Part 5 — THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS (continued 2)

Hill 70 is ours again after two years since we took it and lost it. I don't know whether that will cause a thrill to people at home. I think it will to those whose men fought there in the September of 1915. One of my own great memories of the war is of those days in the battle of Loos, when the Scots of the 15th Division and the Londoners of the 47th, and afterwards the Guards, went through the village of Loos and gained that dirty ridge of ground among old slag-heaps under frightful shell-fire. It was gained in the first great rush of the Londoners and the Scots. The Londoners played a football up the slopes, and the Scots went up with their pipes—do you remember?—and for a few hours they had a quiet time here and collected souvenirs, until later the enemy came back in fierce counter-attacks, and the Guards and the 1st Division fell back after heroic fighting and great losses. I saw the Jocks on that first day coming back with German helmets on their heads, laughing in spite of their wounds, and for the first time I saw masses of German prisoners taken by British troops, and in the square of Béthune, through which, in driving rain, there went a steady tide of men and artillery, there was a group of German guns as trophies of victory. It seemed a great victory at first. It was only afterwards we knew how much more might have been gained. And there was a tragic story to tell. Some of the Jocks went as far as an outlying northern suburb of Lens, but few of them ever came back again. Now to-day, after two years less a month, the Canadians have fought over the same ground, and have gone over and beyond Hill 70 and linked up many of their former gains in these mining cités on the outskirts of Lens.

In describing former fighting round Lens I said it was like a war in Wigan. The comparison is true. But to-day, when I watched the scene of the Canadian attack with heavy shell-fire over all these houses and pit-heads, I thought of another northern town which would look very much like this if the hell of war came to it. I thought of Bolton and its suburbs, Entwistle and other straggling little towns on the edge of the moors, with Doffcocker and rural villages among cornfields, and factory chimneys on the horizon, and slag-heaps beyond green fields. That will give an image to English people of the scene of war to-day, except that Lens and its suburbs were never so black as our English factory towns, and its walls are still red in spite of their shell-holes.

Before the attack began at dawn wild flights of shells passed over this little world of ruin to Hill 70, which is no hill at all, but just a low hummock of ground criss-crossed with trenches and burrowed with dug-outs and barren and filthy with relics of death, on the northern side of the city of Lens. From all the ruins around, separate villages of ruin joining up with the streets of Lens itself, red flames gushed up when our batteries fired at a hot pace, and where the shells burst there were long low flashes spreading across a sky heavy and black with storm-clouds. Over the German lines and the houses where they held the cellars the shells burst in a tumult which had a sudden beginning just before the dawn, and above all their smoke and fire there were fountains of wonderfully bright light, of burning gold and of running flame all scarlet and alive. The light was from our smoke-producing rockets, and the running flame was from drums of boiling oil which we fired into the enemy's trenches to burn him alive if we caught him there. I saw the far spread of gun-fire in the early morning after the thin crescent moon had faded, and when there was a grey, moist light over the city and fields.

Soon after the Canadians had taken Hill 70 the enemy flung back a great barrage, so that the ridge was vomiting up columns of black smoke like scores of factory chimneys on a foggy day. And in all the suburbs of Lens, those cités of St.-Laurent and St.-Emilie and St.-Pierre, and into Liévin and Calonne, and Maroc and Grenay, he pitched heavy shells which came howling across the wilderness of bricks and slag-heaps, and broke into gruff enormous coughs out of which black demons of smoke rose like the evil genii out of the bottle, darkening the view. An hour or so later the sun came brightly through the clouds, and these cités of strife, girdled by cornfields in which the stooks are standing, and by green hills across which the tide of slaughter has swept, leaving them in peace again, were flooded with fresh, glinting light, so that the scene was rich in colour. There was not a figure to be seen on Hill 70, not a movement of life among the houses around Lens. The Canadians had gone across in the smoke, and now they were hidden among the ruins. The only life was that of shell-fire, and it has a life of its own, though it is meant for death.

A little to the left in front of me was one of the fosses which rise among the broken houses. For some reason the enemy had special spite against it, and every few minutes a great shell came with a yell and smashed about it. The German gunners were flinging their stuff about in a random way, searching for our batteries and hoping to kill collections of men. They did not have much luck, and they all but caught sixty of their own men who had just come along as prisoners, and, having escaped from the barrage-fire, hoped for safety from their own guns. One of their shells fell within twenty yards of them, but before the next one came their guards told them to quick march, and they ran hard. They were wretched-looking men, more miserable in physique than any I have seen for a long time, and sallow and pinched and gaunt. Some of them were very young, but not all, and there were none so young as those described to me by some Canadian soldiers who fought with them to-day.

"They were children," said one man, "no bigger than schoolboys. I call it cruel to send such youngsters into the fighting-line."

Another man told me that he saw boys lying dead who looked no older than fourteen, and it made him feel sick. They could not all have been like that, these men of the 155th and 156th Reserve Regiments, regiments from whom some of the prisoners come, because they are making a very stiff fight in some parts of their defensive system, and the Canadians have real men against them. It seems that Hill 70 was held lightly and by the younger class of soldiers, the best Prussian troops being kept back to hold the inner defences of Lens, and to make counter-attacks.

"It was a walk-over," said a Canadian, describing the assault on the hill. "Our barrage was great, and it had simply smashed the ground to pulp. I thought it a worse wreck than Vimy, which was some wreck. One could just see a faint suggestion of trenches, but everything was clean swept. There were two or three machine-gun emplacements which gave us a bit of trouble, but not much. We jumped on them and wiped them out. I can't say I saw many German dead, but just a few boys. I expect the others were buried and smashed up." These Canadians were wonderful. They went into the battle with an absolute confidence. "I knew we should do the trick," said one of them, who came walking back with a wound in his thigh, "and all my pals were of the same mind."

He said one amazing thing, lying there waiting for his operation in the back parlour of a miner's cottage, in one of these mazes into which the enemy was plugging shells at times: "I enjoyed the show very much," he said, "it was a fair treat."

Next to him lay another badly wounded man with a piece of wire plucked from his own flesh wrapped up in a piece of cotton-wool as a trophy, and a hole through his leg. He grinned at me and said: "We put it across them all right. I wouldn't have missed it, but I'm sorry I got this leg messed up. I didn't come over to get a Blighty wound. I want to see the end of this war. That's what I want to do. I want to be in at the end."

The wounded men came back like that unless they came back with only the soles of their boots showing over the edge of the ambulance. Fortunately, up to midday at least, there were not many badly wounded men. The spirit of men who have fought and fought and seen the worst horrors of war, and suffered its most hideous discomforts, is one of those miracles which I do not understand. I only record the fact about these hardy Canadians and the Canadian Scottish.

Of the same character are the civilian inhabitants of one of these mining cités on the edge of the battlefields, where they have remained since the beginning of the war. Nearer even than the edge. They live in streets where most of the houses have been hit and many of them wrecked. Death comes about and above them. Many of the people have been killed, and the children go to school in cellars with gas-masks because of the poison, that comes on an east wind or a north. They were there again to-day: old women drinking early morning coffee in little rooms that have stood between masses of ruin; a widow in black weeds, like a dowager duchess, walking slowly down a street shelled last night and to-day; girls with braided hair standing at street corners, among soldiers in steel helmets, watching shells bursting a little way off, with no certainty that that is their limit.

One of these girls came along, and I saw that she had a bandaged head.

"Wounded?" I asked. She nodded and said, "Yes, a day or two ago."

"Why do you stay in such a place?" I said. "Aren't you frightened?"

She laughed. "What can one do? My mamma keeps living here, so how can I go away? Besides, one gets used to it a little."

I am bound to say I don't get used to these things, but see them always with amazement.

A Few Days Later

Lens itself is now no better than its outer suburbs, a town of battered houses without roofs and with broken walls leaning against rubbish-heaps of brickwork and timber. The enemy sent out a wireless message that the English gunners were destroying French property by bombarding the city, and then made a deep belt of destruction by blowing up long blocks of streets. After that our guns have completed the ruin, for there was a German garrison in every house, and in this kind of warfare there must be no tenderness of sentiment about bricks and mortar if the enemy is between the walls. So now in Lens the only cover for Germans and their only chance of safety is below ground in the tunnels and cellars reinforced by concrete and built by the forced labour of civilians two years and more ago when the city was menaced by a French attack. Into these tunnels the German garrisons of Lens make their way by night, and in them they live and die. Many die in them it is certain, for a tunnel is no more than a death-trap when it is blocked at the entrance by the fall of houses, or when it collapses by the bombardment of heavy shells which pierce down deep and explode with monstrous effect. That has happened, as we know, in many parts of the German line, and recently on the French front whole companies of German soldiers were buried alive in deep caves. It is happening in Lens now, if the same effect is produced by the same power of artillery. But death comes to the German soldiers there in another way, without any noise and quite invisible, and very horrible in its quietude. Many times lately the Canadians have drenched the city of Lens with gas that kills, and soaks down heavily into dug-outs and tunnels, and stifles men in their sleep before they have time to stretch out a hand for a gas-mask, or makes them die with their masks on if they fumble a second too long. The enemy, who was first to use poison-gas, should wish to God he had never betrayed his soul by such a thing, for it has come back upon him as a frightful retribution, and in Lens, in those deep, dark cellars below the ruins, German soldiers must live with terror and be afraid to sleep.

Yesterday, when I went to that neighbourhood, I saw four German soldiers who had come out into the open, rather risking death there than by staying in their dungeon. They appeared for a minute round the corner of some brick-stacks in the Cité St.-Auguste. I was watching the German lines there, and staring at the ruined houses and slag-heaps and broken water-towers of Harnes and Annay, beyond the outer fields of the mining city. The church towers in both those villages still stand, though a little damaged, and some of the red roofs are still intact. The German lines were away beyond a strip of No Man's Land, and here not a soul was to be seen, no trace of life in all this land of death until suddenly I saw those four figures come stealthily up behind the brick-stacks. They stood up quite straight and looked towards our ground, and then after a second crouched low so that only their heads showed above a little dip in the ground. A few minutes later I saw two more Germans. They ran at a jog-trot along a hedge outside the Cité St.-Auguste and made a bolt through a gap. It was as strange to see them as though they were visitors from another planet, for, in this district of Lens, no man shows his body above ground unless he is careless of a quick death, and one may stare for days at the empty houses and the broken mine-shafts and the high black slag-heaps without seeing any living thing.

On our side of the lines, during a long walk yesterday to the crest of Hill 70, I saw only a few lonely figures above ground, although below ground there were many, and in one dug-out where I was lucky to go I found a luncheon-party of officers discussing the psychology of Kerensky and news of the world one day old, and the chances of three years more of war or thirty, as men do round a London dinner-table, though there were loud, unpleasant noises overhead, where German shells were in flight to a trench which had been recommended to me as a nice safe place for a Sunday walk. Somehow, I did not believe in the safety of any walk in this neighbourhood, because there were fresh shell-holes along the tracks between the ruined houses which could not inspire the simplest soul with confidence. There is not a house there which has not been knocked edgewise or upside down, and the little village church I passed is no longer a place for worship but a nightmare building, inhabited by the menace of death. The German gunners cannot leave these mining villages alone, though they are as deserted as the Polar regions, with no cheerful Tommy's face to be seen through any of the empty window-frames, or through any of the holed walls or down any of the sand-bag shelters which used to be the homes of British soldiers when the fighting was closer this way.

It is the loneliness which one hates most in these places, especially when shells come along with a beastly noise which seems a particular menace to one's own body as there is nobody else to be killed. So I was glad to fall in with a young officer who was working his way up the line. He had just brought down a wounded man, and was stopping a while in a wayside dressing-station, where there was a friendly and lonely doctor, who offered the hospitality of his sand-bags and steel girders to any passer-by, and said "Stay a bit longer" when bits of shell could be heard whining outside. We went along the way together, close to the grim old muck-heap, the Double Grassier, where Germans and English lived cheek by jowl for two years until recent weeks, fighting each other with bombs when they were bored with each other's company, and so past the village of Loos.

The way up to Hill 70 is historic ground, and every bit of brickwork, every stump of a tree, every yard or so of road, is haunted by the memory of gallant men, who in September just two years ago came this way under frightful shell-fire and fell here in great numbers. Among them were the Londoners of the glorious 47th Division and the Scots of the 15th—as I walked by the village of Loos I thought of some friends of mine in the Gordons who had great adventures there that day amongst those dreadful little ruins—and Hill 70 was taken and lost again after heroic fighting and tragic episodes, which are still remembered with a shudder by men who hate to think of them.

It is only a few weeks ago that we took the ground beyond in that great Canadian assault upon Hill 70 which I described at the time, and up there on the hill-side—it is not much of a hill, but goes up very gradually to the crest—the trenches are still littered with German relics, and in the deep dug-outs burnt out and blown out there are still German bodies lying. The smell of death comes out of these holes, and it is not a pleasant place.

Before the Canadian assault English troops of the glorious old 6th Division captured and held the approaches and raided the Germans in Nash Alley, which is a famous trench in the history of the Durhams and the Essex Regiment and of the Buffs and West Yorkshires, and resisted ferocious German attacks with the most grim courage. Under their pressure the Germans yielded part of their line one night, withdrawing to another line of trenches secretly, but these troops of ours followed them up so quickly that they were in the German dug-outs before the candles had gone out. The Canadian capture of Hill 70 was a great blow to the German command, and they tried vainly to get it back by repeated counter-attacks. They will never get it back now, and Lens, which lies below it, remains for them a death-trap, which only pride makes them hold, and where in the cellars men are forced to live hellishly under our shells and gas in order to uphold that pride in men who do not take the risks nor suffer the agony of this hidden death.

IX

LONDONERS IN GLENCORSE WOOD

August 17

The battle of Langemarck yesterday, and all the struggle southward to the ground about Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse was one of the most heroic as well as one of the bloodiest days of fighting in all this war. The enemy put up a fierce resistance except at points where underfed boys had been thrust out in shell-holes, as in the neighbourhood of Langemarck, to check the first onslaught of our men if possible, and if not to die. Behind them, as storm troops for counter-attack, were some of the finest troops of the German army. Among them was the 54th Division, which had already been severely mauled by our gun-fire and was utterly exhausted. But other divisions, like the 34th, who were in front of our Londoners, were fresh and strong, only just brought into the battle-line. Behind the immediate supporting troops were massed reserves whom the German command held ready to hurry up in wagons and light railways to any part of the field where their lines were most threatened, or when instant counter-attacks might inflict most damage on our men.

In gun-power the enemy was and is strong. He had prepared a large concentration of guns south-east of our right flank, and whatever may be his reserves of ammunition he has gathered up great stores for this present battle. On the right of our attack he stood on high ground, the crest of Polygon Wood, and the slopes down from Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel Ridge. It is the big door which he must slam in our face at all costs, because it opens out to his plains beyond; and against it he has massed all his weight. Our men, it will be seen, were not likely to have a walk-over. They did not, but took all they gained by hard fighting. It could in no sense of the word be a walk-over. The ground was hideous, worse than in the winter on the Somme. That seems strange, with a hot sun shining overhead and dust rising in clouds along traffic roads behind the battle-line as I saw it to-day. That is the irony of things. Where our men were fighting yesterday and to-day there are hundreds of thousands of shell-holes, some three feet deep and some ten feet deep, and each shell-hole is at least half full of water, and many of them are joined so that they form lakes deep enough to drown men and horses if they fall in. So it was, and is, around the place where Langemarck village stood, and where the old lake of the château that no longer stands has flooded over into a swamp, and where a double row of black tree-stumps goes along the track of the broken road where the people of Langemarck used to walk to church before the devil did in so many old churches and established little hells of his own on their rubbish-heaps. So it was yesterday and remains to-day all about, the stumps of trees sticking up out of a mush of slimy, pitted ground which go by the romantic names of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse, and Shrewsbury Forest and Polygon Wood. The photographs of our airmen taken yesterday in low flights over these damned places reveal the full foulness of them. Seen from this high view, they are long stretches of white barren earth pock-marked by innumerable craters, where no man or human body is to be seen, though there are many dead and some living lying in those holes, and they are all bright and shining, because the sun is glinting on the water which fills them, except where dense clouds of smoke from great gun-fire drift across.

The courage of men who attacked over such ground was great courage. The grim, stubborn way in which our soldiers made their way through these bogs and would not be beaten, though they slipped and fell and stuck deep while the enemy played machine-gun bullets on to their lines and flung high explosives over the whole stretch of bog-land through which they had to pass, is one of the splendid and tragic things in our poor human story.

I told yesterday how some of our English battalions took Langemarck like this, leaving many comrades bogged, wounded, and spent, but crawling round the concrete houses, over the old cellars of the village and routing out the Germans who held them with machine-guns. At the blockhouse on the way up, called Au Bon Gîte, an oblong fort of concrete walls ten feet thick, the Germans bolted inside as soon as they saw our men, slammed down an iron door, and for a time stayed there while our bombers prowled round like hungry wolves waiting for their prey. Later they gave themselves up because our line swept past them and they had no hope.

In another place of the same kind, called Reitre Farm, from which came a steady blast of machine-gun fire, our men made several desperate rushes and at last, when many lay wounded, a machine-gunner of ours got close and thrust the barrel of his weapon through a slit in the wall and swept the inner chamber with a flood of bullets.

There were savage fights in some of the dark cellars of Langemarck between men who would not surrender and men who would not turn back, and men who fell heavily against other men and knew that in these underground holes it must be their life or the other's, and the quicker the better. They fought their way beyond Langemarck yesterday, and on the left of our advance we hold to-day all the ground that was taken, which follows the curve of the Langemarck-Gheluvelt line, dug and wired by months of labour according to the orders of the German command, afraid of our coming menace, and now blotted out. The fighting all about this ground was by groups of English soldiers, in some cases without officers, and in some cases led by privates with a sense of leadership and fine, stern courage. They were Royal Fusiliers, Lancashire Fusiliers, Middlesex, Guernseys, and other battalions of the 29th Division, the Light Infantry battalions of the 20th Division, the Yorkshires, Lancashires, South Staffords, Lincolns, and Borderers of the 11th Division, and the Oxfords, Gloucesters, and Berkshires of the 48th Division. So things happened on the left of the battle. All ground was gained as it had been planned, and all held, and many hundreds of prisoners were taken, though that is not the best proof of success.

On the right it was different. It was on the right that the enemy fought hardest, counter-attacked most fiercely and most often, and concentrated the heaviest artillery. There were the Irish Brigades here, and English county troops of the 8th Division, and London battalions of the 56th. All this side of the attack become involved at once in desperate fighting. The ground was damnable—cratered and full of water and knee-deep in foul mud—and beyond them was high ground, struck through with gully-like funnels, through which the enemy could pour up his storm troops for counter-attack; and away in the mud were the same style of concrete forts as up north, still unbroken by our bombardments and fortified again with new garrisons of machine-gunners, taking the place of those who on July 31 were killed or captured when this ground was stormed and, later, lost.

The English and the Irish battalions made progress in spite of heavy fire on them and no light losses; but in the afternoon of yesterday they had to withdraw from their advanced positions under the pressure of fierce counter-attacks by fresh troops. They fought these rear-guard actions stubbornly. Irish as well as English fought sometimes in small groups in isolated posts, until they were killed or captured. They made the enemy pay a big price in blood for his old ground, but their own casualties could not be light in view of the desperate character of this struggle.

As yet I know very few details of the Irish side of things. I know more about the Londoners, for I have been to see them to-day, and they have told me the facts of yesterday. They are tragic facts, because for English troops it is always a tragedy to withdraw from any yard of soil they have taken by hard fighting, and many good London lads will never come back from that morass. But there is nothing the matter with London courage, and to me there is something more thrilling in the way these boys fought to the death, some of them in the bitterness of retreat, than in the rapid and easy progress of men in successful attack. Lying out all night in the wet mud under heavy fire, they attacked at dawn up by Glencorse Wood, in the direction of Polygon Wood. On the right they and their neighbours at once came under blasts of fire from five machine-guns in a strong point, and under a hostile barrage-fire that was frightful in its intensity They could not make much headway. No mortal men could have advanced under such fire, and so their comrades on the left were terribly exposed to the scythe of bullets which swept them also.

Men of London regiments—the Queen's Westminsters and the old "Vics" and the Rangers and the Kensingtons—fought forward with a wonderful spirit which is a white shining light in all this darkness—through Glencorse Wood and round to the north of Nuns' Wood, avoiding the most deeply flooded ground here, where there was one big boggy lake. Parties of the Middlesex went into Polygon Wood, which is a long way forward, and actually brought prisoners out of that place. At a strong point near the Hooge-Gheluvelt road they killed thirty-four Germans and captured the redoubt. But there were Germans still left in other concrete houses near by, and they were very strong at the Zonnebeke position on the north-west.

Very soon counter-attacks developed from the south out of Inverness Copse, and from the north. The Londoners were exhausted after their dreadful night and all this fighting over foul ground; they were in exposed positions, and they were shut in by the most terrible gun-fire. What happened with the Irish and other troops happened here. Our airmen, flying low, saw small isolated groups of London boys fighting separate battles against great odds. The enemy was encircling them, and they were trying to hold rear-guard positions, so that their comrades could withdraw in good order. A signalled message that found its way to headquarters tells one such story. I read to-day the little pink slip bearing the words as they came in. They are from a Middlesex officer. "Am in shell-hole before second objective, and two strong points held by the enemy. Have ten men with me. We are surrounded, and heavy machine-gun fire is being turned on us. Regret no course but to surrender. Can't see any of our forces."

That message was the only one of its kind received, but there were many small groups of London men, led by young officers, or without officers, who held on to the last like that, and did not let down the pride of their great city, so gay, so ignorant yesterday afternoon, with a tide of traffic swirling down its streets, while out here on the wet barren earth, under the same sun, these boys of London fought and died, or in small groups rose from among their dead and wounded and went white-faced into the circle of the enemy who had surrounded them.

X

SOMERSETS AT LANGEMARCK

August 19

The enemy, after denying our taking of Langemarck, now admit their loss of it. Our prisoners who were brought through the place had the German wireless read out to them and were abashed by the untruth of the message. It was a German sergeant-major who put up the only excuse. He laughed and said: "In this war it is only those who win who can afford to tell the official truth. A reverse is always covered by a lie."

We are well beyond Langemarck, and to-day I went among the men who got there first—the 20th Division—fighting their way past machine-gun blockhouses, which is the new system of German defence, past the deadly machine-gun fire that came out of them, and through to the village and its surrounding swamps. These young officers, who have lost many of their comrades, and these men of theirs belonging to light-infantry battalions, were sleeping and resting in their tents behind the fighting-lines, and cleaning themselves up after days in wet mud and the filth of the battlefield. But they were keen to tell the tale of their adventures, and if I could put them down just as they were told, one man adding to another man's story, the excitement of remembrance rousing them from their weariness, and queer grim laughter breaking out when they spoke of their greatest dangers, it would be a strange narrative. They were men who had escaped death by prodigious chance, and officers and men greeted each other joyfully and with a splendid spirit of comradeship as brothers-in-arms who were glad to see each other alive and remembered how they had stuck it together in the worst hours. They belonged to the Somerset Light Infantry of the 20th Division, and they came from old towns like Bridgwater and Crewkerne and Yeovil, which seem a million miles away from such scenes of war. One young officer of the Somersets knew most of what had happened, and his own adventures that day would fill a book if told in detail. He took me into his tent and showed me how his kit had been pierced by bullets and torn by the blast of shell-fire, and he marvelled that he had no more than a hurt hand cut against the teeth of a German sniper and a body bruised all over, but with a whole skin. "A bit of luck," he said. This young man must have been born under a lucky star, for the things he went through that day would have frightened a cat relying on nine lives and taking a hundred chances on the score of them.

On the way up to Langemarck to the left of that solid blockhouse called Au Bon Gîte, where the enemy held out behind iron doors while our troops went past them swept by machine-gun fire, there were many German snipers lying about in shell-holes. They were very brave men, put out into these holes to check our advance, and knowing that they were bound to die, because that is the almost certain fate of snipers on such ground. They lay doggo, pretending to be corpses when any of our men were near enough to see, but using their rifles with deadly aim when they had any elbow-room. I heard that one man killed four of our officers, and another killed fourteen men and wounded eleven before he was shot through the head. One of these men well behind our advancing waves lay very still, close to the young officer of the Somersets of whom I spoke, and who saw the fellow move and raise his rifle. He pounced on him and struck him across the face with his bare fist and tore his hand open against the man's teeth. They were bad teeth, and the hand is now festering. Another sniper gave himself away, and the young officer shot him through the head with a revolver, which was very busy all that day. I have already told how these light-infantry men had to struggle through bogs around Langemarck, how they fell into shell-holes full of water, and how, under great fire, they made their way into the place where Langemarck village had once been and attacked the dug-outs and blockhouses there. Some of the strangest episodes happened between the village and a point called the Streiboom. There were two more blockhouses on the Langemarck road girdled by machine-gun fire. The first one was rushed by twenty men, led by this young officer I have been telling about, and bombed until thirty Germans tumbled out and surrendered. But beyond was the other blockhouse, and upon this the officer of the Somersets advanced with only six men. A machine-gun was firing from the right of it, and it was a strong place of concrete with no open door. The seven Somersets went straight for it, and the officer flung two bombs through the loopholes, but they did not seem to take effect. Then he hurled two more bombs, which were his last, at the iron door, but they did not burst. With his bare fists he beat at the door and shouted out, "Come out, you blighters, come out." Presently, to his surprise, they came out, not two or three, nor six or seven, but forty-two stout and hefty men. Among them was an English soldier badly wounded, who had been taken prisoner three days before. He was a Yorkshireman, who had lain among the enemy, well treated, but dying. The Germans could not send him behind their lines because of our bombardment, which had cut off their supplies, so that they were four days hungry when they surrendered. In another dug-out was another Yorkshireman, and he is now safe and well behind our own lines.

There were eight machine-guns in that last blockhouse, one of which I saw to-day, and two of them, fitted up with new springs, were used against the enemy. One of them was worked on a hydraulic lift, so that it could be got into action very quickly from its underground place. In the blockhouse from which the forty-two had been taken by this small body of Somersets was a great store of 5·9 shells. All told this little group of men took 100 prisoners that day, and their officer himself is said to have killed sixteen Germans and to have wounded many more. After the blockhouse affair he chased a number of the enemy running down the Langemarck road, and, using his revolver in the cowboy fashion, dropping his wrist from the shoulder, he plugged them as he ran. After that he went on and held an exposed advanced post with a mixed lot of Somersets and "Koylies" (King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry) and Rifle Brigade men. They had next to no ammunition, but they held on all night, hoping for the best, but not sure of it. And this young officer who was their leader told me to-day that—great God!—he "enjoyed" himself and was "fearfully bucked" with his day's work. The excitement of it all was in his eyes, as he told me, in much more detail than I have given, the story of the thirty-six hours.

It is indeed an astounding chapter of courage all this attack on Langemarck by men who before the attack had been bombarded with gas and other shells, and who then floundered in deep bogs, where they got stuck up to the waist, but worked in small parties up and on, fighting all the way against an enemy who put up a gallant and stubborn resistance and sold every hundred yards of ground as dearly as he could. The runners who went back again and again through that slough of despond under damnable fire were real heroes. The stretcher-bearers who carried down the wounded all that day and night regardless of their own lives were beyond words splendid, and the carriers who brought up rations so that the men in front should have enough to eat and drink were as brave as those who fought. In the midst of all this turmoil, all this death, all this mud and blood, men kept their sense of humour and their shrewd wit in a way which beats me. "Do you speak English?" said a sergeant-major to a German non-commissioned officer who came out of a dug-out full of men. "Nein, nein," said the man. "Well, you've got to learn bally quick," said the sergeant-major, "so go and tell those pals of yours to come out before something happens to them." And the German learnt enough English in the sergeant-major's eyes to deliver the command correctly enough.

I have spoken only of the Somersets. Other light infantry—the Durhams and the "Koylies" and the D.C.L.I.—who worked with them and who took Reitres Farm and other strong points, were not less dogged, and this day at Langemarck was a glorious revelation of the old spirit of the West Country, which is still strong and fine.

And now I must write again about the Canadians, whose attack towards Lens I watched the other day among our guns.

That story is not yet finished, and has been going on ever since that morning when the Canadians took Hill 70 and the cités of St.-Emile and St.-Laurent, working forward towards the heart of Lens. It is clear that the enemy's command issued orders for Hill 70 and the other ground to be retaken at all costs. There have been no fewer than thirteen counter-attacks against the Canadian troops, and men of the 4th Guards Division, and later of the 220th Regiment, have come forward in wave after wave and hurled themselves with desperate courage against the Canadian defence.

Time after time they have been seen assembling by our flying men and observers, and time after time their ranks have been shattered by our guns. To the north of Lens there is a chalk quarry, which was not gained by the Canadians in their first attack, so that they established their line on the west side of it, and it was against this line that repeated efforts were made. Each attempt was smashed up, and then the Canadians advanced into the quarry and captured ninety men of many units and twenty machine-guns. The prisoners complain that their officers had lost their heads, and had been utterly demoralized. After violent attacks on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, the enemy made a great effort with every weapon of frightfulness on Friday evening, using poison-gas and flame-jets and a hurricane of high explosives in order to drive the Canadians off Hill 70. It failed with great losses to themselves when the German infantry attacked, and the attacks yesterday have had no greater success. The Canadians claim that the enemy's losses must be at least three times as great as their own. There were moments when the Canadians were hard pressed, and one of them was when a battalion commander was warned that the Germans were behind him. "I'm all right," he said cheerily, and then suddenly he said, "Good Lord, so they are." He was not heard from again for two hours and a half, and in that time he had organized his clerks and batmen and signallers and driven out a party of Germans who had worked out round No Man's Land and thrust a wedge behind him. The fighting has been savage and fierce, and the Canadians have used the bayonet at close quarters and fought hand to hand in the dark cellars of the mining cités. This phase of the war is as bloody as anything that has been done in the history of human strife.

XI

THE IRISH IN THE SWAMPS

August 21

It is of the Irish now that I will write, though their story is four days old and not a tale of great victory. It is easier to write of success than of failure, and of great advances than of grim rear-guard actions fought by men desperately tried but still heroic. But I want to tell the story of the Irish who went forward over bad ground on the morning of August 16, that morning when there was great success at Langemarck on the left, and something less than success on the right.

These Irishmen had no luck at all. They gained ground but lost it again. It is up to the Irish to tell this tale, for they were grand men and they fought and fell with simple valour. They were the Southern Irish and the men of Ulster side by side again, as they were at Wytschaete, where I met them on the morning of the battle and afterwards, glad because they had taken a great share in one of the finest victories of the war. Their laughter rang out then as they told me their adventures, all their young officers keen to say how splendid their men had been, and the men themselves drawing cheerful comparisons between this day's luck and that other day at Ginchy, on the Somme, when they gained another victory, but with thinned ranks, so that when I met them marching out they had but the remnants of battalions, and their general called out words of good cheer to them with a break in his voice. After Wytschaete they were in high spirits. Quick in attack, full of the old Irish dash, they were the men for a sudden assault, needing an impetuous advance, while they were fresh and unspoilt. But they had no luck this time.

Let me tell first the happenings of the Irish troops on the right, the Catholic Irish, whose own right was on the Roulers railway, going up to the Potsdam Redoubt. An hour or so before the attack the enemy, as though knowing what was about to come, flung down a tremendous and destructive barrage, answered by our own drum-fire, which gave the signal for the Irish to advance. The Dublin Fusiliers and the Royal Irish Rifles went forward on the right and the Inniskillings on the left. In front of them were numbers of German strong points, the now famous pill-boxes, or concrete blockhouses, which the enemy has built as his new means of defence to take the place of trench systems. They were Beck House, Borry Farm, and the Bremen Redoubt—sinister names which will never be forgotten in Irish history. There were also odd bits of trench here and there for the use of snipers and small advanced posts. As the first wave of the Irish assaulting troops advanced Germans rose from those ditches and ran back to the shelter of the concrete works, and immediately from those emplacements and from other machine-gun positions echeloned in depth behind them swept a fierce enfilade fire of machine-gun bullets, even through the barrage of our shell-fire, which went ahead of the Irish line. Many men in the first wave dropped, but the others kept going, and reached almost as far as they had been asked to go. The Royal Irish Rifles worked up the Roulers railway to the level crossing, and captured two German officers and thirty prisoners. The Dublin Fusiliers, on their left, were held up by machine-guns from the Bremen Redoubt, and later a message came down from that small party. It was from a young Irish subaltern. "I am lying out here in a shell-hole. All officers and men killed or wounded." Other men joined him, but were cut off and taken prisoners. On the left the Inniskillings, who had crossed over the Zonnebeke river, made good and rapid progress, capturing two strong redoubts and seizing an important little hill—Hill 37—which was one of the keys of the position. The success of the day would have been gained if the centre had been carried, and if the supporting troops could have come up. But neither of these things happened. The supporting waves were caught by the cross-fire of machine-guns, and they could make hardly any headway. The Borry Farm Redoubt gave most trouble. It contained five machine-guns and a garrison of sixty expert and determined gunners, and never fell all day. It broke the centre of the Irish attack, and was the cause of heroic but deadly efforts by the Irish Rifles, followed by Inniskillings. The Royal Irish Fusiliers attacked it by direct assault, knowing that everything was staked on their success. They went for it like tigers, but without avail. One of the battalion officers, seeing this failure, but knowing how all depended upon the capture of that fort, thereupon led another attack by a company of the Royal Irish Rifles. This met the same fate.

Meanwhile the men of the Ulster Division were fighting just as desperately. They had ahead of them several of the concrete forts, one of which, near Pond Farm, was a strong defensive system with deep dug-outs and overhead cover proof against shell-fire. This and other strong points had wooden platforms above the concrete walls, on which the gunners could mount their machines very quickly, firing them behind two yards thickness of concrete.

Opposite the Pommern Redoubt stands a small hill which the enemy has used for a long time as one of his chief observation-posts, as it gives a complete view of our ground. Beyond that the country rises to a saddle-back ridge, with double spurs guarded on the lower slope by a small fort called Gallipoli, and from these spurs he could fling a machine-gun barrage across the low ground. An ugly position to attack. It was worse for the Ulster men because of the state of the ground, which was a thin crust over a bog of mud. On the left some of the Inniskillings and Irish Rifles rushed forward as far as a network of trenches and wired defences, which they took in a fierce assault against a Bavarian garrison, who fought to a finish. Here they recaptured one of our Lewis guns lost in the fighting on July 31. On the right the Irish Rifles and the Fusiliers, walking through the fire of many machine-guns, made a straight attack upon Hill 35, which dominated the centre of the Ulster attack. Before it were some gun-pits, and the Ulster men, by most desperate efforts, took and crossed these pits and fought up the slopes of the hill beyond. But they could not keep the hill nor the pits. So after many hours of frightful fighting the situation was that some scattered groups of Dublins and Royal Irish held out on a far goal with exposed flanks, with some Inniskillings clinging to the slopes of Hill 37, while on the other side of the Zonnebeke river the Ulster men had been forced off their little hill, and had been unable to get beyond the German chain of concrete houses.

The enemy's aeroplanes came over to survey the situation, and, taking a leaf from our book, flew very low, firing their machine-guns at the advanced posts of Irish lying in shell-holes and in the hummocky ground. They were in a desperate position, those advanced posts.... Then the enemy launched his counter-attack from the direction of Zonnebeke, and gradually the shattered lines of the Irish fell back, slowly fighting little rear-guard actions in isolated groups. Many of them were surrounded and cut off, or had to fight their way back in the night or the dawn of next day.

All through the worst hours an Irish padre went about among the dead and dying, giving absolution to his boys. Once he came back to headquarters, but he would not take a bite of food or stay, though his friends urged him. He went back to the field to minister to those who were glad to see him bending over them in their last agony. Four men were killed by shell-fire as he knelt beside them, and he was not touched—not touched until his own turn came. A shell burst close, and the padre fell dead.

There were many other men who gave up their lives for their friends that day—stretcher-bearers, who had a long way to go under fire, and runners, who had to crawl on their stomachs from shell-hole to shell-hole, and carrying-parties and medical officers. Near the Frezenberg Redoubt, which was on the right of the Catholic Irish, a doctor worked, never sleeping for days and nights, but going out of his dug-out to crawl after wounded men and bandaging up their wounds under heavy fire. The first man he found was not one of his Irish. Away in front of the line, in No Man's Land, was a bogged Tank, and Irish sentries heard a wail from it. The doctor heard of this and crept out to the Tank and found a Scottish soldier there badly wounded, as he had crept into this shelter days before. The doctor bandaged him, and, without calling for help, carried him back on his own shoulders. Another Scot was found in a shell-hole wounded in both legs. He was one of the Gordons, and had been lying there since July 31. He is "in a good state of health," was the report of the Irish patrol, and will be sent home to-night.

Before the battle and after it the Bavarians behaved decently about the wounded, and allowed the stretcher-bearers to work in the open without being shelled, though some of them were hit in the machine-gun barrage. It is good to know that, and fair to say it. The Bavarians against the Irish fought, as I am told by Irishmen, in a clean, straight way, and their defence was stronger than our attack. The Irish troops had no luck. It was a day of tragedy. But poor Ireland should be proud of these sons of hers, who struggled against such odds and fought until their strength was spent, and even then held on in far posts with a spirit scornful of the word "surrender." Some very noble young officers gave up their lives rather than say that word, and all these dear Irish boys went to the last limit of human endurance before they fell back. Not by any hair's-breadth did they lose the honour they won at Wytschaete and Ginchy.

XII

THE WAY THROUGH GLENCORSE WOOD

August 22

There was severe fighting again to-day eastwards of St.-Julien (3-1/2 miles north-east of Ypres), extending south across the Zonnebeke, beyond the Frezenberg Redoubt, while on the right our troops again penetrated Glencorse Copse (due east of Ypres), and fought on that ugly rising ground which the enemy is defending in great strength. The Divisions engaged, from north to south, are the 29th, 38th, 11th, 48th, 18th, 61st, 15th, 19th, 47th, 14th, and 24th.

On the left progress has been made from the high road of St.-Julien to the Zonnebeke-Langemarck road, which cuts across it, guarded on the enemy's side by two strong points with the usual concrete shelters which the Germans have adopted as their new means of forward defence. Below them there is another strong position called Winnipeg, about which our men were heavily engaged in the early hours of this morning, and below that again the same series of pill-boxes and concrete blockhouses against which the Irish battalions went forward with such desperate valour on the 16th of this month, as I described in my message yesterday.

Scottish troops of the 15th Division attacked to-day where the Southern Irish were engaged six days ago. Before them they had those sinister forts, Beck House and Borry Farm, and Vampire Point guarding the way to the Bremen Redoubt, which will be remembered always in the history of the Irish brigades as places of heroic endeavour, just as now this morning they will take their place in the annals of our Scottish fighting. To the left of them are other forts, round which the Ulster men were fighting last week—Pond Farm, Schuler Farm, and others on the way to the Gallipoli Redoubt. About these places Warwickshires and other Midland troops of the 61st Division have been fighting, and have met with the same difficulties, apart from the state of the ground, which has dried a little. It has not dried much, for our shell-fire has broken up the gullies and streams with which it was drained, and the country is water-logged, so that the pools remain until the sun dries them up. The shell-holes and these ponds are not so full of water as when the Irish went across, and the surface of the shell-broken earth is hardening. But it is only a thin crust over a bog, so that the Tanks which went forward to-day here and there could not get very far without sinking in. One Tank was taken by a gallant crew almost as far as a German strong point nearly half a mile beyond our old front line very early in the morning, and did good work up there. The enemy put down a furious barrage-fire soon after the attack had started to-day, and kept the Frezenberg Redoubt under intense bombardment. But as soon as the attack developed he could not use his artillery against our men at many points, not knowing what forts and ground were still held by his own troops. He relied again upon the cross-fire of machine-guns, arranged very skilfully in depth, for enfilade barrages, and upon the garrisons who held his concrete redoubts in the advanced positions. In one of the blockhouses this morning our Warwickshire men captured forty-seven prisoners, who, when they were surrounded, took refuge in tunnelled galleries running to the right of the main fort, called Schuler Farm. Some of our men fought through the enfilade fire of machine-guns as far as the slopes of Hill 35, and to the right of this the Scots made a gallant and fierce assault towards Bremen Redoubt.

August 30

The sky of Flanders is still full of wind and water, and heavy rain-storms driven by the gale sweep over the battlefield, flinging down trees already broken by shell-fire. Behind the lines some of the hop-fields round Poperinghe and other villages are sadly wrecked. Many of the hop-poles have fallen, and the long trailing hops lie all tangled in the mire. Many telephone wires were down also just after the gale, and the signallers had a rough windy time in getting them up again. But it is on the field of battle that this weather matters most, and there in such places as Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse and Sanctuary Wood on our side of the lines, the linked shell-craters are ponds. In and between them is a quagmire.

I write of Glencorse Wood and Inverness Copse rather than of the ground farther north, in the valley of the Steenbeek, though that is just as bad, or a little worse, because yesterday I went to see the troops of the 14th Division who made the last attack in those sinister woodlands in the track of the London men who fought there so desperately on July 31.

The last attack, beginning on August 22, was made by light-infantry regiments, among whom were the Duke of Cornwall's and the Somerset Light Infantry. They were fine well-trained men—trained hard and trained long in the tactics of assault—and though they took ground which they could not hold, because the enemy was in great strength against them and they were weakened after hard fighting in frightful ground, they held off repeated counter-attacks and indicted great loss upon the enemy, and held their original line intact against most fierce assaults. The enemy's storm troops advanced against them through Inverness Copse, and in encircling movements which tried to get round and through their flanks again and again during two days of violent fighting, they counter-attacked behind the barrage-fire of many batteries, so that all the ground held by our men was swept by high explosives and shrapnel hour after hour, and when these waves of Saxons and Prussians were broken or repulsed, others came with a sheet of flame before them--from "flammenwerfer" machines, which project fire like water from a fireman's hose. Our riflemen and light infantry did not break before this advancing furnace, but fired into the heart of it, and saw some of the "flammenwerfer" men go up in their own flame like moths bursting in the light of a candle with loud reports, "a loud pop" as the men describe it, so that nothing of them was left but a little smoke and a few cinders.

But that was at the end of the battle, and the light-infantry battalions had fought through terrible hours before they faced that last ordeal. Before the attack they held a line opposite Glencorse Wood on the left and running down on the right past Stirling Castle, the old German fort above a nest of dug-outs, which has become famous in all this fighting. In front of them lay Inverness Copse, a thousand yards long by 500 deep, with many concrete blockhouses hidden, or half hidden, among the fallen trees and tattered stumps and upheaved earth of this blasted wood; and north-east of that, ruins of an old château called Herenthage Castle.

Facing our left were three lines of battered trenches north of Inverness Copse, and two blockhouses called L-shaped Farm—on an aeroplane photograph it looks exactly like the capital letter—and Fitzclarence Farm. These places were strongly garrisoned, and the German machine-gunners were safe within their concrete walls from any shell-splinters. Our barrage swept on to the enemy's lines, flung up the earth, crashed among the trees, and tore all this belt of land to chaos, where already it was deeply cratered by the earlier bombardment. Behind that barrage went over the light-infantry battalions, and immediately they came under gusts of machine-gun fire from the blockhouses which still stood intact. It was then 7 o'clock in the morning. They forced their way into Inverness Copse, followed by some Tanks, and roved round one of the blockhouses, where thirty Germans sat inside with their steel doors shut and their machine-guns firing through the loopholes. Some sappers were sent for, and blew in the doors, and the garrison were killed fighting.

The Duke of Cornwall's men were checked for a time by machine-gun fire from Glencorse Wood, and advance waves were held up round a blockhouse with a garrison of sixty men north of Inverness Copse, but after fierce fighting this place fell, and not a man escaped. The Somerset Light Infantry passed on, and fought their way to the rubbish-heap called Herenthage Château, where a hundred and twenty Germans of the 145th Infantry Regiment held out in concrete chambers. Only their officer remained alive after the fighting here, and he was brought in a prisoner.

The Somersets established themselves in their goal with posts in front of Inverness Copse and Herenthage Castle, but on the left the Cornish lads were held up by machine-gun fire east of "Clapham Junction," where there was another fortified farm with sixty men and six machine-guns inside. A Tank came up and sat outside the place, firing point-blank at its walls, and the Cornwalls followed it and burst the doors in and fought until again not a single German remained alive, after a terrible bayonet contest. So the attack had succeeded, but with forces now heavily reduced. It was now ten o'clock in the morning. The story that follows is one long series of counter-attacks. It began with a barrage which came down with a tempest of shells half-way through Inverness Copse. For miles around the German batteries concentrated their fire on this ground and raked it. From the east of Inverness Copse, and at the same time from the south, storming parties of Germans advanced behind this great gun-fire and, though the first attack was broken and then the second by rifles and machine-guns, a third developed in greater strength. A runner came down from the Somersets--one of those brave runners who all day long and next day worked to and fro through dreadful barrage-fire until many were killed and other men went out to search for those dead boys and look for their dispatches, unless they had been blown to bits. The message from the Somersets reported that they could not hold on. They were being enclosed on both flanks, and proposed to fall back half-way through Inverness Copse, and this was done. Some reserves from light-infantry battalions were thrown in to strengthen the line, and the Cornwalls threw out a defensive flank with strong points.

At midday another attack was made on the Somersets, and driven off by rifles and machine-guns, and at two o'clock they reported that the enemy was massing in an attempt to turn their left flank, which was then weak. The artillery answered an urgent call, and the German assembly was destroyed. So the evening came and the night, and the Light Infantry held on east of Stirling Castle and partly in Inverness Copse with many dead and wounded about them, and lines of German dead in front of them, awaiting riflemen coming to their support.

In a brigade headquarters a group of officers waited more anxiously for this help, having more responsibility. They sat with wet towels about their heads and eyes, in poisonous fumes and dreadful stenches which crept down from above, where heavy shells burst incessantly, shaking all the earth and blowing out the candles. The concrete ceiling bulged in. Runners came in white-faced and shaking, after frightful journeys, and officers bent to the candlelight to read scribbled messages sent down by hard-pressed men. Outside were the groans of wounded men.

At dawn, Tanks went out to attack the strong points north of Inverness Copse, where the enemy had rallied again, and one of them approached Fitzclarence Farm and broke up a counter-attacking preparation there. Some Germans ran into the blockhouse there and shot down the steel doors and lay doggo. Others came out of a trench to attack the Tank, but fled before the fire. Later in the morning German aeroplanes came out and flew very low and played their machine-guns on to our men, but without doing much harm.

From 1 A.M. to 3.30 A.M. the enemy kept a terrific barrage over all our ground, and then flamed out all along the line the signal of a new counter-attack. It was the "flammenwerfer" attack against the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, and the whole sky was red with the light of these advancing fire-jets. For a time, in spite of the enemy's heavy losses, the Cornwalls had to retire before these far-reaching flames, but they rallied and went forward again, driving the enemy part of the way back, where he was swept by our artillery-fire. The enemy kept up a steady barrage-fire over three wide belts, and an officer who went up to report the position had the worst hours of his life on that journey through bursting shells and over the fields of dead. But in spite of a message that had come down reporting a new withdrawal, it was found that the line was intact, and that the thin ranks of Light Infantry and King's Royal Rifles had beaten back all the enemy's assaults, and had destroyed their spirit for further attacks by most deadly losses. We could not hold Inverness Copse, but the fighting here was worthy of men who, during two years of war, have fought with steadfast courage and have many acts of heroism in their long record.

XIII

THE SLAUGHTER-HOUSE OF LENS

August 23

One day, when it is possible to get in and around Lens, the veil will be torn from a human charnel-house, or, rather, from charnel-houses which none of us may yet enter or see through the drifting smoke. Yesterday I looked down on Lens and saw its roofless buildings and its gaping walls, but I could only guess at the scenes which are hidden below ground there in the tunnels where the Germans assemble for their counter-attacks against the Canadians, and to which they drag back their dead and wounded. Those places must reek with the smell of death and corruption, for the losses of the Prussian Guards during the last few and of other divisions who have come up against the Canadians, have been, I am told and believe, enormous. The Canadians tell me that their troops have never had harder or more prolonged fighting, not even in their old days of the Ypres salient nor on the Somme. Every hundred yards of the ground they have taken, and during the last week or so they have taken thousands of yards of open country and of ruined streets in and about the mining cités, until they have forced their way into Lens itself, have been contested by desperate fighting and held against unceasing counter-attacks delivered by great bodies of picked German troops supported by monstrous bombardments. Imagination can, if it likes, picture the slaughter involved in all this to those German assault troops, because they have not succeeded in gaining their purpose, and counter-attacks like that, in those numbers and in that strength, are shattered when they do not succeed. It is a wonderful tribute to the Canadians and to their grim tenacity that, after all the repeated counter-attacks against them, and after storms of fire from batteries which have increased in number every day, they hold their lines round Lens intact as they stood on August 15 and 16, and have gained an entry into the streets of Lens and swung up southwards with increasing pressure.

Lens is packed tight with German troops. They belong to the 4th Guards Division, and latterly to the 1st Guards Reserve, the crack division of the German army, which had a month's rest at Cambrai before being sent into this slaughter-house. For although that city is tunnelled throughout, all the cellars being linked up and strengthened with massive concrete, so that even heavy shells cannot pierce down to them, men cannot fight in tunnels if they are on the offensive, and must get out of them to make their counter-attacks. It is at those times that they suffer more hideously than in any other battle.

Our aeroplanes are always watching for these assemblies. To take only one case out of many, they reported a mass of men in a certain square of Lens the day before yesterday. Our guns turned on to them, not only our field-guns but our heavies, up to those howitzers which could batter down a massive fortress after a few rounds. Men under the fire of such shells as those things send do not escape in great numbers. Most of them die. The Prussians in the square of Lens were caught by this hurricane fire, and before they could get into the tunnels many were blown to bits.

Yesterday as I looked down on Lens the fire had quietened on both sides, as though the guns were tired. For several minutes at a time there was a great quietude over the city of doom, and as the afternoon sun lay warm upon its red walls, and cast black shadows across its deserted streets, where no single figure walked, it was hard to believe that a few hours before swarms of men had been fighting on the edge of those houses, and that the place was full of new dead and old. The water of the Souchez river was as blue as the sky, which was deep bright blue above wispy clouds. A little light glinted from the white church tower which a shell has smashed off at the top. Perhaps some German officer was there staring through his glasses, or perhaps it was only a bit of metal caught by the sun. A smoke-barrage drifted densely across the northern side of the city, and every now and then there came a sharp vicious hammering of machine-guns to show that somewhere in those ruins men wore alive and watchful. Then the guns got busy again, but in a slow, unhurried way. The enemy had a hate against the outer edge of Liévin, and every two minutes smote it with a great shell, which burst with big billowing smoke-clouds, and a flash which was followed by a low, sullen roar. He flung shells as big as this into Angres and Avion, but seemed to rely on machine-gun fire to barrage our lines nearest to his own. Behind me to the right were some of our big howitzers, old friends of mine, whose voices I prefer at a mile or two's distance. They tuned up their bass viols and played their dead march. Perhaps it was their shells I saw smashing on to the German defences. Rosy clouds went up, and in those clouds the dust of red-brick houses went up, too, leaving gaps of nothingness where the buildings had once been. There was a kite-balloon in the sky behind me with the wispy clouds like white horse-tails all curled about it, and presently there came riding above it several coveys of aeroplanes, so that the sky was filled with their loud drone-song. They flew round about Lens, and only a few German "Archies" tried to strafe them with bursts of shrapnel. They flew not very high above the mining city, circling round and round like hawks before swooping to their prey. The guns were loud but shrill; and sweet and clear above them a bugle sounded from some camp of ours behind the lines among the cornfields all gold and glowing in the evening light, with a little shadow sleeping beside each stook; and it blew the evening retreat. It is the first time I have heard a bugle play that call so near to the guns, and it stirred one's heart with a queer sense of emotion, as though its music belonged to the spirit world. The night closed down on the battlefields but did not bring peace. Below the stars there were many strange lights and fires and sounds. A tall bank of clouds was pierced with lightning so like shell-fire, except for a longer tremor of light, that men looked and wondered what devilry was on over there in the back areas. The devilry was round about. It was time for the German raiders to come out under the cover of darkness, and they came and dropped their bombs over quiet villages and among the cornfields and the hop-gardens. The explosions came up with sharp flashes and gruff roars from dark fields between black belts of trees. From the earth hands of light stretched up, reaching up to the clouds and touching them with their finger-tips. They felt their way for those flying raiders, groped about like hands searching in a dark room, and then clasped each other. In the archway below their long straight arms shrapnel glinted like confetti. Our anti-aircraft guns had got their target. Along the lines rockets were rising, giving a second or two of white steady light to No Man's Land, with fringes of trees etched blackly against it. Somewhere a dump—ours or the enemy's—had been hit, and the clouds above it were tipped with scarlet flame. So then the night scene began as usual, and as it is played out below the stars every night. And somewhere in Lens the Prussians were preparing for a new counter-attack, while German doctors in deep tunnels stared down upon a mass of wounded which was their day's harvest. Into one of the houses there the night before, where fifteen German soldiers lay in the cellar after a day of prodigious fighting, a party of Canadian raiders appeared and dragged them all out to a ditch over the way in the Canadian lines. Well may the German prisoners say to these men of ours, "You give us no rest." There is never a night's rest in Lens nor round about it unless men are put to sleep for ever. Many of them were put to sleep by thousands of gas-shells fired into the town by our artillery a night ago as an answer to German gas. Perhaps they were glad of it, for the wakeful hours in Lens must be hell on earth.

August 24

To the south of Lens there is a slag-heap overgrown with weeds called the Green Crassier. It is clearly visible across the Souchez river beyond a broken bridge, and I have often seen it from the lower slopes of Vimy. It was the scene of fierce fighting yesterday, for in the morning the Canadians, who are showing an indomitable spirit after ten days of most furious attacks and counter-attacks, launched an assault upon it and seized the position. Later in the day the enemy came back in strength and, after violent efforts, succeeded in thrusting the Canadians off the crest of this old mound of cinders, though they still cling to the western side. It is another incident in the long series of fierce and bloody encounters which since the battle of Vimy, on April 9, have surrounded the city of Lens and given to its streets and suburbs a sinister but historic fame. The Canadians have fought here with astounding resolution. They have hurled themselves against fortress positions, and by sheer courage have smashed their way through streets entangled with quick-set hedges of steel, through houses alive with machine-gun fire, through trenches dug between concrete forts, through tunnels under red-brick ruins, sometimes too strong to be touched by shell-fire, and through walls loopholed for rifle-fire and hiding machine-gun emplacements designed to enfilade the Canadian line of advance. Through the cités of St.-Laurent, St.-Théodore, and St.-Emilie, to the north and west of Lens, they have fought past high slag-heaps and pit-heads, along railway embankments, and down sunken roads, until they have broken a route through frightful defences to the western streets of the inner city.

Every day, and sometimes many times a day, they have been counter-attacked by swarms of Germans coming up out of their tunnels, and between these attacks they have been under terrific gun-fire from a wide semicircle of heavy batteries. In the early days of the war the French fought like this through the streets of Vermelles, smashing their way from one wall to another, from one house to another, and over trenches dug across the streets. That fighting in Vermelles stands as one of the most frightful episodes of the war, and when I first went there I stood aghast at the relics of this bloody struggle. But Vermelles is hardly more than a village, and the mining district of Lens, with all its suburbs, covers several square miles of ground, so that the Canadians have had a longer and a harder task. Six German divisions have attacked them in turn, and have been shattered against them. These are the 7th and 8th, the 4th Guards Division, the 11th Reserve, the 220th, and the 1st Guards Reserve Division. In addition to these six divisions, some portions, at any rate, of the 185th Division and of the 36th Reserve Division have been engaged. The total German strength used at Lens must well exceed fifty battalions, and the German losses may perhaps be estimated at between 12,000 to 15,000 men.

The Canadians themselves have been hard pressed at times, but have endured the exhaustion of a savage struggle with amazing strength of spirit, grimly and fiercely resolved to hold their gains, unless overwhelmed by numbers in their advanced positions, as it has sometimes happened to them. But it is no wonder that some of the men whom I met yesterday coming out of that city of blood and death looked like men who had suffered to the last limit of mental and bodily resistance. Their faces were haggard and drawn. Their eyes were heavy. Their skin was grey as burnt ash. Some of them walked like drunken men, drunk with sheer fatigue, and as soon as they had reached their journey's end some of them sat under the walls of a mining village with their chalky helmets tilted back, drugged by the need of sleep, but too tired even for that. They were men of the battalions who three days ago came face to face with the enemy in No Man's Land, a stretch of barren cratered earth between St.-Emilie and the northern streets of Lens, and fought him there until many dead lay strewn on both sides, and their ammunition was exhausted. An officer of one of these battalions came out of a miner's cottage to talk to me. He was a very young man with a thin, clean-shaven face, which gave him a boyish look. He was too weary to stand straight and too weary to talk more than a few jerky words. He leaned up against the wall of the miner's cottage, and passed a hand over his face and eyes, and said:

"I'm darned tired. It was the hell of a fight. We fought to a finish, and when we had no more bombs of our own we picked up Heine's bombs and used those." [The Canadians call their enemy Heine and not Fritz.] "Heine was at least three times as strong as us, and we gave him hell. It was hand-to-hand fighting—rifles, bombs, bayonets, butt-ends, any old way of killing a man, and we killed a lot. But he broke our left flank, and things were bloody in the centre. He had one of his strong points there, and swept us with machine-gun fire. My fellows went straight for it, and a lot of them got wiped out. But we got on top of it and through the wire, and held the trench beyond until Heine came down with swarms of bombers."

This young Canadian officer was stricken by the loss of many of his men. "The best crowd that any fellow could command," and he had been through indescribable things under enormous shell-fire, and he had had no sleep for days and nights, and could not sleep now for thinking of things. But he smiled grimly once or twice when he reckoned up the enemy's losses. The remembrance of the German dead he had seen seemed like strong wine to his soul. "We made them pay," was his summing up of the battle. The nightmare of it all was still heavy on him, and he spoke with a quiet fierceness about the enemy's losses and the things he had endured in a way which would scare poor, simple souls who think that war is a fine picturesque business.

A senior officer of a battalion on the flank of his was a different type of man—a very tall, strong-featured man of middle age, like an English squire of the old style, with a fine smiling light in his eyes, in spite of all he had been through, and with a vivid way of speech that would not come fast enough to say splendid things about his men, to describe the marvellous way in which they had fought in frightful conditions, to praise first one and then another for the things they had done when things were at their worst. He had been addressing some of the survivors of this battle when I came upon him, and I saw them march away, straightening themselves up before this officer of theirs, and proud because he was pleased with them. He thanked them for one thing above all, and that was for the gallant way in which, after all their fighting, they had gone out to fetch in their dead and wounded, so that not one wounded man lay out there to die or to be taken prisoner, and the dead were brought back for burial. He said a word, too, for Heine, as they call him. The Germans had not sniped or machine-gunned the stretcher-bearers, but had sent their own men out on the same mission too. That was after the battle, and there was no surrendering while the fighting was on.

This officer's story was as wonderful as anything I have heard in this war. And the man himself was wonderful, for he had had no sleep for six days and nights, and had suffered the fearful strain of his responsibility for many men's lives; yet now, when I met him straight from all that, he was bright-eyed and his mind was as clear as a bell, and the emotion that surged through him was well controlled. He described the things I have attempted to describe before—the fortified streets and houses of Lens, which make it one great fortress, tunnelled from end to end with exits into concrete forts two yards thick in cement, in the ruined cottages. On the morning of our attack the enemy was expecting it, and within a minute and a half of our barrage put down his own barrage with terrific intensity. So there were the Canadians between two walls of high explosives, and it was between that inferno that they fought in the great death struggle. For the Canadians had already advanced towards the enemy's line, and in greater numbers—three times as great—he had advanced to ours, and the two forces met on the barren stretch of earth crossed by twisted trenches, which for a time had been No Man's Land.

While the battalion on the left was heavily engaged fighting with rifles and bombs until their ammunition gave out, and then with bayonets and butt-ends, the battalion on the right was working southward and eastward to the northern outskirts of Lens. They came up at once against the fortress houses from which machine-gun and rifle fire poured out. The Canadians in small parties tried to surround these places, but many were swept down. Some of them rushed close to the walls of one house, which was a bastion of the northern defences of Lens, and were so close that the machine-guns, through slits in the walls, could not fire at them. They even established a post behind it and beyond it, quite isolated from the rest of their men, but clinging to their post all day. The enemy dropped bombs upon them through the loopholes and sand-bagged windows, fired rifle-grenades at them, and tried to get machine-guns at them, but there were always a few men left to hold the post, until at last, when the line withdrew elsewhere, they were recalled. One house near here, into which a party of Canadians forced their way, was a big arsenal. Its cellars were crammed with shells and piled boxes of bombs. In other cellars were dead bodies, and the stench of corruption mingled with the stale vapour of gas. Down in one of these vaults a young Canadian soldier stayed with his officer, who was badly wounded, and could not leave him, but waited until night, when he carried the officer back to safety.

Before that night came there were great German counter-attacks. Masses of men carrying nothing but stick-bombs, which they had slung around them, advanced down the communication-trenches and flung these things at the Canadians of the left battalion, who were fighting out in the open, and in another communication-trench with the right battalion. The enemy walked over the piled corpses of his own dead before he could drive back the Canadians, but by repeated storming parties he did at last force them to give way and retreat down the trench to gain the support of their comrades of the other battalion, which had not been so hard pressed. These came to the rescue, and for a long time held the German grenadiers at bay. The fighting was fierce and savage on both sides.

At last, weakened by their losses and with failing stores of ammunition, these two battalions were given the order to retire to a trench farther back, and the survivors of the most desperate action in Canadian history withdrew, still fighting, and established blocks in the communication-trenches down which the enemy was bombing, so that they could not pass those points to the line upon which here on the north of Lens the Canadians had fallen back. Southward there had been no withdrawal, and other battalions had forced their way forward a good distance, shutting up that entrance to the city and getting down into the deep tunnels, over which there howled the unceasing fire of the German heavies. Our own guns were hard at work, and I have already told how the Prussians were destroyed in the square of Lens by 12-inch shells and shrapnel.

I could write more, but I have written enough. The Canadians never had fighting so hard as this, but the losses they have inflicted upon the enemy have made Lens a Prussian tomb, so that its tunnels are death vaults. The heart of the city is still a fortress, and the new garrison is still strong there, so that, like Thiepval, which held out for many weeks after it was enclosed on three sides, Lens will not fall in a night. But as a dwelling-place for German troops it is a city of abomination and dreadfulness.

XIV

THE AGONY OF ARMENTIÈRES

September 15

The harvests of France and Flanders have been gathered in, and already the plough, driven by men too old to fight or boys too small and young, or by peasant women whose men are somewhere near St.-Quentin or Verdun, is turning up the stubble in the fields and making a brown landscape where three weeks ago it was all gold and bronze.

The trees are turning brown also, deepening to a reddish tint in all the woods between Boulogne and the battlefields, where there are only dead trees. Round about Poperinghe the trailing hops have been pulled down from their poles, already stripped in places by last month's gale, and the sticks are all bare. Outside the wooden huts built on the edge of war by refugees from Ypres and shell-broken villages, Flemish women sit with the hops in their laps and in great baskets beside them, and British soldiers on the march with dry throats exchange remarks about the good beer which they may never have the luck to drink. White cloud-mountains which turn black and threaten a deluge between bursts of sunshine are banked up above the russet foliage and the brown earth and the old black windmills which wave their arms across the landscape, and in the wind there is a smell of moisture and mist, and the first faint sniff of rotting leaves. It is the autumn touch—the autumn touch of a war in which some of us have seen four harvests gathered into French barns and four winters come. It makes one feel a bit sad, that thought. It puts an autumn touch for a second or two into the souls of men coming back from leave as I came back with some of them two days ago.

By day the sky out here is full of interest, for one cannot go anywhere near the lines without seeing that aerial activity which has become intense and fierce lately. Yesterday I saw a great flight of our aeroplanes over the dead town of Armentières. There were between twenty and thirty of them making their way over the German lines, and the enemy hated the sight of them. His anti-aircraft guns got to work savagely and bursts of black shrapnel filled the sky all about those steady wings, but did not bring them down. He hated other aircraft watching over his lines—a long line of kite-balloons, "clustered like grapes," as some one described them, in our side of the sky. They were as white as snow when the sun touched them, and made tempting targets for long-range guns. Some German gunners registered on one of them nearest to Armentières, and I saw a terrific burst of yellow smoke, so close to it that it seemed like a hit. But the smoke cleared, and the kite balloon stayed calmly on its wire, and there was no parachute demonstration by our observers in the basket. The drone of our aeroplanes and the reports of German anti-aircraft guns made the only noise in Armentières—that and the sound of two men's footsteps as I and another walked through the streets of that town which is dead.

It is a queer thing to walk through a big town out of which all life has gone, and queer to me especially in Armentières, because I knew it not long ago when there were many women and girls about its streets, and when one could take one's choice of tea-shops—though only eighteen hundred yards away from the German line—and get an excellent little dinner in more than one restaurant. One could have one's hair cut and a shampoo to the musical accompaniment of field-batteries outside the town, and buy most of the things a man wants in the simple life of war (except peace) in shops kept by brave Frenchwomen—women too brave and too rash because they lived within 1800 yards of the enemy's line as though it were eighteen miles. Armentières was a modern little manufacturing town for lace and thread, with neat red-brick houses kept by well-to-do people who liked good comfortable furniture, and put a piano into their front parlour and a little marble Venus and other knick-knacks of art on the drawing-room table as a proof of good taste above the mere sordid interest of money-making.

For a long time in the war that town has been known to British soldiers who have passed it on their way to Plug Street as "Armentears." They made friends with some of the girls in the tea-shops, and said "Hallo, granny! Tray bong!" to old ladies who sold them picture post cards. Now it is a town of tears to any people who once lived there. The tea-shops have been smashed to bits and the women and the girls have gone, unless their bodies lie in the cellars beneath the ruins. The agony of Armentières began at the end of June, when the enemy first began to bombard it with systematic violence, and though there is no life left in it the broken houses are still battered by more shells when the enemy's gunners have nothing else to do. When I walked through its streets yesterday I was the witness of the horror that had passed. The German bombardment began quite suddenly one night, and the old women and the girls and the children were in their beds. They rushed down into their cellars, not for the first time, because during nearly three years of war stray shells had often come into the town. But never like this. These were not random shells, scattered here and there. They came with a steady and frightful violence into every part of the town, sweeping down street after street, blowing houses to dust, knocking the fronts off the shops, playing fantastic, horrible tricks of choosing and leaving, as shell-fire does in any town of this size. There were gas-shells among the high explosives, and their poison filtered down into the cellars. A fire broke out in one of the squares beyond the old church of St.-Vaast, and the houses were gutted by flames, which licked high above their roofless walls.

The fires were out when I walked there yesterday, and the church of St.-Vaast was surrounded by its own ruins—great blocks of masonry hurled from its dome and buttresses amidst a mass of broken glass. Inside there is a tragic ruin, and rows of cane chairs lie in wild chaos among the broken pillars and the piled stones. The pipes of the great organ have been flung out of their framework, but curiously the side altars, with the figures of apostles and saints, and the central figure of the Sacred Heart, are hardly touched, and stand unscathed amidst this great destruction. There is nothing new in all this. For three years I have been walking through destroyed towns and villages, but it has the grim interest of recent history, and Armentières is the scene of a tragedy to its civilian population which makes one's heart ache with a new revolt against this monstrous cruelty of war upon the innocent and the helpless.

It was easy to see what had happened during those days and nights of terror some weeks ago. I looked into the blown-out fronts of little shops and houses, and saw how everything had been abandoned in that rush of women and children to the cellars. In spite of the wreckage of the upper stories and of the walls about them, some of the rooms were intact. Here were the remains of an estaminet, with its cash-box on the bar counter, and games such as soldiers love—dominoes and darts, and quoits and bagatelle, set out as though for an evening's entertainment. Here was a chemist's shop, with many bottles unbroken on the shelves, though most of the house was blown across the street. I looked through a hole in the wall to a drawing-room, with a piano, standing amid a litter of broken furniture, as though some madman had wreaked his fury on the sofa and chairs.