My Second Year of the War Part 22

Secure in their dugouts from bombardment, the first that the Germans, in their systematized confidence that the enemy would not try for a second objective that day, knew of the presence of the Canadians was when the attackers were at the door and a St. Lawrence River incisiveness was calling on the occupants to come out as they were prisoners--which proves the advantage of being quick. The second wave was left to "mop up" while the first wave pa.s.sed on through the village to nail down the prize by digging new trenches. Thus, they had their second objective, though on the left of the line where the action had been against a part of the old first-line system of trenches progress had been slow and fighting bitter.

The Canadians who had to "mop up" had the "time of their lives" and some ticklish moments. What a scene! Germans in clean uniforms coming out of their dugouts blinking in surprise at their undoing and in disgust, resentment and suppressed rage! Canadians, dust-covered from sh.e.l.l-bursts, eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in the midst of shouts of congratulation and directions to prisoners among the ruins, and the German commander so angered by the loss of the village that he began pouring in sh.e.l.ls on Germans and Canadians at the same time! Two colonels were among the captured, a regimental and a battalion commander. The senior was a baron--one cannot leave him out of any narrative--and inclined to bear himself with patrician contempt toward the Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons in his situation with every Canadian more or less of a king that day. When he tried to start his men into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the result that the uprising was nipped in the bud and the baron was shot through the leg, leaving him still "fractious and patronizing." Then the little colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself.

One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian. No other Canadian battalion will deny them the glory that they won that day, and it must have been irritating to the German baron to surrender superior numbers to the stocky type that we see in New England factory towns and on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the battalion, the frontiersmen, the _courrier de bois_, having been mostly killed in the salient. Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked him how he felt after he received the clout from a sh.e.l.l-fragment, remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache!

"You have the military cross!" I said.

"Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria Cross!" he replied, saluting.

Talk about "the spirit that quickeneth!"

Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of nave unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a sh.e.l.l and finding, "'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had taken hold of them as it had of the rest of Canada they would not have been found wanting.

"'I golly!" they had to fight from the very fact that there were only a few to strike for old France and for the martial honor of Quebec. And they held all they took as st.u.r.dily as the other Canadian battalion in front of the village when the Germans awakened to revenge for the loss of Courcelette.

From start to finish of that great day it had been quickness that counted; quickness to realize opportunities; alertness of individual action in "mopping up" after the village was taken; prompt adaptability to situations which is the gift of the men of a new country; and that individual confidence of the Canadian once he was not tied to a trench and might let his initiative have full play, man to man, which is not a thing of drill or training but of inheritance and environment. On the right, Martinpuich was taken by the British and also held.

It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had pa.s.sed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the sh.e.l.l-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, sh.e.l.l-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, mud-spattered, but in the joy of having made good when their turn came, and in a way that was an exemplification of Canadian character in every detail. "Heap good!" I suppose that big Sioux Indian, looking as natural seated in a trench in his imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange business, but high explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion.

With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of the _Fleur-de-lis_. Officers and men of every walk of life called to a new occupation, a democracy out of the west submitting to discipline had been inured and trained to a new life of risk and comradeship and sacrifice for a cause. It will seem strange to be out of khaki and to go to the office, or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn; "but," as one man said, "we'll manage to adapt ourselves to it without spending nights in a mud hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs over the fence in order to make the change gradual."

XXIX

THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES

High and low visibilities--Low Visibility a pro-German--High Visibility and his harvest smile--Thirty villages taken by the British--The 25th of September--The Road of the Entente--Twelve miles of artillery fire--Two villages taken--Combles--British and French meet in a captured village--English stubbornness--Dugouts holding a thousand men--Capture of Thiepval.

Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the "zero" of an attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.

Low Visibility, a pro-German who was in his element in the Ypres salient in midwinter, delighted in rain, mist, fog and thick summer haze--anything that prevented observers from seeing the burst of sh.e.l.ls, transformed sh.e.l.l-craters into miniature lakes and fields into mire to founder charges, and stalled guns.

High Visibility was as merry as his wicked brother was dour. He sent the sunlight streaming into your room in the morning, washed the air of particles enabling observers to see sh.e.l.l-bursts at long range, and favored successful charges under accurate curtains of fire--the patron saint of all modern artillery work, who would be most at home in Arizona where you could carry on an offensive the year around.

During September his was a glad harvest smile which revealed figures on the chalk welts a mile away as clearly as if within a stone's throw under the gla.s.ses and limned the tree-trunks of ruined villages in sharp outlines. He was your companion now when you might walk up the Ridge and, standing among sh.e.l.l-craters still as a frozen sea where but lately an inferno had raged, look out across the fields toward new lines of sh.e.l.l fire and newly won villages on lower levels. He helped to make the month of September when he was most needed the most successful month of the offensive, with its second great attack on the 25th turning the table of losses entirely against the Germans and bringing many guests to the prisoners' inclosures.

These were days that were rich with results, days of harvest, indeed, when the ceaseless fighting on the Ridge and the iron resolution of a commander had its reward; when advances gathered in villages till the British had taken thirty and the French, with fresh efforts after their own chipping away at strong points, also had jumping-off places for longer drives as they swung in with their right on the Somme in combination with British attacks.

The two armies advanced as one on the 25th. The scene recalled the splendor of the storming of Contalmaison which, if not for its waste and horror, might lead men to go to war for the glory of the panorama--glorious to the observer in this instance when he thought only of the spectacle, in a moment of oblivion to the hard work of preparation and the savage work of execution. Our route to a point of observation for the attack which was at midday took us along the Road of the Entente, as I called it, where French battalions marched with British battalions, stately British motor trucks mixed with the lighter French vehicles, and Gaul sat resting on one side of the road and Briton on the other as German prisoners went by, and there was a mingling of blue and khaki which are both of low visibility against the landscape yet as distinct as the characters of the two races, each with its own way of fighting true to racial bent yet accomplishing its purpose.

Just under the slope where we sat the British guns linked up with the French. To the northward the British were visible right away past Ginchy and Guillemont to Flers and the French clear to the Somme. We were almost midway of a twelve-mile stretch of row upon row of flashes of many calibers, the French more distinct at the foot of a slope fearlessly in the open like the British, a long machine-loom of gunnery with some monsters far back sending up great clouds of black smoke from Mt. St. Quentin which hid our view of Peronne.

Now it was all together for the guns in the preliminary whirlwind, with _soixante-quinzes_ ahead sparkling up and down like the flashes of an automatic electric sign, making a great, thrumming beat of sound in the valley, and the 120's near by doing their best, too, with their wicked crashes, while the ridges beyond were a bobbing canopy of looming, curling smoke. The units of the two armies might have been wired to a single switchboard with heartbeats under blue and khaki jackets timed together in the final expression of _entente cordiale_ become _entente furieuse_.

The sunlight had the golden kindness of September and good Brother High Visibility seemed to make it a personal matter to-day against the Kaiser. Distinct were the moving figures of the gunners and bright was the gleam of the empty sh.e.l.ls dropping out of the breach of the _soixante-quinze_ as the barrel swung back in place and of the loaded sh.e.l.ls going home; distinct were paths and trenches and all the detail of the tired, worn landscape, with the old trenches where we were sitting tumbling in and their sides fringed with wild gra.s.s and weeds, which was Nature's own little say in the affair and a warning that in a few years after the war she and the peasant will have erased war's landmarks.

The lifting of the barrage as the infantry went in was signaled to the eye when the canopy of sh.e.l.l-smoke began to grow thin and gossamery for want of fresh bursts and another was forming beyond, as if the master hand at such things had lifted a long trail of cloud from one set of crests to another; only, nature never does things with such mathematical precision. All in due order to keep its turn in the program the German artillery began to reply according to its system of distribution, with guns and ammunition plentiful but inferior in quant.i.ty to the French.

They did not like that stretch of five hundred yards behind a slope where they thought that the most troublesome batteries were, and the puffs of shrapnel smoke thickened dimming the flashes from the bursting jackets until a wall of mist hung there. A torrent of five-point-nines was tearing up fresh craters with high explosives back of other gun positions, and between the columns of smoke we saw the French gunners going on unconcerned by this plowing of the landscape which was not disturbing them.

Far off on the plain where a British ammunition train was visible the German loosed more anger, whipping the fields into geysers; but the caissons moved on as if this were a signal of all aboard for the next station without the Germans being aware that their target was gone. A British battery advancing at another point evidently was not in view of the Germans two thousand yards away, though good Brother High Visibility gave our gla.s.ses the outline of the horses at five thousand yards.

Thus, you watched to see what the Germans were shooting at, with suspense at one point and at another the joy of the observer who sees the one who is "it" in blind man's buff missing his quarry. Some shrapnel searching a road in front and a scream overhead indicated a parcel of high explosives for a village at the rear. In Morval where houses were still standing, their white walls visible through the gla.s.ses, there was a kind of flash which was not that of a sh.e.l.l but prolonged, like a windowpane flaming under the sun, which we knew meant that the village was taken, as was also Gueudecourt we learned afterward.

Reserves were filing along a road between the tiers of guns, helmets on the backs of heads French fashion when there is no fire, with the easy marching stride of the French and figures disappeared and reappeared on the slope as they advanced. Wounded were coming along the winding gray streak of highway near where we sat and a convoy of prisoners pa.s.sed led by a French guard whose att.i.tude seemed to have an eye-twinkling of "See who's here and see what I've got!" Not far away was a French private at a telephone.

"It goes well!" he said. "Rancourt is taken and we are advancing on Fregicourt. Combles is a ripe plum."

All the while Combles had been an oasis in the sh.e.l.l fire, the one place that had immunity, although it had almost as much significance in the imagination of the French people as Thiepval in that of the English.

They looked forward to its storming as a set dramatic event and to its fall as one of the turning-points in the campaign. Often a position which was tactically of little importance, to our conception, would become the center of great expectations to the outside world, while the conquest of a strong point with its nests of machine guns produced no responsive thrill.

Combles was a village and a large village, its size perhaps accounting for the importance a.s.sociated with it when it had almost none in a military sense. Yet correspondents knew that readers at the breakfast table would be hungry for details about Combles, where the taking of the Schwaben Redoubt or Regina Trench, which were defended savagely, had no meaning. Its houses were very distinct, some being but little damaged and some of the shade trees still retaining their branches. This town nestling in a bowl was not worth the expenditure of much ammunition when what the Germans wanted to hold and the Anglo-French troops to gain was the hills around it. Rancourt was the other side of Combles, which explains the plum simile.

The picturesque thing was that the British troops were working up on one side of Combles and the French on the other side; and the next morning after the British had gathered in some escaping Germans who seemed to have lost their way, the blue and the khaki met in the main street without indulging in formal ceremonies and exchanged a "Good morning!"

and "_Bon jour!_" and "Here we are! Voyla! Quee p.a.w.nsays-vous!" and "ca va bien! Oh, yais, I tink so!" and found big piles of sh.e.l.ls and other munitions which the Germans could not take away and cellars with many wounded who had been brought in from the hills--and that was all there was to it: a march in and look around, when for glory's sake, at least, the victors ought to have delivered congratulatory addresses. But tired soldiers will not do that sort of thing. I shall not say that they are spoiling pictures for the Salon, for there are incidents enough to keep painters going for a thousand years; which ought to be one reason for not having a war for another thousand!

As for Thiepval, the British staff, inconsiderate of the correspondents this time--they really were not conducting the war for us--did not inform us of the attack, being busy those days reaping villages and trenches after they were over the Ridge while High Visibility had Low Visibility shut up in the guardhouse. Besides, the British were so near Thiepval as the result of their persistent advances that its taking was only another step forward, one of savage fighting, however, in the same kind of operations that I have described in the chapter on "Watching a Charge." The debris beaten into dust had been so scattered that one could not tell where the village began or ended, but the smudge was a symbol to the army no less than to the British public--a symbol of the boasted impregnability of the first-line German fortifications which had resisted the attack of July 1st--and its capture a reward of English stubbornness appealing to the race which is not unconscious of the characteristic that has carried its tongue and dominion over the world.

Point was given, too, by the enormous dugouts, surpa.s.sing previous exhibits, capable of holding a garrison of a thousand men and a hospital which, under the bursts of huge sh.e.l.ls of the months of British bombardment, had been safe under ground. The hospital was equipped with excellent medical apparatus as well as anaesthetics manufactured in Germany, of which the British were somewhat short. The German battalion that held the place had been a.s.sociated with the work of preparing its defenses and were practically either all taken prisoner or killed, so far as could be learned. They had sworn that they would never lose Thiepval; but the deeper the dugouts the farther upstairs men inside have to climb in order to get to the door before the enemy, who arrives at the threshold as the whirlwind barrage lifts.

As I have said, Thiepval was not on the very crest of the Ridge and on the summit the same elaborate works had been built to hold this high ground. We watched other attacks under curtains of fire as the British pressed on. Sometimes we could see the Germans moving out in the open from their dugouts at the base of the hill in St. Pierre Divion and driven to cover as the British guns sniped at them with shrapnel.

Resistlessly the British infantry under its covering barrages kept on till the crest and all its dugouts and galleries were gained, thus breaking back the old first-line fortifications stage by stage and forcing the German into the open, where he must dig anew on equal terms.

The capture of Thiepval did not mean that its ruins were to have any rest from sh.e.l.ls, for the German guns had their turn. They seemed fond of sending up spouts from a little pond in the foreground, which had no effect except to shower pa.s.sing soldiers with dirty water. However much the pond was beaten it was still there; and I was struck by the fact that this was a costly and unsuccessful system of drainage for such an efficient people as the Germans to apply.

x.x.x

FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN

Sixty miles an hour to meet General Joffre--Joffre somewhat like Grant--Two figures which France will remember for all time--Joffre and Castelnau--Two very old friends--At Verdun--What Napoleon and Wellington might have thought--A staff whose feet and mind never dragged--The hero of Douaumont, General Nivelle--Simplicity--Men who believe in giving blows--A true soldier--A prized photograph of Joffre--The drama of Douaumont--General Mangin, corps commander at Verdun--An eye that said "Attack!"--A five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps--The old fortress town, Verdun--The effort of Colossus--Germany's high water mark--Thrifty fighters, the French--Germany good enough to win against Rumania, but not at Verdun.

That spirited friend Lieutenant T., at home in an English or a French mess or walking arm-in-arm with the _poilus_ of his old battalion, required quick stepping to keep up with him when we were not in his devil of a motor car that carried me on a flying visit to the French lines before I started for home and did not fail even when sixty miles an hour were required to keep the appointment with General Joffre--which we did, to the minute.

Many people have told of sitting across the table in his private office from the victor of the Marne; and it was when he was seated and began to talk that you appreciated the power of the man, with his great head and its ma.s.s of white hair and the calm, largely-molded features, who could give his orders when the fate of France was at stake and then retire to rest for the night knowing that his part was done for the day and the rest was with the army. In common with all men when experience and responsibility have ripened their talents, though lacking in the gift of formal speech-making, as Grant was, he could talk well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of a great national era.

In view of changes which were to come, another glimpse that I had of him in the French headquarters town which was not by appointment is peculiarly memorable. When I was out strolling I saw on the other side of the street two figures which all France knew and will know for all time. Whatever vicissitudes of politics, whatever campaigns ensue, whatever changes come in the world after the war, Joffre's victory at the Marne and Castelnau's victory in Lorraine, which was its complement in masterly tactics, make their niches in the national Pantheon secure.

The two old friends, comrades of army life long before fame came to them one summer month, Commander-in-Chief and Chief of Staff, were taking their regular afternoon promenade--Joffre in his familiar short, black coat which made his figure the burlier, his walk affected by the rheumatism in his legs, though he certainly had no rheumatism in his head, and Castelnau erect and slight of figure, his slimness heightened by his long, blue overcoat--chatting as they walked slowly, and behind them followed a st.u.r.dy guard in plain clothes at a distance of a few paces, carrying two cushions. Joffre stopped and turned with a "you-don't-say-so" gesture and a toss of his head at something that Castelnau had told him.

Very likely they were not talking of the war; indeed, most likely it was about friends in their army world, for both have a good wit, a keen and amiable understanding of human nature. At all events, they were enjoying themselves. So they pa.s.sed on into the woods, followed by the guard who would place their cushions on their favorite seat, and the two who had been lieutenants and captains and colonels together would continue their airing and their chat until they returned to the business of directing their millions of men.

It was raining in this darkened French village near Verdun and a pa.s.sing battalion went dripping by, automobiles sent out sprays of muddy water from their tires, and over in the crowded inclosures the German prisoners taken at Douaumont stood in the mud waiting to be entrained.