IV THE DEATH-SONG OF THE GERMANS

“Morgenroth” (Dr. Blackie’s translation).

“Morgenroth!” the haunting death-song of the forlorn hopes of the German armies, is the song which was sung so often in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and is being sung again to-day.

The words were written by Wilhelm Hauff, a patriotic German writer of the first half of the nineteenth century.

1

July 4

No sensational progress has been made by us since I wrote my last despatch, yesterday, but our guns are in a good position to follow up our advance, and the battle is developing, I believe, according to the original plan which anticipated slow and steady fighting from one German position to another. That is being done, and another point was gained to-day by the capture of Bernafay Wood to the north-east of Montauban, from which I have just come back after seeing the shelling of this wood, from close range.

It is behind the lines on the outskirts of the battlefields that one sees most of the activity of war, as I saw it to-day again when I went up to this captured ground of Montauban. Up there where fighting was in progress not many men were visible. Until the advance, after the work of our guns, and the short, sharp rush from open ground under the enemy’s shrapnel, our men are hidden and the only movement to be seen is that of the shells bursting and tossing up the earth.

But on the way up, now that the war is no longer stationary, there is a great turmoil of men and mules and guns and wagons and again and again to-day I wished that I could put on to paper sketches rather than words to describe these scenes. For here all along the way were historic pictures of the campaign full of life and colour.

Great camps had been assembled in the dips and hollows of the hills with painted tents between the lines and great masses of horses and wagons and gun-limbers crowded together, with thousands of men busy as ants. Transport columns came down or went up the hilly roads driven by tired men who drooped in their seats or saddles after three days of battle, in which they have had but little sleep. One of them was asleep to-day. He had fallen backwards in his wagon still holding the reins, and while he slept his horses jogged on steadily following the leaders of the column. On the roadside and among the wild flowers of uncultivated fields batches of infantry, who had been marching all night, had flung themselves down and slept also while they had a half-hour’s chance, with their arms outstretched, with their rifles and packs for their pillows.

Other men were moving up towards the fighting lines, marching with a steady tramp along the chalky roads, which plastered them with white dust from steel helmet downwards, and put a white mask upon their faces, except where the sweat came down in gullies. Artillerymen were leading up reserve horses, who put their ears back for a moment, as though to switch off flies when heavy guns blared forth close to them and shells of at least 8in. calibre went howling overhead to the enemy’s lines.

At wayside corners were field dressing stations flying the Red Cross flag, and surrounded by little parks of ambulances, where stretcher men were busy. And every now and then, at a cross-road or a by-path, a wooden notice-board directed the way in red letters and the words “Walking wounded.”

This was the Via Dolorosa of men who could hobble away from the battlefield up there and get back on their legs to save transport more badly needed by stricken comrades.

Closer to the lines there was a scene which would make one weep if one had the weakness of tears after two years of war. Our dead were being buried in a newly-made cemetery, and some of their comrades were standing by the open graves and sorting out the crosses—the little wooden crosses which grow in such a harvest across these fields of France.

They were white above the brown earth, and put into neat rows, and labelled with strips of tin bearing the names of those who now have peace.

French troops were mingled among our own men. A working party of them came along shouldering picks and shovels. They were Territorials, past the fighting age, but tall, sturdy, hardened men, with a likeness to their young sons who, with less weight, but with the same hard bronzed look, are fighting the new battles of the war.

It was the sound of French guns away to the south which was making most commotion in the air to-day. Big fighting was going on there, as though the French were making a further advance, and the rafale of their field guns was incessant, and like the roll of many drums.

2

As I went over the battlefield of Montauban the enemy’s shells and our own were falling over Bernafay Wood, where each side held part of the ground. A little to my left Mametz was being pounded heavily by the German gunners, and they were flinging shrapnel and “crumps” into the ragged fringe of trees, just in front of me, which marks the place where the village of Montauban once stood. They were also barraging a line of trench just below the trees, and keeping a steady flow of five-point-nines into one end of the wood to the right of Montauban, for which our men are now fighting.

Other shells came with an irregular choice of place over the battlefield, and there were moments when those clouds of black shrapnel overhead suggested an immediate dive into the nearest dug-out.

I passed across our old line of trenches from which on Saturday morning our men went out cheering to that great attack which carried them to the furthest point gained that day, in spite of heavy losses. The trenches now were filled with litter collected from the battlefield—stacks of rifles and kit, piles of hand-grenades, no longer needed by those who owned them.

This old system of trenches, in which French troops lived for many months of war before they handed them over to our men, was like a ruined and deserted town left hurriedly because of plague, and in great disorder. Letters were lying about, and bully beef tins, and cartridge clips. Our men had gone forward and these old trenches are abandoned.

It is beyond the power of words to give a picture of the German trenches over this battlefield of Montauban, where we now hold the line through the wood beyond. Before Saturday last it was a wide and far-reaching network of trenches, with many communication ways and strong traverses, and redoubts—so that one would shiver at their strength to see them marked on a map. No mass of infantry, however great, would have dared to assault such a position with bombs and rifles.

It was a great underground fortress, which any body of men could have held against any others for all time apart from the destructive power of heavy artillery. But now!... Why now it was the most frightful convulsion of earth that the eyes of man could see.

The bombardment by our guns had tossed all these earthworks into vast rubbish-heaps. We had made this ground one vast series of shell craters, so deep and so broad that it was like a field of extinct volcanoes.

The ground rose and fell in enormous waves of brown earth, so that standing above one crater I saw before me these solid billows with 30 feet slopes stretching away like a sea frozen after a great storm. We had hurled thousands of shells from our heaviest howitzers and long-range guns into this stretch of field.

3

I saw here and touched here the awful result of that great gun-fire which I had watched from the centre of our batteries on the morning of July 1. That bombardment had annihilated the German position. Even many of the dug-outs, going 30 feet deep below the earth and strongly timbered and cemented, had been choked with masses of earth so that many dead bodies lay buried there. But some had been left in spite of the upheaval of earth around them, and into some of these I crept down, impelled by the strong grim spell of those little dark rooms below where German soldiers lived only a few days ago.

They seemed haunted by the spirits of the men who had made their homes here and had carried into these holes the pride of their souls, and any poetry they had in their hearts, and their hopes and terrors, and memories of love and life in the good world of peace. I could not resist going down to such places, though to do so gave me gooseflesh.

I had to go warily, for on the stairways were unexploded bombs of the “hair-brush” style. A stumble or a kick might send one to eternity by high explosive force, and it was difficult not to stumble, for the steps were broken or falling into a landslide.

Down inside the little square rooms were filled with the relics of German officers and men. The deal tables were strewn with papers, on the wooden bedsteads lay blue-grey overcoats. Wine bottles, photograph albums, furry haversacks, boots, belts, kit of every kind had all been tumbled together by British soldiers who had come here after the first rush to the enemy’s trenches and searched for men in hiding.

There were men in hiding now, though harmless. In one of the dug-outs where I groped my way down it was pitch dark. I stumbled against something, and fumbled for my matches. When I struck a light I saw in a corner of the room a German.

He lay curled up, with his head on his arm, as though asleep. I did not stay to look at his face, but went up quickly. And yet I went down others and lingered in one where no corpse lay because of the tragic spirit that dwelt there and put its spell on me. I picked up some letters.

They were all written to “dear brother Wilhelm,” from sisters and brothers, sending him their loving greetings, praying that his health was good, promising to send him gifts of food, and yearning for his homecoming. “Since your last letter and card,” said one of them, “we have heard nothing more from you.”

“Every time the postman comes we hope for a little note from you.... Dear Wilhelm, in order to be patient with your fate you must thank God because you have found fortune in misfortune.”

Poor, pitiful letters! I was ashamed to read them because it seemed like prying into another man’s secrets, though he was dead.

There was a little book I picked up. It is a book of soldiers’ songs, full of old German sentiment, about “the little mother” and the old house at home and the pretty girl who kissed her soldier boy before he went off to the war. And here is the sad old “Morgenlied,” which has been sung along many roads of France.

“Red morning sun! Red morning sun! Do you light me to an early death? Soon will the trumpets sound, and I must leave this life, and many a comrade with me.”

“I scarcely thought my joy would end like this. Yesterday I rode a proud steed; to-day I am shot through the chest; to-morrow I shall be in the cold grave, O red morning sun!”

On the front page of this book, which I found to-day at Montauban, there is an Army Order from Prince von Rupprecht of Bavaria to the soldiers of the Sixth Army.

“We have the fortune,” it says, “to have the English on our front, the troops of those people whose envy for years has made them work to surround us with a ring of enemies in order to crush us. It is to them that we owe this bloody and most horrible war.... Here is the antagonist who stands most in the way of the restoration of peace. Forwards!”

It seemed to me that the preface by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria spoilt the sentiment in the German folksongs, which were full of love rather than of hate.

4

I stood again above ground, in the shell craters. Other shells were coming over my head with their indescribable whooping, and the black shrapnel was still bursting about the fields, and the Germans were dropping five-point-nines along a line a hundred yards away.

“Be careful about those dug-outs,” said an officer. “Some of them have charged mines inside, and there may be Germans still hiding in them.”

Two Germans were found hiding there to-day. Some of our men found themselves being sniped, and after a search found that the shots were coming from a certain section of trench in which there were communicating dug-outs.

After cunning trappers’ work they isolated one dug-out in which the snipers were concealed.

“Come out of that,” shouted our men. “Surrender like good boys.”

But the only answer they had was a shot.

The dug-out was bombed, but the men went through an underground passage into another one. Then a charge of ammonal was put down and the dug-out blown to bits.

5

This afternoon, while I was still on the battlefield of Montauban, a great thunderstorm broke. It was sudden and violent, and rain fell in sheets. The sky became black with a greenish streak in it when the lightning forked over the high wooded ridges towards La Boiselle and above Fricourt Wood.

“Heaven’s artillery!” said an officer, and his words were not flippant. There was something awe-inspiring in the darkness that closed in upon these battlefields and the great rolls of thunder that mingled with the noise of the guns. Artillery observation was impossible, but the guns still fired, and their flashes were as vivid as the lightning, revealing through the murk the dark figures of marching men, and the black woods slashed with shell-fire just above Montauban. In a little while the low-lying ground was flooded, so that the guns in the valleys were in water, and the horse transport splashed through ponds, scattering fountains above their axles, and rivers ran down the broken trenches of the old German line.

I stood in the storm watching this scene of war, and the gloom and terror of it closed about me.