Now It Can Be Told Part 20

One of them waved his hand toward the tumult of guns which were firing ceaselessly.

"I pity our poor people there," he said.

One of them, who spoke English, described all he had seen of the battle, which was not much, because no man at such a time sees more than what happens within a yard or two.

"The English caught us by surprise when the attack came at last," he said. "The bombardment had been going on for days, and we could not guess when the attack would begin. I was in a deep dugout, wondering how long it would be before a sh.e.l.l came through the roof and blow us to pieces. The earth shook above our heads. Wounded men crawled into the dugout, and some of them died down there. We sat looking at their bodies in the doorway and up the steps. I climbed over them when a lull came. A friend of mine was there, dead, and I stepped on his stomach to get upstairs. The first thing I saw was a crowd of your soldiers streaming past our trenches. We were surrounded on three sides, and our position was hopeless. Some of our men started firing, but it was only asking for death. Your men killed them with bayonets. I went back into my dugout and waited. Presently there was an explosion in the doorway and part of the dugout fell in. One of the men with me had his head blown off, and his blood spurted on me. I was dazed, but through the fumes I saw an English soldier in a petticoat standing at the doorway, making ready to throw another bomb.

"I shouted to him in English:

"'Don't kill us! We surrender!'

"He was silent for a second or two, and I thought he would throw his bomb. Then he said:

"'Come out, you swine.'

"So we went out, and saw many soldiers in petticoats, your Highlanders, with bayonets. They wanted to kill us, but one man argued with them in words I could not understand-a dialect-and we were told to go along a trench. Even then we expected death, but came to another group of prisoners, and joined them on their way back. Gott sei dank!"

He spoke gravely and simply, this dirty, bearded man, who had been a clerk in a London office. He had the truthfulness of a man who had just come from great horrors.

Many of the men around him were Silesians-more Polish than German. Some of them could not speak more than a few words of German, and were true Slavs in physical type, with flat cheek-bones.

A group of German artillery officers had been captured and they were behaving with studied arrogance and insolence as they smoked cigarettes apart from the men, and looked in a jeering way at our officers.

"Did you get any of our gas this morning?" I asked them, and one of them laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

"I smelled it a little. It was rather nice... The English always imitate the German war-methods, but without much success."

They grinned and imitated my way of saying "Guten Tag" when I left them. It took a year or more to tame the arrogance of the German officer. At the end of the Somme battles he changed his manner when captured, and was very polite.

In another place-a prison in St.-Omer-I had a conversation with two other officers of the German army who were more courteous than the gunners. They had been taken at Hooge and were both Prussians-one a stout captain, smiling behind horn spectacles, with a false, jovial manner, hiding the effect of the ordeal from which he had just escaped, and his hatred of us; the other a young, slim fellow, with clear-cut features, who was very nervous, but bowed repeatedly, with his heels together, as though in a cafe at Ehrenbreitstein, when high officers came in. A few hours before he had been buried alive. One of our mines had exploded under him, flinging a heap of earth over him. The fat man by his side-his captain-had been buried, too, in the dugout. They had sc.r.a.ped themselves out by clawing at the earth.

They were cautious about answering questions on the war, but the younger man said they were prepared down to the last gaiter for another winter campaign and-that seemed to me at the time a fine touch of audacity-for two more winter campaigns if need be. The winter of '16, after this autumn and winter of '15, and then after that the winter of '17! The words of that young Prussian seemed to me, the more I thought of them, idiotic and almost insane. Why, the world itself could not suffer two more years of war. It would end before then in general anarchy, the wild revolutions of armies on all fronts. Humanity of every nation would revolt against such prolonged slaughter... It was I who was mad, in the foolish faith that the war would end before another year had pa.s.sed, because I thought that would be the limit of endurance of such mutual ma.s.sacre.

In a room next to those two officers-a week before this battle, the captain had been rowing with his wife on the lake at Potsdam-was another prisoner, who wept and wept. He had escaped to our lines before the battle to save his skin, and now was conscience-stricken and thought he had lost his soul. What stabbed his conscience most was the thought that his wife and children would lose their allowances because of his treachery. He stared at us with wild, red eyes.

"Ach, mein armes Weib! Meine Kinder!... Ach, Gott in Himmel!"

He had no pride, no dignity, no courage.

This tall, bearded man, father of a family, put his hands against the wall and laid his head on his arm and wept.

XII

During the battle, for several days I went with other men to various points of view, trying to see something of the human conflict from slag heaps and rising ground, but could only see the swirl and flurry of gun-fire and the smoke of sh.e.l.ls mixing with wet mist, and the backwash of wounded and prisoners, and the traffic of guns, and wagons, and supporting troops. Like an ant on the edge of a volcano I sat among the slag heaps with gunner observers, who were listening at telephones dumped down in the fields and connected with artillery brigades and field batteries.

"The Guards are fighting round Fosse 8," said one of these observers.

Through the mist I could see Fosse 8, a flat-topped hill of coal-dust. Little glinting lights were playing about it, like confetti shining in the sun. That was German shrapnel. Eruptions of red flame and black earth vomited out of the hill. That was German high explosive. For a time on Monday, September 27th, it was the storm-center of battle.

"What's that?" asked an artillery staff-officer, with his ear to the field telephone. "What's that?... Hullo!... Are you there?... The Guards have been kicked off Fosse 8... Oh, h.e.l.l!"

From all parts of the field of battle such whispers came to listening men and were pa.s.sed on to headquarters, where other men listened. This brigade was doing pretty well. That was hard pressed. The Germans were counter-attacking heavily. Their barrage was strong and our casualties heavy. "Oh, h.e.l.l!" said other men. From behind the mist came the news of life and death, revealing things which no onlooker could see.

I went closer to see-into the center of the arc of battle, up by the Loos redoubt, where the German dead and ours still lay in heaps. John Buchan was my companion on that walk, and together we stood staring over the edge of a trench to where, grim and gaunt against the gray sky, loomed the high, steel columns of the "Tower Bridge," the mining-works which I had seen before the battle as an inaccessible landmark in the German lines. Now they were within our lines in the center of Loos, and no longer "leering" at us, as an officer once told me they used to do when he led his men into communication trenches under their observation.

Behind us now was the turmoil of war-thousands and scores of thousands of men moving in steady columns forward and backward in the queer, tangled way which during a great battle seems to have no purpose or meaning, except to the directing brains on the Headquarters Staff, and, sometimes in history, none to them.

Vast convoys of transports choked the roads, with teams of mules harnessed to wagons and gun-limbers, with trains of motor ambulances packed with wounded men, with infantry brigades plodding through the slush and slime, with divisional cavalry halted in the villages, and great bivouacs in the boggy fields.

The men, Londoners, and Scots, and Guards, and Yorkshires, and Leinsters, pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed in dense ma.s.ses, in small battalions, in scattered groups. One could tell them from those who were filling their places by the white chalk which covered them from head to foot, and sometimes by the blood which had splashed them.

Regiments which had lost many of their comrades and had fought in attack and counter-attack through those days and nights went very silently, and no man cheered them. Legions of tall lads, who a few months before marched smart and trim down English lanes, trudged toward the fighting-lines under the burden of their heavy packs, with all their smartness befouled by the business of war, but wonderful and pitiful to see because of the look of courage and the gravity in their eyes as they went up to dreadful places. Farther away within the zone of the enemy's fire the traffic ceased, and I came into the desolate lands of death, where there is but little movement, and the only noise is that of guns. I pa.s.sed by ruined villages and towns.

To the left was Vermelles (two months before death nearly caught me there), and I stared at those broken houses and roofless farms and fallen churches which used to make one's soul shiver even when they stood clear in the daylight.

To the right, a few hundred yards away, was Masingarbe, from which many of our troops marched out to begin the great attack. Farther back were the great slag heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, and all around other black hills of this mining country which rise out of the flat plain. It was a long walk through narrow trenches toward that Loos redoubt where at last I stood. There was the smell of death in those narrow, winding ways. One boy, whom death had taken almost at the entrance-way, knelt on the fire-step, with his head bent and his forehead against the wet clay, as though in prayer. Farther on other bodies of London boys and Scots lay huddled up.

We were in the center of a wide field of fire, with the enemy's batteries on one side and ours on the other in sweeping semicircles. The sh.e.l.ls of all these batteries went crying through the air with high, whining sighs, which ended in the cough of death. The roar of the guns was incessant and very close. The enemy was sweeping a road to my right, and his sh.e.l.ls went overhead with a continual rush, pa.s.sing our sh.e.l.ls, which answered back. The whole sky was filled with these thunderbolts. Many of them were "Jack Johnsons," which raised a volume of black smoke where they fell. I wondered how it would feel to be caught by one of them, whether one would have any consciousness before being scattered. Fear, which had walked with me part of the way, left me for a time. I had a strange sense of exhilaration, an intoxicated interest in this foul scene and the activity of that sh.e.l.l-fire.

Peering over the parapet, we saw the whole panorama of the battleground. It was but an ugly, naked plain, rising up to Hulluch and Haisnes on the north, falling down to Loos on the east, from where we stood, and rising again to Hill 70 (now in German hands again), still farther east and a little south.

The villages of Haisnes and Hulluch fretted the skyline, and Fosse 8 was a black wart between them. The "Tower Bridge," close by in the town of Loos, was the one high landmark which broke the monotony of this desolation.

No men moved about this ground. Yet thousands of men were hidden about us in the ditches, waiting for another counter-attack behind storms of fire. The only moving things were the sh.e.l.ls which vomited up earth and smoke and steel as they burst in all directions over the whole zone. We were sh.e.l.ling Hulluch and Haisnes and Fosse 8 with an intense, concentrated fire, and the enemy was retaliating by scattering sh.e.l.ls over the town of Loos and our new line between Hill 70 and the chalk-pit, and the whole length of our line from north to south.

Only two men moved about above the trenches. They were two London boys carrying a gas-cylinder, and whistling as though it were a health resort under the autumn sun... It was not a health resort. It stank of death, from piles of corpses, all mangled and in a mush of flesh and bones lying around the Loos redoubt and all the ground in this neighborhood, and for a long distance north.

Through the streets of Bethune streamed a tide of war: the transport of divisions, gun-teams with their limber ambulance convoys, ammunition wagons, infantry moving up to the front, despatch riders, staff-officers, signalers, and a great host of men and mules and motor-cars. The rain lashed down upon the crowds; waterproofs and burberries and the tarpaulin covers of forage-carts streamed with water, and the bronzed faces of the soldiers were dripping wet. Mud splashed them to the thighs. Fountains of mud spurted up from the wheels of gun-carriages. The chill of winter made Highlanders as well as Indians-those poor, brave, wretched Indians who had been flung into the holding attack on the ca.n.a.l at La Ba.s.see, and mown down in the inevitable way by shrapnel and machine-gun bullets-shiver in the wind.

Yet, in spite of rain and great death, there was a spirit of exultation among many fighting-men. At last there was a break in the months of stationary warfare. We were up and out of the trenches. The first proofs of victory were visible there in a long line of German guns captured at Loos, guarded on each side by British soldiers with fixed bayonets. Men moving up did not know the general failure that had swamped a partial success. They stared at the guns and said, "By G.o.d-we've got 'em going this time!"

A group of French civilians gathered round them, excited at the sight. Artillery officers examined their broken breech-blocks and their inscriptions:

"Pro Gloria et Patria."

"Ultima ratio regis."

The irony of the words made some of the onlookers laugh. A French interpreter spoke to some English officers with a thrill of joy in his voice. Had they heard the last news from Champagne? The French had broken through the enemy's line. The Germans were in full retreat.. . It was utterly untrue, because after the desperate valor of heroic youth and horrible casualties, the French attack had broken down. But the spirit of hope came down the cold wind and went with the men whom I saw marching to the fields of fate in the slanting rain, as the darkness and the mist came to end another day of battle.

Outside the headquarters of a British army corps stood another line of captured field-guns and several machine-guns, of which one had a strange history of adventure. It was a Russian machine-gun, taken by the Germans on the eastern front and retaken by us on the western front.

In General Rawlinson's headquarters I saw a queer piece of booty. It was a big bronze bell used by the Germans in their trenches to signal a British gas-attack.

General Rawlinson was taking tea in his chateau when I called on him, and was having an animated argument with Lord Cavan, commanding the Guards, as to the disposal of the captured artillery and other trophies. Lord Cavan claimed some for his own, with some violence of speech. But General Rawlinson was bright and breezy as usual. Our losses were not worrying him. As a great general he did not allow losses to worry him. He ate his tea with a hearty appet.i.te, and chaffed his staff-officers. They were antic.i.p.ating the real German counter-attack-a big affair. Away up the line there would be more dead piled up, more filth and stench of human slaughter, but the smell of it would not reach back to headquarters.