From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 30

Meanwhile the fiercest battle was being fought by the Canadians near the centre of the attack, up the slopes of Bellevue below Goudberg (which is just west of Pa.s.schendaele), where the enemy had long and elaborate defences of concrete, and to the right and left of that from Vienna House, below Crest Farm on the right, to the ground on the left beyond Wolfe Copse. It was from the direction of Peter Pan House and Wolfe Copse that the Canadians succeeded in getting a grasp of the Bellevue slopes, attacking a row of concrete huts in a sunken road which were strongly held by German machine-gunners. The enemy counter-attacked strongly and sharply down the northern end of the spur, and from the direction of Pa.s.schendaele, and drove our men for a time down the slopes, though only for a time. Farther left there was heavy fighting round the pill-boxes. Two of them, Moray House and Varlet House, yielded a score or more of prisoners each, but the ground all about the left of our attack by the Broenbeek and the Watervlietbeek was one great deep marsh, through which the men had the utmost difficulty in struggling.

The German wounded are in a terrible condition, covered in mud and blood, and shaking as men with ague. They are full of despair, and their officers say that Germany is only holding out in the hope of a U-boat victory. The German people, they say, will suffer badly this winter from lack of food. Our own wounded are men who seem to have come out of watery graves, and are plastered from head to foot in a whitish slime.

In the field dressing-stations they are as patient as after all these battles, and if in some places they had ill luck they blame the weather for it. No words are too bad for that, but in spite of it our men did wonders to-day.

OCTOBER 28

The most important position in the attack yesterday was given to the Canadians to carry, and the story of their capture of the Bellevue spur is fine and thrilling as an act of persistent courage by bodies of men struggling against great hardships and under great fire. Nothing that they did at Courcelette and Vimy and round about Lens was finer than the way in which on Friday they fought their way up the Bellevue spur, were beaten back by an intense destructive fire, and then, reorganizing, went back through the wounded and scaled the slope again and drove the German machine-gunners out of their blockhouses.

I have seen those Germans as prisoners of the Canadians. They are men of the 11th Bavarian Division, which includes the 3rd Bavarian Infantry Regiment and two reserve infantry regiments. The other day I wrote about undersized, half-witted fellows who were caught by our men, and said the German man-power must be wearing thin if they sent recruits like this.

These Bavarian soldiers are not undersized, but tall, proper men, and stout fellows who fought hard. They carried their mud with a certain swagger, not as men who had surrendered easily, and were not utterly dejected, like so many of our prisoners. They had been picked to hold Bellevue because of their good moral, and they were full of confidence in their defensive position. They were perched up above the swamps through which our men had to wade to get at them. They had plenty of concrete houses for their shelter, and their machine-guns. The weather was in their favour. They guessed that the British would try to attack them again, but they looked at the floods and rain-clouds, and felt safe, or pretty safe. For some reason of psychology--which is greatly influenced by sh.e.l.l-fire--these men of the 11th Bavarian Division were not mutinous against discipline like other Bavarians, who are cursing the Prussians because of too much fighting, and malingering, and jeering at the officers, or refusing to go into the forward positions, like 800 men of the 99th Reserve Infantry Regiment, who, according to a prisoner, revolted against going into the line at Lens.

"They were all sent to prison," says the man, "and seem to have been very pleased with the change."

A look at a contour map explains the reason why the 11th Bavarians were satisfied with their defensive position at Bellevue, on Goudberg or Meetscheele spur, which strikes out westwards from the main Pa.s.schendaele Ridge. The deep gully of the Ravelbeek rims below the slopes on which Bellevue is raised, and down there there is one filthy swamp of mud and water. On the other side of the gully is a hill which rises to Pa.s.schendaele, and the separate hummock of Crest Farm, south-east of that high pile of ruin, which commands the long, wide view of the plains beyond. Bellevue on one side and Crest Farm and Pa.s.schendaele on the other support each other from attack, and from their blockhouses they are able to sweep machine-gun fire upon any bodies of men advancing up either slope. So the Australians found in the great attack on October 12, when they had to fall back, when Pa.s.schendaele itself was almost in their grip, because of the enfilade fire from the ground about Bellevue, while other Australians, trying to work up those slopes on the west side of the Ravelbeek, were terribly scourged by the machine-gun barrage. The Canadians knew all that. They, too, had the black luck of that terrible twelfth of October, when English and New Zealand and Australian troops advanced into bogs, struggled through a sea of mud, and failed to gain a victory not by lack of valour, for the courage of them all was almost super-human, or rather human as we know it in this war, but by the sheer impossibility of getting one leg after the other in the slime that covered all this ground.

It was as bad on Friday morning--worse. The rain had poured down all night and the sh.e.l.l-craters brimmed over, and every track was so slippery that men with packs and rifles fell at every few steps. Beyond the duck-board tracks there were no tracks for 1500 yards, and there was a mora.s.s knee-deep and sticky, so that men had to haul each other to get unstuck. In the darkness and pouring rain and sh.e.l.l-fire it was hard going--a nightmare of reality worse than a black dream. But the men got to their places and lay in the mud, and hoped they were not seen. As I said in my last message, some of them seem to have been seen by hostile aircraft coming out before the moon went down, and the enemy's guns ravaged the ground searching for them.

The right body of Canadian troops worked up towards Crest Farm along the main Pa.s.schendaele Ridge--that is to say, on the right of the Ravelbeek gully. Their ground here was very bad, but nothing like that on the left below Bellevue. They got close to Duck Wood, where there are a few stumps of trees to give a meaning to the name, and on their right other troops pushed forward towards Decline Copse, which protected their flank. Heavy machine-gun fire came at them out of Duck Wood, from sh.e.l.l-craters and "pill-boxes," and the enemy sh.e.l.led very fiercely all around with high explosives and a great number of whiz-bangs from field-batteries very close to them just below Pa.s.schendaele. All the Canadian soldiers speak of these whiz-bangs, directed, after the ground was taken, by low-flying aeroplanes, who signalled with flash-lamps or with a round or two of machine-gun fire when they saw any group of men.

The signals were answered rapidly by a flight of the small sh.e.l.ls.

But from a tactical point of view, apart from the hardships and perils of the men, the situation on the Canadian right was good. They had their ground, and would have found it easier to hold if all had been well on the other side of the Ravelbeek up by Bellevue. All was not well there at that time. The Canadian troops on the left were having the same tragic adventure as befell the Australians in the same place two weeks before. In trying to work up beyond Peter Pan House they were caught in the clutch of the mud, and moving slowly behind their barrage came under the fire of many machine-guns worked by those 11th Bavarians from a row of blockhouses along the road running across the crest of the ridge, and from other strong points above and below that line. The Canadian Brigade made most desperate attempts to get as far as those d.a.m.nable little forts, and small parties of grim, resolute fellows did get a footing on the higher slopes, scrambling and stumbling and falling, with the deadly swish of bullets about them, and those Bavarians waiting for them with their thumbs on the triggers of their weapons behind the walls.

Behind, it was difficult to get news of that heroic Canadian Brigade.

Foul mists and smoke lay low over them; no signals or messages came back. An airman, who flew along the line to work in contact with the guns, could see nothing at two thousand feet, nothing when he risked his wings at a thousand feet, nothing still on another journey at half that height. The Canadian rockets were all wet, and no light answered the airman's signals. Ten times he flew along the line, twice at last within two hundred yards of the ground, when he did see the infantry struggling through the enemy's lash of bullets. A bit of shrapnel or sh.e.l.l casing smashed through the airman's engine, and his wings were pierced. He flew in a staggering way on our side of the lines and crashed down and got back with his report.

The next news was not good. It looked like a tragedy. Under the continued fire the Canadian Brigade had to fall back from Bellevue almost to their original line. It was then that officers and men of this Canadian Brigade showed what stuff they were made of--stuff of spirit and of body. Imagine them, these muddy, wet men, with their ranks thinned out by losses up those h.e.l.lish slopes of Bellevue, and with all their efforts gone to nothing as they gathered together in the mist in the low ground again. It was enough to take the heart out of these men.

Strengthened by a small body of Canadian comrades they re-formed and attacked again. That was great and splendid of them. The barrage was brought back and the lines of its sh.e.l.l-fire moved slowly before them again as when they had first started. So they began all over again the struggle through which they had already been, and went out again into its abomination. Even now I do not know how they gained success where they had failed. I doubt whether they know. The enemy was still up the slopes and on the slopes, still protected in his concrete, and with his machine-guns undamaged. But these Canadians worked their way forward in small packs, and each man among them must have been inspired by a kind of rage to get close to the blockhouses and have done with them. They went through those who had fallen in the first attack, and others fell, but there was enough to close round the concrete forts and put them out of action. The garrisons of these places, thirty in the largest of them, fifteen to twenty in the smaller kind, had been told to hold them until they were killed or captured. They obeyed their orders, but preferred capture when the Canadians swarmed about them and gave them the choice.

There were about 400 prisoners brought down from Bellevue, and nearly all of them were taken from the blockhouses on the way up to the crest and from a row of them along the road which goes across the crest.

It was a few hours before the enemy behind launched his counter-attacks, after a heavy sh.e.l.ling of Bellevue, which he now knew was lost to him--a bitter surprise to his regimental and divisional commanders. It is uncertain what delayed his counter-attacks, but the mud had something to do with it, for on the German side as well as on ours there are swamps in which tall men sink to their necks, and bogs in which they are stuck to their knees, so badly that some of our prisoners lost their boots in getting free of this grip.

It was at about four o'clock in the afternoon that the first German column tried to advance upon Bellevue from the northern end of the spur.

They were caught in our barrage and shattered. Half an hour later another heavy attack was delivered against the Canadians on the main Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, and this was repulsed after close and fierce fighting, in which fifty prisoners were taken by our side.

All through the night, after those vain efforts to get back their ground, the enemy sh.e.l.led the Canadian positions heavily, but on the left, by Bellevue, the men of that brigade, which had done such heroic things, not only held their ground, but went farther forward to Bellevue cross-roads, where there was another row of blockhouses. They were abandoned by the enemy, who had fled hurriedly, leaving behind their machine-guns and ammunition--eighteen machine-guns on 300 yards of road, which shows how strongly this position was held by machine-gun defence. Yesterday there were more counter-attacks, but they had no success, and many lie on the ground.

The price of victory for the Canadians was heavy in physical suffering, and unwounded men as well as wounded had to endure agonies of wetness and coldness and thirst and exhaustion. It was only their hardness which enabled them to endure. They lay in cold slime, and a drop of rum would have been elixir vit to them. Away behind, carrying parties were stuck in bogs as the fighting men had been stuck. Pack-mules were floundering in sh.e.l.l-craters. Men were rescuing their comrades out of pits and then sinking themselves and crying for help. At ten yards distance no shout was heard because of the roar of gun-fire and the howling of sh.e.l.ls and the high wailing of the wind.

"I saw some fellows in front of me," said a wounded lad of the Devons, "and I halloed to them because I wanted company and a bit of help. But they didn't hear all my halloing, and they went faster than I could, and I could not catch up with them because my leg was bad."

"It was water we wanted most," said a young Canadian, "and some of us were four days thirsty in the front line. No blame to anybody. It was the state of the ground."

"I had a poisoned finger," said a young field-gunner, "and my arm swelled up, but I couldn't leave the battery before the show, as they were short-handed."

Sitting round after the battle these men out of the slime, these muddy, b.l.o.o.d.y men, spoke quietly and soberly about things they had seen and suffered, and the tales they told would freeze the blood of gentle souls who do not know even now, after three years of war, what war means to the fighting men. But as they listened to each other they nodded, as though to say, "Yes, that's how it was," and there was no consciousness among them of extraordinary adventures, and neither self-glory nor self-pity. They had just done their job, as when their wounds heal they will do it again, if fate so wills.

What I have written about the Canadians is true of all English battalions who were fighting on each side of them, and to whom I devoted most of my message on the day of the battle. Those London Territorials, Lancashire troops, Artists Rifles, Bedfords, and the old county regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions who were fighting around Polderhoek Chteau and on the way to Gheluvelt had the same sufferings, the same difficulties in bad ground, the same ordeal of sh.e.l.l-fire, machine-gun fire, and German counter-attacks. They showed the same courage, neither more nor less, and although the capture of Bellevue spur was the most important gain of the day, it was only possible because the English battalions on either side kept the enemy hotly engaged, and a.s.saulted his lines of blockhouses with repeated efforts.

The fighting of the Artists Rifles and Bedfords of the 63rd Division was typical of all the history of this day in hardship and valour. Even the German officers taken prisoners by them expressed their wonderment and admiration. "Your men are magnificent," they said. "They have achieved the impossible. We did not think any troops could cross such ground."

That belief was reasonable. The stream of the Paddebeek had become a wide flood, like all the other beeks in the fighting ground. It seemed unfordable and impa.s.sable, and on the other side of it was the old German trench system with machine-gun emplacements. The 63rd plunged in, wading up to their waists, and horribly hampered while machine-gun bullets whipped the surface of the water. There was fierce fighting for Varlet House, a strong blockhouse, and the Artists and Bedfords, Royal Fusiliers and Shropshires swarmed round it, and finally routed the garrison. Desperate attempts were made against other strong points, and the men of the 63rd Division gained some of them, and captured about 140 prisoners.

Meanwhile on the left of our line, around the flooded areas to the west of Houthulst Forest, the French have made great progress on Friday and Sat.u.r.day. The Belgians have made a dash too, and there was a gallant episode, not without a gleam of humour, when a small party of Belgian soldiers crossed the marshes in a punt, found the ground deserted by the enemy, and went forward at a hot pace to join up with the French in the freshly captured village of Merckem. The French themselves have cleared a wide tract of marsh-land during these two days' operations, cleared it of men and cleared it of guns, which the enemy had just time to drag away round a spit of land on the edge of the floods. These floods are very deep and broad above Bixschoote and below Dixmude, where the St.-Jansbeek slopes over by Langewaade and swirls round a peninsula of mud.

On Friday the French routed out the German outposts who guarded that mud-bank, several thousands yards in length, and yesterday made a bigger attack above St.-Jansbeek and Draeibank. Before their gallant infantry advanced through these bogs, for it is all a bog, the French gunners were in full orchestra, and played a terrible symphony on the 75's and 120's. Over 160,000 sh.e.l.ls were fired by the "soixante-quinze" batteries at the German positions in the marshes and on the west side of Houthulst Forest. Then under cover of this fury of the fire the French infantry advanced in waves. In spite of the ground they went very fast and very far, and spread out in a fan-shaped phalanx between Merckem and Aschoop.

Their field-guns are now able to enfilade Houthulst Forest on the western side, and the German guns north of that must be making their escape. It is an important tactical success, which will make Houthulst Forest less tenable by the enemy.

OCTOBER 30

Following up the heroic capture of Bellevue spur, on October 26, the Canadians attacked again this morning on both sides of the Ravelbeek, working up from Bellevue to the top of Meetscheele spur on the left, and gaining Crest Farm on the right, up the main ridge of Pa.s.schendaele. If this ground can be held--and the taking is sometimes not so hard as the holding--almost the last heights of the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge are within our grasp, and all the desperate fighting of the last three months or more, the great a.s.saults on the ridges by English, Scottish, Irish, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian troops, through bogs and marshes in the low ground, against concrete blockhouses and great numbers of machine-guns, against ma.s.ses of the finest German troops fighting every yard of the way, and against incredibly bad luck with the weather, even as far back as August, will have given us the dominating ground in Flanders overlooking the plains beyond.

Crest Farm, on a knoll below the village of Pa.s.schendaele, is the outer fort of Pa.s.schendaele itself, and its capture exposes the greater fortress under the ragged ruins which stick up like fangs on the skyline of the ridge.

Without Crest Farm Pa.s.schendaele was unapproachable, and the capture of this hummock is of historical importance. But in order to take or hold it, as the Australians found, it was necessary that Bellevue and Meetscheele should also be ours. Both heights were taken this morning by the Canadians.

It was not a great battle in numbers of men, and the longest distance to go was not more than a thousand yards, but it was a hard battle, not won lightly, because of the desperate resistance of the enemy, the difficulty of the ground, the badness of the weather, and the physical hardships endured by the men. The enemy had relieved his troops who met the Canadians' attack on Bellevue on Friday last--the 11th Bavarian Division, who are now said to be on their way to Italy--although I saw one of their non-commissioned officers this morning, taken prisoner a few hours before, after he had been lying in a sh.e.l.l-hole for three days. He knew nothing about his division and nothing about the German thrust in Italy. Nor did he care what had happened over there, but was only glad to be out of the sh.e.l.l-fire with the hope that the war would end soon, somehow and anyhow. His division had apparently been replaced by the 238th, a strong and well-disciplined crowd of men, who knew the value of the Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, and fought hard this morning until the Canadians had forced their blockhouse when the rest of them ran back into Pa.s.schendaele.

The German Command probably expected an attack this morning. As usual, yesterday he sh.e.l.led heavily over the neighbourhood of our tracks and back areas of the battle zone in order to hinder the getting up of supplies, and in the night he sent out his air squadrons to bomb the country about Ypres and try to play h.e.l.l generally behind our lines. Our airmen were about in the night too. It was the night of the full moon, wonderfully clear and beautiful in this part of Flanders, and many tons of explosives were dropped over enemy dumps and batteries and routes of march. The weatherwise, who have been gloomy souls for some weeks, and no wonder, predicted heavy rain before the night was out, and a rising gale of wind. They were right about the wind. It came howling across the sea and the flats from somewhere in the west of Ireland, but it veered to the east later in the night and the rain held off until after midday.

By that time our attack had gone away and gained the ground; and it is in their new positions that the Canadians and other British troops are now suffering the foul storm, with a cold rain slashing upon them. The night was cold for them, and they lay out in sh.e.l.l-holes, getting numbed and cramped and longing for the first gleam of light, when they could get on the move and do this fighting. It is the waiting which is always worst, and it was waiting under the heavy fire of big sh.e.l.ls and shrapnel and whiz-bangs and gas-sh.e.l.ls and machine-gun bursts scattered over the sodden fields in this wet darkness without aim, but sinister in its blind search for men. The carriers trudged through all this, stubborn in spirit, to get up ammunition and supplies. There was rum for the fighting men, and they thanked G.o.d for it, because it gave them a little warmth of body and soul in the cold quarter of an hour before an attack at dawn, when the vitality of men is low.

Some of the Canadians say that the enemy started to barrage before our own artillery gave the signal of attack by combined fire. Five minutes before the start, they say, hostile sh.e.l.l-fire burst over them. Men get this fancy sometimes when there is no truth in it, but it may have been true. They all agree that the German SOS flared up instantly the attack was begun, and that the enemy's gunners answered it without a second's pause. At the same time many machine-guns began their sharp tattoo from the blockhouses on the slopes above and from many hiding-places. In front of the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry there was a number of fanged tree-stumps called by the sylvan name of Friesland Copse. They expected one or two machine-guns there, but found a nest of them. It was a hornets' nest, not easily routed out. The German machine-gunners kept up a steady stream of bullets across their field of fire, and the Princess Pat's suffered in trying to rush the place. Small parties of them a.s.saulted it with grim courage, and when they fell, or took cover in sh.e.l.l-craters, others made their way forward, trying to get round the flanks of the position. It was in that way finally that they made the last close dash upon the emplacements and destroyed them. Some of the German gunners surrendered here, but not many. Hard and fierce was the fighting at close quarters.

The Canadian troops pushed on to Meetscheele village--no village at all, as you may guess, but just a tract of sh.e.l.l-craters and a few mounds of broken brick about a few concrete chambers, with dead bodies of German soldiers lying huddled outside the walls. That is a village in the battlefields. The blockhouses gave trouble, for there were living men inside with the usual weapon which spat out bullets. So there was another struggle here, very fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y, and the place was only taken by groups of men who crawled round it in the mud, sprang at it out of sh.e.l.l-craters, and acted with individual cunning and courage. That at least is how some of these men described it this morning, when they came away with wounds. Beyond Meetscheele was another row of blockhouses on a road, and another fight, desperate and exhausting and b.l.o.o.d.y. But it was from that neighbourhood that the Germans began to run, and when they were seen running the Canadians knew that the objectives had been won.

All that was on the left of the Ravelbeek stream, which is a No Man's Land of slime between the slopes.

On the right, which is the main Pa.s.schendaele Ridge, another Canadian Brigade was fighting up to Crest Farm. They, too, had to a.s.sault some "pill-boxes" and had to fight hard for their ground, but they captured Crest Farm and the farmer's boys, who were stalwart young Germans, and a number of machines with which they plough the fields for the harvest of death. These machine-guns and their ammunition store were used against the enemy by the Canadians, and helped to smash up the counter-attacks, which a.s.saulted the new positions very quickly after their capture. On the extreme right of the Canadians the enemy opened a very heavy bombardment from the Keifburg spur, and it was so violent that special artillery action was called for, and a number of Australian heavies took measures to silence these guns. The first counter-attack developed at about eight o'clock, from the direction of Mosselmarkt, but this was dealt with by our guns, and did not reach the Canadian lines. Our airmen, flying in the gale, reported groups of men retreating in a disorderly way and the German stretcher-bearers were busy. At about 9.30 hostile infantry in extended order were seen advancing towards the front, and our guns again got busy. Meanwhile the Artists, Bedfords, Royal Fusiliers, and Shropshires of the 63rd Division, and London men of the 58th Division were fighting in the low swampy ground to the north of the Canadians. They have had a very hard time on both sides of the Paddebeek and in other swamps, where little isolated garrisons of the enemy hold their "pill-boxes" in a girdle of the machine-gun fire. The rain is now heavy, and a thick, dank mist lies over the fields, and what was bad ground is now worse ground. There is no aeroplane observation this afternoon, and the Canadians, who are holding the captured positions, can no longer be seen by the hostile air squadrons.

This morning they flew very low over the infantry in places, dropping bombs and firing their machine-guns at groups of men. The battle is one of those called "a minor operation," but the ground taken by heroic effort is the gateway to Pa.s.schendaele.

XXIV

LONDON MEN AND ARTISTS

OCTOBER 31

We still hold the high ground about Crest Farm and the Meetscheele Spur, from which Pa.s.schendaele is only 400 or 500 yards distant, and the Canadians have consolidated their positions there, and with the help of the guns have beaten off the enemy's counter-attacks. Up there the ground is dry, and the Canadian soldiers are on sandy soil above the hideous swamps of the valleys and beeks. The enemy's batteries are sh.e.l.ling our new lines with intense fire, and are attempting as usual to hara.s.s our tracks and artillery. To-day, after the battle, the weather is clear and beautiful again, as it was on the day after the last battle--a tragic irony which makes our men rather bitter with their luck--and in the sunshine and fleecy clouds there are many hostile aeroplanes overhead and many air combats between their fighting-planes and ours. I saw the beginning of one over Ypres this morning before the chase of the enemy machine pa.s.sed out of sight with a burst of machine-gun fire, and all through the morning our anti-aircraft guns were busy flinging white shrapnel at these birds, who came with prying eyes over our camps, their wings all shining in the sunlight and looking no bigger than b.u.t.terflies at the height they flew. Yesterday, during the battle, it was almost impossible to fly, owing to the strength of the gale, and impossible to see unless a pilot almost brushed the earth with his wings. One of our airmen did fly as low as that, as I have told, and went ten times on his business up and down the Canadian lines.

But elsewhere, above the dreadful swamps of the Paddebeek and the Lekkerbolerbeek, the airmen had an almost hopeless task.

It was partly owing to this that it was very difficult to get any news of the London Territorials of the 58th Division and the Artists, Bedfords, and others of the 63rd who went away at the same time as the Canadians in the low ground instead of on high ground. Even their battalion commanders, not far behind, could see nothing of the men when the attack had started, and could get no exact knowledge of them for many hours. The wounded came back to give vague hints of what was happening, but as a rule wounded men know nothing more than their own adventures in their own track of sh.e.l.l-craters. Some of them have never come back. No man knows yet what has become of them out there. Little groups may still be holding on to advanced posts out there in the swamps.

It is idle for me to try to describe this ground again, the ground over which the London men and the Artists had to attack. Nothing that I can write will convey remotely the look of such ground and the horror of it.

Unless one has seen vast fields of barren earth, blasted for miles by sh.e.l.l-fire, pitted by deep craters so close that they are like holes in a sieve, and so deep that the tallest men can drown in them when they are filled with water, as they are now filled, imagination cannot conceive the picture of this slough of despond into which our modern Christians plunge with packs on their backs and faith in their hearts to face dragons of fire a thousand times more frightful than those encountered in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The sh.e.l.l-craters yesterday were overbrimmed with water, and along the way of the beeks, flung out of bounds by great gun-fire, these were not ponds and pools, but broad deep lakes in which the litter and corruption of the battlefield floated.