Now It Can Be Told Part 45

"Your men are extraordinary," a German officer told me. "They asked me whether I would care to go down at once or wait till the barrage had pa.s.sed."

He seemed amazed at that thoughtfulness for his comfort. It was in the early days of the Somme fighting, and crowds of our men stood on the banks above a sunken road, watching the prisoners coming down. This officer who spoke to me had an Iron Cross, and the men wanted to see it and handle it.

"Will they give it back again?" he asked, nervously, fumbling at the ribbon.

"Certainly," I a.s.sured him.

He handed it to me, and I gave it to the men, who pa.s.sed it from one to the other and then back to the owner.

"Your men are extraordinary," he said. "They are wonderful."

One of the most interesting prisoners I met on the field of battle was a tall, black-bearded man whom I saw walking away from La Boisselle when that place was smoking with sh.e.l.l-bursts. An English soldier was on each side of him, and each man carried a hand-bag, while this black-bearded giant chatted with them.

It was a strange group, and I edged nearer to them and spoke to one of the men.

"Who's this? Why do you carry his bags?"

"Oh, we're giving him special privileges," said the man. "He stayed behind to look after our wounded. Said his job was to look after wounded, whoever they were. So there he's been, in a dugout bandaging our lads; and no joke, either. It's h.e.l.l up there. We're glad to get out of it."

I spoke to the German doctor and walked with him. He discussed the philosophy of the war simply and with what seemed like sincerity.

"This war!" he said, with a sad, ironical laugh. "We go on killing one another-to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death and will be impoverished for long years. We Germans thought it was a war for Kultur-our civilization. Now we know it is a war against Kultur, against religion, against all civilization."

"How will it end?" I asked him.

"I see no end to it," he answered. "It is the suicide of nations. Germany is strong, and England is strong, and France is strong. It is impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?"

I met many other prisoners then and a year afterward who could see no end of the ma.s.sacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by bleeding to death?

XVIII

The struggle for the Pozieres ridge and High Wood lasted from the beginning of August until the middle of September-six weeks of fighting as desperate as any in the history of the world until that time. The Australians dealt with Pozieres itself, working round Moquet Farm, where the Germans refused to be routed from their tunnels, and up to the Windmill on the high ground of Pozieres, for which there was unceasing slaughter on both sides because the Germans counter-attacked again and again, and waves of men surged up and fell around that mound of forsaken brick, which I saw as a reddish cone through flame and smoke.

Those Australians whom I had seen arrive in France had proved their quality. They had come believing that nothing could be worse than their ordeal in the Dardanelles. Now they knew that Pozieres was the last word in frightfulness. The intensity of the sh.e.l.l-fire under which they lay shook them, if it did not kill them. Many of their wounded told me that it had broken their nerve. They would never fight again without a sense of horror.

"Our men are more highly strung than the English," said one Australian officer, and I was astonished to hear these words, because those Australians seemed to me without nerves, and as tough as gristle in their fiber.

They fought stubbornly, grimly, in ground so ravaged with fire that the earth was finely powdered. They stormed the Pozieres ridge yard by yard, and held its crest under sweeping barrages which tore up their trenches as soon as they were dug and buried and mangled their living flesh. In six weeks they suffered twenty thousand casualties, and Pozieres now is an Australian graveyard, and the memorial that stands there is to the ghosts of that splendid youth which fell in heaps about that plateau and the slopes below. Many English boys of the Suss.e.x, West Kents, Surrey, and Warwick regiments, in the 18th Division, died at their side, not less patient in sacrifice, not liking it better. Many Scots of the 15th and 9th Divisions, many New-Zealanders, many London men of the 47th and 56th Divisions, fell, killed or wounded, to the right of them, on the way to Martinpuich, and Eaucourt l'Abbaye and Flers, from High Wood and Longueval, and Bazentin. The 3d Division of Yorkshires and Northumberland Fusiliers, Royal Scots and Gordons, were earning that name of the Iron Division, and not by any easy heroism. Every division in the British army took its turn in the blood-bath of the Somme and was duly blooded, at a cost of 25 per cent. and sometimes 50 per cent. of their fighting strength. The Canadians took up the struggle at Courcelette and captured it in a fierce and b.l.o.o.d.y battle. The Australians worked up on the right of the Albert-Bapaume road to Thilloy and Ligny Thilloy. On the far left the fortress of Thiepval had fallen at last after repeated and frightful a.s.saults, which I watched from ditches close enough to see our infantry-Wiltshires and Worcesters of the 25th Division-trudging through infernal fire. And then at last, after five months of superhuman effort, enormous sacrifice, ma.s.s-heroism, desperate will-power, and the tenacity of each individual human ant in this wild ant-heap, the German lines were smashed, the Australians surged into Bapaume, and the enemy, stricken by the prolonged fury of our attack, fell back in a far and wide retreat across a country which he laid waste, to the shelter of his Hindenburg line, from Bullecourt to St.-Quentin.

XIX

The goal of our desire seemed attained when at last we reached Bapaume after these terrific battles in which all our divisions, numbering nearly a million men, took part, with not much difference in courage, not much difference in average of loss. By the end of that year's fighting our casualties had mounted up to the frightful total of four hundred thousand men. Those fields were strewn with our dead. Our graveyards were growing forests of little white crosses. The German dead lay in heaps. There were twelve hundred corpses littered over the earth below Loupart Wood, in one ma.s.s, and eight hundred of them were German. I could not walk without treading on them there. When I fell in the slime I clutched arms and legs. The stench of death was strong and awful.

But our men who had escaped death and sh.e.l.l-shock kept their sanity through all this wilderness of slaughter, kept-oh, marvelous!-their spirit of humor, their faith in some kind of victory. I was with the Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought out trophies like men at a country fair... I remember an Australian colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle... Next day, though sh.e.l.ls were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian boys set up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the "Coo-ee Theater."

The enemy was in retreat to his Hindenburg line, over a wide stretch of country which he laid waste behind him, making a desert of French villages and orchards and parks, so that even the fruit-trees were cut down, and the churches blown up, and the graves ransacked for their lead. It was the enemy's first retreat on the western front, and that ferocious fighting of the British troops had smashed the strongest defenses ever built in war, and our raw recruits had broken the most famous regiments of the German army, so in spite of all tragedy and all agony our men were not downcast, but followed up their enemy with a sense of excitement because it seemed so much like victory and the end of war.

When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, where so many boys of the 56th (London) Division had fallen on the 1st of July, I went through that evil place by way of Fonquevillers (which we called "Funky Villas"), and, stumbling over the sh.e.l.l-craters and broken trenches and dead bodies between the dead masts of slashed and branchless trees, came into the open country to our outpost line. I met there a friendly sergeant who surprised me by referring in a casual way to a little old book of mine.

"This place," he said, glancing at me, "is a strange Street of Adventure."

It reminded me of another reference to that tale of mine when I was among a crowd of London lads who had just been engaged in a b.l.o.o.d.y fight at a place called The Hairpin.

A young officer sent for me and I found him in the loft of a stinking barn, sitting in a tub as naked as he was born.

"I just wanted to ask you," he said, "whether Katharine married Frank?"

The sergeant at Gommecourt was anxious to show me his own Street of Adventure.

"I belong to Toc-emmas," he said (meaning trench-mortars), "and my officers would be very pleased if you would have a look at their latest stunt. We've got a 9.2 mortar in Pigeon Wood, away beyond the infantry. It's never been done before and we're going to blow old Fritz out of Kite Copse."

I followed him into the blue, as it seemed to me, and we fell in with a young officer also on his way to Pigeon Wood. He was in a merry mood, in spite of hara.s.sing fire round about and the occasional howl of a 5.9. He kept stopping to look at enormous holes in the ground and laughing at something that seemed to tickle his sense of humor.

"See that?" he said. "That's old Charlie Lowndes's work."

At another pit in upheaved earth he said: "That's Charlie Lowndes again... Old Charlie gave 'em h.e.l.l. He's a topping chap. You must meet him... My G.o.d! look at that!"

He roared with laughter again, on the edge of an unusually large crater.

"Who is Charlie?" I asked. "Where can I find him?"

"Oh, we shall meet him in Pigeon Wood. He's as pleased as Punch at having got beyond the infantry. First time it has ever been done. Took a bit of doing, too, with the largest size of Toc-emma."

We entered Pigeon Wood after a long walk over wild chaos, and, guided by the officer and sergeant, I dived down into a deep dugout just captured from the Germans, who were two hundred yards away in Kite Copse.

"What cheer, Charlie!" shouted the young officer.

"Hullo, fellow-my-lad!... Come in. We're getting gloriously binged on a rare find of German brandy."

"Topping and I've brought a visitor."

Capt. Charles Lowndes-"dear old Charlie"-received us most politely in one of the best dugouts I ever saw, with smoothly paneled walls fitted up with shelves, and good deal furniture made to match.

"This is a nice little home in h.e.l.l," said Charles. "At any moment, of course, we may be blown to bits, but meanwhile it is very comfy down here, and what makes everything good is a bottle of rare old brandy and an unlimited supply of German soda-water. Also to add to the gaiety of indecent minds there is a complete outfit of ladies' clothing in a neighboring dugout. Funny fellows those German officers. Take a pew, won't you? and have a drink. Orderly!"

He shouted for his man and ordered a further supply of German soda-water.

We drank to the confusion of the enemy, in his own brandy and soda-water, out of his own mugs, sitting on his own chairs at his own table, and "dear old Charlie," who was a little etoile, as afterward I became, with a sense of deep satisfaction (the noise of sh.e.l.ls seemed more remote), discoursed on war, which he hated, German psychology, trench-mortar barrages (they had simply blown the Boche out of Gommecourt), and his particular fancy stunt of stealing a march on the infantry, who, said Captain Lowndes, are "laps behind." Other officers crowded into the dugout. One of them said: "You must come round to mine. It's a blasted palace," and I went round later and he told me on the way that he had escaped so often from sh.e.l.l-bursts that he thought the average of luck was up and he was bound to get "done in" before long.

Charlie Lowndes dispensed drinks with n.o.ble generosity. There was much laughter among us, and afterward we went upstairs and to the edge of the wood, to which a heavy, wet mist was clinging, and I saw the trench-mortar section play the devil with Kite Copse, over the way. Late in the afternoon I took my leave of a merry company in that far-flung outpost of our line, and wished them luck. A few sh.e.l.ls crashed through the wood as I left, but I was disdainful of them after that admirable brandy. It was a long walk back to "Funky Villas," not without the interest of arithmetical calculations about the odds of luck in hara.s.sing fire, but a thousand yards or so from Pigeon Wood I looked back and saw that the enemy had begun to "take notice." Heavy sh.e.l.ls were smashing through the trees there ferociously. I hoped my friends were safe in their dugouts again....