne like heroes, slowly and with unconscious dignity, by these tall men in steel helmets. The enemy had ruined the road in several places with enormous craters, to stop our progress. They were twenty yards across, and very deep, and fearful pitfalls in the dark.

Past the ruins of La Barque, past the ruins of Ligny-Thilloy and Thilloy, went the road to Bapaume. Behind me now on the left was Loupart Wood, the storm-centre of strife when I went up to it a few days ago, and Grevillers beside it, smashed to death, and then presently and quite suddenly I came into sight of Bapaume. It was only a few hundred yards away, and I could see every detail of its streets and houses. A street along the Bapaume road went straight into the town, and then went sharply at right angles, so that all the length of Bapaume lay in front of me. The sun was upon it, shining very bright and clear upon its houses. It was a sun-picture of destruction. Bapaume was still standing, but broken and burnt.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of the front from Arras to Soissons]

In the middle of Bapaume stood the remnant of the old clock-tower, a tower of brown brick, like the houses about it, but broken off at the top, only two-thirds of its former height, and without the clock which used to tell us the time miles away when we gazed through telescopes from distant observation-posts, when we still had miles to go on the way to Bapaume. On the right of the old tower the town was burning, not in flames when I entered, but with volumes of white smoke issuing slowly from a row of red villas already gutted by fires lighted before the Germans left.

A Colonel came riding out of Bapaume. He was carrying a big German beer-jug, and showed me his trophy, leaning down over his saddle to let me read the words:

Zum Feldgrauen Hilfe

"Is it pretty easy to get into Bapaume?" I asked.

"Barring the heavy stuff," he said. "They're putting over sh.e.l.ls at the rate of two or three a minute."

They were, and it was not pleasant, this walk into Bapaume, though very interesting.

It was when I came to an old farmhouse and inn--the sh.e.l.l of a place--on the left of the road (Duhamel-Equarriseur, Telephone No. 30) that I knew the full menace of this hour was above and about. The enemy was firing a great number of sh.e.l.ls into Bapaume. They came towards us with that rushing, howling noise which gives one a great fear of instant death, and burst with crashes among the neighbouring houses. They were high explosives, but shrapnel was bursting high, with thunderclaps, which left behind greenish clouds and scattered bullets down. I went through the outer defences of Bapaume, walking with a General who was on his way to the town, and who pointed out the strength of the place. Lord! It was still horribly strong, and would have cost us many lives to take by a.s.sault. Three belts of wire, very thick, stood solid and strong, in a wide curve all round the town. The enemy had dug trenches quite recently, so that the earth was fresh and brown, and dug them well and perfectly. Only here and there had they been broken by our sh.e.l.l-fire, though some of the dug-outs had been blown in.