My Second Year of the War Part 5

"Never mind. It's from your own side!" said one Briton to a German who had been knocked over by a German "krump" when he picked himself up; and the German answered that this did not make him like it any better.

Scattered with British wounded taking cover in new and old sh.e.l.l-craters was No Man's Land as the living pa.s.sed. A Briton and his prisoner would take cover together. An explosion and the prisoner might be blown to bits, or if the captor were, another Briton took charge of the prisoner.

Persistently stubborn were the captors in holding on to prisoners who were trophies out of that inferno, and when a Briton was back in the first-line trench with his German his delight was greater in delivering his man alive than in his own safety. Out in No Man's Land the wounded hugged their sh.e.l.l-craters until the fire slackened or night fell, when they crawled back.

Where early in the morning it had appeared as if the attack were succeeding reserve battalions were sent in to the support of those in front, and as unhesitatingly and steadily as at drill they entered the blanket of sh.e.l.l-smoke with its vivid flashes and hissing of shrapnel bullets and sh.e.l.l-fragments. Commanders, I found, stood in awe of the steadfast courage of their troops. Whether officers or men, those who came out of h.e.l.l were still true to their heritage of English phlegm.

Covered with chalk dust from crawling, their bandages blood-soaked, bespattered with the blood of comrades as they lay on litters or hobbled down a communication trench, they looked blank when they mentioned the scenes that they had witnessed; but they gave no impression of despair.

It did not occur to them that they had been beaten; they had been roughly handled in one round of a many-round fight. Had a German counter-attack developed they would have settled down, rifle in hand, to stall through the next round. And that young officer barely twenty, smiling though weak from loss of blood from two wounds, refusing a.s.sistance as he pulled himself along among the "walking wounded,"

showed a bravery in his stoicism equal to any on the field when he said, "It did not go well this time," in a way that indicated that, of course, it would in the end.

It was over one of those large scale, raised maps showing in facsimile all the elevations that a certain corps commander told the story of the whole attack with a simplicity and frankness which was a victory of character even if he had not won a victory in battle. He rehea.r.s.ed the details of preparation, which were the same in their elaborate care as those of corps which had succeeded; and he did not say that luck had been against him--indeed, he never once used the word--but merely that the German fortifications had been too strong and the gunfire too heavy.

He bore himself in the same manner that he would in his house in England; but his eyes told of suffering and when he spoke of his men his voice quavered.

Where the young officer had said that it had not gone well this time and a private had said, "We must try again, sir!" the general had said that repulse was an incident of a prolonged operation in the initial stage, which sounded more professional but was no more illuminating. All spoke of lessons learned for the future. Thus they had stood the supreme test which repulse alone can give.

What could an observer say or do that was not ba.n.a.l in the eyes of men who had been through such experiences? Only listen and look on with the awe of one who feels that he is in the presence of immortal heroism. And an hour's motor ride away were troops in the glow of that success which is without comparison in its physical elation--the success of arms.

VII

OUT OF THE HOPPER OF BATTLE

An army of movement--Taking over the captured s.p.a.ce--At Minden Post, a crossroads of battle--German prisoners--Their desire to live--Their variety--The ambulance line--The refuse from the hopper of battle--Resting in the battle line--Reminiscences of the fighters--A mighty crater--The dugouts around Fricourt--Method of taking a dugout--The litter over the field.

When I went southward through that world of triumph back of Mametz and Montauban I kept thinking of a strong man who had broken free of his bonds and was taking a deep breath before another effort. Where from Thiepval to Gommecourt the men who had expected to be organizing new trenches were back in their old ones and the gunners who had hoped to move their guns forward were in the same positions and all the plans for supplying an army in advance were still on paper, to the southward antic.i.p.ation had become realization and the system devised to carry on after success was being applied.

A mighty, eager industry pervaded the rear. Here, at last, was an army of movement. New roads must be made in order that the transport could move farther forward; medical corps men were establishing more advanced clearing stations; new ammunition dumps were being located; military police were adapting traffic regulations to the new situation. Old trenches had been filled up to give trucks and guns pa.s.sageway. In every face was the shining desire which overcomes fatigue. An army long trench-tied was stretching its limbs as it found itself in the open. At corps headquarters lines were drawn on the maps of positions gained and beyond them the lines of new objectives.

Could it be possible that our car was running along that road back of the first-line trenches where it would have been death to show your head two days ago? And could battalions in reserve be lying in the open on fields where forty-eight hours previously a company would have drawn the fire of half a dozen German batteries? Was it dream or reality that you were walking about in the first-line German trenches? So long had you been used to stationary warfare, with your side and the other side always in the same places hedged in by walls of sh.e.l.l fire, that the transformation seemed as amazing as if by some magic overnight lower Broadway with all its high buildings had been moved across the North River.

Among certain scenes which memory still holds dissociated from others by their outstanding characterization, that of Minden Post remains vivid as ill.u.s.trating the crossroads man-traffic of battle. A series of big dugouts, of houses and caves with walls of sandbags, back of the first British line near Carnoy was a focus of communication trenches and the magnet to the men hastening from bullet-swept, sh.e.l.l-swept s.p.a.ces to security. The hot breath of the firing-line had scorched them and cast them out and they came together in congestion at this clearing station like a crowd at a gate. Eyes were bloodshot and set in deep hollows from fatigue, those of the British having the gleam of triumph and those of the Germans a dazed inquiry as they awaited directions.

Only a half-hour before, perhaps, the Germans had been fighting with the ferocity of racial hate and the method of iron discipline. Now they were simply helpless, disheveled human beings, their short boots and green uniforms whitened by chalk dust. Hunger had weakened the stamina of many of them in the days when the preliminary British bombardment had shut them off from supplies; but none looked as if he were really underfed. I never saw a German prisoner who was except for the intervals when battle kept the food waiting at the rear away from his mouth, though some who were under-sized and ill-proportioned looked incapable of absorbing nutrition.

In order to make them fight better they had been told that the British gave no quarter. Out of h.e.l.l, with sh.e.l.ls no longer bursting overhead or bullets whimpering and hissing past, they were conscious only that they were alive, and being alive, though they had risked life as if death were an incident, now freed of discipline and of the exhilaration of battle, their desire to live was very human in the way that hands shot up if a sharp word were spoken to them by an officer. They were wholly lacking in military dignity as they filed by; but it returned as by a magic touch when a non-commissioned officer was bidden to take charge of a batch and march them to an inclosure. Then, in answer to the command shoulders squared, heels rapped together, and the instinct of long training put a ramrod to their backbones which stiffened mere tired human beings into soldiers. Distinct grat.i.tude was evident when their papers were taken for examination over the return of their identification books, which left them still docketed and numbered members of "system" and not mere lost souls as they would otherwise have considered themselves.

"All kinds of Boches in our exhibit!" said a British soldier.

As there were, in truth: big, hulking, awkward fellows, beardless youths, men of forty with stoops formed in civil life, professional men with spectacles fastened to their ears by cords and fat men with the cranial formation and physiognomy in keeping with French comic pictures of the "type Boche."

Mixed with the British wounded they came, tall and short, thin and portly, the whole a motley procession of friend and foe in a strange companionship which was singularly without rancor. I saw only one incident of any harshness of captor to prisoner. A big German ran against the wounded arm of a Briton, who winced with pain and turned and gave the German a punch in very human fashion with his free arm. Another German with his slit trousers' leg flapping around a bandage was leaning on the arm of a Briton whose other arm was in a sling. A giant Prussian bore a spectacled comrade pickaback. Germans impressed as litter-bearers brought in still forms in khaki. Water and tobacco, these are the bounties which no man refuses to another at such a time as this. The gurgle of a canteen at a parched mouth on that warm July day was the first gift to wounded Briton or German and the next a cigarette.

Every returning Briton was wounded, of course, but many of the Germans were unwounded. Long rows of litters awaited the busy doctors' visit for further examination. First dressings put on by the man himself or by a comrade in the firing-line were removed and fresh dressings subst.i.tuted.

Ambulance after ambulance ran up, the litters of those who were "next"

were slipped in behind the green curtains, and on soft springs over spinning rubber tires the burdens were sped on their way to England.

Officers were bringing order out of the tide which flowed in across the fields and the communication trenches as if they were used to such situations, with the firing-line only two thousand yards away. The seriously wounded were separated from the lightly wounded, who must not expect to ride but must go farther on foot. The sh.e.l.l-mauled German borne pickaback by a comrade found himself in an ambulance across from a Briton and his bearer was to know sleep after a square meal in the prisoners' inclosure.

And all this was the refuse from the hopper of battle, which has no service for prisoners unless to carry litters and no use at all for wounded; and it was only a by-product of the proof of success compared to a trip over the field itself--a field still fresh.

Artillery caissons and ambulances and signal wire carts and other specially favored transport--favored by risk of being in range of hundreds of guns--now ran along the road in the former No Man's Land which for nearly two years had had no life except the patrols at night.

The bodies of those who fell on such nocturnal scouting expeditions could not be recovered and their bones lay there in the midst of rotting green and khaki in the company of the fresh dead of the charge who were yet to be buried.

There was the battalion which took the trenches resting yonder on a hillside, while another battalion took its place in the firing-line. The men had stripped off their coats; they were washing and making tea and sprawling in the sunshine, these victors, looking across at curtains of fire where the battle was raging. Thus reserves might have waited at Gettysburg or at Waterloo.

"They may put some sh.e.l.ls into you," I suggested to their colonel.

"Perhaps," he said. The prospect did not seem to disturb him or the men.

It was a possibility hazy to minds which asked only sleep or relaxation after two sleepless nights under fire. "The Germans haven't any aeroplanes up to enable them to see us and no sausage balloons, either.

Since our planes brought down those six in flames the day before the attack the others have been very coy."

His young officers were all New Army products; he, the commander, being the only regular. There were still enough regulars left to provide one for each of the New Army battalions, in some cases even two.

"The men were splendid," he said, "just as good as regulars. They went in without any faltering and we had a stiffish bit of trench in front of us, you know. It's jolly out here, isn't it?"

He was tired and perhaps he would be killed to-morrow, but nothing could prevent him from going some distance to show us the way to the trenches that his men had taken. They were heroes to him and he was one to them; and they had won. That was the thing, victory, though they regarded it as a matter of course, which gave them a glow warmer than the sunlight as they lay at ease on the gra.s.s. They had "been in;" they had seen the day for which they had long waited. A quality of mastery was in their bearing, but their elation was tempered by the thought of the missing comrades, the dead.

"I wish as long as Bill had to go that he hadn't fallen before we got to the trench," said one soldier. "He had set his heart on seeing what a Boche dugout was like."

"George was beside me when a Boche got him with a bomb. I did for the Boche with a bayonet," said another.

"When the machine gun began I thought that it would get us all, but we had to go on."

They were matter-of-fact, dwelling on the simple essentials. Men had died; men had been wounded; men had survived. This was all according to expectation. Mostly, they did not rehea.r.s.e their experiences. Their brains had had emotion enough; their bodies asked for rest. They lay silently enjoying the fact of life and sunlight. Details which were lost in the haze of action would develop in the memory in later years like the fine points of a photographic plate.

The former German trench on a commanding knoll had little resemblance to a trench. Here artillerists had fulfilled infantry requirements to the letter. Areas of sh.e.l.l-craters lay on either side of the tumbled walls and dugout entrances were nearly all closed. The infantry which took the position met no fire in front, but had an enfilade at one point from a machine gun. Where the dead lay told exactly the breadth of its sweep through which the charge had unfalteringly pa.s.sed; and this was only a first objective. As you could see, the charge had gone on to its second with slight loss. A young officer after being wounded had crawled into a sh.e.l.l-crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had died peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the earth beside him.

In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty crater of one of the mines exploded on July 1st at the hour of attack was large enough to hold a battalion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with its vast plume of smoke and dust scooped from the bowels of the earth. Famous since to sightseers of war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were the last word in German provision against attack. The making of dugouts is standardized like everything else in this war. There is the same angle of entrance, the same flight of steps to that underground refuge, in keeping with the established pattern. Depth, capacity and comfort are the result of local initiative and industry. There may be beds and tables and tiers of bunks. Many such chambers were as undisturbed as if never a sh.e.l.l had burst in the neighborhood. The Germans in occupation had been told to hold on; a counter-attack would relieve them. The faith of some of them endured so well that they had to be blasted out by explosives before they would surrender.

There was rea.s.surance in the proximity of such good dugouts when habitable to a correspondent if sh.e.l.ls began to fall, as well as protection for the British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors were closed by the British as the simplest form of burial for the dead within who had waited for bombs to be thrown before surrendering. For the method of taking a dugout had long since become as standardized as its construction. The men inside could have their choice from the Briton at the entrance.

"Either file out or take what we send," as a soldier put it. "We can't leave you there to come out and fire into our backs, as the Kaiser told you to do, when we've started on ahead."

You could follow for miles the ruins of the first line, picking your way among German dead in all att.i.tudes, while a hand or a head or a foot stuck out of the sh.e.l.l-hammered chalk mixed with flesh and fragments of clothing, the thing growing nauseatingly horrible and your wonder increasing as to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and how men had been able to conquer the remains that the sh.e.l.ls had left. It was a prodigious feat, emphasizing again the importance of the months of preparation.

And the litter over the whole field! This, in turn, expressed how varied and immense is the material required for such operations. One had in mind the cleaning up after some ghastly debauch. Sh.e.l.l-fragments were mixed with the earth; piles of cartridge cases lay beside pools of blood. Trench mortars poked their half-filled muzzles out of the toppled trench walls. Bundles of rocket flares, empty ammunition boxes, steel helmets crushed in by sh.e.l.l-fragments, gasbags, eye-protectors against lachrymatory sh.e.l.ls, spades, water bottles, unused rifle grenades, egg bombs, long stick-handled German bombs, map cases, bits of German "K.K."

bread, rifles, the steel jackets of sh.e.l.ls and unexploded sh.e.l.ls of all calibers were scattered about the field between the irregular welts of chalky soil where sh.e.l.l fire had threshed them to bits.

The rifles and accoutrements of the fallen were being gathered in piles, this being, too, a part of a prearranged system, as was the gathering of the wounded and later of the dead who had worn them. Big, barelegged forms of the st.u.r.dy Highland regiment which would not halt for a machine gun were being brought in and laid in a German communication trench which had only to be closed to make a common grave, each identification disk being kept as a record of where the body lay. Another communication trench near by was reserved for German dead who were being gathered at the same time as the British. In life the foes had faced each other across No Man's Land. In death they were also separated.

Up to the first-line German trenches, of course, there were only British dead, those who had fallen in the charge. It was this that made it seem as if the losses had been all on one side. In the German trenches the entries on the other side of the ledger appeared; and on the fields and in the communication trenches lay green figures. Over that open s.p.a.ce they were scattered green dots; again, where they had run for cover to a wood's edge, they lay thick as they had dropped under the fire of a machine gun which the British had brought into action. A fierce game of hare and hounds had been played. Both German and British dead lay facing in the same direction when they were in the open, the Germans in retreat, the British in pursuit. An officer called attention to this grim proof that the initiative was with the British.

By the number of British dead lying in No Man's Land or by the blood clots when the bodies had been removed, it was possible to tell what price battalions had paid for success. Nothing could bring back the lives of comrades who had fallen in front of Thiepval to the survivors of that action; but could they have seen the broad belts of No Man's Land with only an occasional prostrate figure it would have had the rea.s.surance that another time they might have easier going. Wherever the Germans had brought a machine gun into action the results of its work lay a stark warning of the necessity of silencing these automatic killers before a charge. Yet from Mametz to Montauban the losses had been light, leaving no doubt that the Germans, convinced that the weight of the attack would be to the north, had been caught napping.

The Allies could not conceal the fact and general location of their offensive, but they did conceal its plan as a whole. The small number of sh.e.l.l-craters attested that no such artillery curtains of fire had been concentrated here as from Thiepval to Gommecourt. Probably the Germans had not the artillery to spare or had drawn it off to the north.