IX A CAMEO OF WAR

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July 9

Slowly, but quite steadily, we are drawing our lines closer about the enemy’s strong places along the whole extent of our attacking front in order that one by one he must abandon them. Last night our troops captured new trenches about Ovillers-la-Boiselle, so that the pressure upon that place is tighter, and during the past eighteen hours we have established ourselves in the Bois des Trones, and its neighbourhood to the east of Montauban.

The meaning of our attacking methods and of the hard fighting at different points may not be clear to people who do not realise the position which our men have to storm. It has often been said that the enemy’s lines, which stretch from the sea to the Vosges, are one great fortress, and this is true, but it is more essentially and even technically true of the line through which we broke on the first day of July.

The great German salient which curves round from Gommecourt to Fricourt is like a chain of mediæval fortresses connected by earthworks and tunnels. The fortresses, or strong places as we now call them, are the ruined villages—stronger in defence than any old tower because they are filled with machine-guns, trench-mortars, and other deadly engines—of Gommecourt, Beaumont-Hamel, Thiépval, Ovillers-la-Boiselle and Fricourt.

In spite of the superb courage of those British battalions which flung themselves against those strongholds on the left side of the German salient they did not fall, but breaches were made in their defences which are now being widened and deepened. On the southern side, where the attack succeeded, La Boiselle and Fricourt and further eastwards Mametz and Montauban, are ours, and the attack is pushing further in to turn the strong places on the left from within the fortress walls, as it were, while they are being weakened by assaults from without, gradually putting the strangle-grip upon them. If we have luck and keep striking deeper into the salient, as we have done during the past twenty-four hours at Contalmaison and Ovillers, it would seem to me as if the strong places on the left must either be evacuated by the enemy or surrounded and taken, with their imprisoned troops, by us.

I saw the scene of this struggle for the enemy’s strongholds to-day almost as if I were looking into the mirror of the Lady of Shalott. It seemed like that, strangely unreal, as though in an image—and yet terribly real and vivid—because I came upon it suddenly, by accident, arranged for me by a gap in a hedge and by two trees on each side of the gap, like the frame of a picture.

I had been up to the lines in search of an officer whose headquarters is in dug-outs below the crest of a hill. Beyond this crest and another one beyond that the fires of hate were burning all right. I could tell that by the smoke clouds which came black, and white, and green, into the fleecy sky of this July day in France, and by the noise of the guns all about me. But I did not trouble to climb to the crest. There were interesting things to see below and fine men whom I wanted to meet again before they go nearer to those fires.

I passed two friends on the roadway riding in the centre of a long column of troops, and when I waved my hands to them and shouted “Good luck!” they turned in their saddles and waved back and smiled in a way that one remembers through a lifetime. I did not trouble to climb the crest because there were some captured German guns below it worth seeing as the first fruits of victory.

They were being fastened to our own gun-carriages and taken off to the place where such trophies go, cheered by French townsfolk on the way. Queer, beastly things were some of these captured engines. There were long wooden barrels hooped with steel, and with a touch-hole to fire the charge for a “plum-pudding” bomb large enough to blow up ten yards of trench—as primitive as the engines of war used in the fifteenth century.

It was on the way back that I came upon the gap in the hedge. I passed camps of men and horses, masses of guns and long lines of dug-outs in chalk banks, where soldiers sat in the entries on this Sunday afternoon, smoking their pipes with an air of profound peace in spite of the noise of shell-fire; and large bodies of splendid troops, English and Scottish, tramping up the roads, all powdered with white dust, or lying under the shadows of wayside trees, sleeping on their backs with the sun full on their bronzed, sweat-begrimed faces. It was the madding crowd of war, with a tangle of traffic on the roads, and kicking mules making beasts of themselves at the sight of a motor-car, and artillery wagons with creaking axles plunging through it all under the daring guidance of red-faced boys with short whips.

Turning off the road, away from all this turmoil, and presently, through the gap in the hedge, I saw, quite unexpectedly, the scene of war across the fields in front of me, all gold with that weed which is ruining so many harvest fields of France. It was Mametz Wood. I knew at once the queer shape of it with a great bite out of its western side. In spite of all our shell fire it is still thick with foliage, upon which the sunlight lay, casting a great black shadow underneath. Just below it was Peak Wood, a row of broken trees by a sunken road, and a triangle trench, for which our men fought desperately, so that it changed hands three times before they won it finally, on Friday afternoon.

To the left of Mametz Wood and on a line with it was Contalmaison, and on the left of that Bailiff Wood, which we captured and lost again the day before yesterday, and then further left Ovillers-la-Boiselle, and completing the crescent, La Boiselle itself.

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Between the gap in the hedge I saw again one of the world’s great battlefields, and every detail of it was so clearly and sharply defined in the sunlight that it was like a Pre-Raphaelite picture painted in vivid colours. I could count the shell-holes in the roofs of Contalmaison village, and the château there, standing to the right of a little wood, was brought so closely forward by a stereoscopic effect that I could look into the blackness of its broken windows.

Down below me were our trenches, and I saw our men in them. Some of them were outside the trenches, strolling about in the open, in little groups, or walking about on a lone track, as though taking a quiet half-hour on this Sunday afternoon.

And yet they were in the centre of the battlefield, and over their heads came an incessant flight of shells, our shells which I could see falling in the German lines, and in the fields about them German shells, bursting with dull crashes and with clouds of black and greenish smoke. All the power of destruction was at work, but because of the utter calm and beauty of the sky and the golden light over all the scene it seemed to me, standing on the edge of it, less deadly, like a dream of war.

It was no dream. Three of our shells followed each other in a group and burst with one explosion against the left-hand tower of Contalmaison château, smashing off a turret as though it were a card-castle.

Our shells were flinging up fountains of black earth and smoke in the German lines beyond—at Pozières. All round the battlefield there were the black clouds of shell fire breaking and rising and spreading over Bailiff Wood, at Ovillers, and between the broken tree trunks of La Boiselle. Men were being killed as usual, là-bas. But our shells were doing most of the damage.

An extraordinary thing happened as I looked across the château of Contalmaison. The earth seemed suddenly to open in the enemy’s lines and let forth the smoke of its inner fires. It gushed out in great round, dense masses, and rose to a vast height, spreading like the foliage of some gigantic tree. It was not a mine.

The explosion from a mine flings up a black mass with jagged edges like a piece of black-cardboard cut into teeth. But this was a regular uprising of curly black clouds of great volume, getting denser, and coming continuously. I watched it for twenty minutes or more, and could not make out its meaning, but guessed that we had blown up an ammunition store.

Two great explosions which came quite a few seconds after the first vomit of smoke suggested this. So I went away from the picture through the gap in the trees. Down in the valley where I passed the enemy’s shells were coming rather near. A heavy crump burst on a knoll close by, and some officers and men were watching with that curious smile men have at times when they know their lives depend upon a freak of chance. It is an ironical smile, and rather grim.