VIII HOW THE PRUSSIANS FELL AT CONTALMAISON

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July 8

After the first four days of battle there was something like a lull of twenty-four hours—a lull filled with the great noise of guns—which was broken by fresh assaults made by our troops in the direction of Mametz Wood and Contalmaison. For two days now—on Thursday and Friday—there has been severe fighting in that territory, and although we lost Contalmaison last night after taking it in the morning, it is, I am sure, only a temporary set-back, for our position is strong in its neighbourhood, and great loss has been inflicted upon the enemy. The battle of Contalmaison, not yet finished, will be a distinct and important episode in the history of this campaign.

I was able to see something of the battle—all the fierce picture of our shell fire—but, at the time, with no accurate idea of what was really happening beyond our guns, and with that sense of confusion and mystery which all soldiers have when they are on the battlefield, knowing very little of what is going on to the left or right of them, not knowing what is happening to themselves, or why they stand where they do, or what order will next come to them, or whether our men are doing well or badly.

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It was early in the morning that I went out beyond many of our batteries and watched the bombardment that was to precede the infantry attacks upon the enemy’s positions in front of Contalmaison and, to the right, on Mametz Wood, where some of our men held the south-west corner. There were large bodies of troops about on high ground where our old trenches are, and bunched about in groups beyond, up a slope leading to the line from which our attack was to be made. They seemed to have nothing in the world to do except hang about in a casual way. Many of them were lying on the grass, or along roadsides, asleep. Not all the roar of the guns made them turn uneasily. They had been there all night, waiting to go up in support, and now, dog-tired, they were taking their chance of rest.

It was not quite a safe spot for sleep. Although the enemy’s guns were busy on different places, there was no knowing whether they might not shift a point or two this way at any moment. The roadway had already tempted some of their shells earlier in the morning. Tall beech trees here and there had been cut clean in half, and a litter of branches and foliage lay below the broken stumps. There were new shell craters in the field over the way, just where a company of R.A.M.C. men had sat down on their stretchers, waiting for work. But nobody seemed to worry.

A captain of Pioneers spoke to me and said, “Any news?”

He was a middle-sized, keen-looking man, with a humorous look in his grey eyes which were shaded by a steel helmet, khaki covered. He was as muddy as a scarecrow, and shivered a little after his night in the rain.

“Dashed if I know what’s happening,” he said; “one never does. Our fellows are supposed to be going up, but no orders come along. There’s our adjutant, waiting for ’em.” I looked across the road and saw the adjutant. He was lying on his back, quite straight, at full length, with his head on his pack and his waterproof coat over him. He was profoundly asleep.

The Pioneer captain pointed towards little masses of men below the crest of the rising ground, beyond which were hell-fires.

“I thought they would go up an hour ago, but they’re still waiting, poor lads. I expect they’ll go in it all right in less than half an hour.”

He stared towards Mametz village. It was under a pall of greenish smoke, and not a minute passed without a big German shell bursting over it and raising black columns of cloud.

“Nasty kind of place,” said the Pioneer. “Thought I should have to spend the night there. Glad I didn’t, though! And such a night! I never saw anything like it. Exactly like hell, only worse; a sky full of shells, and lights bursting like blazes. A regular Brock’s benefit.... Hulloa, some of ’em are going up.”

The men who were in small bunches on the low ground were getting into a new kind of order. They were moving up towards the crest in extended formation....

A German shell was coming our way. I heard its high gobbling note, and shifted my steel hat a little, and hoped it might serve. There was a nasty crash fifty yards away below the road, where some of the men were bunched.... A whistle sounded, and the R.A.M.C. men, who had been squatting on their stretchers, sprang up and ran, carrying their stretchers, down a side track. They had found some work to do.

Two other shells came closer, and we changed our position a little. It was getting rather hot.

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But not so hot as other places, compared with which our ground was Paradise. Mametz Village, behind our lines now, was being shelled heavily by the enemy, and was a very ugly spot, but even that was a health resort, as soldiers say, compared with any of the German positions in the neighbourhood of Contalmaison. Our guns were concentrating their fire along a line north of Birch Tree Wood from Horseshoe Trench, now in our hands, across to Peak Wood and Quadrangle Trench away to Mametz Wood on the right. We were also putting a terrific barrage round the village of Contalmaison and Acid Drop Copse. Our batteries, heavy and light, seemed to be in rings round this storm centre.

The heavies were away behind, and I could only know their existence by the great shells that came rushing overhead, from invisible places at long range, with a long drone like some great harp plucked by old god Thor, as each shell crossed the valley and smashed over the enemy’s lines. They came in great numbers and from half the points of the compass, to fall upon that one stretch of ground a mile or so broad. Our field guns were not invisible.

I could see them winking and blinking in the valleys and up the slopes as far as the eye could range. They fired salvoes or rounds with sharp and separated rat-tat-tats. Every kind of gun and howitzer—old “Grandmothers,” the long six-inchers, four-point-sevens, French soixante-quinze, and our own eighteen pounders—played the devil over the German lines.

I think it was about eleven that they lifted and put a dense barrage of shells further back. For the first time in my experience, this moment was perceptible. It was a kind of hush for just a second, as though all the guns were taking breath. Then the tumult began again, while the infantry went forward into and through the smoke. A little while later I saw rockets high above the smoke in the direction of Contalmaison. Something told me, though without any certainty, that our men were in that village.

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From a visual point of view that is all I can tell, but to-day have seen some of the officers who were directing this battle, and what happened is now much clearer, though not absolutely clear in all its details. The day before yesterday, after heavy fighting in the early stages of the battle, some of our battalions took possession of the Horseshoe Trench to the north-west of Birch Tree Wood and to the south-west of Contalmaison. Other battalions to the right were stretching along a line through Birch Tree Wood to the south of Mametz Wood. A curious affair was happening in a trench called the Old Jaeger Trench, running out of the Horseshoe towards a German redoubt to the west of Peak Wood.

Part of this trench was held by the troops on the left and part by the troops on the right, and both reported and believed that they held all of it. The truth was that a gap in the middle was still held by a party of Germans, who had machine-guns and bombs with which, presently, they made themselves unpleasant. Orders were sent to clear the trench of these ugly customers, and it was done by the troops on the left. Then orders were given to clear forward to a triangle trench to the right of the Old Jaeger. It was a strong redoubt, and the Germans defended themselves so tenaciously at this point that it changed hands three times before our men held it for good.

It yielded finally when the troops on the right fought their way up to Peak Wood, captured it, and enfiladed the enemy with machine-gun fire. At that moment they saw their position was hopeless, and came running out with their hands up. Further on there was a machine-gun emplacement which was giving us a good deal of trouble, but this was bombarded and rushed, and on the evening of July 6 the machine-gun, to use the words of one of the officers, was “done in.”

Yesterday morning the attack following the bombardment extended from these points south-west of Contalmaison away to the right. Unfortunately, although the fortune of war favoured us in another way, the troops on the right were unable to make much headway. But at this time an extraordinary, and, for the enemy, a terrible, thing happened. Some battalions of the Prussian Guard Reserve, hurriedly brought up a day or two ago from Valenciennes, and thrown into this battlefield without maps or guidance or local knowledge, advanced to meet our men on the right, and walked up, by an awful stroke of chance, straight into the terrific barrage which our guns had just started round Contalmaison. A whole battalion was cut to pieces.

Many others suffered frightful things. I am told by some of the prisoners that they lost three-quarters of their number in casualties, and although this may be an exaggeration—prisoners always have the tendency to exaggerate their losses—it is certain that a mass of men were killed and wounded. As soon as our barrage lifted our troops on the right, most of them men of Yorkshire and northern counties, swept forward and without great trouble entered Contalmaison and Bailiff Wood to the north-west. It was their lights which I had seen signalling through the smoke.

It was a magnificent success, not too dearly bought. But just when our position looked full of promise for the morrow disappointing news came in last night. It is here that the details of what happened are not clear. Germans were reported to be streaming out of Mametz Wood towards Contalmaison, apparently to make a counter-attack there. The enemy’s guns were shelling the place. Rain fell heavily, and our men who had fought so well and so long were exhausted.

Owing to the difficulty of communication and other troubles which happen at those times, the situation became confused, and late in the evening it was reported that Contalmaison had been evacuated as a temporary measure for defensive reasons.

At the same time it was also reported that Mametz Wood had been so heavily shelled by our guns that much damage had been inflicted upon the Germans inside, some of whom had escaped to our lines. We are now holding the outskirts of Contalmaison, in, or in the neighbourhood of, the cemetery, and, I believe, Acid Drop Copse, so that we are in a sound position for further attack.

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A large number of prisoners were taken, and they came straggling back over the battlefield in miserable little groups. Some of them carried our wounded on stretchers or on their backs, and our men carried their wounded.

They were the remnants of the 3rd Prussian Guards Division which has been so utterly broken that it no longer exists as a fighting unit. Those who did not fall into our hands have been withdrawn from the line. The moral of the men as well as their fighting force has been smashed. Even the officers admit that they have no more stomach for the fight, and several of the men with whom I spoke to-day were frank in saying that they are glad to be prisoners to be safe at last from the frightfulness of this war.

Some of them told me that after leaving Valenciennes a few days ago, after our attack had started, they were brought to Cambrai, and while the officers were sent on by motor-car they marched a long distance through unknown country to the front. They do not know the names of the villages through which they passed, their officers had no maps, and they had an ominous feeling that they were going to their doom. But the strength of our artillery, and its deadly accuracy of aim, surprised them.

They did not know the English had such gunners. Still more were they surprised by the dash of our infantry when they heard that they had against them “men of the ‘New Army.’” “We thought they were Guards,” said these Prussian prisoners, who belonged chiefly to the Lehr, Grenadiers and Fusiliers—all Guards’ Divisions—the 70th Jaeger and the 110th, 114th and 190th regiments of the line. Some of them I spoke to were Poles from Silesia—“ich kann nur ein wenig Deutsch sprechen” (I can only speak a little German), said one of them. Yet they were tall, hefty men of good physique and well-fed. Some of them were middle-aged fellows, and fathers of families, corresponding to the French Territorials. They spoke of their wives and children, and their tired, dazed eyes (for they were just down from the field of fire) lighted up at the thought of going home again after the war.

“God send a quick ending to the war!” said one of them, and he spoke the words as a prayer with his hands upraised.

I sat in a little dug-out, bomb-proof, perhaps, but not sound-proof, because the noise of guns was appallingly close and loud while some of the men were being brought in to be examined by a bright-eyed officer, who spoke their dialects as well as their language, and had an easy way with him so that they were not frightened.

They answered frankly, in a manly way, and were grateful for our treatment of them. A queer scene inside these walls of sandbags, lighted by German candles, filled with all sorts of litter from German pockets—great clasp-knives, leaden spoons, cartridge clips, compasses, watches, pencils. One of the investigating officers was the son of a famous musician, and seemed to find an intense interest in his job, though new batches of prisoners keep arriving through day and night, so that his meals and his sleep are interrupted.

But with his brother officers he is accumulating a store of information, and sees all the drama of the war, and all its misery for the enemy, between these sandbags, and in the dim candlelight which flickers upon the worn faces of German soldiers taken an hour before up there where the shells are falling.