Letters from France Part 7

AN ABYSM OF DESOLATION

_France, August 1st._

When I went through Boiselle I thought it was the limit that desolation could reach. A wilderness of powdered chalk and broken brick, under which men had burrowed like rats, but with method, so as to make a city underneath the shattered foundations of the village. And then their rat city had been crushed in from above; and through the splintered timbered entrances you peered into a dark interior of dishevelled blankets and scattered clothing. It was only too evident that there had been no time as yet, in the hustle of battle, to search these ghastly, noisome dug-outs for the Germans who had been bombed there. The mine craters in the white chalk of La Boiselle are big enough to hide a large church.

But for sheer desolation it will not compare with Pozieres. On the top of a gently rising hill, over which the Roman road ran as is the way with Roman roads, was a pretty village, with its church, its cemetery under the shady trees; its orchards and picturesque village houses. When the lines crystallised in front of Albert it was some miles behind the German trenches. Our guns put a few sh.e.l.ls into it; but six weeks ago it was still a country village, somewhat wrecked but probably used for the headquarters of a German regiment. Then came the British bombardment for a week before the battle of the Somme.

The bombardment shattered Pozieres. Its buildings were scattered as you would scatter a house of toy bricks. Its trees began to look ragged. By the time Boiselle and Ovilliers were taken, and the front had pushed up to within a quarter or half a mile of Pozieres, a tattered wood was all that marked the spot. Behind the brushwood you could still see in three or four places the remains of a pink wall. Some way to the north-east of the village, near the actual summit of the hill, was a low heap of bleached terra-cotta. It was the stump of the Pozieres windmill.

Since then Pozieres has had our second bombardment, and a German bombardment which lasted four days, in addition to the normal German barrage across the village which has never really ceased. You can actually see more of the buildings than before. That is to say, you can see any brick or stone that stands. For the brushwood and tattered branches which used to hide the road have gone; and all that remain are charred tree stumps standing like a line of broken posts. The upland around was once cultivated land, and it should be green with the weeds of two years. It is as brown as the veldt. Over the whole face of the country sh.e.l.ls have ploughed up the land literally as with a gigantic plough, so that there is more red and brown earth than green. From the distance all the colour is given by these upturned crater edges, and the country is wholly red.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A MAIN STREET OF POZIeRES IN A QUIET INTERVAL DURING THE FIGHT]

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CHURCH, POZIeRES]

But even this did not prepare one for the desolation of the place itself. Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, G.o.d-forsaken up-country township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats, in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the top of the hill, and there you have Pozieres.

I know of nothing approaching that desolation. Perhaps it is that the place is still in the thick of the fight. In most other ruins behind battlefields that I have seen there are the signs of men again--perhaps men who have visited the place like yourself. There is life, anyhow, somewhere in the landscape. In this place there is no sign of life at all. When you stand in Pozieres to-day, and are told that you will find the front trench across another hundred yards of sh.e.l.l-holes, you know that there must be life in the landscape. The dead hill-side a few hundred yards before you must contain both your men and the Germans. But as in most battlefields, where the warmest corner is, there is the least sign of movement. Dry sh.e.l.l crater upon sh.e.l.l crater upon sh.e.l.l crater--all bordering one another until some fresh salvo shall fall and a.s.sort the old group of craters into a new one, to be rea.s.sorted again and again as the days go on. It is the nearest thing to sheer desert that I have seen since certain lonely rides into the old Sahara at the back of Mena Camp two years ago. Every minute or two there is a crash.

Part of the desert b.u.mps itself up into huge red or black clouds and subsides again. Those eruptions are the only movement in Pozieres.

That is the country in which our boys are fighting the greatest battle Australians have ever fought. Of the men whom you find there, what can one say? Steadfast until death, just the men that Australians at home know them to be; into the place with a joke, a dry, cynical, Australian joke as often as not; holding fast through anything that man can imagine; stretcher bearers, fatigue parties, messengers, chaplains, doing their job all the time, both new-joined youngsters and old hands, without fuss, but steadily, because it _is_ their work. They are not heroes; they do not want to be thought or spoken of as heroes. They are just ordinary Australians doing their particular work as their country would wish them to do it. And pray G.o.d Australians in days to come will be worthy of them!

CHAPTER XVII

POZIeRES RIDGE

_France, August 14th._

You would scarcely realise it from what the world has heard, but I think that the hardest battle ever fought by Australians was probably the battle of Pozieres Ridge.

There have been four distinct battles fought by the Australian troops on the Somme since they made their first charge from the British trenches near Pozieres. The first was the heavy three days' fight by which they took Pozieres village. The second was the fight in which they tried to rush the German second line along the hill-crest behind Pozieres. The third was the attack in which this second line was broken by them along a front of a mile and a half. The fourth has been the long fight which immediately began along the German second line northwards from the new position, along the ridge towards Mouquet Farm. It has been hard fighting all the way, and what was three weeks ago a German salient into the British line is now a big Australian salient into the German line. But I think that the hardest fight of all was that of the second and third phases--the battle for Pozieres Ridge.

Pozieres village itself was not on the crest of the hill. It was on the British side of it, where the German was naturally hanging on because it was almost the highest point in his position and gave him a view over miles of our territory. On the other hand, the German main second line behind Pozieres was practically on the summit; in some parts farther north it was actually on or just over the summit. It was from two to seven hundred yards beyond the village itself.

The German line on the hill-crest was attacked as soon as ever the village was properly cleared. The Australians went at it in the night across a wide strip of waste hill-top. The thistles there, and the brown earth churned up in sh.e.l.l craters, and the absolute absence of any kind of movement (simply because it was too dangerous to move), call to one's mind Shakespeare's old stage direction of a "blasted heath." There had been a short artillery preparation; the attack reminded one of our old raids up on the Armentieres front.

I have seen Germans who were in the line in front of that attack. They state that they were not surprised. In the light of their flares they had seen numbers of "Englishmen" advancing over the shoulder of the hill. When the rush came, one German officer told me, he, in his short sector of the line alone, had three machine-guns all hard at work. The attack reached the remnants of the German wire. Some brave men picked a path through the tangle, and, in spite of the cross-fire, managed to reach the German trench. They were very few. We have since discovered men in the craters even beyond the front German trench. The German officer told me that his men had afterwards found an Australian who had been lying in a crater in front of his line for four days. He had been shot through the abdomen and had a broken leg, but he had been brought in by the Germans and was doing well. We also afterwards brought in both Australians and Germans who had been out there for six days, wounded, living on what rations they had with them.

It was a brave attack. On the extreme left it succeeded. But the trenches won by the Victorians there were on the flank, not on the hill-top. The country behind that crest, sloping gradually down to the valley of Courcelette and beyond, where the German field batteries were firing and where the Germans could come and go unseen--all this was so far an unknown land into which no one on the British side had peered since the battle began.

Six days later the Australians went for that position again. They attacked just after dusk. There was enough light to make out the face of the country as if by a dim moonlight. They were the same troops who had made the attack a week before, because there was a determination that they, and they alone, should reach that line. The artillery had been pounding it gradually during the week.

The German troops who were holding that part were about to be relieved.

They had suffered from the slow, continual bombardment. There were deep dug-outs in their trenches, where they saved the men as far as possible, but one after another these would be crushed or blocked by a heavy sh.e.l.l. The tired companies had lost in some cases actually half their men by this sh.e.l.l fire, losing them slowly, day by day, as a man might bleed to death. The remainder had their packs made up ready to march out to rest. The young officer of one of the relieving battalions was actually coming into the trenches at the head of his platoon--when there crashed on them a sudden hail of sh.e.l.l fire. The officer extended his men hurriedly and pushed on. It was about half-past ten by German time, which is half-past nine by ours.

The first sight that met him, as he reached the support line of German trenches, was two wounded Australians lying in the bottom of it. So the British must be attacking, he thought. He ordered his platoon to advance over the trench and counter-attack. But in the dark and the dust they lost touch and straggled to the north--he saw no more of them. He tumbled on with two men into a sh.e.l.l crater and began to improve it for defence--then they found Australians towering around them in the dark.

They surrendered.

It was a most difficult business to get the various parties for our attack into position in the night, and some of the troops behind had to be pushed forward hurriedly. In consequence the officers out in front had to carry on as if theirs were the only troops in the attack, and see the whole fight through without relying upon supports. The way in which junior officers and N.C.O.'s have acted upon their own initiative during some of this fighting has been beyond praise. The attack went through up to time. The supports had to come in parties organised in the dark on the spur of the moment. The Germans had several machine-guns going. But as another German officer told me, "This time they came on too thick. We might have held them in front, but they got in on one side of us; then we heard they were in on the other; then they came from the rear as well--on all four sides. What could we do?"

Almost immediately after the Australians reached the trenches, watchers far behind could see the horizon beyond them lit by five slow illuminations, about ten minutes' interval between each. They were beyond the crest of the hill. I do not know, but I think the German must have been blowing up his field-gun ammunition.

The men in the new trenches may, or may not, have seen this. What they did notice, as soon as the battle cleared and they had time to look into the darkness in front of them, was a succession of brilliant glares from some position just hidden by the slope of the hill. It was the flash of the German guns which were firing at them. It is, as far as I know, the first time in this battle that our men have seen the actual flash of the enemy's guns.

When day broke they found beyond them a wide, flat stretch of hill-top, with a distant hill line beyond. Far down the slope there were Germans moving. And in the distant landscape they saw the German gun teams limber up and hurry away with the field guns which for a fortnight had been firing upon our men.

The Germans have twice afterwards attacked that position. In the early light of the first morning a party of them came tumbling up from some trench against a sector of the captured line. In front of them was an officer, well ahead, firing his automatic pistol as he went, levelling it first at one Australian, then at another, as he saw them in the trenches before him. He was shot, and the attack quickly melted; it never seemed very serious. Two days later, after a long, heavy bombardment, the Germans attacked again--this time about fifteen hundred of them. They penetrated the two trenches at one point, but our company officers, again acting on their own initiative, charged them straight, on the instant, without hesitation. Every German in that section was captured, and a few Australians, whom they had taken, were released.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE GREEN COUNTRY

_France, August 28th._

For a mile the country had been flayed. The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open--it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of gra.s.s or a thistle to clothe its nakedness--covered with the wreckage of men and of their works as the relics of a shipwreck cover the uneasy sea.

As we dodged over the last undulations of an unused trench, the crest of each crater brought us for an instant into view of something beyond--something green and fresh and brilliant, like new land after a long sea journey. Then we were out of view of it again, for a time; until we came to a point where it seemed good to climb and peep over the low parapet.

It was a peep into paradise. Before us lay a green country. There was a rich verdure on the opposite hills. Beyond them ran a valley filled with the warm haze of summer, out of which the round tree-tops stood dark against the still higher hills beyond. The wheat was ripe upon the far hill slopes. The sun bathed the lap of the land with his midday summer warmth. Along the crest of the distant hills ran the line of tall, regular trees which in this country invariably means a road. A church spire rose from a tree clump on a nearer crest. Some of the foreground was pitted with the ugly red splashes which have become for us, in this horrible area, the normal feature of the countryside. But, beyond it, was the green country spread out like a picture, sleeping under the heat of a summer's sun.

It was the promised land--the country behind the German lines--the valley about Bapaume where the Germans have been for two years undisturbed in French territory, until our troops for the first time peeped over the ridge the other day at the flashes of the very German guns which were firing at them.

Quite close at hand was a wood. The trees were not more than half a mile away, if that. It was a growing wood--with the green still on the branches, very different from the charred posts and tree stumps which are all that now remain of the gardens and orchards of Pozieres. I remember a little over a month ago, when some of us first went up near to Pozieres village--on the day when the bombardment before our first attack was tearing branches from off the trees a hundred yards away--Pozieres had a fairly decent covering then. There was enough dead brushwood and twigs, at any rate, to hide the buildings of the place. A few pink walls could then be half seen behind the branches, or topping the gaps in the scrub.

Within four days the screen in front of Pozieres had been torn to shreds--had utterly disappeared. The German bombardment ripped off all that the British had left. The buildings now stood up quite naked, such as they were. There was the church--still recognisable by one window; and a sc.r.a.p of red wall at the north-east end of the village, past which you then had to crawl to reach an isolated run of trench facing the windmill. Both trench and red wall have long since gone to glory. I doubt if you could even trace either of them now. The solitary arched window disappeared early, and a tumbled heap of bricks is all that now marks Pozieres church. One sc.r.a.p of gridironed roof sticking out from the powdered ground cross-hatches the horizon. There is not so much foliage left as would shelter a c.o.c.k sparrow.

But here were we, with this desolation behind us, looking out suddenly and at no great distance on quite a respectable wood. It tempted you to step out there and just walk over to it--I never see that country without the feeling that one is quite free to step across there and explore it.

There are men coming up the farther side of the slope--men going about some normal business of the day as our men go about theirs in the places behind their lines.

Those men are Germans; and the village in the trees, the collection of buildings half guessed in the wood, is Courcelette. It has been hidden ground to us for so long that you feel it is almost improper to be overlooking them so constantly; like spending your day prying over into your neighbour's yard. Away in the landscape behind, in some hollow, there humps itself into the air a big geyser of chestnut dust. One has seen German sh.e.l.l burst so often in that fashion, back in our hinterland, that it takes a moment to realise that this sh.e.l.l is not German but British. I cannot see what it is aimed at--some battery, I suppose; or perhaps a much-used road; or some place they suspect to be a headquarters. Clearly, it is not always so safe as it seems to be in the green country behind the German lines.

CHAPTER XIX

TROMMELFEUER

_France, August 21st._