Part 5 — THE BATTLES OF FLANDERS (continued 4)

The main force of his attack, which was to be made by the Fourth Guards Division, with two others, I am told, in support, was ready to assault the centre of our battle-front in the direction of Polygon Wood and down from the Broodseinde cross-roads. It was our men who fought the German assault divisions at the Broodseinde cross-roads, and took many prisoners from them before they had time to advance very far. The enemy's shelling had been heavy about the ground of Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood, where a week or so ago I saw the frightful heaps of German dead, and spread over a wide area of our line of battle along the Polygon Wood heights and the low ground in front of Zonnebeke. The men tell me that it did not do them as much harm as they expected. The shells plunged deep into the soft ground, bursting upwards in tall columns, as I saw them this morning on the field, and their killing effect was not widespread. Many of them also missed our waves altogether. So, half an hour later, our men went away behind our own barrage, which was enormous and annihilating. The wet mist lay heavily over the fields, and it was almost dark except for a pale glamour behind the rain-clouds, which brightened as each quarter of an hour passed, with our men tramping forward slowly to their first objective.

The shell-craters on the German side were linked together here and there to form a kind of trench system, but many of these had been blown out by other shell-bursts, and German soldiers lay dead in them. From others, men and boys, many boys of eighteen, rose with their arms upstretched, as white in the face as dead men, but living, and afraid. Across these frightful fields men came running towards our soldiers. They did not come to fight, but to escape from the shell-fire, which tossed up the earth about them, and to surrender. Many of them were streaming with blood, wounded about the head and face, or with broken and bleeding arms. So I saw them early this morning when they came down the tracks which led away from that long line of flaming gun-fire.

The scene of the battle in those early hours was a great and terrible picture. It will be etched as long as life lasts in the minds of men who saw it. The ruins of Ypres were vague and blurred in the mist as I passed them on the way up, but as moment passed moment the jagged stump of the Cloth Hall, and the wild wreckage of the asylum, and the fretted outline of all this chaos of masonry which was so fair a city once, leapt out in light which flashed redly and passed. So it was all along the way to the old German lines. Bits of villages still stand, enough to show that buildings were there, and where isolated ruins of barns and farmhouses lie in heaps of timber and brickwork about great piles of greenish sand-bags and battered earthworks. Through shell-holes in fragments of walls red light stabbed like a flame, and out of the darkness of the mist they shone for a second with an unearthly brightness. It was the light of our gun-fire. Our guns were everywhere in the low concealing mist, so that one could not walk anywhere to avoid the blast of their fire. They made a fury of fire. Flashes leapt from them with only the pause of a second or two while they were reloaded. There was never a moment within my own range of vision when hundreds of great guns were not firing together. They were eating up shells which I had seen going up to them, and the roads and fields across which I walked were littered with shells. The wet mist was like one great damp fire, with ten miles or more of smoke rising in a white vapour, through which the tongues of flames leapt up, stirred by some fierce wind. The noise was terrifying in its violence. Passing one of those big-bellied howitzers was to me an agony. It rose like a beast stretching out its neck, and there came from it a roar which clouted one's ear-drums and shook one's body with a long tremor of concussion. These things were all firing at the hardest pace, and the earth was shaken with their blasts of fire. The enemy was answering back. His shells came whining and howling through all this greater noise, and burst with a crash on either side of mule tracks and over bits of ruin near by, and in the fields on each side of the paths down which German prisoners came staggering with their wounded. Fresh shell-holes, enormously deep and thickly grouped, showed that he had plastered this ground fiercely, but now, later in the morning, his shelling eased off, and his guns had other work to do over there where our infantry was advancing. Other work, unless the guns lay smashed, with their teams lying dead around them, killed by our counter-battery work with high explosives and gas; for in the night we smothered them with gas and tried to keep them quiet for this battle and all others.

I went eastward and mounted a pile of rubbish and timber, all blown into shapelessness and reeking with foul odours, and from that shelter looked across to the Passchendaele Ridge and Hill 40 on the west of Zonnebeke and the line of the ridge that goes round to Polygon Wood. It was all blurred, so that I could not see the white ruins of Zonnebeke as I saw them the other day in the sunlight, nor the broken church tower of Passchendaele. It was all veiled in smoke and mist, through which the ridge loomed darkly with a black hump where Broodseinde stands. But clearly through the gloom were the white and yellow cloud-bursts of our shell-fire and the flame of their shell-bursts. It was the most terrible bombardment I have seen, and I saw the fire of the Somme, and of Vimy, and Arras, and Messines. Those were not like this, great as they were in frightfulness. The whole of the Passchendaele Crest was like a series of volcanoes belching up pillars of earth and fire. "It seemed to us," said soldier after soldier who came down from those slopes, "as if no mortal man could live in it, yet there were many who lived despite all the dead."

I saw the living men. Below the big pile of timber and muck on which I stood was a winding path, and other tracks on each side of it between the deep shell-craters, and down these ways came batches of prisoners and the trail of our walking wounded. It was a tragic sight in spite of its proof of victory, and the valour of our men and the spirit of these wounded of ours, who bore their pain with stoic patience and said, when I spoke to them, "It's been a good day; we're doing fine, I think." The Germans were haggard and white-faced men, thin and worn and weary and frightened. Many of them, a large number of them, were wounded. Some of them had masks of dry blood on their faces, and some of them wet blood all down their tunics. They held broken arms from which the sleeves had been cut away, and hobbled painfully on wounded legs. The worst were no worse than some of our own men who came down with them and among them.

It has been a bad defeat for them, and they do not hide their despair. They did not fight stubbornly for the most part, but ran one way or the other as soon as our barrage passed and revealed our men. Our gun-fire had overwhelmed them. In the blockhouses were groups of men who gasped out words of surrender. Here and there they refused to come out till bombs burst outside their steel doors. And here and there they got their machine-guns to work and checked our advance for a time, as at Joist Farm, on the right of our attack, and at a château near Polderhoek, where there has been severe fighting. There was heavy machine-gun fire from a fortified farm ruin to the north of Broodseinde, and again from Kronprinz Farm on the extreme left. The enemy also put down a heavy machine-gun barrage from positions around Passchendaele, but nothing has stopped our men seriously so far.

The New-Zealanders and Australians swept up and beyond the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, went through and past the ruins of Zonnebeke village, and with great heroism gained the high ground about Broodseinde, a dominating position giving observation of all the enemy's side of the country. It has been a wonderful battle in the success that surmounted all difficulty, and if we can keep what we have gained it will be a victorious achievement. The weather is bad now and the rain is heavier, with a savage wind blowing. But that is not good for the enemy's plans, and may be in our favour now that the day has gone well. Our English troops share the honour of the day with the Anzacs, and all were splendid.

October 5

The men who were fighting in the great battle yesterday, and after the capture of many strong positions held their ground last night in spite of many German counter-attacks and heavy fire, tell grim tales, which all go to build up the general picture of the most smashing defeat we have inflicted on the enemy.

On one section of the Front, where the Warwicks, Sherwoods, Lancashire Fusiliers and other county troops of the 48th and 11th Divisions fought up to Poelcappelle and its surrounding blockhouses, six enemy battalions in the front line were either taken or killed. The men themselves do not know those figures. They only know that they passed over large numbers of dead and that they took many prisoners.

The New-Zealanders and the Australians on their right, fighting up the Abraham Heights, took over 2000 prisoners, and say that they have never seen so many dead as those who lay shapeless in their tracks. Other Australians fighting for the Broodseinde cross-roads have counted 960 dead Germans on their way. The full figure of the German dead will never be counted by us. They lie on this battle-ground buried and half-buried in the water of shell-holes, in blockhouses blown on top of them, and in dug-outs that have become their tombs. They fought bravely in some places with despairing courage in or about some of the blockhouses which still gave them a chance of resistance, and sometimes worked their machine-guns to the last. Men lying in shell-craters still alive among all their dead used their rifles and sniped our men, knowing that they would have to pay for their shots with their lives. That is courage, and New-Zealanders I met to-day, and English lads, were fair to their enemy, and said Fritz showed great pluck when he had a dog's chance, though many of them ran when we got close to them behind the barrage. It was the barrage that made them break. The Fourth Guards Division seems to have fought well on the line of our first objective, though after that they would not stand firm, and ran or surrendered like the others.

Owing to the coincidence of the simultaneous attack from both sides yesterday morning, and the complete overthrow of the German assault divisions who were about to advance on us, there seems no doubt that some confusion prevailed behind the German lines and on the left and centre of our attack. All their attempts at counter-thrusts were badly planned, and led to further disaster. They did not advance in orderly formation, but straggled up from local reserves and supports, and were smashed in detail by our artillery. So it happened with two battalions who came down the road to Poelcappelle, but withered away. The Lancashire Fusiliers of the 11th Division in that region say the thing was laughable, though it is the comedy of war, and not mirthful in the usual sense. Small groups of Germans wandered up in an aimless way, and were shot down by machine-gun and rifle fire. On the right of the battle-front the enemy's attacks have been more serious and thrust home with grim persistence against the "Koylies," Lincolns, West Kents, and Scottish Borderers of the 5th Division.

It was after the advance of our men on Polderhoek and its château by the Gheluvelt spur of the Passchendaele Ridge. Some of the Surreys, Devons, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry swung round the stream and marshlands of the Reutel and accounted for many of the enemy in close and fierce fighting. The Devons were astride the stream and, working north of it, attacked a slope called Juniper Spur.

In Polderhoek was a nest of machine-guns, which fired out of the ruins of the château, and for some time our men had difficult and deadly work. This was worst against the Scottish Borderers, who were facing the château grounds, but they dug in and made some cover, while behind the prisoners, about 500 of them, were getting back to the safety of our lines.

It was at three o'clock in the afternoon that the enemy sent a very strong counter-attack down the slopes of the Gheluvelt Spur against the 5th and 7th Divisions. Six times through the afternoon masses of men appeared and tried to force their way forward, but each time they were caught under rifle-fire and machine-guns and artillery.

It was at seven o'clock that the heaviest attack came, under cover of savage shelling, and our men had to fall back on the ground beyond Cameron House, which is the scene of the enemy's fierce attacks on September 25, when they were for some little time a serious menace to us. This morning the enemy had driven a wedge into our line in this neighbourhood, and it is quite possible that he will deliver other blows in the same direction. Last night he made no great endeavour to get back ground. It was a dirty night for our men, who had been fighting all day. The rain fell heavily, filling the shell-holes and turning all the broken ground of battle to the same old bog which made so much misery in Inverness Copse and Glencorse Wood and other positions attacked on July 31 and afterwards.

"I lay up to my waist in water," said one of the Devons who came down wounded this morning; "it was bitter cold, and Fritz was putting over his 5·9's; he was also putting over a lot of machine-gun fire, and the bullets came over the heads of our men like the cracking of whips." It was bad for the wounded and the stretcher-bearers—the splendid stretcher-bearers, who worked all through the night up and down through fierce barrage-fire. Most of them got through with their burdens by that queer miracle of luck which is often theirs. But one little party came down when the fire was fiercest, and took cover in a shell-hole close beside some Warwickshire boys who were crouching in another hole until the storm of shells had passed. Suddenly they heard the howl of a monstrous shell—an eight-inch or even a twelve-inch by the noise if it. It fell and burst right inside the shell-crater where the stretcher-bearers were huddled with their wounded men, and they were blown out of it yards high, so that their bodies were tossed like straws in a fierce wind.... I met many men who worked their way down under fire like that, and some who had been wounded already were wounded again, and some of the comrades who trudged with them were killed.

The Warwickshire battalions of the 48th Division on the left of the New-Zealanders had some very hard fighting, lasting all through the day, which concluded with an attack on a position called Terrier Farm, above the pill-boxes of Wellington House and Winchester House, which they had captured after some bad quarters of an hour.

The Warwicks had started with great luck. In spite of the German shelling they had got away to their first objective with only three casualties. They went through the first line of blockhouses without much trouble, picking up prisoners on the way in most of them. Their first trouble came from one of these concrete places called Wellington House. Machine-gun fire came crackling from it, and bullets were also sweeping the ground from hidden emplacements. After twenty minutes' struggle Wellington House fell, and the flanks on either side closed up and went forward, the Warwicks helped on the right by a body of New Zealand men. In the centre the machine-gun fire from those concrete walls ahead caused a check and a gap, and although they tried many times with great gallantry under brave officers, to silence that fire and work round the blockhouses, they could not do this without greater loss, and decided to link up with their flanks by digging a loop-line in front of those positions, which make a small wedge, or pocket, in our line there.

The attack against Terrier Farm was done by other Warwickshire lads, who were very game after a long day under fire, but for all their spirit tired and cold. They stood almost knee-deep in mud, and they were wet to the skin, as it was now raining steadily, so a Tank came up to help them, and drew close enough to Terrier Farm to fire broadsides at its concrete and machine-gun its loophole. A white rag thrust through a hole in the wall was the sign of the enemy's surrender. But the conditions were too bad for any greater progress, and the men dug in for the night, while brother Tank crawled back.

All the Tanks used in the battle did well, in spite of the bad going, and helped to reduce several of the blockhouses. They had only two casualties among their crews, and most of them got back to their hiding-places without damage from German shells.

It is astounding that the German counter-attacks were so quickly signalled to the guns, for the light all day was bad, and the weather was dead against the work of the flying men. They did their best by flying low and risking the enemy's fire. There was one pilot who is the talk of the Australians to-day. They watched that English child doing the most amazing "stunts" over the fighting-lines. He was out all day, swooping low, so that his plane seemed just to skim over the craters. The Germans tried to get him by any manner of means. They turned their "Archies" on to him and their machine-guns, and then tried to bring him down with rifle-fire, and that failing, though they pierced his wings many times, they called up the heavies and tried to snipe him with 5·9's, which are mighty big and beastly things. But he went on flying till many of his wires were cut and his struts splintered, and his aeroplane was a rag round an engine. He was bruised and dazed when he came to earth, making a bad landing in our own lines, but not killing either himself or the observer, who shares the honour and the marvel of this exploit.

It was a great day for the Australians and the New-Zealanders, their greatest and most glorious day. I saw them going up—these lithe, loose-limbed, hatchet-faced fellows, who look so free and fine in their slouch hats and so hard and grim in their steel helmets. There were many thousands of them on the roads or camped beside the roads, and Flanders for a time seemed to have become a little province of Australia.

Then the New-Zealanders came along, a type half-way between the English of the old country and the Australian boys—not so lean and wiry, with more colour in the cheeks, and a squarer, fuller build. It was good to see them—as fine a set of boys as one could see in the whole world, so that it was hard to think of them in the furnace fires up there, and to know that some of them would come back maimed and broken. In a dug-out on the battlefield I talked with some of them, and they were cheery lads, full of confidence in the coming battle. They wanted to go as far as the Australians, to do as well, and among the Australians also there was a friendly rivalry, the new men wanting to show their mettle to those who are already old in war, one battalion keen to earn the honour which belongs by right of valour to another which had fought before. It was certain they would get to the Broodseinde cross-roads if human courage could get there against high explosives, and they were there without a check, over every obstacle, regardless of the enemy's fire, too fast some of them behind their own. So the New-Zealanders went up to Abraham Heights and carried all before them. The hardest time was last night in the mud and the cold, under heavy fire now and then, but they have stuck it out, as our English boys have stuck it through many foul days and in harder times than these, and that is good enough.

The German prisoners do not hide their astonishment at the spirit of our men, and they know now that our troops are terrible in attack, and arrive upon them with a strange, fearful suddenness behind the barrage. One man, a German professor of broad intelligence and a frank way of facing ugly facts, said that our artillery was too terrific for words. They got harassed all the way up to the front line, and lost many men. When they got there they had to lie flat in the bottom of shell-holes, and the next thing they knew was when they were surrounded by masses of English soldiers. He described our men as gallant and chivalrous. This professor thinks it will not be long before Germany makes a great bid for peace by offering to give up Belgium. By midwinter she will yield Alsace-Lorraine, Russia will remain as before the war, except for an autonomous Poland; Italy will have what she has captured; and Germany will get back some of her colonies, he thinks. He laughed when an indemnity was mentioned, and said "Germany is bankrupt." He describes the German Emperor as a broken man and all for peace, the Crown Prince posing as the head of the military party but being unpopular. If the German people knew that the submarine threat had failed they would demand that the war should stop at once. That is the opinion of one educated German who has suffered the full horror of war and his words are interesting if they represent no more than his own views.

XIX

SCENES OF BATTLE

October 7

The scene of war since Thursday, when our troops went away in the wet mist for the great battle up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, has been dark and grim and overcast with a brooding sky, where storm-clouds are blown into wild and fantastic shapes. Yesterday over the country round Ypres, which still in its ruins holds the soul of all the monstrous tragedy hereabouts, white cloud-mountains were piled up against black, sullen peaks and were shot through with a greenish light, very ghastly in its revelation of the litter and the wreckage of the great arena of human slaughter. Etched sharply against this queer luminance were the lopped trunks of shell-slashed trees and bits of ruined buildings with tooth-like jags above heaps of fallen masonry. Rain fell heavily for most of the day, as nearly all the night, and as it rains to-day, and a wet fog rose from the ground where the shell-craters were already ponds brimming over into swamps of mud. Through the murk our guns fired incessantly, almost as intense as the drum-fire which precedes an attack, though there was no attack from our side or the enemy's, and it was a strange, uncanny thing to hear all that crashing of gun-fire and the wail of great shells in flight to the German lines through this midday darkness.

I marvelled at the gunners, who have gone on so long—so long through the days and nights—feeding those monsters. The infantry have a hard time. It is they who fight with flesh and blood against the machinery of slaughter which is set against them. It is they who go out across the fields on that wild adventure into the unknown. But the gunners, standing by the heavies and the 18-pounders in the sodden fields, with piles of shells about them and great dumps near by, have no easy, pleasant time. On the morning of the last battle I saw the enemy's shells searching for them, flinging up the earth about their batteries, ploughing deep holes on either side of them. They worked in the close neighbourhood of death, and at any moment, between one round and another, a battery and its gun teams might be blown up by one of those howling beasts which seem to gather strength and ferocity at the end of their flight before the final roar of destruction. Now and again a lucky shell of the enemy's gets an ammunition dump, and a high torch rises to the dark sky, and in its flames there are wild explosions as the shells are touched off. But the gunners go on with their work in all the tumult of their own batteries, deafening and ear-splitting and nerve-destroying, and our young gunner officers, muddy, unshaven, unwashed, with sleep-drawn eyes, pace up and down the line of guns saying, "Are you ready, Number One?—Number One, fire!" with no sign of the strain that keeps them on the rack when a big battle is in progress. For them the battle lasts longer than for the infantry. It begins before the infantry advance, it lulls a little and then breaks out into new fury when the German counter-attacks begin. It does not end when the SOS signals have been answered by hours of bombardment, but goes on again to keep German roads under fire, to smother their back areas, to batter their gun positions.

So yesterday, when the German guns were getting back behind the Passchendaele, hauled back out of the mud to take up new emplacements from which they can pour explosives on the ground we have captured, our gunners could not rest, but made this work hideous for the enemy and followed his guns along their tracks. The British gunners in these frightful battles have worked with a courage and endurance to the limit of human nature, and the infantry are the first to praise them and to marvel at them. The infantry go marching in the rain and trudging in the mud, and stumbling over the water-logged craters, and out on the battlefield standing knee-deep in pools and bogs that have been made by shell-fire, cutting up the beds of the Flemish brooks, like the Hanebeek and the Stroombeek and the Reutelbeek, and by the heavy downpour on the upheaved earth. Winter conditions have come upon us, too. They were the old winter pictures of war that I saw yesterday round about the old Ypres salient, when wet men gathered under the lee side of old dug-outs with cold rain sweeping upon them, so that their waterproof capes stream with water, and pattering upon their steel hats with a sharp metallic tinkling sound. Along the roads Australian and New Zealand horsemen go riding hard, with their horses' flanks splashed with heavy gobs of mud. Gun-wagons and transports pass, flinging mud from their wheels. Ambulances, with their red crosses spattered with slime, go threading their way to the clearing-stations, with four pairs of muddy boots upturned beneath the blankets which show through the flap behind, and a dozen "sitting cases" huddled together, with their steel hats clashing and their tired eyes looking out on the traffic of war which they are leaving for a time. They come down cold and wet from the line, but in an hour or two they are warm, inside the dressing-stations, between sand-bagged walls built up inside ruined houses, still within range of shell-fire, but safer than the fields from which these men have come.

"If any man feels cold," said a medical officer yesterday, "give him a hot-water bottle." To a man who had been lying in cold mud until an hour or two before it was like offering him a place by the fireside at home.

The Y.M.C.A. is busy in another tent or another dug-out. It has a cheery way of producing hot cocoa on the edge of a battlefield and of thrusting little packets of chocolate, biscuits, cigarettes, and matches into the hands of lightly wounded men as soon as they have trudged down the long trail for walking wounded and reached the first dressing-station, where there is a little group of men waiting to bandage their wounds, to say, "Well done, laddy; you did grandly this morning," and to fix them up with strange and wonderful speed for the journey to the base hospital, where there are beds with white sheets—sheets again, ye gods!—and rest and peace and warmth.

There are queer little groups between the sand-bags of those forward dressing-stations. On one bench I saw a tall New-Zealander and some Warwick boys—the Warwicks of the 48th Division did famously in this battle—and a farmer's lad from the West Country, who said "It seems to Oi," and spoke with a fine simple gravity of the things he had seen and done; and a thin-faced Lancashire boy, who still wanted to kill more Germans and put them to a nasty kind of death; and a fellow of the Lincolns, who said, "Our lads went over grand."

Near by was a wounded German soldier who had clotted blood over his face and a bloody bandage round his head. A friendly voice spoke to him and said, "Wie gehts mit Ihnen?" ("How are you getting on?") And he looked up in a dazed way and said, "Besser hier als am Kampfe" ("Better here than on the battlefield.")

The tall New-Zealander said: "Fritz fought all right. His machine-gunners fired till we were all round them."

"'Twas a bit of a five-point-nine that hit Oi in the arm," said the farmer's lad. "He put over a terrible big barrage, and Oi was a-laying up till the waist in a shell-hole all filled with mud, and Oi was starved with cold."

"They're all cowards, them Fritzes," said the Lancashire boy. "They ran so hard I couldn't catch them with my bayonet. Then a bullet came and went slick through my head." The bullet failed to kill the Lancashire boy by the smallest fraction of an inch, and had furrowed his skull.

The Warwickshire lads told queer tales of the battle, and they bear out what I have heard from their officers elsewhere. There were numbers of German soldiers who lay about in shell-holes after our barrage had passed over their lines and their blockhouses, and sniped our officers and men as they swarmed forward, though they knew that by not surrendering they were bound to die. It was the last supreme courage of the human beast at bay. There was one of these who lay under the wreckage of an aeroplane, and from that cover he shot some of our men at close range; but because there were many bullets flying about, and shells bursting, and all the excitement of a battle-ground, he was not discovered for some time. It was a sergeant of the Warwicks who saw him first, and just in time. The German had his rifle raised at ten yards range, but the sergeant whipped round and shot him before he could turn. Some of these men were discovered after the general fighting was over, and a nasty shock was given to a young A.D.C. who went with his Divisional General to see the captured ground next day. The General, who is a quick walker, went ahead over the shell-craters, and the A.D.C. suddenly saw two Germans wearing their steel helmets rise before the General from one of the deep holes.

"Now there's trouble," thought the young officer, feeling for his revolver. But when he came up he heard the General telling two wounded Germans that the English had won a very great victory, and that if they were good boys he would send up stretcher-bearers to carry them down.

All over the battlefield there were queer little human episodes thrust for a minute or two into the great grim drama of this advance by British and Overseas troops up the heights of the Passchendaele Ridge, where thousands of German soldiers who had been waiting to attack them were caught by the rolling storm of shells which smashed the earth about them and mingled them with its clods. One tragic glimpse like this was on the Australian way up to the Broodseinde cross-roads, the key of the whole position, after a body of those Australians had marched many miles through the night over appalling ground under scattered shell-fire, and were only in their place of attack half an hour before it started. The story of that night march is in itself a little epic, but that is not the episode I mean. The Australians drew close to one of the blockhouses, and the sound of their cheering must have been heard by the Germans inside those concrete walls. The barrage had just passed and its line of fire, volcanic in its look and fury, went travelling ahead. Suddenly, out of the blockhouses, a dozen men or so came running, and the Australians shortened their bayonets. From the centre of the group a voice shouted out in English, "I am a Middlesex man, don't shoot. I am an Englishman." The man who called had his hands up, in sign of surrender, like the German soldiers.

"It's a spy," said an Australian. "Kill the blighter." The English voice again rang out: "I'm English." And English he was. It was a man of the Middlesex Regiment who had been captured on patrol some days before. The Germans had taken him into their blockhouse, and because of our gun-fire they could not get out of it, and kept him there. He was well treated, and his captors shared their food with him, but the awful moment came to him when the drum-fire passed and he knew that unless he held his hands high he would be killed by our own troops.

The New-Zealanders had many fights on the way up to the Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, and one thing that surprised them was the number of pill-boxes and blockhouses inhabited by the enemy close to their own lines. They believed that the foremost ones had been deserted. But it must not be forgotten that running all through the narrative of this battle is the thwarted plan of the enemy to attack us in strength the same morning and at nearly the same hour. For that reason he had thrust little groups of men into advanced posts and into these most forward blockhouses with orders to hold them at all costs until the attacking divisions should reach and pass them. And for that reason, as we know, the enemy's guns laid down a heavy barrage over our lines half an hour before our attack started.

The New-Zealanders did not escape this shelling, and their brigadiers were under the strain of intense anxiety, not knowing in their dug-outs, over which the enemy's fire passed, whether their boys were so cut up that a successful assault would be impossible. As it happened, the New-Zealanders were not seriously hurt nor thrown into disorder. When the moment came they went away in waves, with the spirit of a pack of hounds on a good hunting morning. As fierce as that and as wild as that. They had not gone more than a few yards before they had fifty prisoners. This was at a blockhouse just outside the New Zealand assembly line. There was no fight there, but the garrison surrendered as soon as our men were round their shelter. The Hanebeek stream flows this way, but it was no longer within its bounds. Our gun-fire had smashed up its track, and all about was a swamp made deeper by the rains.

The New Zealand lads had a devil of a time in getting across and through. Some of them stuck up to the knees and others fell into shell-holes, deep in mud, as far as their belts. "Give us a hand, Jack," came a shout from one man, and the answer was, "Hang on to my rifle, Tom." Men with the solid ground under their feet hauled out others in the slough, and all that was a great risk of time while the barrage was travelling slowly on with its protecting screen of shells.

The only chance of life in these battles is to keep close to the barrage, risking the shorts, for if it once passes and leaves any enemy there with a machine-gun, there is certain death for many men. The New Zealand boys nearly lost that wall of shells because of the mud, but somehow or other managed to scramble on over 800 yards in time enough to catch it up. Many blockhouses yielded up their batches of prisoners, who were told to get back and give no trouble. The first fight for a blockhouse took place at Van Meulen Farm, just outside the New-Zealanders' first objective. The barrage went ahead and sat down—as one of the officers put it, though the sitting down of a barrage is a queer simile for that monstrous eruption of explosive force. From Van Meulen Farm came the swish of machine-gun bullets, and New Zealand boys began to drop. They were held up for half an hour until the "leap-frog" battalions—that is to say, the men who were to pass through the first waves to the next objective—came up to help.

It was a New Zealand captain, beloved by all his men for his gallantry and generous-hearted ways, who led the rush of Lewis-gunners and bombers and riflemen. He fell dead with a machine-gun bullet in his heart, but with a cry of rage because of this great loss the other men ran on each side of the blockhouse and stormed it.

On the left of the New-Zealanders' line, one of their battalions could see Germans firing from concrete houses on the slopes of the Gravenstafel, and although they had to lose the barrage, which was sweeping ahead again, they covered that ground and went straight for those places under sharp fire. Some of them worked round the concrete walls and hauled out more prisoners. "Get back, there," they shouted, but there was hardly a New-Zealander who would go back with them to act as escort. So it happened that a brigadier, getting out of his dug-out to see what was happening to his men away there over the slopes, received the first news of success from batches of Germans who came marching in company formation under the command of their own officers, and without escort. That was how I saw many of them coming back on another part of the field. From the Abraham Heights there was a steady stream of machine-gun fire until the New-Zealanders had climbed them and routed out the enemy from their dug-outs, which were not screened by our barrage so that they were able to fire. Only the great gallantry of high-spirited young men could have done that, and it is an episode which proved the quality of New Zealand troops on that morning of the battle, so keen to do well, so reckless of the cost. On Abraham Heights a lot of prisoners were taken and joined the long trail that hurried back through miles of scattered shell-fire from their own guns.

The next resistance was at the blockhouse called Berlin, and the New-Zealanders are proud of having taken that place, because of its name, which they will write on their scroll of honour. It is not an Imperial place. It is a row of dirty concrete pill-boxes above a deep cave, on the pattern of the old type of dug-outs. But it was a strong fortress for German machine-gunners, and they defended it stubbornly. It was a five minutes' job. Stokes mortars were brought up and fired thirty rounds in two minutes, and then, with a yell, the New-Zealanders rushed the position on both sides and flung pea-bombs through the back door, until part of the garrison streamed out shouting their word of surrender. The other men were dead inside. A battalion commander and his staff were taken prisoners in another farm, and the New-Zealanders drank soda-water and smoked high-class cigarettes which they found in this place, where the German officers were well provided. After that refreshment they went on to Berlin Wood, where there were several pill-boxes hidden among the fallen trees and mud-heaps. They had to make their way through a machine-gun barrage, and platoon commanders assembled their Lewis-gunners and riflemen to attack the house in detail. From one of them a German officer directed the fire, and when the gun was silenced inside came out with another and fired round the corner of the wall until our men rushed upon him. Even then he raised his revolver as though to shoot a sergeant, who was closest to him, but he was killed by a bayonet-thrust.

At other parts of the line our English boys were fighting hard and with equal courage, and some of them against greater fire. It was on the right that the enemy's gun-fire was most fierce, and our old English county regiments of the 5th and 7th Divisions—Devons and Staffords, Surreys and Kents, Lincolns with Scottish Borderers, Northumberland Fusiliers, and Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry—opposite Gheluvelt and Polderhoek and the Reutelbeek had to endure some bad hours. I have already mentioned in earlier messages how the enemy made ceaseless thrusts against this right flank of our attacking front, driving a wedge in for a time, so that our men had to fall back a little and form a decisive flank. It is known now that they were misled somewhat by some isolated groups of the enemy who held out in pill-boxes behind Cameron House. When these were cleared out our line swept forward again and established itself on the far side of that wood. Our men hold the outer houses of Gheluvelt.

The whole of the fighting here was made very difficult by the swamps of the Reutelbeek, worse even than those of the Hanebeek, through which the New-Zealanders crossed, and our English boys were bogged as they tried to cross. But they fought forward doggedly, and by sheer valour safeguarded our right wing in the hardest part of the battle. Meanwhile, far on the north in the district of the Sehreiboom astride the Thourout railway, Scottish and Irish troops were fighting on a small front but on an heroic scale. It was the Dublin Fusiliers who fought most recklessly. They had begged to go first into this battle, and they went all out with a wild and exultant spirit. The ground in front of them was a mud-pit, and they had to swing round to get beyond it. They did not wait for the barrage. They did not halt on their final objective, but still went away into the blue, chasing the enemy and uplifted with a strange fierce enthusiasm until they were called back to the line we wanted to hold. They excelled themselves that morning, and could not be held back after the word "Go!"

XX

THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

October 9

Another battle was fought and another advance was made by our troops to-day with the French, in a great assault on their left. Our Allies gained about 1200 yards of ground in two strides, captured some hundreds of prisoners and many machine-guns and two field-guns, and killed large numbers of the enemy in this attack, and in the bombardments which have preceded it. The Allied troops are within a few hundred yards of that forest of which Marlborough spoke when he said, "Whoever holds Houthulst Forest holds Flanders," and have gone forward about 1500 yards in depth along a line beyond Poelcappelle across the Ypres-Gheluvelt road. The enemy has suffered big losses again. Two new divisions just brought into the line—the 227th straight from Rheims only getting into the line at three o'clock this morning, and the 195th arrived from Russia—have received a fearful baptism of fire, and at least three other divisions—the 16th, 233rd, and 45th Reserve Division—have been hard hit and are now bleeding from many wounds and have given many prisoners from their ranks into our hands.

How was this thing done? How did we have any success to-day when even the most optimistic men were preyed upon last night by horrid doubts? Our troops, we know, are wonderful. There is nothing they could be asked to do which they would not try to do, and struggle to the death to do. But last night's attack might have seemed hopeless in the morning except to men who had weighed all the chances, who had all the evidence in their hands—evidence, I mean, of the measure of the enemy's strength and spirit—and who took the terrific responsibility of saying "Go!" to the start of this new battle.

It was a black and dreadful night, raining more heavily after heavy rains. The wind howled and raged across Flanders with long, sinister wailings as it gathered speed and raced over the fields. Heavy storm-clouds hiding the moon and the stars broke, and a deluge came down, drenching all our soldiers who marched along the roads and tracks, making ponds about them where they stood. And it was cold, with a coldness cutting men with the sharp sword of the wind, and there was no glimmer of light in the darkness. To those of us who know the crater-land of the battlefields, who with light kit or no kit have gone stumbling through it, picking their way between the shell-holes in daylight, taking hours to travel a mile or two, it might have seemed impossible that great bodies of troops could go forward in assault over such country and win any kind of success in such conditions. That they did so is a proof, one more proof to add to a thousand others, that our troops have in them an heroic spirit which is above the normal laws of life, and that, whatever the conditions may be, they will face them and grapple with them, and, if the spirit and flesh of man can do it, overcome the impossible itself. This battle seems to me as wonderful as anything we have done since the Highlanders and the Naval Division captured Beaumont-Hamel in the mud and the fog. More wonderful even than that, because on a greater scale and in more foul weather.

This morning I have been among the Lancashire and West Riding men of the 66th and 49th Divisions who lay out last night before the attack, which followed the first gleams of dawn to-day, and who marched up—no, they did not march, but staggered and stumbled up to take part in the attack. These men I met had come back wounded. Only in the worst days of the Somme have I seen such figures. They were plastered from head to foot in wet mud. Their hands and faces were covered with clay, like the hands and faces of dead men. They had tied bits of sacking round their legs, and this was stuck on them with clots of mud. Their belts and tunics were covered with a thick, wet slime. They were soaked to the skin, and their hair was stiff with clay. They looked to me like men who had been buried alive and dug up again, and when I spoke to them I found that some of them had been buried alive and unburied while they still had life. They told me this simply, as if it were a normal thing. "A shell burst close," said a Lancashire fellow, "and I was buried up to the neck." "Do you mean up to the neck?" I asked, and he said, "Yes, up to the neck." There were many like that, and others, without being flung down by a shell-burst or buried in its crater, fell up to their waists in shell-holes and up to their armpits, and sank in water and mud.

A long column of men whom I knew had to make their way up at night to join in the attack at the dawn. I had seen them the day before, with rain slashing down on their steel hats and their shiny capes, and I thought they were as grand a set of lads as ever I have seen in France. They were men of the Lancashire battalions in the 66th Division.

It was at dusk that they set out on their way up to the battle-line, and it was only a few miles they had to go. But it took them eleven hours to go that distance, and they did not get to the journey's end until half an hour before they had to attack. It was not a march. It was a long struggle against the demons of a foul night on the battlefield. The wind blew a gale against them, slapping their faces with wet canes, so that their flesh stung as at the slash of whips. It buffeted them against each other and clutched at their rifles and tried to wrench their packs off their backs. And the rain poured down upon them in fierce gusts until they were only dry where their belts crossed, and their boots were filled with water. It was pitch-dark at the beginning of the night, and afterwards there was only the light of the stars. They could not see a yard before them, but only the dark figure of the man ahead. Often that figure ahead fell suddenly with a shout. It had fallen into a deep shell-hole and disappeared.

"Where are you. Bill?" shouted one man to another. "I'm bogged. For God's sake give me a hand, old lad."

There was not a man who did not fall. "I fell a hundred times," said one of them. "It was nigh impossible to keep on one's feet for more than a yard or two."

So that little party of men went stumbling and staggering along, trying to work across the shell-holes.

"My pal Bert," said one man, "fell in deep, and then sank farther in. 'Charlie,' he cried. Two of us, and then four, tried to drag him out, but we slipped down the bank of the crater and rolled into the slime with him. I thought we should never get out. Some men were cursing and some were laughing in a wild way, and some were near crying with the cold. But somehow we got on."

Somehow they got on, and that is the wonder of it. They got on to the line of the attack half an hour before the guns were to start their drum-fire, and they joined the thousands of other men who had been lying out in the shell-holes all night, and were numbed with cold and waist-high in water.

Not all of them got there. The German guns had been busy most of the night, and big shells were coming over. Thirty men were killed or wounded with one shell, and others were hit and fell into the water-pools, and lay there till the stretcher-bearers—the splendid stretcher-bearers—came up to search for them.

The Lancashires, who had travelled eleven hours, had had no food all that time. "I would have given my left arm for a drop of hot drink," said one of them, "I was fair perished with cold."

Some of them had rum served out to them. They were the lucky ones, for it gave them a little warmth. But others could not get a drop.

One man, who was shaking with an ague when I met him this morning, had a pitiful tragedy happen to him. "I had a jar of rum in my pack," he said, "and the boys said to me, 'Keep it for us till we get over to the first objective. We'll want it most then.' But when I went over I dropped my pack. 'Oh, Christ!' I said, 'I've lost the rum!'"

They went over to the attack, these troops who were cold and hungry and exhausted after a dreadful night, and they gained their objective and routed the enemy, and sent back many prisoners. I marvel at them, and will salute them if ever I meet them in the world when the war is done.

There were a number of German blockhouses in front of them, beyond Abraham Heights and the Gravenstafel. These were Yetta House and Augustus House and Heine House on the way to Tober Copse and Friesland Copse just outside their line of assault. On their left there was a blockhouse called Peter Pan, though no little mother Wendy would tell stories to her boys there, and instead of Peter Pan's cockcrow there was the wail of a wounded man. Beyond that little house of death were Wolfe Copse and Wolfe Farm, from which the fire of German machine-guns came swishing in streams of bullets. There was no yard of ground without a shell-hole. They were linked together like the holes in a honeycomb, and the German troops, very thick because of their new method of defence—very dense in the support lines though the front line was more lightly held—were scattered about in these craters. Large numbers were killed and wounded when our barrage stormed over them, but numbers crouching in old craters were left alive, and as the barrage passed they rose and came streaming over in small batches, with their hands high—came to meet our men, hoping for mercy. Many prisoners were made before the first objective was reached, and after that by harder fighting. Some of the men in shell-holes, wet like our men and cold like our men, decided to keep fighting, and fired their rifles as our lads struggled forward. The boy who lost his rum-jar met three of these men in a shell-hole, and he threw a bomb at them, and said, "This is to pay back for the gas you gave me a month ago."

A little farther on there was another German in a shell-hole. He was a boy of sixteen or so, and he raised his rifle at the lad of the rum-jar, who flung the bayonet on one side by a sudden blow, but not quick enough to escape a wound in the arm. "I couldn't kill him," said the Lancashire lad; "he looked such a kid, like my young brother, so I took him prisoner and sent him down."

Not all the prisoners who were taken came down behind our lines. The enemy was barraging the ground heavily, and many of their own men were killed, and some of our stretcher-bearers, as they came down with the wounded. Up in the leafless and shattered trees on the battlefield were Germans with machine-guns, and German riflemen who sniped our men as they passed. Many of these were shot up in the trees and came crashing down. Up on the left of the attack, where our troops were in liaison with the French, the enemy were taken prisoners in great numbers, officers as well as men, and the hostile bombardment was not so heavy as on the right, so that the casualties seem to have been light there. In spite of the frightful ground all the objectives were taken, so that our line has drawn close to Houthulst Forest.

There was heavy fighting by the Worcesters of the 29th Division at a place called Pascal Farm, and a lot of concrete dug-outs on the Langemarck-Houthulst road gave trouble with their machine-guns. Adler Farm, just outside our old line, somewhat south of that, also held out a while, but was mastered, and opened the way to the second objective, which on the right carried the attack through Poelcappelle. Here there was hard fighting, by the Lancashire Fusiliers, South Staffords, and Yorkshires of the 11th, and the German garrison put up a desperate resistance in the brewery of Poelcappelle. On the right there has been grim fighting again in the old neighbourhood of Polderhoek Château, but on either side of it our troops of the 5th Division have made good progress, in spite of intense and concentrated fire from many heavy batteries. The enemy has again had a great blow, and has lost large numbers of men—dead, wounded, and captured. That our troops could do this after such a night and over such foul ground must seem to the German High Command like some black art.

October 10

In my message yesterday I described the appalling condition of the ground and of the weather through which our men floundered in their assault towards Houthulst Forest and Passchendaele. That is the theme of this battle, as it is told by all the men who have been through its swamps and fire, and it is a marvel that any success could have been gained. Where we succeeded—and we took a great deal of ground and many prisoners—it was due to the sheer courage of the men, who refused to be beaten by even the most desperate conditions of exhaustion and difficulty; and where we failed, or at least did not succeed, in making full progress or holding all the first gains, it was because courage itself was of no avail against the powers of nature, which were in league that night with the enemy's guns.

The brunt of the fighting fell yesterday in the centre upon the troops of North-country England, the hard, tough men of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and it was Lancashire's day especially, because of those third-line Territorial battalions of Manchesters and East Lancashires and Lancashire Fusiliers, with other comrades of the 66th Division. There were some amongst them who went "over the bags," as they call it, for the first time, and who fought in one of the hardest battles that has ever been faced by British troops, with most stubborn and gallant hearts. I know by hearing from their own lips, to-day and yesterday, the narrative of the sufferings they endured, of the fight they made, and of the wounds they bear without a moan.

The night march of some of these men who went up to attack at dawn seems to me, who have written many records of brave acts during three years of war, one of the most heroic episodes in all this time. It was a march which in dry, fine weather would have been done easily enough in less than three hours by men so good as these. But it took eleven hours for these Lancashire men to get up to their support line, and then, worn out by fatigue that was a physical pain, wet to the skin, cold as death, hungry, and all clotted about with mud, they lay in the water of shell-holes for a little while until their officers said, "Our turn, boys," and they went forward through heavy fire and over the same kind of ground, and fought the enemy with his machine-guns and beat him—until they lay outside their last objective and kept off counter-attacks by a few machine-guns that still remained unclogged, and rifles that somehow they had kept dry. Nothing better than that has been done, and Lancashire should thrill to the tale of it, because their sons were its heroes. Dirty, blood-stained, scarecrow heroes, as I met some of them to-day, lightly wounded, but hardly able to walk after the long trail back from the line. It was eleven hours' walking on the way up, and then, after the wild day and half a night under shell-fire and machine-gun fire, eleven hours down again, in shell-holes and out of them, falling every few yards, crawling on hands and knees through slimy trenches, staggering up by the help of a comrade's arm and going on again with set jaws, and the cry of "No surrender!" in their soul.... Gallant men. They had no complaint against the fate that had thrust them into this morass, nor any whimper against their hard luck. They told of the hard time they had had simply and gravely, without exaggeration and without self-pity, but as men who had been through a frightful ordeal with many thousands of others whose luck was no better than theirs and whose duty was the same. They came under severe machine-gun fire from some of the German blockhouses, especially on their flanks. Our barrage-fire had gone travelling beyond them, and because of the swamps and pools it was impossible to keep pace with it. Men were lugging each other out of the bogs, rescuing each other free from the rain-filled shell-pits. So they lost the only protection there is from machine-guns, the screen of great belts of gun-fire, and the Germans had time to get out of the concrete houses and to get up from the shell-holes and fire at our advancing groups of muddy men. Many Germans were sniping from these holes, and others were up broken trees with machine-guns on small wooden platforms. I met one man to-day who had eleven comrades struck down in his own group by one of the snipers. A party was detached to search for the German rifleman, but they could not find him. They got ahead through Peter Pan House and then they had to face another blast of machine-gun fire. The German garrison, in a place called Yetta House, gave trouble in the same way, and there was a nest of machine-guns ahead at Bellevue. Some Yorkshire lads of the 49th Division went up there to rout them out, but what happened is not yet known.

All through the day and last night the Lancashire men were under the streaming bullets of a machine-gun barrage, which whipped the ground about them as fast as falling hailstones, so that no man could put his head above a shell-hole without getting a bullet through his steel hat. I have seen many of those steel hats punctured clean through, but with the men who wore them still alive and able to smile grimly enough when they pointed to these holes. At night the lightly wounded men who tried to get back had a desperate time trying to find their way. Some of them walked away to the German lines and were up to the barbed wire before they found out their mistake. It was difficult to get any sense of direction in the darkness, but the German flares helped them. They rose with a very bright light, flooding the swamps of No Man's Land with a white glare, revealing the tragedy of the battlefield, where many bodies lay still in the bogs, for many men had been killed. Before the darkness German aeroplanes came over, as it were, in dense flocks. One Lancashire boy declared he counted thirty-seven as he lay looking up to the sky from a shell-hole, and they flew low to see where our men had made their line. Our stretcher-bearers worked through the day and night, but it was hard going even with empty stretchers, and they fell and got bogged like the fighting men, and many were hit by shell-fire and machine-gun bullets. With full stretchers they made their way back slowly, and each journey took many hours, and on the way they stuck many times in bogs and slipped many times waist-deep in shell-holes. The transport and the carriers struggled with equal courage through the slough of despond, trying to get up rations to their cold and hungry comrades and ammunition wanted by riflemen and machine-gunners. Even in water beyond their belts the men tried to clean their rifles and their belts from the mud which had fouled them, knowing that later on their lives might depend on this. And it is a wonderful thing that some counter-attacks were actually repulsed by rifle-fire and by machine-guns, which jam if any speck of dirt gets in their mechanism. That was on the left, when the Coldstream, Irish, and Welsh Guards and some old county regiments of England—Middlesex, Worcesters, Hampshires, Essex—and a gallant little body of Newfoundlanders in the 29th Division had fought forward a long way with rapid success.

The losses of the Guards in going over to the first objective were not heavy. They preceded the attack by a tremendous trench-mortar bombardment, which so frightened the enemy and caused such loss among them that before the infantry advanced many of them came rushing over to our lines to surrender. On the second objective there was heavy fighting at a strong place called Strode House, which was surrounded with uncut wire and defended by heavy machine-gun fire. The Guards, after being checked, rushed it from all sides and captured it with all its garrison. There was more fighting of the same kind farther south, at ruins close to Houthulst Forest, on the edge of the swamps, which seem to be a No Man's Land, because the ground is too wet for the Germans to live there. Very quickly after the attack the enemy countered heavily on the Guards' left, but the Guards held firm and beat it off.

Farther south the Middlesex, Royal Fusiliers, and the Newfoundlanders of the 29th Division went straight through to their objective as far as Cinq Chemins Farm (the Farm of the Five Roads), and they had to resist a series of counter-attacks, starting before half-past eight in the morning. The first of these was shattered by rifle-fire, and the second by artillery-fire, but afterwards, owing no doubt to heavy shelling, our line withdrew a little in front of the Poelcappelle road.

On the left centre of our attack our progress was not maintained. The ground here was deplorable, as the two streams of the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Stroombeek had been cut through by shell-fire, so that their boundaries were lost in broad floods. Mortal men could not pass through quick enough to keep up with a barrage, and after desperate struggles they were forced to withdraw from the forward positions beyond Adler Farm and Burns House.

Round the village of Poelcappelle, now no more than a dust-heap of ruin, there was fierce fighting, and the enemy held out in the brewery, from which he swept the ground with machine-gun bullets so that all approach was deadly. The Yorkshire men of the 11th Division here made repeated rushes, but without much success, it seems.

Meanwhile, on the extreme right of the attack some very grim and desperate work was being done by English troops of famous old regiments round about Reutel and Polderhoek. At Polderhoek the enemy had a nest of dug-outs and machine-gun emplacements behind the château, and in spite of the assaults of Warwicks and Norfolks held them by unceasing fire.

On the north of Polderhoek success was complete in the attack on Reutel, though the village was defended by machine-guns in a cemetery beyond Reutel, and several defended blockhouses. These were attacked and taken by the H.A.C., Warwicks, and Devons, and our line of objectives was made good beyond Reutel and Judge Copse, which have been thorns in our side—spear-heads rather—for many days.

Splendid and chivalrous work was done on this part of the ground by the stretcher-bearers. Out of two hundred and fifty labouring in these fields over a hundred were hit, and all of them took the utmost risk to rescue their fallen comrades in the fighting-lines. The sappers and the pioneers, the transport and the runners, fought not against the enemy from Germany, but against an enemy more difficult to defeat, and that was the mud.

XXI

THE ASSAULTS ON PASSCHENDAELE

October 12

OUR troops went forward again to-day farther up the slopes of the Passchendaele Ridge, striking north-east towards the village of Passchendaele itself, which I saw this morning looming through the mist and the white smoke of shell-fire, with its ruins like the battlements of a mediæval castle perched high on the crest.

It has been a day of very heavy fighting, and the supreme success will only be gained by the spirit of men resolute to win in the face of continual blasts of machine-gun bullets, heavy shelling, and weather which has made the ground as bad as ever a battlefield has been. The enemy, if we may believe what his prisoners say, expected the attack, and that they did expect it is borne out by the quickness with which they dropped down their defensive barrage, the violent way in which they shelled our back areas during the night, and by other unmistakable signs of readiness. Perhaps the last attack two days ago through the wild gale and the mud warned them that not even the elements would safeguard them against us, and that our troops, who had already achieved something that was next to impossible, would attempt another and greater adventure.

To me these blows through the mud seem the most daring endeavours ever made by great bodies of men. The strength of the enemy—and he is very strong still—and the courage of the enemy, which is high among his best troops, are not the greatest powers which our men are called upon to overcome in this latest fighting. Given a good barrage, and they are ready to attack his pill-boxes now that we have broken the first evil spell of them. But this mud of Flanders, these swamps which lie in the way, these nights of darkness and rain in the quagmires—those are the real terrors which are hardest to win through. Yet our men were confident of their fate to-day, and backed each other with astounding courage to take the ground they were asked to take; and that pledge which they made between their battalions was after that night, now three nights ago, when the Lancashire and Yorkshire men made their march through the mud which I have described in other messages—eleven hours' going before they reached their starting-line after frightful tribulations in the darkness and before they went into the battle, late for their barrage and exhausted in body, but still with the pluck to fight through machine-gun fire to their objectives. They did not go as far as had been hoped, but they did far more than any one might dare expect in such conditions, and the men in to-day's battle depended for success upon the starting-line gained for them by those comrades of North-country England.

The New-Zealanders who went over to-day swore that with any luck, or even without luck, they would plant their flag high, and among those men there was a grim, smouldering fire of some purpose which boded ill for the enemy they should find against them. These are not words of rhetoric, to give a little colour to the dark picture of war, but the sober truth of what was in those New Zealand boys' minds yesterday when they made ready for this new battle.

It was difficult to get the men anywhere near the line of attack, owing to the foulness of the ground. Those who were in their positions the night before—that is, on Wednesday night—found that they were not utterly comfortless in the sodden fields. By a fine stroke of daring and by the great effort of carriers and transport officers, who risked their lives in the task, bivouacs were taken up and pegged out in the darkness under the very nose of the enemy, so that the men should not lie out in the pouring rain, and before dawn came they were taken away, in order not to reveal these assemblies. There was food also, and hot drink close to the fighting-lines, and some of the coldness and horrors of the night were relieved. A clear line was made for the barrage which would be fired by our guns this morning. But some troops had still to go up, and some men had to march through the night as those Lancashire men had marched up three nights before. They had the same grim adventure. They, too, fell into shell-holes, groped their way forward blindly in a wild downpour of rain, lugged each other out of the bogs, floundered through mud and shell-fire from five in the evening until a few minutes only before it was time to attack. The enemy was busy with his guns all night to catch any of our men who might be on the move. He flung down a heavy barrage round about Zonnebeke, but by good chance it missed one group of men thereabouts, and scarcely touched any of the others in that neighbourhood. But his heavy shells were scattered over a wide area, and came bowling through the darkness and exploding with great upheavals of the wet earth. Small parties of men dodged them as best they could, and pitched into shell-holes five feet deep in water when they threatened instant death. Then gas-shells came whining, with their queer little puffs, unlike the exploding roar of bigger shells, and the wet wind was filled with poisonous vapour smarting to the eyes and skin, so that our men had to put on their gas-masks and walk like that in a worse darkness. These things, and this way up to battle, might have shaken the nerves of most men, might even have unmanned them and weakened them by the fainting sickness of fear. But it only made the New-Zealanders angry. It made them angry to the point of wild rage.

"To Hell with them," said some of them. "We won't spare them when we go over. We will make them pay for this night." They used savage and flaming words, cursing the enemy and the weather and the shell-fire and the foulness of it all.

I know the state of the ground, for I went over its crater-land this morning to look at this flame of fire below the Passchendaele spur. I had no heavy kit like the fighting men, but fell on the greasy duck-boards as they fell, and rolled into the slime as they had rolled. The rain beat a tattoo on one's steel helmet. Every shell-hole was brimful of brown or greenish water; moisture rose from the earth in a fog. Our guns were firing everywhere through the mist and thrust sharp little swords of flame through its darkness, and all the battlefields bellowed with the noise of these guns. I walked through the battery positions, past enormous howitzers which at twenty paces distance shook one's bones with the concussion of their blasts, past long muzzled high velocities, whose shells after the first sharp hammer-stroke went whinnying away with a high fluttering note of death, past the big-bellied nine-point-twos and monsters firing lyddite shells in clouds of yellow smoke. Before me stretching away round the Houthulst Forest, big and dark and grim, with its close-growing trees, was the Passchendaele Ridge, the long, hummocky slopes for which our men were fighting, and our barrage-fire crept up it, and infernal shell-fire, rising in white columns, was on the top of it, hiding the broken houses there until later in the morning, when the rain ceased a little, and the sky was streaked with blue, and out of the wet gloom Passchendaele appeared, with its houses still standing, though all in ruins. There were queer effects when the sun broke through. Its rays ran down the wet trunks and the forked naked branches of dead trees with a curious, dazzling whiteness, and all the swamps were glinting with light on their foul waters, and the pack-mules winding along the tracks, slithering and staggering through the slime, had four golden bars on either side of them when the sun shone on their 18-pounder shells. There was something more ghastly in this flood of white light over the dead ground of the battlefields, revealing all the litter of human conflict round the captured German pill-boxes, than when it was all under black storm-clouds.

It was at the side of a pill-box famous in the recent fighting that I watched the progress of our barrage up the slopes of Passchendaele, and it was only by that fire and by the answering fire of the German guns with blacker shell-bursts that one could tell the progress of our men.

"How's it going?" asked a friend of two officers of the Guards who came down the duck-boards from Poelcappelle way.

"Pretty well," was the answer. "We have cut off four Boche guns with our barrage, though we only had a little way to go—on the left, you know."

"Big fellows?"

"No, pip-squeak. The usual seventy-seven."

It seemed that there had been a check on the left. Our men had come up against abominable machine-gun fire. On the right things were doing better. Our line was being pushed up close to Passchendaele, within a few hundred yards or so. Some prisoners were coming down—there had been a lot of bayonet fighting, and a lot of killing. The wounded are getting back already, most of them with machine-gun wounds, the worst of them with shell wounds. The New-Zealanders had hardly gone over before German flares rose to call on the guns. The guns did not answer for some little while; but instantly there was the chattering fire of many machine-guns; and from places above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and all the length of the Goudberg spur of the Passchendaele, where there were many blockhouses and concrete streets, there was poured out a sweeping barrage of bullets.

Our men, advancing on all sides of the Passchendaele Ridge and right up to the edge of Houthulst Forest, were everywhere checked a while by the swampy ground. The streams, or beeks, that intersect this country, like the Lekkerbolerbeek and the Ravelbeek, had lost all kind of bounds, and by the effect of shell-fire had flowed out into wide bogs. Here and there the men crossed more easily, and that led to some parts of the line getting farther forward then others and so to being enfiladed on the right or left. It is on the left that we have had most difficulty, round about Wolfe Copse and Marsh Bottom. On the right it is reported that some of the Anzacs have been seen going up across the slopes of Crest Farm, which is some 500 yards from Passchendaele village, on the heights of the ridge. At the present time it is impossible to tell more about this battle than to say it is being fought desperately. Our airmen are unable to bring back exact news owing to the darkness which has again descended, and all that is known so far is that our men are making progress in spite of the deadly machine-gun fire against them, and that they are resolute to go on. The enemy is fighting hard, and his Jaegers, with green bands round their caps, and the men of the 223rd Reserve Division, have not surrendered easily, though many of them are now our prisoners. It is raining again heavily, and the mists have deepened.

XXII

ROUND POELCAPPELLE

October 14

To-day there was a fine spell, though yesterday, after Friday's battle, it was still raining, and looked as if it might rain until next April or March. Our soldiers cursed the weather, cursed it with deep and lurid oaths, cursed it wet and cursed it cold, by day and by night, by duck-boards and mule-tracks, by shell-holes and swamps, by Ravelbeek and Broenbeek and Lekkerbolerbeek. For it was weather which robbed them of victory on Friday and made them suffer the worst miseries of winter warfare, and held them in the mud when they had set their hearts upon the heights. It was the mud which beat them. Man after man has said that to me on the day of battle and yesterday.

"Fritz couldn't have stopped us," said an Australian boy, warming his hands and body by a brazier after a night in the cold slime, which was still plastered about him. "It was the mud which gave him a life chance."

"It was the mud that did us in," said an officer of the Berkshires, sitting up on a stretcher and speaking wearily. "We got bogged and couldn't keep up with the barrage. That gave the German machine-gunners time to get to work on us. It was their luck."

A young Scottish Borderer, shivering so that his teeth chattered, spoke hoarsely, and there was no warmth in him except the fire in his eyes. "We had a fearful time," he said, "but it was the spate of mud that kept us back, and the Germans took advantage of it."

"Whenever we got near to Fritz he surrendered or ran," said a young sergeant of the East Surreys. "We should have had him beat with solid ground beneath us, but we all got stuck in the bog, and he came out of his blockhouses and machine-gunned us as we tried to get across the shell-holes, all filled like young ponds, and sniped us when we could not drag one leg after the other."

No proof is needed of the valour of our men. It is idle to speak of it, because for three years they have shown the height of human courage in the most damnable and deadly places. But I have known nothing finer in this war than the quality of the talk I have heard among the men who fought all Friday after a night exposure in wild rain, and lay out all that night in water-pools under gun-fire, and came back again yesterday wounded, spent, bloody and muddy, cramped and stiff, cold to the marrow-bones, and tired after the agony of the long trail back across the barren fields. They did not despair because they had not gained all they had hoped to gain. "We'll get it all right next time," said man after man among them. They all stated the reasons for their bad luck.

"If you step off a duck-board you go squelch up to the knees, and handling them big shells is no joke. All that means delay in getting up ammunition." This was from a young soldier who had been flung 50 yards and senseless away from a group of comrades who were all killed by a big shell-burst. His senses had come back, and a quiet, shrewd judgment of all he had seen and his old faith that our men can win through every time if they have equal chances with the enemy. That faith, that confidence in their own fighting quality, was not dimmed because on Friday they did not go far. The fire of it, the beauty of it, the simplicity of it shone in the eyes of these men, who were racked by aches and shot through with pain, all befouled by the mud, which was in the very pores of their skin, and seared by remembrances of tragic things. To command soldiers like that should be the supreme joy of their officers, and indeed there is not one of our officers who does not think so, and is not proud of them with a pride that is full of comradeship for his good company. Napoleon's Old Guard was not of better stuff than these boys from English farms and factories, Scottish homesteads, Australian and New Zealand sheep-farm runs.

In these recent battles home troops and overseas troops have been mixed together in the mud of battlefields, and they come down together out of the shell-fire to field dressing-stations, waiting to have their wounds dressed and telling their tales of the fighting. There is no difference there between them. They are all figures carved out of the same clay, with faces and hands of the tint of clay, like men risen out of wet graves. A moist steam rises from them as they group round the braziers, and they know each other—Australian and English lad, Scot and Welsh, Irish, New-Zealander—as comrades who have taken the same risks, suffered the same things, escaped from death by the same kind of miracle. They talk in low voices. There is no bragging among them; no wailing; no excited talk. Quietly they tell each other of the things that happened to them and of the things they saw, and it is the naked truth, idle sometimes as truth itself. So when they say, as I heard them say yesterday, "It is all right, it was only the mud that checked us," one knows that this is truth in the hearts of brave men, the truth of the fine faith that is in them.

I told in my last message how the enemy was ready for attack and tried to prevent it, before it started, by violent shelling over our back areas, all through Thursday night, mixing his high explosives with gas-shells and trying to catch our men on the move and our batteries deep in the mud. It is certain that his aeroplanes, flying low through mists, saw great traffic behind the lines and the work of thousands of men laying down new tracks and getting forward with supplies. That could not be hidden from them. We did not try to hide it, but worked in the daylight under the eyes of their observers in Passchendaele and in Crest Farm below it, and on the high ground above Poelcappelle, so that they could see the tide of all this energy when the gunners, pioneers, engineers, transports drivers, mule leaders, and the long winding columns of troops surged up the arteries of the battlefields and choked them about the Piccadilly Circus of the crater-land.

It was a supreme defiance of the enemy's power, a challenge louder than any herald's trumpet announcing the beginning of a new battle. The enemy accepted the challenge, though not, as we know, with any gladness of heart. Behind his lines there was disorder and dismay, and his organization had been horribly strained by the rapid series of blows which had fallen on him and by his great losses. His local reserves had been flung together anyhow, to meet the pressure we had put upon him. Remnants of battalions were mixed up with other remnants, and our prisoners are from many units. These divisions of his which have withstood the brunt of this recent fighting, like the 195th and the 16th and the 227th, were horribly mauled and broken, and other divisions coming up to relieve them were caught by our long-range guns far back from the lines, and lost their way in the swamps which are on their side of the battlefield as well as on ours, and struggled forward in the darkness and shell-fire to positions hard to find by troops new to this ground. Their High Command issued new orders hurriedly, and made desperate efforts to strengthen their lines. They put up new apron-wire defences around their blockhouses. All the heavy machine-guns of the supporting troops were sent forward to the front lines to reinforce those already in position in their blockhouses and organized shell-holes between the blockhouses and the narrow streets of concrete. Never before did the enemy mass so many machine-guns on his front for continuous barrage over a wide region, and to defend the last spurs of Passchendaele. He had machine-guns up trees as well as on the ground, and he scattered his riflemen among the shell-craters with orders to shoot until they were killed or captured.

It is fair to these men to say that they obeyed their orders and fought on Friday with most fierce courage. It was only here and there that small bodies of German troops, caught in our barrage and nerve-broken by the long agony of lying in water under a ceaseless shell-fire, ran forward to our men as soon as the first brown lines appeared out of the mud and surrendered. The men behind the machine-guns opened fire at the moment of attack, and it was the noise of this light artillery, the long-drawn swish of its bullets whipping the ground, and a devil's tattoo of groups of machine-guns hidden up the slopes, that broke upon our men as soon as they began to make their way through the mud.

I have already told how many of our men had spent the night. Large bodies of them had lain out since Wednesday. Of these some had been luckier than others, getting hot drink and food and shelter under tarpaulin tents which did not keep them dry, but kept off the full force of the beating rains. Others, not so lucky, had to lie in shell-holes half full, or quite full, of ice-cold water, and rations had gone astray, as many ration parties could not get up through the hostile barrage or were bogged somewhere down below; and for some men at least there was not the usual drop of rum to warm the "cockles of their hearts" and to bring back a little glow of life to their poor numbed limbs. Other men had spent the night in marching, spurred on by the hateful fear of being too late to take their place in the battle-line, so that their comrades would not have their help, but spurred to no quickness because every yard of ground had its obstacle and its ditch, and it was a crawl all the way, with many slips and falls and shouts for help.

It was pitch-dark, and the rain beat against these men, driven by the savage wind, plucking at their capes, buffeting their steel helmets, straining at the straps of their packs, slashing them across the face. Their boots squelched deep in the mud and made a queer, sucking noise as these single files of dark figures went shuffling across along slimy duck-boards, a queer noise which I heard when I went up with some of them on the morning of the battle over duck-board tracks. Some of them lost the duck-boards and went knee-deep into bogs, and waist-deep into shell-holes, and neck-deep into swamps. In spite of all the frightfulness of the night, the coldness, the weariness, and the beastliness of this floundering in mud and shell-fire, they went forward into the battle with grim, set faces, and attacked the places from which the machine-gun fire came in blasts. The New-Zealanders attacked many blockhouses and strong points immediately in front of their first objective on the left above the Ypres-Roulers railway, and on the way to the marsh bottom and rising slope of the Goudberg spur, where at Bellevue the enemy's machine-guns were thickly clustered.

Below that, by Heine House and Augustus, the Australian troops were trying to work their way forward to the hummock of Crest Farm, barring the way to Passchendaele, and up on the left centre, from the cross-roads and cemetery of Poelcappelle, the Scottish and English battalions—Berkshires, East Surreys, West Kents, and others—assaulted the brewery, which has been captured twice and twice lost, and a row of buildings in heaps of ruin on the Poelcappelle road, which the Germans use as cover for their machine-gunners. Many of these outposts were captured by groups. Our men worked round then and rushed them, in spite of the streams of bullets which pattered around them so that many fell in the first attempts. Here and there the enemy fought fiercely to the last, and fell under the bayonets of our men. Here and there, in the open ground to the right of Poelcappelle and on the ground below Passchendaele, batches of German soldiers made little fight, but came rushing out of their holes with their hands up, terror-stricken.

But machine-gun fire never ceased from the higher ground, from tall masts of branchless trees, from shell-craters beyond the reach of our men. Our barrage travelled ahead, and slow as it was I saw it creeping up the lower slopes of the Passchendaele ridge for the second objective on Friday morning—our men could not keep pace with it. They were stuck in the swamps at Marsh Bottom in the Lekkerbolerbeek below Poelcappelle and in the bogs below Crest Farm. They plunged into these bogs, fiercely cursing them, struggling to get through them to the enemy, but the men could do nothing with their legs held fast in such slime, nothing but shout to comrades to drag them out. While they struggled German snipers shot at them with a cool aim, and the machine-gun bullets of the deadly barrage lashed across the shell-craters.

Australian troops on the right made good and reached the edge of the hummock called Crest Farm. Some of them swarmed up it and fought and killed the garrison there, but beyond was another knoll with machine-gunners and riflemen, and as our men came up to the top of Crest Farm they were under close and deadly fire. They would have held their ground here if they could have been supported on the left, but the New-Zealanders were having a terrible time in Marsh Bottom and Bellevue, and could not make much headway because of the deadly fire which came down from the spur on which Bellevue is perched. All this time it was raining hard, making the ground worse than before, and the wet mists deepened, preventing all visibility for our machines working with the guns. Orders were given not to continue the second stage of the attack, because the weather was too bad, and the Australians on the right centre withdrew their line in order not to have an exposed flank. In the afternoon the enemy's heavy artillery, which had been very hesitating and uncertain during the first stages of the attack, began to barrage the ground intensely, and continued this fire all the night.

Meanwhile close and fierce fighting was all about Poelcappelle. English and Scottish troops entered the ruins of the village, in spite of the waves of machine-gun bullets which girdled it, drove the Germans out of the brewery buildings for a time, fought their way among the brick-heaps and ruined houses, killed many men who held out there, and with bayonet and rifle defended themselves against counter-attacks which came down the Poelcappelle road. It was as savage and desperate fighting as any episode in this war at close quarters, without mercy on either side, one man's life for another's. Our men were reckless and fierce. They fought in small parties, with or without officers. Ground was gained and lost by yards, and men fought like wild beasts across the broken walls and ditches and shell-craters which go by the name of Poelcappelle. It was five o'clock in the evening that another strong counter-attack by the enemy came down Poelcappelle road and drove in our advanced posts. The brewery then became a sort of No Man's Land—an empty shell between opposing sides. Our men were spent after all that night and day in the mud and all this fighting, and now dusk was creeping down, and it was hard to see who was friend and who was enemy among the figures that crawled about in the slime.