Letters from France Part 10

The fight that raged for two days on this ridge was not one of those in which the enemy put up his hands as soon as our men came on to him. Far on the top of the hill to the right, and in the maze of trenches between, and in the dug-outs of the farm on the left, he was fighting stiffly over the whole front. In the dim light, as the party which was to take the farm rushed into it, a machine-gun was barking at them from somewhere inside that rubbish yard itself. They could hear the bark obviously very close to them, but it was impossible to say where it came from, whether thirty yards away or fifty. They knew it must be firing from behind one of the heaps of rubbish where the entrances of the dug-outs probably were, firing obliquely and to its rear at the men who rushed past it. They chose the heap which seemed most probable, and fired six rifle grenades all at once into it. There was a clatter and dust; the machine-gun went out like a candle. Later they found it lying smashed at the mouth of a shaft there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE TUMBLED HEAP OF BRICKS AND TIMBER WHICH THE WORLD KNOWS AS MOUQUET FARM]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "PAST THE MUD-HEAPS Sc.r.a.pED BY THE ROAD GANGS" (_See p.

192_).]

The Germans fought them from their rat-holes. When a man peered down the dark staircase shaft, he sometimes received a shot from below, sometimes a rifle grenade fired through a hole in a sandbag barricade, which the Germans had made at the bottom of the stair. Occasionally a face would be seen peering up from below--for they refused to come out--and our men would fling down a bomb or fire a couple of shots. But those on the top of the stair always have the advantage. The Germans were bombed and shot out of entrance after entrance, and at last came up through the only exit left to them. Finding Australians swarming through the place, they surrendered; and the whole garrison of Mouquet Farm was accounted for. Those who were not lying dead in the craters and dust-heap were prisoners. Mouquet Farm was ours, and a line of Australian infantry was entrenching itself far ahead of it.

On the ridge the charge had farther to go. It swarmed over one German trench and on to a more distant one. The Germans fought it from their trench. The rush was a long one, and the German had time to find his feet after the bombardment. But the men he was standing up to were the offshoot of a famous Queensland regiment; and, though the German guardsmen showed more fight than any Germans we have met, they had no match for the fire of these boys. The trench is said to have been crowded with German dead and wounded. On the left the German tried at once to bomb his way back into the trench he had lost, and for a time he made some headway. Part of the line was driven out of the trench into the craters on our side of it. But before the bombing party had gone far, the Queenslanders were into the trench again with bomb and bayonet, and the trenches on the right flank of the attack were solidly ours.

The Queenslanders who reached this trench and took it, found themselves looking out over a wide expanse of country. Miles in front of them, and far away to their flank, there stretched a virgin land. They were upon the crest of the ridge, and the landscape before them was the country behind the German lines. Except for a gentle rise, somewhat farther northward behind Thiepval, they had reached about the highest point upon the northern end of the ridge.

The connecting trenches, between Mouquet Farm and the ridge above and behind it, were attacked by the Tasmanians. The fire was very heavy, and for a moment it looked as if this part of the line, and the Queenslanders immediately next to it, would not be able to get in.

Officer after officer was. .h.i.t. Leading amongst these was a senior captain, an officer old for his rank, but one who was known to almost every man in the force as one of the most striking personalities in Gallipoli. He had two sons in the Australian force, officers practically of his own rank. He was one of the first men on to Anzac Beach; and was the last Australian who left it: Captain Littler.

I had seen him just as he was leaving for the fight, some hours before.

He carried no weapon but a walking-stick. "I have never carried anything else into action," he said, "and I am not going to begin now." He was ill with rheumatism and looked it, and the doctor had advised that he ought not to be with his company. But he came back to them that evening for the fight; and one could see that it made a world of difference to them. He was a man whom his own men swore by. Personally, one breathed more easily knowing that he was with them. It would be his last big fight, he told me.

Half-way through that charge, in the thick of the whirl of it, he was seen standing, leaning heavily upon his stick. It was touch and go at the moment whether the trench was won or lost. "Are you hit, sir?"

asked several around him. Then they noticed a gash in his leg and the blood running from it--and he seemed to be hit through the chest as well.

"I will reach that trench if the boys do," he said.

"Have no fear of that, sir," was the answer. A sergeant asked him for his stick. Then--with the voice of a big man, like his officer, the sergeant shouted, and waved his stick, and took the men on. In the half-dark his figure was not unlike that of his commander. They made one further rush and were in the trench.

They were utterly isolated in the trench when they reached it. A German machine-gun was cracking away in the same trench to their right, firing between them and the trench they had come from. There was barbed wire in front of it. When they tried to force a way with bombs up the trench to the gun, German bombers in craters behind the trench showered bombs on to them. Then a sergeant crawled out between the wire and the machine-gun--crawled on his stomach right up to the gun and shot the gunner with his revolver. "I've killed three of them," he said, as he crawled back. Presently a sh.e.l.l fell on him and shattered him. But our bombers, like the Germans, crept out into craters behind the trench, and bombed the German bombers out of their shelter. That opened the way along the trench, and they found the three machine-gunners, shot as the sergeant had said. The Tasmanians went swiftly along the trench after that, and presently saw a row of good Australian heads in a sap well in front of them. There went up a cheer. Other German guardsmen, who had been lying in craters in front of the trench, and in a sc.r.a.p of trench beyond, heard the cheering; seeing that there were Australians on both sides of them, they stumbled to their feet and threw up their hands.

They were marched off to the rear, and the Tasmanians joined up with the Queenslanders.

So the centre was joined to the right. On the left it was uncertain whether it was joined or not. There was a line of trench to be seen on that side running back towards the German lines. It was merely a more regular line of mud amongst the irregular mud-heaps of the craters; but there were the heads of the men looking out from it--so clearly it was a trench. As the light grew they could make out men leaning on their arms and elbows, looking over the parapet. Every available gla.s.s was turned on them, but it was too dark still to see if they were Australians. Two scouts were sent forward, creeping from hole to hole. Both were shot. A machine-gun was turned at once on to the line of heads. They started hopping back down their tumbled sap towards the German rear. Clearly they were Germans. The machine-gun made fast practice as the line of backs showed behind the parapet.

There were Germans, not Australians, in the trenches on the Tasmanians'

left--in the same trench as they. The flank there was in the air. There was nothing to do except to barricade the trench and hold the flank as best they could.

And for the next two days they held it, sh.e.l.led with every sort of gun and trench mortar, although fresh companies of the Prussian Guard Reserve constantly filed in to the gap which existed between this point and Mouquet Farm. Their old leader, who had promised to reach that trench with them, was not there. They found him lying dead within a few yards of it, straight in front of the machine-gun which they had silenced. So Littler had kept his promise--and lost his life. They had a young officer and a few sergeants. All through that day their numbers slowly dwindled. They held the trench all the next night, and in the grey dawn of the second day a sentry, looking over the trench, saw the Germans a little way outside of it. As he pointed them out he fell back shot through the head. They told the Queenslanders, and the Queenslanders came out instantly and bombed from their side, in rear of the Germans. The Queensland officer was shot dead, but the Germans were cleared out or killed.

That afternoon the Germans attacked that open flank with heavy artillery. For hours sh.e.l.l after sh.e.l.l crashed into the earth around. A heavy battery found the barricade and put its four big sh.e.l.ls systematically round it. They reduced the garrison as far as possible, and four or five only were kept by the barricade. They were not all Australians now.

For the end of the Australian work was coming very near. But that occasion deserves a letter to itself.

CHAPTER XXIV

HOW THE AUSTRALIANS WERE RELIEVED

_France, September 19th._

It was before the moment at which my last letter ended that the time had come for the first relieving troops to be drafted into the fight.

I shall not forget the first I saw of them. We were at a certain headquarters not a thousand miles from the enemy's barrage. Messages had dribbled through from each part of the attacking line telling exactly where every portion of it had got to; or rather telling where each portion believed it had got to--as far as it could judge by sticking up its collective head from sh.e.l.l craters and broken-down trench walls and staring out over the limitless sea of craters and crabholes which surrounded it. As the only features in the landscape were a ragged tree stump, and what looked like the remains of a broken fish basket over the horizon, all very distant--and a dozen sh.e.l.l-bursts and the bark of an unseen machine-gun, all very close--the determination was apt to be a trifle erratic. Still, the points were marked down, where each handful believed and trusted itself to be. The next business was to fill up certain gaps. An order was dispatched to the supports. They were to send an officer to receive instructions.

He came. He was a man nearing middle age, erect, tough as wire, with lines in his face such as hard fighting and responsibility leave on the face of every soldier.

The representative of authority upon the spot--an Australian who also had faced ugly scenes--explained to him quietly where he wished him to take his men, into such and such a corner, by such and such a route. It meant plunging straight into the thick of the Somme battle, with all its unknown horrors--everyone there knew that. But the new-comer said quietly, "Yes, sir"--and climbed up and out into the light.

It was not an Australian who spoke. That "Yes, sir" came unmistakably from the other side of the Pacific. It was the first of the Canadians upon the Somme battlefield.

An hour or so later an Australian officer, moving along with his men to improve an exposed and isolated trench (a trench which was outflanked already, and enfiladed, and in half a dozen ways unhealthy) into a condition to be held against any attacks at all costs--found, coming across the open towards his exposed flank, a line of stalwart men in kilts. His men were dead tired, the enemy's sh.e.l.l-fire was constant and heavy, grey heads and helmets constantly seen behind a red mud parapet, across a hundred yards of red mud craters, proved that the Prussian Guard Reserve was getting ready to counter-attack him. Every message he sent back to Headquarters finished, "But we will hold this trench."

And yet here the new men came--a line of them, stumbling from crater into crater, and by one of those unaccountable chances that occur in battles, only two or three of them were hit in crossing over. They dropped into the trench by the side of the Australians. Their bombers went to the left to relieve the men who had been holding the open flank.

They brought in with them keen, fresh faces and bodies, and an all-important supply of bombs. It was better than a draught of good wine.

So it was that the first of the Canadians arrived.

Long before the last Australian platoon left that battered line, these first Canadians were almost as tired as they. For thirty-six hours they had piled up the same barricades, garrisoned the same sh.e.l.l-holes, were shattered by the same sh.e.l.ls. Twenty-four hours after the Canadians came, the vicious bombardment described in the last letter descended on the flank they both were holding. They were buried together by the heavy sh.e.l.l-bursts. They dug each other out. When the garrison became so thin that whole lengths of trench were without a single unwounded occupant, they helped each others' wounded down to the next length, and built another barricade, and held that.

Finally, when hour after hour pa.s.sed and the incessant sh.e.l.ling never ceased, the garrison was withdrawn a little farther; and then five of them went back to the barricade which the enemy's artillery had discovered. They sat down in the trench behind it. A German battery was trying for it--putting its four big high-explosive sh.e.l.ls regularly round it--salvo after salvo as punctual as clockwork. It was only a matter of time before the thing must go.

So the five sat there--Tasmanians and Canadians--and discussed the rival methods of wheat growing in their respective dominions in order to keep their thoughts away from that inevitable sh.e.l.l.

It came at last, through their shelter--slashed one man across the face, killed two and left two--smashed the barricade into a sc.r.a.p-heap. Then others were brought to stand by. Sh.e.l.ls were falling anything from thirty to forty in the minute. One of the remaining Tasmanian sergeants--a Lewis gunner--came back from an errand, crawling, wounded dangerously through the neck. "I don't want to go away," he said. "If I can't work a Lewis gun, I can sit by another chap and tell him how to."

In the end, when he was sent away, he was seen crawling on two knees and one hand, guiding with the other hand a fellow gunner who had been hit.

That night a big gun, much bigger than the rest, sent its sh.e.l.ls roaring down through the sky somewhere near. The men would be waked by the shriek of each sh.e.l.l and then fall asleep and be waked again by the crash of the explosion. And still they held the trench. And still every other message ended--"But we will hold on."

They had withdrawn a little to where they could hold during the night; but before the grey morning, the moment the bombardment had eased, they crept back again lest the Germans should get there first.

With the light came a reinforcement of new Canadians--grand fellows in great spirit. And the last Australian was during that morning withdrawn.

It was the most welcome sight in all the world to see those troops come in. Not that the tired men would ever admit that it was necessary. As one report from an Australian boy said, "The reinforcement has arrived.

Captain X---- may tell you that the Australians are done. Rot!"

Whether they were done or whether they were not, they spoke of those Canadian bombers in a way it would have done Canadian hearts good to hear. Australians and Canadians fought for thirty-six hours in those trenches inextricably mixed, working under each others' officers. Their wounded helped each other from the front. Their dead lie and will lie through all the centuries hastily buried beside the tumbled trenches and sh.e.l.l-holes where, fighting as mates, they died.

And the men who had hung on to that flank almost within shouting distance of Mouquet for two wild days and nights--they came out of the fight asking, "Can you tell me if we have got Mouquet Farm?"

We had not. The fierce fighting in the broken centre had enabled us to hold all the ground gained upon the crest. But through this same gap the Germans had come back against the farm. They swarmed in upon its garrison, driving in gradually the men who were holding that flank.

Under heavy sh.e.l.l-fire the line dwindled and dwindled until the Western Australians, who had won the farm and held it for five hours, numbered barely sufficient to make good their retirement. The officer left in charge there, himself wounded, ordered the remnant to withdraw. And the Germans entered the farm again.

But on the crest the line held. The Prussian Guard Reserve counter-attacked it three times, and on the last occasion the Queenslanders had such deadly shooting against Germans in the open as cheered them in spite of all their fatigue. I saw those Queenslanders marching out two days later with a step which would do credit to a Guards regiment going in.

So ended a fight as hard as Australians have ever fought.

Mouquet Farm was taken a fortnight later in a big combined advance of British and Canadians. The Farm itself held out many hours after the line had pa.s.sed it, and was finally seized by a pioneer battalion, working behind our lines.