Letters from France Part 6

A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our sh.e.l.ls streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.

I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash over the parapet to our right--perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.

"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above our heads. We can hear the swish of our own sh.e.l.ls, perhaps 100 feet up, and the occasional rustle of some missile pa.s.sing overhead a good deal higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer sh.e.l.ls making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know, but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of that trench as to prevent German supports from reaching their front line without clambering into the open fields where our shrapnel is falling like hail.

But under those two streams of overhead traffic is a third quite easily distinguishable. It comes with short, descending screams--sheafs of them together.

At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the bang as of an exploding rocket.

That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute. We always know when that crash is coming by a certain fierce orange glare which lights up the tops of our sandbags immediately before we hear the sound. Three or four times the crash and the glare came together, and a big cloud of stuffy-smelling white smoke drifted low overhead, and bits of mud and earth cascaded down upon us from the sky above; and just for two minutes the sheaf of four sh.e.l.ls from some particular field battery, which sent them pa.s.sing as regularly as a clock about five times a minute overhead, seemed to lower and burst just above us; and one or two odd high-explosive bursts--4.2, I should say--crept in close upon us from the rear, while the parapet gave several ponderous jumps towards us from the other direction. One would swear that it had shifted inwards a good inch, though I do not suppose it had. The dazzling orange flashes and crashes close around us were rather like a bad dream. One could not resist the reflection that often comes over a man when he begins his holiday with a rough sea crossing, "How on earth did I ever imagine that there was advantage to be obtained out of this?"

That was the moment which was chosen by one of the party to go along and see that the men were all right. There was a sentry in the next bay of the trench. All by himself, but "right as rain," as he puts it. Shrapnel was breaking in showers on the parapet, swishing overhead like driven hail. While the enemy is bursting sh.e.l.l on your parapet he cannot come there himself. Provided that your sentry's nerves are all right, and that a "crump" does not drop right into his little section of trench, there is not much that can go wrong. And there is nothing much wanting in the nerves of this infantry.

However, something had clearly gone wrong with this attack. It was quite obvious that the enemy somehow or another knew that it was coming off, and where; for he had begun to shoot back within a very few minutes of our opening shot, and he was shooting very hard. Clearly he had noticed some point in our preparations, and he too had prepared. "I will teach these people a lesson this time," he thought, as he laid his guns on the likely section.

Right in the midst of all this uproar we heard one of his machine-guns cracking overhead. Then another joined in--we could hear them traversing from flank to front and round to flank again. "Of course, the raiders cannot have got in," one thought. "Perhaps he has seen them crossing No Man's Land, and those machine-guns are on to them in the open. Poor beggars! Not much chance for them now"--and one shivered at the thought of them out there, open and defenceless to that hail. As the minutes slipped on towards the hour, and our bombardment slackened, but the enemy's did not, and no one stirred at all in the trenches, one felt quite sure of it--of course, we had failed this time--well, we ought to expect such failures; we cannot always hope to jump into German trenches exactly whenever we please.

Just then a dark figure crept round the traverse of the b.u.t.tress of the trench. "Room in here?" he asked.

Two others came after him, bending, and then a fourth. We squeezed along to make room.

"Was you hit?" asked the second man of the first.

"Only a bang on the scalp, and I wouldn't have got that if it hadn't been for the prisoner--waiting to get him over."

"Keep your head down, Mac, you'll only get hit," said a third. "Where's Mr. Franks--you all right, sir?--Mr. Little was. .h.i.t, wasn't he?"

So these were the raiders, and they had come through it after all. They were rather distracted. The man next me wiped his forehead, and took a cigarette. He looked disinterestedly up at the sh.e.l.l-bursts, but he talked very little. He looked on the raid as a bit of a failure, clearly.

An hour later we heard all about it. The racket had quietened down. The enemy was contenting himself with throwing a few shrapnel sh.e.l.ls far back over communication trenches. We were in a room lighted with candles. In the midst of an interested crowd of half a dozen young officers was a youngster in grey cloth, with a mud be-spattered coat, a swollen face, and two bandaged hands. On the table were a coffee-pot, some cups, and biscuits, and a small heap of loot--gas masks and bayonets, and such stuff from German dug-outs. Most of the crowd was interestedly fingering a grey steel helmet with a heavy steel shield or visor in front of the forehead, evidently meant to be bullet-proof when the wearer looked over the parapet. The prisoner was murmuring something like "Durchgeschossen," "Durchgeschossen."

"He says he's shot through," said someone, who understood a little German.

"Oh, nonsense," broke in a youth; "you were shot through the hand, old man, but you were not shot there." The prisoner was pointing to his ribs.

"Oh, you've got a rat," said the youngster, as the man went on pointing to the same place. But he tore the man's shirt open quickly. "Yes, you have, sure enough," he exclaimed, showing the small, neat entry hole of a bullet in the side. "Here, sit down, old man, and take this," he added tenderly, giving the man a cup of warm coffee, and pressing him to a chair. The whole att.i.tude had changed to one of solicitude.

It was while the prisoner sat there that we heard about the raid. They clearly considered it something of a failure. They had to get through a ditch full of water to their necks, then some trip-wire, then a knee-deep entanglement, then a ditch full of rusty wire, then some "French" coils of barbed wire, then more wire knee-deep, with trip-wire after that. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was heavy. They simply went on over the parapet into the enemy's trench for a few minutes and killed with their bombs about a dozen Germans, and brought in as prisoners those who were left wounded. Every man of their own who was wounded they carried carefully back through the tempest in No Man's Land. The Germans had spent at least as much artillery ammunition as we had, and in spite of all the noise they had done wonderfully little damage. We put a dozen of them out of action till the end of the war--a dozen that our men saw and know of; and they may have put out of action five of ours.

As we took a tired prisoner to the hospital through the grey light of morning, I thought I would give, for a change, an account of a "failure."

[It was almost immediately after this that the Australians were brought down to the Somme battle. From this time on they left the neighbourhood of green fields and farmhouses and plunged into the brown, ploughed-up nightmare battlefield where the rain of sh.e.l.ls has practically never since ceased. They came into the battle in its second stage, exactly three weeks after the British.]

CHAPTER XV

POZIeRES

_France, July 26th._

I have been watching the units of a certain famous Australian force come out of action. They have fought such a fight that the famous division of British regular troops on their flank sent them a message to say that they were proud to fight by the side of them.

Conditions alter in a battle like this from day to day. But at the time when the British attack upon the second German line in Longueval and Bazentin ended, the farther village of Pozieres was left as the hub of the battle for the time being. This point is the summit of the hill on which the German second line ran. And, probably for that reason, the new line which the Germans had dug across from their second line to their third line--so as to have a line still barring our way when we had broken through their second line--branched off near Pozieres to meet the third line near Flers. The map of the situation at this stage of the battle will show better than a page of description why it was necessary that Pozieres should next be captured.

There were several days' interval between the failure of the first attack on Pozieres and the night on which the Australians were put at it. The Germans probably had little chance of improving their position in the meanwhile, for the village was kept under a slow bombardment with heavy sh.e.l.ls and shrapnel which made movement there dangerous. Our troops could see occasional parties of Germans hurrying through the tattered wood and powdered, tumbled foundations. The garrison lost men steadily, and on about the night of Thursday or Friday, July 20th or 21st, the Second Guard Reserve Division, which had been mainly responsible for holding this part of the line, was relieved; and a fresh division, from the lines in front of Ypres, was put in. The new troops brought in several days' rations with them, and never lacked food or water. It was probably a belated party of these new-comers that our men noticed wandering through the village in daytime.

During the afternoon of Sat.u.r.day our bombardment of Pozieres became heavier. Most of these ruined villages are marked on this sh.e.l.l-swept country by the trees around them. It is not that they originally stood in a woodland; but when the village is a mere heap of foundations powdered white the only relic of it left standing erect, if you except a battered wall or two, is the shredded trunks and stumps of trees which once made the gardens or orchards or hedges behind the houses. Our troops had three obstacles before them--first a shallow, hastily dug trench in the open in front of the trees around the village; then certain trenches running generally through the trees and hedges and behind a trench railway; thirdly, such lines as existed in the village itself. The village is strung out along a stretch of the Albert-Bapaume road up which the battle has advanced from the first. Just beyond the village, near what remains of the Pozieres Mill on the very top of the hill, is the German second line still (at time of writing) in possession of the Germans. Another line crossing the road in front of the village was then in their hands.

On Sat.u.r.day afternoon our heavy sh.e.l.ls were tearing at regular intervals into the rear of the brickheaps which once were houses, and flinging up branches of trees and great clouds of black earth from the woods. A German letter was found next day dated "In h.e.l.l's Trenches." It added: "It is not really a trench, but a little ditch, shattered with sh.e.l.ls--not the slightest cover and no protection. We have lost 50 men in two days, and life is unendurable." White puffs of shrapnel from field guns were lathering the place persistently, so that when the German trenches were broken down it was difficult to repair them or move in them.

Our men in their trenches were cleaning rifles, packing away spare kit, yarning there much as they yarned of old over the stockyard fence or the gate of the horse paddock.

That night, shortly after dark, there broke out the most fearful bombardment I have ever seen. As one walked towards the battlefield, the weirdly shattered woods and battered houses stood out almost all the time against one continuous band of flickering light along the eastern skyline. Most of it was far away to the east of our part of the battlefield--in some French or British sector on the far right. There must have been fierce fire upon Pozieres, too, for the Germans were replying to it, hailing the roads with shrapnel and trying to fill the hollows with gas sh.e.l.l. They must have suspected an attack upon this part of their line as well, and were trying to hamper the reserves from moving into position.

About midnight our field artillery lashed down its shrapnel upon the German front line in the open before the village. A few minutes later this fire lifted and the Australian attack was launched.

The Germans had opened in one part with a machine-gun before that final burst of shrapnel, and they opened again immediately after. But there would have been no possibility of stopping that charge with a fire twenty times as heavy. The difficulty was not to get the men forward, but to hold them. With a complicated night attack to be carried through it was necessary to keep the men well in hand.

The first trench was a wretchedly shallow affair in places. Most of the Germans in it were dead--some of them had been lying there for days. The artillery in the meantime had lifted on to the German trenches farther back. Later they lifted to a farther position yet. The Australian infantry dashed at once from the first position captured, across the intervening s.p.a.ce over the tramway and into the trees.

It was here that the first real difficulty arose along parts of the line. Some sections found in front of them the trench which they were looking for--an excellent deep trench which had survived the bombardment. Other sections found no recognisable trench at all, but a maze of sh.e.l.l craters and tumbled rubbish, or a simple ditch reduced to white powder. Parties went on through the trees into the village, searching for the position, and pushed so close to the fringe of their own sh.e.l.l fire that some were wounded by it. However, where they found no trench they started to dig one as best they could. Shortly after the bombardment shifted a little farther, and a third attack came through and swept, in most parts, right up to the position which the troops had been ordered to take up.

As daylight gradually spread over that bleached surface Australians could occasionally be seen walking about in the trees and through the part of the village they had been ordered to take. The position was being rapidly "consolidated." German snipers in the north-east of the village and across the main road could see them, too. A patrol was sent across the main road to find a sniper. It bombed some dug-outs which it found there, and from one of them appeared a white flag, which was waved vigorously. Sixteen prisoners came out, including a regimental doctor.

There were several other dug-outs in this part and various sc.r.a.ps of old trenches, probably the site of an old battery. The Germans, now that they had been driven from their main lines, were naturally fighting from the various sc.r.a.ps of isolated fortification which exist behind all positions. During the afternoon two patrols were sent to clear out other snipers from these half-hidden lurking places. But the garrison was sufficiently organised to summon up some sort of reserve, and the patrols had to come back after a short, sharp fight more or less in the open.

After dark, the Australians pushed across the road through the village.

By morning the position had been improved, so that nearly the whole village was secure against sudden attack.

An official report would read: "The same progress continued on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the whole of Pozieres was consolidated."

That is to say--in the heart of the village itself there was little more actual hand-to-hand fighting. All that happened there was that, from the time when the first day broke and found the Pozieres position practically ours, the enemy turned his guns on to it. Hour after hour--day and night--with increasing intensity as the days went on, he rained heavy sh.e.l.l into the area. It was the sight of the battlefield for miles around--that reeking village. Now he would send them crashing in on a line south of the road--eight heavy sh.e.l.ls at a time, minute after minute, followed up by burst upon burst of shrapnel. Now he would place a curtain, straight across this valley or that, till the sky and landscape were blotted out, except for fleeting glimpses seen as through a lift of fog. Gas sh.e.l.l, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear sh.e.l.l that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand--building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again and again and again.

What is a barrage against such troops! They went through it as you would go through a summer shower--too proud to bend their heads, many of them, because their mates were looking. I am telling you of things I have seen. As one of the best of their officers said to me, "I have to walk about as if I liked it--what else can you do when your own men teach you to?" The same thought struck me not once but twenty times.

On Tuesday morning the sh.e.l.ling of the day before rose to a crescendo, and then suddenly slackened. The German was attacking. It was only a few of the infantry who even saw him. The attack came in lines at fairly wide intervals up the reverse slope of the hill behind Pozieres windmill. Before it reached the crest it came under the sudden barrage of our own guns' shrapnel. The German lines swerved away up the hill.

The excited infantry on the extreme right could see Germans crawling over, as quickly as they might, from one sh.e.l.l crater to another, grey backs hopping from hole to hole. They blazed away hard; but most of our infantry never got the chance it was thirsting for. The artillery beat back that attack before it was over the crest, and the Germans broke and ran. Again the enemy's artillery was turned on. Pozieres was pounded more furiously than before, until by four in the afternoon it seemed to onlookers scarcely possible that humanity could have endured such an ordeal. The place could be picked out for miles by pillars of red and black dust towering above it like a Broken Hill dust-storm. Then Germans were reported coming on again, as in the morning. Again our artillery descended upon them like a hailstorm, and nothing came of the attack.

During all this time, in spite of the sh.e.l.ling, the troops were slowly working forwards through Pozieres; not backwards. Every day saw fresh ground gained. A great part of the men who were working through it had no more than two or three hours' sleep since Sat.u.r.day--some of them none at all, only fierce, hard work all the time.

The only relief to this one-sided struggle against machinery was the hand-to-hand fighting that occurred in the two trenches before-mentioned--the second-line German trench behind Pozieres and the similar trench in front of it. The story of it will be told some day--it would almost deserve a book to itself.

CHAPTER XVI