III THE FIELD OF HONOUR

I

July 3

As the hours pass we are gaining new ground and extending our line slowly but steadily to straighten it out between the German strongholds which have been captured by the great gallantry of our men after heavy fighting.

To-day when I went into the heart of these battlefields in and around Fricourt, where we have made our most successful advance, I could see the progress we have made since the first day’s attacks by the elevation of the shell-fire, which traced out the German and British lines. To the right of me was Mametz, held by our troops, and our encircling loop no longer dipped so steeply southwards as before, but curved gradually westwards below the Bois de Mametz until it reached Fricourt itself.

Here we are not only in possession of the village but have the wood on the high ground beyond, the Crucifix Trench on the edge to the left, and Lozenge Wood still farther to the left. Our line then runs to La Boisselle, most of which was in our hands early this morning after a fierce bombardment by our guns, followed by the infantry advance. It seemed to me, from my own observation to-day, that the German guns are retiring farther back to escape capture or direct hits, for many of their shrapnel shells appeared to come from an extreme range by high angle fire. All this shows that we are pressing the enemy hard, and that so far he is unable to bring up supports to secure his defence.

The scene here was wonderful, and though I have been in many battlefields since this war began I have never watched before such a complete and close picture of war in its infernal grandeur. The wood of La Boisselle was to my left on the rising slopes, up which there wound a white road to that ragged fringe of broken tree-trunks, standing like gallows-trees against the sky-line.

Immediately facing me was Lozenge Wood and the Crucifix, with two separate trees known as the Poodles, and just across the way to my right in the hollow that dips below the wood was Fricourt. Montauban, which our troops took by assault in the first day’s fighting, was marked only by one tall chimney, the rest of its ruins being hidden behind a crest of ground, but to the right, near enough for me to see and count its ruined houses, was Mametz lying in a cup below the ridge.

A great bombardment was raging from both sides, the enemy shelling the places we had taken from him, and our guns putting a heavy barrage on to his positions. La Boisselle was being shelled by shrapnel with great severity, and there was one spot at the northern end of the tree stumps where British and German shells seemed to meet and mingle their explosions.

In what was once a village there were dense clouds of smoke which rose up in columns and then spread out into a thick pall. In the very centre of this place, which looked like one of Dante’s visions of hell-fire, one of our soldiers was signalling with a flaming torch.

The red flame moved backwards and forwards through the wrack of smoke, and was then tossed high, as a new burst of shrapnel broke over the place where the signaller stood.

Our batteries were firing single rounds and salvos in the direction of Contalmaison from many places behind our lines, so that I was in the centre of a circle of guns all concentrating upon the enemy’s lines behind Fricourt and Mametz Wood and La Boisselle. Shells from our heavies came screaming overhead with a high rising note which ends with a sudden roar as the shell bursts, and our field-batteries were firing rapidly and continuously so that the sharp crack of each shot seemed to rip the air as though it were made of calico.

It was a tornado of shell-fire, and though one’s head ached at it and each big shell as it travelled over seemed in a queer way to take something from one’s vitality by its rush of air, there was a strange exultation in one’s senses at the consciousness of this mass of artillery supporting our men. Those were our guns. Ours!

They had the mastery. They were all registered on the enemy. Our guns at last had given us a great chance. The infantry had something behind them, and it was not all flesh and blood against great engines, as in the early days it used to be.

2

The enemy was replying chiefly on the ground about La Boisselle, so that I hated to think of our men up there, for though it was nothing like our bombardment it was heavy enough to increase the cost we have had to pay for progress. I could see nothing of the men in that smoke and flame, but I could see men going up towards it, in a quiet, leisurely way as though strolling on a summer morning in peaceful fields.

It was curious to watch our soldiers walking about this battlefield. They seemed very aimless, in little groups, wandering about as though picking wild flowers—some of those poppies which made great splashes of scarlet up to the trenches, or some of the blue cornflowers and purple scabious and white stitchwort which weaved the colours of France over these poor stricken fields of hers, now hers again, and the charlock which ran with a riot of gold in all this great luxuriance between the tumbled earthworks where dead bodies lay.

The shells were whining and rending the air above their heads, but they did not glance upwards or forwards to where the shells burst and vomited black smoke. They seemed as careless of war as holiday-makers on Hampstead Heath. Yet when I went among them I found that each man had his special mission, and was part of a general purpose guided by higher powers. Some of them were laying new wires for new telephones over ground just captured from the enemy.

Others were runners coming down with messages through the barrage higher up the roads. Artillerymen and engineers were getting on with their job, quietly, without fuss.

From over the ridge where Crucifix Trench runs from the Poodles into Fricourt Wood came a body of men. I could see their heads above the trench. Then they seemed to rest a while. After that they came into full view below the ridge.

Had they been seen by the German gunners? Why were they running like that down the slope? Some shrapnel-clouds came white and curly above the sky-line; others fluffed lower, nearer to the men. They were in such a bunch that one shell would do great damage there....

They scattered a little and I saw their figures taking cover in the hummocky ridges. It was only later that I heard that these men had been fighting heavily down near the two trees known as the Poodles, and that they had captured a number of German prisoners, who came towards them with uplifted hands. The prisoners were being brought down in small batches, whom I met on the road.

3

Up at La Boisselle the shelling was still intense, but our troops had already surrounded part of the position, and after a concentration by our guns advanced and captured it. A number of Germans were there in their dug-outs, the remnant of a battalion which had suffered frightful things under our gun-fire. Some of the officers, it seems, from what the prisoners told me, went away to Bush Tree Copse, Contalmaison, saying that they were going to bring up reserves. But they did not come back.

The other men—about 250 of them—stayed in the dug-outs, without food and water, while our shells made a fury above them and smashed up the ground. They had a German doctor there, a giant of a man with a great heart, who had put his first-aid dressing-station in the second-line trench and attended to the wounds of the men until our bombardment intensified so that no man could live there.

He took the wounded down to a dug-out—those who had not been carried back—and stayed there expecting death. But then, as he told me, to-day at about eleven o’clock this morning the shells ceased to scream and roar above-ground, and after a sudden silence he heard the noise of British troops. He went up to the entrance of his dug-out and said to some English soldiers who came up with fixed bayonets, “My friends, I surrender.” Afterwards he helped to tend our own wounded, and did very good work for us under the fire of his own guns, which had now turned upon this position.

There was another German to-day at La Boisselle, but his work was not that of helping wounded men. It was one of those machine-gunners who kept up a fire of dropping bullets upon our troops when we first made an assault upon this position. And to-day he was there still in his emplacement doing very deadly work, and though he was wounded in nine places when we found him he was still working his terrible little gun.

Our men took him prisoner, and, in the English way, bore no grudge against him, but sang his praises. Many other machine-guns were captured, and round one of them all the team was laid out dead by one of our shells.

4

At about 11.30 in the morning I walked down into Fricourt, which was captured yesterday afternoon. It was a strange walk, not pleasant, but full of a terrible interest. Fighting was still going on on the high ground above, a few hundred yards away, and while I had been watching the scene of war from a field near by I had seen heavy shells, certainly five-point-nines, falling near the village and raising clouds of black and greenish smoke, and they were falling into Mametz some distance to the right.

Fricourt was not an inviting place, but other men had been there at a worse time. And the interest of it called to one to get into this bit of ruined ground with its broken brickwork which for more than a year we have stared at across barbed wire and through holes in the ground as an evil place beyond our knowledge, as a place from which death came to our men from trench-mortars and machine-guns, separated from us by lines of trenches full of snipers who waited and watched for any of our heads to appear, even for a second, above the parapet, and by No Man’s Land into which some of our brave boys went out at night at great peril, hiding in shell-holes, and avoiding the mine-fields of the Bois Français and other ground honeycombed below by German galleries which, night after night—do you remember the line in the official communiqué?—flung up the soil and formed another crater and buried some more of our men. “There was mining activity near Fricourt.” Well, there will be no more of it there.

I went across the fields—Lord God! that would have meant death a week or two ago, before the enemy was busy with other things close by—and came down to our old system of trenches. Here were the little wooden bridges across which our men made their advance, and litters of sandbags no more to be used for the parapets here, and the abandoned properties of men who had left these old familiar places—the old rat-holes, the bays in the trenches where they stood on guard at night, the dug-outs where they had pinned up photographs—upon the morning of the great adventure, which was yesterday.

Here was a redoubt from which I had first looked across to the Crucifix and the communication-trench up which the men used to come at night. Now all abandoned, for the men had gone forward.

The flowers were growing richly in No Man’s Land, red and yellow and blue, except where the earth was white and barren above the mine-fields of the famous Tambour, and brown and barren in the Bois Français, where never a tree now grows.

We walked across No Man’s Land in the full sunlight of this July day, and though shells were rushing overhead, those from our batteries seemed low enough to cut off the heads of the flowers, and mine. They were mostly our shells.

Lightly wounded men, just hit up there beyond the wood, walked along unaided, or helped by a comrade. One of them, a boy of 18 or so, with blue eyes under his steel helmet, stopped me and showed me a bloody bandage round his hand, and said with an excited laugh:

“They got me all right. I was serving my Lewis when a bullet caught me smack. Now I’m off. And I’ve had 18 months of it.”

He went away grinning at his luck, because the bullet might have chosen another place.

Some German prisoners followed him. Two of them were carrying a stretcher on which an English soldier lay with his eyes shut. A wounded German behind turned and smiled at me—a strong, meaningful smile. He was glad to be wounded and out of it.

Other Germans came down under guard, and little groups of English soldiers and Red Cross men. I struck across the field again to the old German lines of trenches, and saw the full and frightful horror of war. The German trenches were smashed at some places, by our artillery fire, into shapelessness. Green sandbags were flung about, timbers from the trench sides had been broken and tossed about like matchsticks.

I stumbled from one shell-crater to another, over bits of indescribable things, and the litter of men’s tunics and pouches and haversacks, and dug-outs. Rifles lay about, and the ground was strewn with hand-grenades, and here and there was a great unexploded shell which had nosed into the soil. There were many German dead lying there in Fricourt, and some of our own poor men. The Germans were lying thick in one part of the trenches.

They had been tall, fine men in their life. One of them lying with many wounds upon him was quite a giant. Another poor man lay on his back with his face turned up to the blue sky and his hands raised up above his body as though in prayer....

But I turned my head away from these sights, as most people hide these things from their imagination, too cowardly to face the reality of war.

I followed an officer down into a German dug-out until he halted half-way down its steps and spoke a word of surprise.

“There’s a candle still burning!”

It gave one an uncanny feeling to see that lighted candle in the deep subterranean room, where yesterday German officers were living, unless dead before yesterday.

It could not have been burning all that time. For a moment we thought an enemy might still be hiding there, and it was not improbable, as two of them had been found in Fricourt, only a few hours before. But in all likelihood it had been lit by an English soldier after the capture of the place.

The dug-out was littered with German books and papers. I picked up one of them, and saw that it was “Advice on Sport.” Here was sad sport for Germans. There was a tragic spirit in that little room, and we went out quickly. I peered into other German dug-outs, and saw how splendidly built they were, so deep and so strongly timbered that not even our bombardment had utterly destroyed them. They are great workers, these Germans, and wonderful soldiers.

Everywhere there lay about great numbers of steel helmets, some of them with vizors, and well designed, so that they come down to the nape of the neck and protect all the head. Some of our soldiers were bringing them back as souvenirs. One man had ten dangling about him, like the tin pots on a travelling tinker.

In the wood beyond the Crucifix our machine-guns were firing fiercely, and the noise was like that of a great flame, beyond the village. Fricourt itself is just a heap of frightful ruin, with the remains of houses which the enemy had used as machine-gun emplacements. Every yard of it was littered with the débris of war’s aftermath. Before our final attack yesterday many of the German troops filtered out in retreat, leaving some of their wounded behind, and one poor puppy—a fox terrier—which is now the trophy of one of our battalions.

But a number of men—about 150, I should say—could not get away owing to the intensity of our first bombardment, and when our men stormed the place yesterday afternoon they came up out of their dug-outs with their hands up for mercy. I saw them all to-day, and spoke with some of them.

They belonged to the 109th, 110th and 111th regiments of the 14th Reserve Corps, and were mostly from Baden. It would be absurd to talk of these fellows as being undersized or underfed men. They were tall, strong, stout men, in the prime of life. Only a few were wounded, and lay about in a dazed way. The others answered me cheerfully, and expressed their joy at having escaped from our gun-fire, which they described as “schrecklich”—terrible. They had had no food or drink since yesterday morning until their English guards gave it to them.

I spoke also with a little group of officers. They were young men of an aristocratic type, and spoke very frankly and politely. They, too, acknowledged the new power of our artillery and the courage of our men, which was not new to them. It was here that I had a talk with the German medical officer whom I had seen walking down between two guards close to Fricourt. After describing his own experiences during the bombardment this morning he laughed in a sad way.

“This war!” he said. “We go on killing each other to no purpose. Europe is being bled to death, and will be impoverished for long years. It is a war against religion, and against civilisation, and I see no end to it. Germany is strong and England is strong and France is strong. It is impossible for one side to crush the other, so when is the end to come?” Because of his services to our own men he was given special privileges and an English soldier had brought down all his personal belongings. A little apart from all his fellow officers stood a German lieutenant-colonel who was charged with having killed two of our officers by bombing them after his surrender. A tall, gloomy, truculent man of the worst Prussian type, he stood awaiting an inquiry, and I could only hope that he was not guilty of such a crime.

From personal observation I know nothing of what has happened elsewhere in the line to-day, but I have heard a story of an attack on the Gommecourt salient which shows that this action was one of the most tragic and heroic things in British history. The enemy had concentrated a great mass of guns here in the belief that our main attack was to be directed against this part of the front. The existence of this belief has been proved by German orders which have come into our hands.

As soon as our men left their trenches after the bombardment yesterday the enemy barraged our front and support trenches with a most infernal fire. Our men advanced through this barrage absolutely as though on parade, and in spite of heavy losses made their way over 500 yards of No Man’s Land to the enemy’s front line.

The German soldiers also behaved with great courage, and carried their machine-guns right through our barrage until they faced our men in the open and swept them with fire so that large numbers fell.

The attack did not succeed in this part of the line. But it drew on the enemy’s reserves, and great honour is due to the valour of those men of ours, who fought as heroes in one of the most glorious acts of self-sacrifice ever made by British troops.