Now It Can Be Told Part 53

n.o.body believed the war correspondents. n.o.body ever did believe us, though some of us wrote the truth from first to last as far as the facts of war go apart from deeper psychology, and a naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of facts, which did not come within our liberty of the pen.

They were strange months for me. I felt that I was in possession, as indeed I was, of a terrible secret which might lead to the ending of the world-our world, as we knew it-with our liberties and power. For weeks I had been pledged to say no word about it, to write not a word about it, and it was like being haunted by a specter all day long. One laughed, but the specter echoed one's laughter and said, "Wait!" The mild sunshine of those spring days was pleasant to one's spirit in the woods above La Fere, and in fields where machine-guns chattered a little, while overhead our airplanes dodged German "Archies." But the specter chilled one's blood at the reminder of vast ma.s.ses of field-gray men drawing nearer to our lines in overwhelming numbers. I motored to many parts of the front, and my companion sometimes was a little Frenchman who had lost a leg in the war-D'Artagnan with a wooden peg, most valiant, most gay. Along the way he recited the poems of Ronsard. At the journey's end one day he sang old French chansons, in an English mess, within gunshot of the German lines. He climbed up a tree and gazed at the German positions, and made sketches while he hummed little tunes and said between them, "Ah, les sacres Boches!.. . If only I could fight again!"

I remember a pleasant dinner in the old town of Noyon, in a little restaurant where two pretty girls waited. They had come from Paris with their parents to start this business, now that Noyon was safe. (Safe, O Lord!) And everything was very dainty and clean. At dinner that night there was a hostile air raid overhead. Bombs crashed. But the girls were brave. One of them volunteered to go with an officer across the square to show him the way to the A.P.M., from where he had to get a pa.s.s to stay for dinner. Shrapnel bullets were whipping the flagstones of the Grande Place, from anti-aircraft guns. The officer wore his steel helmet. The girl was going out without any hat above her braided hair. We did not let her go, and the officer had another guide. One night I brought my brother to the place from his battery near St. Quentin. We dined well, slept well.

"Noyon is a good spot," he said. "I shall come here again when you give me a lift."

A few days later my brother was firing at ma.s.ses of Germans with open sights, and the British army was in a full-tide retreat, and the junior officer who had played his gramophone was dead, with other officers and men of that battery. When I next pa.s.sed through Noyon sh.e.l.ls were falling into it, and later I saw it in ruins, with the glory of the Romanesque cathedral sadly scarred. I have ofttimes wondered what happened to the little family in the old hotel.

So March 21st came, as we knew it would come, even to the very date, and Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.

Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke some words which froze my blood.

"We may have to give ground," he said, "if the enemy attacks in strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will, of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that."

"The crossings of the Somme... Amiens!"

Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had suggested terrible possibilities.

All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres. In this book I need not narrate all this history again.

They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with masterly skill, according to the new method of "infiltration" which had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at Caporetto.

It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held out for a long time, completely surrounded, and penetrated our inner battle zone. Through the gaps they made they came in ma.s.ses at a great pace with immense machine-gun strength and light artillery. On the Third Army front where penetrations were made, notably near Bullecourt between the 6th and 51st Divisions, the whole of our army machine was upset for a time like a watch with a broken mainspring and loose wheels. Staffs lost touch with fighting units. Communications were broken down. Orders were given but not received. After enormous losses of men and guns, our heavy artillery was choking the roads of escape, while our rear-guards fought for time rather than for ground. The crossings of the Somme were lost too easily. In the confusion and tumult of those days some of our men, being human, were demoralized and panic-stricken, and gave ground which might have been longer held. But on the whole, and in the ma.s.s, there was no panic, and a most grim valor of men who fought for days and nights without sleep; fought when they were almost surrounded or quite surrounded, and until few of them remained to hold any kind of line. Fortunately the Germans were unable to drag their heavy guns over the desert they had made a year before in their own retreat, and at the end of a week their pace slackened and they halted, in exhaustion.

I went into the swirl of our retreat day after day up by Guiscard and Hum; then, as the line moved back, by Peronne and Bapaume, and at last on a dreadful day by the windmill at Pozieres, our old heroic fighting-ground, where once again after many battles the enemy was in Courcelette and High Wood and Delville Wood, and, as I saw by going to the right through Albert, driving hard up to Mametz and Montauban. That meant the loss of all the old Somme battlefields, and that struck a chill in one's heart. But what I marveled at always was the absence of panic, the fatalistic acceptance of the turn of fortune's wheel by many officers and men, and the refusal of corps and divisional staffs to give way to despair in those days of tragedy and crisis.

The northern attack was in many ways worse to bear and worse to see. The menace to the coast was frightful when the enemy struck up to Bailleul and captured Kemmel Hill from a French regiment which had come up to relieve some of our exhausted and unsupported men. All through this country between Estaires and Merville, to Steenwerck, Metern, and Bailleul, thousands of civilians had been living on the edge of the battlefields, believing themselves safe behind our lines. Now the line had slipped and they were caught by German sh.e.l.l-fire and German guns, and after nearly four years of war had to abandon their homes like the first fugitives. I saw old women coming down lanes where 5.9's were bursting and where our gunners were getting into action. I saw young mothers packing their babies and their bundles into perambulators while sh.e.l.ls came hurtling over the thatched roofs of their cottages. I stood on the Mont des Chats looking down upon a wide sweep of battle, and saw many little farmsteads on fire and Bailleul one torch of flame and smoke.

There was an old monastery on the Mont des Chats which had been in the midst of a cavalry battle in October of 1914, when Prince Max of Hesse, the Kaiser's cousin, was mortally wounded by a shot from one of our troopers. He was carried into the cell of the old prior, who watched over him in his dying hours when he spoke of his family and friends. Then his body was borne down the hill at night and buried secretly by a parish priest; and when the Kaiser wrote to the Pope, desiring to know the whereabouts of his cousin's grave, the priest to whom his message was conveyed said, "Tell the Kaiser he shall know when the German armies have departed from Belgium and when reparation has been made for all their evil deeds." It was the prior who told me that story and who described to me how the British cavalry had forged their way up the hill. He showed me the scars of bullets on the walls and the windows from which the monks looked out upon the battle.

"All that is a wonderful memory," said the prior. "Thanks to the English, we are safe and beyond the range of German sh.e.l.ls."

I thought of his words that day I climbed the hill to see the sweep of battle beyond. The monastery was no longer beyond the range of German sh.e.l.ls. An eight-inch sh.e.l.l had just smashed into the prior's parlor. Others had opened gaps in the high roofs and walls. The monks had fled by order of the prior, who stayed behind, like the captain of a sinking ship. His corridors resounded to the tramp of army boots. The Ulster gunners had made their headquarters in the refectory, but did not stay there long. A few days later the monastery was a ruin.

From many little villages caught by the oncoming tide of war our soldiers helped the people to escape in lorries or on gun-wagons. They did not weep, nor say much, but were wonderfully brave. I remember a little family in Robecq whom I packed into my car when sh.e.l.ls began to fall among the houses. A pretty girl, with a little invalid brother in her arms, and a mother by her side, pointed the way to a cottage in a wood some miles away. She was gay and smiling when she said, "Au revoir et merci!" A few days later the cottage and the wood were behind the German lines.

The northern defense, by the 55th Lancashires, 51st Highlanders (who had been all through the Somme retreat), the 25th Division of Cheshires, Wiltshires and Lancashire Fusiliers, and the 9th Scottish Division, and others, who fought "with their backs to the wall," as Sir Douglas Haig demanded of them, without reliefs, until they were worn thin, was heroic and tragic in its ordeal, until Foch sent up his cavalry (I saw them riding in clouds of dust and heard the panting of their horses), followed by divisions of blue men in hundreds of blue lorries tearing up the roads, and forming a strong blue line behind our thin brown line. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had twenty-six fresh divisions in reserve, but had to hold them until other plans were developed-the Crown Prince's plan against the French, and the attack on Arras.

The defense of Arras by the 3d and 56th Divisions-the Iron Division and the London Division on the left, and by the 15th Division and Guards on the right, saved the center of our line and all our line. We had a breathing-s.p.a.ce while heavy blows fell against the French and against three British divisions who had been sent to hold "a quiet sector" on their right. The Germans drove across the Chemin des Dames, struck right and left, terrific blows, beat the French back, reached the Marne again, and threatened Paris.

Foch waited to strike. The genius of Foch was that he waited until the last minute of safety, taking immense risks in order to be certain of his counter-stroke. For a time he had to dissipate his reserves, but he gathered them together again. As quick as the blue men had come up behind our lines they were withdrawn again. Three of our divisions went with them, the 51st Highlanders and 15th Scottish, and the 48th English. The flower of the French army, the veterans of many battles, was ma.s.sed behind the Marne, and at Chateau Thierry the American marines and infantry were given their first big job to do. What happened all the world knows. The Crown Prince's army was attacked on both flanks and in the center, and was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.

IX

Ludendorff's great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again, and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy's line beyond Amiens and slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous losses.

For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit, and made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners, capturing batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many actions.

"August 8th," writes Ludendorff, "was the black day of the German army in the history of this war."

He describes from the German point of view what I and others have described from the British point of view, and the general narrative is the same-a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which broke not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk across the foul waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval, a.s.sembled under the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength of the enemy, stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and hurled the enemy back from what he thought was an impregnable position, and followed him day by day, taking thousands of prisoners and smashing his rear-guard defenses one by one.

The most decisive battle of the British front in the "come-back," after our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American troops of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands, the 46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along the St.-Quentin Ca.n.a.l. That ca.n.a.l was sixty feet wide, with steep cliffs rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun redoubts and tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis. It seemed to me an impossible place to a.s.sault and capture. If the enemy could not hold that line they could hold nothing. In a dense fog on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men, with the Americans and Australians in support, went down to the ca.n.a.l-bank, waded across where the water was shallow, swam across in life-belts where it was deep, or got across somehow and anyhow, under blasts of machine-gun fire, by rafts and plank bridges. A few hours after the beginning of the battle they were far out beyond the German side of the ca.n.a.l, with ma.s.ses of prisoners in their hands. The Americans on the left of the attack, where the ca.n.a.l goes below ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they forgot, however, to "mop up" behind them, so that the enemy came out of his tunnels and the Australians had to cut their way through), and that evening I met their escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy opposite the British front, and after that our troops fought through open country on the way to victory.

I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war pa.s.sed when the enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us so long, and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable, when old men and women and girls and boys and little children crowded round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all the horror had pa.s.sed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in Bohain, and other villages, the enemy's sh.e.l.l-fire and poison-gas killed and injured many of the people who had been under the German yoke so long and now thought they were safe. Hospitals were filled with women gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying children. In Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there on its day of capture, so that when sh.e.l.ls began to fall the people could not go down to shelter. Some of them did not try to go down. At an open window sat an old veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and with his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. He called out, "Merci! Merci!" when English soldiers pa.s.sed, and when I stopped a moment clasped my hands through the window and could not speak for the tears which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge on the day before the armistice I saw the last dead German of the war in that part of the line. He lay stretched outside the railway station into which many sh.e.l.ls had crashed. It was as though he had walked from his own comrades toward our line before a bullet caught him.

Ludendorff writes of the broken morale of the German troops, and of how his men surrendered to single troopers of ours, while whole detachments gave themselves up to tanks. "Retiring troops," he wrote, "greeted one particular division (the cavalry) that was going up fresh and gallantly to the attack, with shouts of 'Blacklegs!' and 'War-prolongers!"' That is true. When the Germans left Bohain they shouted out to the French girls: "The English are coming. Bravo! The war will soon be over!" On a day in September, when British troops broke the Drocourt-Queant line, I saw the Second German Guards coming along in batches, like companies, and after they had been put in barbed-wire inclosures they laughed and clapped at the sight of other crowds of comrades coming down as prisoners. I thought then, "Something has broken in the German spirit." For the first time the end seemed very near.

Yet the German rear-guards fought stubbornly in many places, especially in the last battles round Cambrai, where, on the north, the Canadian corps had to fight desperately, and suffered heavy and bitter losses under machine-gun fire, while on the south our naval division and others were badly cut up.

General Currie, whom I saw during those days, was anxious and disheartened. He was losing more men in machine-gun actions round Cambrai than in bigger battles. I watched those actions from Bourlon Wood, saw the last German railway train steam out of the town, and went into the city early on the morning of its capture, when there was a roaring fire in the heart of it and the Canadians were routing out the last Germans from their hiding-places.

The British army could not have gone on much farther after November 11th, when the armistice brought us to a halt. For three months our troops had fought incessantly, storming many villages strongly garrisoned with machine-gunners, crossing many ca.n.a.ls under heavy fire, and losing many comrades all along the way. The pace could not have been kept up. There is a limit even to the valor of British troops, and for a time we had reached that limit. There were not many divisions who could have staggered on to new attacks without rest and relief. But they had broken the German armies against them by a succession of hammer-strokes astounding in their rapidity and in their continuity, which I need not here describe in detail, because in my despatches, now in book form, I have narrated that history as I was a witness of it day by day.

Elsewhere the French and Americans had done their part with steady, driving pressure. The illimitable reserves of Americans, and their fighting quality, which triumphed over a faulty organization of transport and supplies, left the German High Command without hope even for a final gamble.

Before them the German troops were in revolt, at last, against the b.l.o.o.d.y, futile sacrifice of their manhood and people. A blinding light had come to them, revealing the criminality of their war lords in this "Great Swindle" against their race. It was defeat and agony which enlightened them, as most people-even ourselves-are enlightened only by suffering and disillusionment, and never by successes.

X

After the armistice I went with our troops to the Rhine, and entered Cologne with them. That was the most fantastic adventure of all in four and a half years of strange and terrible adventures. To me there was no wild exultation in the thought of being in Cologne with our conquering army. The thought of all the losses on the way, and of all the futility of this strife, smote at one's heart. What fools the Germans had been, what tragic fools! What a mad villainy there had been among rival dynasties and powers and politicians and peoples to lead to this ma.s.sacre! What had any one gained out of it all? Nothing except ruin. Nothing except great death and poverty and remorse and revolt.

The German people received us humbly. They were eager to show us courtesy and submission. It was a chance for our young Junkers, for the Prussian in the hearts of young pups of ours, who could play the petty tyrant, shout at German waiters, refuse to pay their bills, bully shopkeepers, insult unoffending citizens. A few young staff-officers behaved like that, disgustingly. The officers of fighting battalions and the men were very different. It was a strange study in psychology to watch them. Here they were among the "Huns." The men they pa.s.sed in the streets and sat with in the restaurants had been in German uniforms a few weeks before, or a few days. They were "the enemy," the men they had tried to kill, the men who had tried to kill them. They had actually fought against them in the same places. At the Domhof Hotel I overheard a conversation between a young waiter and three of our cavalry officers. They had been in the same fight in the village of Noyelles, near Cambrai, a tiny place of ruin, where they had crouched under machine-gun fire. The waiter drew a diagram on the table-cloth. "I was just there." The three cavalry officers laughed. "Extraordinary! We were a few yards away." They chatted with the waiter as though he were an old acquaintance who had played against them in a famous football-match. They did not try to kill him with a table-knife. He did not put poison in the soup.

That young waiter had served in a hotel in Manchester, where he had served a friend of mine, to whom he now expressed his opinion on the folly of the war, and the criminality of his war lords, and things in general. Among these last he uttered an epigram which I remember for its brutal simplicity. It was when a staff-officer of ours, rather the worse for wine, had been making a scene with the head waiter, bullying him in a strident voice.

"Some English gentlemen are swine," said the young waiter. "But all German gentlemen are swine."

Some of our officers and men billeted in houses outside Cologne or across the Rhine endeavored to stand on distant terms with the "Huns." But it was impossible to be discourteous when the old lady of the house brought them an early cup of coffee before breakfast, warmed their boots before the kitchen fire, said, "G.o.d be praised, the war is over." For English soldiers, anything like hostility was ridiculous in the presence of German boys and girls who swarmed round their horses and guns, kissed their hands, brought them little pictures and gifts.

"Kids are kids," said a sergeant-major. "I don't want to cut their throats! Queer, ain't it?"

Many of the "kids" looked half starved. Our men gave them bread and biscuit and bully beef. In Cologne the people seemed pleased to see British soldiers. There was no sense of humiliation. No agony of grief at this foreign occupation. Was it lack of pride, cringing-or a profound relief that the river of blood had ceased to flow and even a sense of protection against the revolutionary mob which had looted their houses before our entry? Almost every family had lost one son. Some of them two, three, even five sons, in that orgy of slaughter. They had paid a dreadful price for pride. Their ambition had been drowned in blood.

In the restaurants orchestras played gay music. Once I heard them playing old English melodies, and I sickened a little at that. That was going too far! I looked round the Cafe Bauer-a strange scene after four and a half years Hun-hating. English soldiers were chatting with Germans, clinking beer mugs with them. The Germans lifted their hats to English "Tommies"; our men, Canadian and English, said "Cheerio!" to German soldiers in uniforms without shoulder-straps or b.u.t.tons. English people still talking of Huns, demanding vengeance, the maintenance of the blockade, would have become hysterical if they had come suddenly to this German cafe before the signing of peace.

Long before peace was signed at Versailles it had been made on the Rhine. Stronger than the hate of war was human nature. Face to face, British soldiers found that every German had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, in spite of being a "Hun." As ecclesiastics would say when not roused to patriotic fury, they had been made "in the image of G.o.d." There were pleasant-spoken women in the shops and in the farmhouses. Blue-eyed girls with flaxen pigtails courtesied very prettily to English officers. They were clean. Their houses were clean, more spotless even than English homes. When soldiers turned on a tap they found water came out of it. Wonderful! The sanitary arrangements were good. Servants were hard-working and dutiful. There was something, after all, in German Kultur. At night the children said their prayer to the Christian G.o.d. Most of them were Catholics, and very pious.

"They seem good people," said English soldiers.