From Bapaume to Passchendaele, 1917 Part 9

III

THE STRUGGLE ROUND MONCHY

APRIL 11

This morning our men advanced upon the villages of Monchy-le-Preux and La Bergre, on each side of the Cambrai road, beyond the ruins of Tilloy-les-Mofflaines, and occupied them after heavy fighting. British cavalry were first into Monchy, riding through a storm of shrapnel, and heavily bombarded in the village so that many of their horses were killed and many men wounded.

I saw the whole picture of this fighting to-day, and all the spirit and drama of it. It was a wonderful scene, not without terror, and our men pa.s.sed through it alert and watchful to the menace about them. Going out beyond Arras through suburbs which were in German hands until Monday last--they had scribbled their names and regiments on broken walls of strafed houses, and men of English battalions who captured them had scrawled their own names above these other signatures--I came to the German barbed wire which had protected the enemy's lines, and then into three systems of trenches which had been the objectives of our men on the morning when the battle of Arras began. Here was Hangest Trench, in which the enemy had made his chief resistance, and Holt Redoubt and Horn Redoubt, where his machine-guns had checked us, and a high point on the road to Tilloy, to which a Tank had crawled after a lone journey out of Arras to sweep this place with machine-gun fire, so that our men could get on to the village. It is no wonder that the Germans lost this ground, and that those who remained alive in their dug-outs surrendered quickly, as soon as our men were about them. The effect of our bombardment was ghastly. It had ploughed all this country with great sh.e.l.l-craters, torn fields of barbed wire to a few tattered strands, and smashed in all the trenches to shapeless ditches.

Tilloy still had parts of houses standing, bits of white wall having no relation to the wild rubbish-heaps around. The Germans had torn up the rails to make barricades, and had used farm carts, ploughs, and brick-heaps as cover. But they could have given no protection when the sky rained fire and thunderbolts. Dead bodies lay about in every shape and shapelessness of death. I pa.s.sed into Devil's Wood--well named, because here there had been h.e.l.lish torture of men--and so on to Observatory Ridge and ground from which, not far away, I looked into Monchy and across the battlefields where our men were fighting then. The enemy was firing heavy sh.e.l.ls. They fell thick about Monchy village and on the other side of the Cambrai road, roaring horribly as they came and flinging up volumes of black earth and mud. The enemy's gunners were scattering other sh.e.l.ls about, but in an aimless way, so that they found no real target, though they were frightening, especially when some of these crumps spattered one with mud.

Flights of British aeroplanes were on the wing, and German aeroplanes tried to fight their way over our lines. I saw several with the swish of machine-gun bullets and the high whining sh.e.l.ls of British "Archies"

about them. I have never before seen so great a conflict in the skies.

It was a battle up there, and as far as I could see we gained a mastery over the enemy's machines, though some of them were very bold.

On the earth it was open warfare of the old kind, for we were beyond the trenches and our men were moving across the fields without cover. Some of our machine-gunners were serving their weapons from sh.e.l.l-holes, and the only protection of the headquarters staff of the cavalry was a shallow ditch in the centre of the battlefield sheltered by a few planks, quite useless against sh.e.l.l-fire, but keeping off the snow, which fell in heavy wet flakes. There the officers sat in the ditch, shoulder to shoulder, studying their maps and directing the action while reports were called down the funnel of a chimney by an officer who had been out on reconnaissance.

"It is villainously unhealthy round here," said this officer, who spoke to me after he had given his news to the cavalry general. He looked across to Monchy, and said, "Old Fritz is putting up a stiff fight." At that moment a German crump fell close, and we did not continue the conversation.

Across the battlefield came stretcher-bearers, carrying the wounded shoulder high, and the lightly wounded men walked back from Monchy and Gumappe very slowly, with that dragging gait which is bad to see. I spoke to a wounded officer and asked him how things were going.

"Pretty hot," he said, and then shivered and said, "but now I feel cold as ice."

Snow fell all through the afternoon, covering the litter of battle and the bodies of all our dead boys, giving a white beauty even to the ugly ruins of Tilloy and changing the Devil's Wood by enchantment to a kind of dream-picture. Through this driving snow our guns fired ceaselessly, and I saw all their flashes through the storm, and their din was enormous. Away in front of me stretched the road to Cambrai, the high road of our advance. It seemed so easy to walk down there--but if I had gone farther I should not have come back.

In a hundred years not all the details of this battle will be told, for to each man in all the thousands who are fighting there is a great adventure, and they are filled with sensations stronger than drink can give, so that it will seem a wild dream--a dream red as flame and white as snow.

For this amazing battle, which is bringing to us tides of prisoners and many batteries of guns, is being fought on spring days heavy with snow, as grim as sternest winter except when in odd half-hours the sun breaks through the storm-clouds and gives a magic beauty to all this whiteness of the battlefields and to trees furred with bars of ermine and to all the lacework of twigs ready for green birth. Now as I write there is no sun, but a darkness through which heavy flakes are falling. Our soldiers are fighting through it to the east of Arras, and their steel helmets and tunics and leather jerkins are all white as the country through which they are forcing back the enemy.

While the battle was raging on the Vimy heights English and Scottish troops of the 15th, 12th, and 3rd Divisions were fighting equally fiercely, with more trouble to meet round about Arras. Beyond the facts I have already written there are others that must be recorded quickly, before quick history runs away from them.

Some day a man must give a great picture of the night in Arras before the battle, and I know one man who could do so--a great hunter of wild beasts, with a monocle that quells the human soul and a very "parfit gentil knight," whose pen is as pointed as his lance. He spent the night in a tunnel of Arras before getting into a sap in No Man's Land before the dawn, where he was with a "movie man," an official photographer (both as gallant as you will find in the Army), and a machine-gunner ready for action. Thousands of other men spent the night before the battle in the great tunnels, centuries old, that run out of Arras to the country beyond, by Blangy and St.-Sauveur. The enemy poured sh.e.l.ls into the city, which I watched that night before the dawn from the ramparts outside, but in the morning they came up from those subterranean galleries and for a little while no more sh.e.l.ls fell in Arras, for the German gunners were busy with other work, and were in haste to get away.

The fighting was very fierce round Blangy, the suburb of Arras, where the enemy was in the broken ruins of the houses and behind garden walls strongly barricaded with piled sand-bags. But our men smashed their way through and on. Troops of those old English regiments were checked a while at strong German works known as the Horn, Holt, Hamel, and Hangest positions, and at another strong point called the Church Work. It was at these places that the Tanks did well on a day when they had hard going because of slime and mud, and after a journey of over three miles from their starting-point knocked out the German machine-guns, and so let the infantry get on. Higher north at a point known as Railway Triangle, east-south-east of Arras, where railway lines join, Gordons, Argylls, Seaforths, and Camerons of the 15th Division were held back by machine-gun fire. The enemy's works had not been destroyed by our bombardment, and our barrage had swept ahead of the troops. News of the trouble was sent back, and presently back crept the barrage of our sh.e.l.l-fire, coming perilously close to the Scottish troops, but not too close. With marvellous accuracy the gunners found the target of the Triangle and swept it with sh.e.l.l-fire so that its defences were destroyed. The Scots surged forward, over the chaos of broken timber and barricades, and struggled forward again to their goal, which brought them to Feuchy Well, and to-day much farther. A Tank helped them at Feuchy Chapel, cheered by the Scots as it came into action scorning machine-gun bullets. The Harp was another strong point of the enemy's which caused difficulty to King's Own Liverpools, the Shropshire Light Infantry, Royal Fusiliers, East Yorks, Scottish Fusiliers, and Royal Scots, as I have already told, on the first day of battle, and another Tank came up, in its queer, slow way, and the gallant men inside served their guns like a Dreadnought, and so ended the business on that oval-shaped stronghold.

So English and Scottish troops pressed on and gathered up thousands of prisoners. "So tame," said one of our men, "that they ate out of our hands." So ready to surrender that a brigadier and his staff who were captured with them were angry and ashamed of men taken in great numbers without a single wounded man among them. Fifty-four guns were captured on this eastern side of Arras, and six were howitzers, and two of these big beasts were taken by cavalry working with the troops. Some of the gunners had never left their pits after our bombardment became intense four days before, and were suffering from hunger and thirst.

Trench-mortars and machine-guns lay everywhere about, in scores, smashed, buried, flung about by the ferocity of our sh.e.l.l-fire. German officers wearing Iron Crosses wept when they surrendered. It was their day of unbelievable tragedy. A queer thing happened to some German transport men. They were sent out from Douai to Fampoux. They did not know they were going into the battle zone. They drove along until suddenly they saw British soldiers swarming about them. Six hours after their start from Douai they were eating bully-beef on our side of the lines, and while they munched could not believe their own senses. Our troops treated them with the greatest good humour, throwing chocolates and cigarettes into their enclosures and crowding round to speak to men who knew the English tongue. There seemed no kind of hatred between these men. There was none after the battle had been fought, for in our British way we cannot harbour hate for beaten enemies when the individuals are there, broken and in our hands. Yet a little farther away the fighting was fierce, and there was no mercy on either side.

APRIL 12

In spite of the enemy's hard resistance and the abominable weather conditions which cause our troops great hardships, we are making steady progress towards the German defensive positions along the Hindenburg line.

North of Vimy Ridge this morning his lines were pierced by a new attack, delivered with great force above Givenchy; and south of the village of Wancourt, below Monchy-le-Preux, we have seized an important little hill-top.

Monchy itself is securely in our hands this morning, after repeated counter-attacks yesterday and last night. In my last dispatch I described in the briefest way how I went up towards Monchy yesterday across the crowded battlefield and looked into that village, where fierce fighting was in progress. Then the village was still standing, hardly in ruins, so that I saw roofs still on the houses and unbroken walls, and the white chteau only a little scarred by sh.e.l.l-fire. Now it has been almost destroyed by the enemy's guns, and our men held it only by the most resolute courage. It is a small place that village, but yesterday, perched high beyond Orange Hill, it was the storm-centre of all this world-conflict, and the battle of Arras paused till it was taken. The story of the fight for it should live in history, and is full of strange and tragic drama.

Our cavalry--the 10th Hussars, the Ess.e.x Yeomanry, and the Blues--helped in the capture of this high village, behaving with the greatest acts of sacrifice to the ideals of duty. I saw them going up over Observation Ridge, and before they reached that point; the dash of splendid bodies of men riding at the gallop in a snow-storm which had covered them with white mantles and crowned their steel hats. Afterwards I saw some of these men being carried back wounded over the battlefield, and the dead body of their general, on a stretcher, taken by a small party of troopers through the ruins of another village to his resting-place. Many gallant horses lay dead, and those which came back were caked with mud, and walked with drooping heads, exhausted in every limb. The bodies of dead boys lay all over these fields.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Map of the Arras front GEORGE PHILIP & SON LTD 32 Fleet St., E.C.]

But the cavalry rode into Monchy and captured the north side of the village, and the enemy fled from them. It is an astounding thing that two withered old Frenchwomen stayed in this village all through this fighting. When our troopers rode in these women came running forward, frightened and crying "Camarades," as though in face of the enemy. When our men surrounded them they were full of joy, and held up their withered old faces to be kissed by the troopers, who leaned over their saddles to give this greeting. Yet the battle was not over, and the sh.e.l.l-fire was most intense afterwards.

The women told strange stories of German officers billeted in their houses. After the battle of Arras began on Monday these officers were very nervous; but, although the sound of gun-fire swept nearer they did not believe that the English troops would get near Monchy for some days.

Late on Wednesday night, after preparing for the defence of the village, they went to bed as usual, looking exhausted and nerve-racked, and told the women to wake them at six o'clock. They were awakened by another kind of knocking at the door. English and Scottish soldiers were firing outside the village, and the German officers escaped in such a hurry that they had no time to pull down the battalion flag outside their gate, and our men captured it as a trophy.

The attack on Monchy was made by English and Scottish troops--the Scots of the 15th Division--who fought very fiercely to clear the enemy out of Railway Triangle, where they were held up for three hours. Afterwards they fought on to Feuchy Redoubt, where they found that the whole of the German garrison had been buried by our bombardment, so that none escaped alive. At Feuchy Weir they captured a German electrical company, a captain and thirteen men, who were unarmed. The enemy sh.e.l.led Feuchy village after our troops had pa.s.sed through and gone far forward, where they dug in for the night under heavy sh.e.l.ling. Here they stayed all day on Tuesday close by a deep square pit, where four eight-inch howitzers had been abandoned to our cavalry.

Meanwhile English troops of the 37th Division--Warwicks and Bedfords, East and West Lancashire battalions, and the Yorks and Lanes--were advancing on the right and linking up for the attack on Monchy in conjunction with the Jocks. On the left bodies of cavalry a.s.sembled for a combined attack with Hotchkiss and machine guns; and at about five o'clock yesterday morning they swept upon the village. The cavalry went full split at a hard pace under heavy shrapnel-fire, and streamed into the village on the north side. They saw few Germans, for as they went in the enemy retreated to the southern side, hoping to escape by that way.

Here they found themselves cut off by our infantry, the English battalions mixed up with Scots before the fight was over. It was hard fighting. The enemy had many machine-guns, and defended himself from windows and roofs of houses, firing down upon our men as they swarmed into the village streets, and fought their way into farmyards and courtyards. It was a house-to-house hunt, and about two hundred prisoners were taken, though some of the garrison escaped to the trench in the valley below, where they had machine-gun redoubts. At about eight o'clock yesterday morning, twenty Scots and a small party of English went forward from Monchy with a Tank which had crawled up over heavy ground and sh.e.l.l-craters, and now trained its guns upon bodies of Germans moving over the ridge beyond. By this time English troops had a number of machine-guns in position for the defence of the village against any counter-attacks that might come. Some of our men had already explored the dug-outs and found them splendid for shelter under sh.e.l.l-fire. Under the chteau was a subterranean system furnished luxuriously and provided with electric light. Half an hour after the capture of the village some English and Scottish officers were drinking German beer out of German mugs.

The peace of Monchy did not last long. At nine o'clock the enemy sh.e.l.led the place fiercely, and for a long time, with 59 guns, as I saw myself at midday from Observation Ridge, which was also under fire.

German airmen, flying above, watched our cavalry and infantry, and directed fire upon them. They were terrible hours to endure, but our men held out n.o.bly; and when the enemy made his counter-attacks in the afternoon and evening, advancing in waves with a most determined spirit, they were hosed with machine-gun bullets and fell like gra.s.s before the scythe. Our 18-pounders also poured sh.e.l.l into them. This morning our men are in advance of the village, and the enemy has retreated from the trench below. The night was dreadful for men and beasts. Snow fell heavily, and was blown into deep drifts by wind as cold as ice. Wounded horses fell and died, and men lay in a white bed of snow in an agony of cold, while sh.e.l.ls burst round them. As gallant as the fighting men were the supply columns, who sent up carriers through blizzard and sh.e.l.l-fire. At four o'clock in the morning a rum ration was served out, "And thank G.o.d for it," said one of our officers lying out there in a sh.e.l.l-hole with a shattered arm. Strange and ironical as it seems, the post came up also at this hour, and men in the middle of the battlefield, suffering the worst agonies of war, had letters from home which in darkness they could not read.

That scene of war this morning might have been in Russia in midwinter, instead of in France in spring-time. Snow was thick over the fields, four foot deep where it had drifted against the banks. Tents and huts behind the lines were covered with snow roofs, and as I went through Arras this poor, stricken city was all white. Stones and fallen masonry which have poured down from great buildings of medival times were overlaid with snow--until, by midday, it was all turned to water. Then our Army moved through rivers of mud, and all our splendid horses were pitiful to see.

IV

THE OTHER SIDE OF VIMY

APRIL 13

The enemy's Headquarters Staff is clearly troubled by the successes gained by our troops during these first days of the battle of Arras, and all attempts to repair the damage to his defensive positions upon which his future safety depends have been feeble and irresolute. It is certain that he desired to make a heavy counter-attack upon the northern edge of the Vimy Ridge. Prisoners taken yesterday all believed that this would be done without delay. The 5th Grenadiers of the Prussian Guards Reserve were hurriedly brought up to relieve or support the Bavarian troops, who had suffered frightfully, and ma.s.sed in a wood, called the Bois d'Hirondelle, or Swallows' Wood, in order to steal through another little wood called Bois-en-Hache to a hill known by us as the Pimple, and so on to recapture Hill 145, taken by the Canadians on Monday night after heavy and costly fighting. This scheme broke down utterly.

Swallows' Wood was heavily bombed by our aeroplanes, so that the ma.s.sed Prussians had an ugly time there, and yesterday morning Canadian troops made a sudden a.s.sault upon the Pimple, which is a knoll slightly lower than Hill 145, to its right, and gained it in spite of fierce machine-gun fire from the garrison, who defended themselves stubbornly until they were killed or captured. At the same time Bois-en-Hache, which stands on rising ground across the little valley of the River Souchez, was attacked with great courage by the 24th Division, and the enemy driven out.

It was difficult work for our infantry and gunners. The ground was a bog of sh.e.l.l-craters and mud, and there was a blizzard of snowflakes. The attack was made with a kind of instinct, backed with luck. Our men stumbled forward in a wake of snow-squalls and sh.e.l.ls, fell into sh.e.l.l-holes, climbed out again, and by some skill of their own kept their bombs and rifles dry. Machine-gun bullets whipped the ground about them. Some fell and were buried in snow-drifts; others went on and reached their goal, and in a white blizzard routed out the enemy and his machine-guns. It was an hour or two later that German officers, directing operations at a distance and preparing a counter-attack on the Vimy Ridge, heard that the Pimple and Bois-en-Hache had both gone--the only places which gave observation on the south side of Vimy and made effective any attack. Their curses must have been deep and full when that message came over the telephone wires. They ordered their batteries to fire continuously on those two places, but they remain ours, and our troops have endured intense barrage-fire without losing ground. Now we have full and absolute observation over Vimy Ridge to the enemy's side of the country reversing all the past history of this position, and we are making full and deadly use of it. The enemy still clings to Vimy village on the other side of the slopes, and to the line of railway on the eastern side of Farbus, but it is an insecure tenure, and our guns are making life hideous for the German soldiers in those places, and in the villages farther back in the direction of Douai, and along the road which he is using for his transport. In the village of Bailleul down there are a number of batteries which the enemy has vainly endeavoured to withdraw. We are smothering them with sh.e.l.l-fire, and he will find it difficult to get them away, though he can ill afford the loss of more guns. The enemy has been in great trouble to move his guns away rapidly enough owing to the dearth of transport horses. Even before the battle of Arras began the German batteries had to borrow horses from each other because there were not enough for all, and some of his guns have been abandoned because of that lack. He cannot claim that he has left us only broken and useless guns.

When the Scottish and South African troops of the 9th Division made the great attack on Monday last the South-Africans were led forward by their colonels, and took the first German line without a single casualty.

Afterwards they fought against wicked machine-gun fire, but, sweeping all before them, and gathering in hundreds of prisoners, they seized a number of guns, including several 59 howitzers. A vast amount of ammunition lay about in dumps, and our men turned the guns about, and are using them against the enemy. To South-Africans who fought in Delville Wood--I have told the story of this tragic epic in the battle of the Somme--this is a triumph that pays back a little for old memories under German gun-fire. Their revenge is sweet and frightful, and they call the captured guns, those monstrous five-point-nines, their trench-mortar battery.

During this fighting our airmen have flown with extraordinary valour, and have done great work. They flew in snow-storms, as I saw them and marvelled, on the east side of Arras, and circled round for hours taking photographs of the enemy's positions and spotting his batteries so accurately, in spite of weather which half blinded them, that the German gunners who are now our prisoners say that they were terrorized by being made targets for our fire.

Farther south yesterday and to-day we have made new breaches in the Hindenburg line by the capture of Wancourt and Hninel, villages south of Monchy. The fighting here has been most severe, and our men of the 14th and 56th Divisions--London Rangers, Kensingtons, Middles.e.x, London Scottish, and King's Royal Rifles--lying out on open slopes in deep snow and under icy gales at night, swept by machine-gun barrages from Gumappe and with the sky above them flashing with shrapnel bursts and high explosives, have had to endure a terrible ordeal. They have done so with a n.o.ble spirit, and young wounded men to whom I spoke yesterday, in the great crypt to which they had crawled down from the battlefield, all spoke of their experience as though they would go through as much again in order to ensure success, without bragging, with a full sense of the frightful hours, but with unbroken spirit.

"I am not out here to make a career," said a Canadian; "I am out to finish an ugly job."

It is to end this filthy war quickly that our men are fighting so grimly and with such deadly resolution. So the Londoners have fought their way into Wancourt and Hninel, and there were great uncut belts of wire before them--the new wire of the Hindenburg line--and trenches and strong points from which machine-guns gushed out waves of bullets. One of the strong points hereabouts is called the Egg, because of its oval hummock, which was hard to hatch and crack, but as one of our officers said to-day, the Egg gave forth two hundred prisoners.

In the fighting for the two villages the Londoners were held up by those great stretches of wire before them and were menaced most evilly by the enfilade fire of machine-guns from Gumappe and a high point south. Two Tanks came to the rescue, and did most daring things.