X THE ASSAULT ON CONTALMAISON

1

July 9

I had an idea that there would be “something doing” to-day at Contalmaison, and I went over the fields towards it, past some of our batteries, past columns of troops marching with their bands along the roads which powder them with white blinding dust, past great camps and ammunition columns, and litters of empty shell cases remaining over from the great bombardment, and past bodies of soldiers stretched out upon the grass and sleeping in the warm sunlight close behind the fighting lines, until I came to a little crest looking down to Contalmaison village, and the woods about it.

Mametz Wood was very quiet this afternoon. As neither side could see exactly the position of its troops underneath the heavy foliage—our men, who were fighting last night, hold a line about half-way through—the gunners were chary of shelling it severely. Now and again a burst of shrapnel smoke puffed against the dark background of the trees, and the shell slashed through the branches, but that was not often, and the wood seemed very peaceful. Looking at it one’s imagination found it difficult to realise that perhaps there were men there who had dug themselves into the earth beneath the spreading roots, and that British and German patrols were feeling their way, perhaps, from one tree to another, through the glades, until they came into touch and exchanged some rifle shots before falling back to their own line. I could only guess at that, and could see nothing but the tight foliage, yellow in the sun and black in the shadows.

There were plenty of shells falling elsewhere, and it seemed to me that the enemy had brought up new batteries to strengthen his defence. His shell-fire was certainly more intense, and wider-spreading, than during the past few days round here. He was bombarding our positions from La Boiselle to Montauban very fiercely. The poor broken wood of La Boiselle, which our men captured after desperate fighting, was being searched by his black shrapnel, and every now and then by one of his “universals,” which broke with a vivid cloud of greenish fumes, very prolonged in density, and forming fantastic shapes as it dissolved. One such cloud, metallic in the brilliance of its green, was like a winged woman with a Medusa face.

High explosives were falling into Montauban village, raising volumes of rose-coloured clouds, beautiful in the sunlight. I think it must have been the dust of red bricks flung up from ruined houses.

2

At half-past three in the afternoon the enemy put a very heavy barrage in a straight line below Contalmaison. One by one the shells burst, and so quickly down the line and back again that they formed a wall of black smoke with only a few gaps.

“It is so nice to get a little fresh air!” said a young gunner officer who was next to me, reporting for his battery, which speaks from afar with a very gruff voice. “During the first few days of the ‘show’ I lived indoors”—he pointed to the dark entry of a dug-out—“but now I’m getting sunburnt again. The men enjoy this open fighting. Look at ’em!”

There were men moving about the battlefield utterly regardless of the trenches—the old German trenches, marked by billows of brown earth (brown because of our gun-fire which ploughed it up), and more regular lines of white earthworks, which were our own parapets before the advance. A long column of them was winding very slowly round towards Contalmaison.

“Looks as if they were going up to support an attack,” said an officer close to me.

Other groups of khaki-coloured men were moving over the ground which one sees southward from the tall chimney of Pozières village which we were bombarding heavily.

I thought back to the Ypres salient for a moment. Men do not move about so freely there! Or between Loos and Hulluch, where over the wide barren stretch of desolation no human being is ever seen, or, if seen, killed. But—“it is nice to get a little fresh air” after the imprisonment in the trenches, and this open warfare is enormously better. It is better even to die in the open, with the wind upon one’s face, standing among the poppies, underneath the blue sky, which to-day was glorious with white snow-mountains piled high with dazzling peaks in its sea of blue and sunlight.

And so our men are touched with a kind of spiritual joy to be fighting above ground again instead of crouching in ditches—though personally I like a handy hole at times.

In the very centre of the battlefield for which some of our men fought and died a day or two ago, one tall fellow was signalling to somebody about something. Now and then a German shell fell dangerously close to his position sending up a fountain of earth and smoke, but he kept talking with his dot-and-dash to a far and invisible friend. It seemed an interesting monologue, as though he had important things to tell. It seemed to be addressed to the ruins of Contalmaison. There were moments when its old French château, set in a little wood, was lit up by a splash of golden light as the white clouds drifted by, so that I could almost count its bricks, and could see how the shells which I watched yesterday had opened its roofs. But the left hand tower was knocked off this morning by a direct hit from that same battery whose fire was being observed by the young gunner officer with whom I sat to-day. It is a wonder the shell did not smash the whole château to a pitiful ruin, but it took the tower en passant as chess players say.

At four o’clock our guns concentrated upon Contalmaison, Acid Drop Copse—the poor little straggly wood to the right of Mametz—and the German trenches defending the Contalmaison ridge. Smoke belched over the battlefield, and the song of the shells was loud and high. It was under those shells falling beyond them and through the smoke that a body of our men moved forward to the assault upon the village.

3

July 10

The village of Contalmaison is ours again. Whether we ever held it before, by more than handfuls of men, who went in and went out, is doubtful. Certainly some men succeeded in getting there from Caterpillar Wood and Acid Drop Copse, because I met them afterwards with wounds in their bodies, but it is difficult to know what happened.

One can only guess that Germans came up from their dug-outs after our men had penetrated the outskirts and made use of the darkness with their machine-guns and bombs.

What happened last night is clear enough. I have already described in a previous dispatch how we concentrated our fire upon the positions in front of the village and then shelled the village itself with terrific intensity.

I saw the beginning of this bombardment, and watched our men going up to support the attack which was to follow. It was begun when fresh troops who had been brought up to help the tired men who had been fighting in this part of the line under heavy shell-fire for several days advanced under the cover of our guns to the left and right of the village.

It was already hemmed in on both sides, for other British troops were in firm possession of Bailiff Wood to the left, and during the evening, by a series of bombing attacks, Mametz Wood to the right had been almost cleared of Germans, who are now only in the outer fringe of it.

The enemy in Contalmaison knew that their position was hopeless. When our guns lifted they heard the cheers of our infantry on both sides of the village, and many of them—at least many of those who were still alive and unwounded—streamed out of the village in disorderly retreat, only to be caught behind by our extended barrages between Contalmaison, Pozières and Bazentin-le-Petit, so that their rout became a shambles.

Our men were quickly into the village, and having learnt a lesson by the experience of other troops at other places made a thorough search of machine-gun emplacements and dug-outs, so that there should be no further trouble with this wasps’ nest.

4

The men left in Contalmaison were in a dreadful state, having suffered to the very limit of human endurance, and beyond. They were surprised to find themselves living enough to be taken prisoners.

One of these men with whom I talked this morning told me a tragic tale. He spoke a little English, having been a cabinet-maker in the Tottenham Court Road some years ago before he went back to Württemberg, where, when the war began, he was, as he said, taken and put in a uniform and told to fight, though it was not his trade, poor devil.

With other men of the 122nd (Bavarian) Regiment he went into Contalmaison five days ago. Soon the rations they had brought with them were finished, and owing to our ceaseless gun-fire it was impossible to get fresh supplies. They suffered great agonies of thirst, and the numbers of their dead and wounded increased steadily.

“There was a hole in the ground,” said this German cabinet-maker, whose head was bound with a bloody bandage and who was dazed and troubled when I talked with him. “It was a dark hole which held twenty men, all lying in a heap together, and that was the only dug-out for my company, so that there was not room for more than a few.”

“It was necessary to take turns in this shelter, while outside the English shells were coming and bursting everywhere. Two or three men were dragged out to make room for two or three others.”

“Then those who went outside were killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them had both legs torn off, and some of them their arms.”

“But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their turn to die, very likely. At last most of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.”

“There was only one doctor there, an ‘unteroffizier’”—he pointed to a man who lay asleep on the ground, face downwards—“and he bandaged some of us till he had no more bandages.”

“Then, last night, we knew the end was coming. Your guns began to fire all together—the dreadful ‘trommelfeuer,’ as we call it—and the shells burst and smashed up the earth about us.”

“We stayed down in the hole waiting for the end. Then we heard your soldiers shouting. Presently two of them came down into our hole. They were two boys and they had their pockets full of bombs.”

“They had bombs in their hands also, and they seemed to wonder whether they would kill us. But we were all wounded, nearly all, and we cried ‘Kameraden!’... And now we are prisoners—and I am thirsty.”

Other prisoners told me that the effect of our fire was terrible in Contalmaison, and that at least half of their men holding it were killed or wounded, so that when our soldiers entered last night they walked over the bodies of the dead.

These men who had escaped were in a pitiful condition. They lay on the ground utterly exhausted most of them, and—that was strange—with their faces to the earth. Perhaps it was to blot out the vision of things seen.

I shall remember the cabinet-maker of the Tottenham Court Road. In spite of the clay which caked his face and clothes and the bloody rag round his head he was a handsome bearded fellow with blue eyes which once or twice lighted up with a tragic smile, as when I asked him when he thought the war would end.

“In 1915,” he said, “when I was wounded at Ypres, I thought the war would end in a few months. And a little while ago I thought so again!”

Then he muttered something to himself, but loudly enough for me to hear the words—“Surely we cannot go on much longer?”

I left these men, and further down the road saw many more prisoners. There were nearly three hundred of them marching down a side track, between some ripening corn, under mounted escort, their grey-blue uniforms hardly visible until I was closer to them against the background of the wheat.

Most of them were young, healthy-looking men, who walked briskly, and it was only a few behind who limped as they walked, and looked broken and beaten men.

5

It was a good day for us in prisoners, for about 500 have come down from Contalmaison, Mametz Wood and the Trones Wood as living proofs of our advance in all those places.

All the prisoners speak of the terror of our artillery fire, and documents captured in their dug-outs tell the same tale in words which reveal the full horror of bombardment.

“We are quite shut off from the rest of the world,” wrote a German soldier on the day before our great attack. “Nothing comes to us; no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches, it is terrible. To-morrow morning it will be seven days since this bombardment began; we cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces.”

“Our thirst is terrible,” wrote another man. “We hunt for water, and drink it out of shell-holes.”

Many of the men speak of the torture of thirst which they suffered during our bombardment.

“Every one of us in these five days has become years older. We hardly know ourselves. Bechtel said that, in these five days, he lost 10 lbs. Hunger and thirst have also contributed their share to that. Hunger would be easily borne, but the thirst makes one almost mad.”

“Luckily it rained yesterday, and the water in the shell-holes, mixed with the yellow shell sulphur, tasted as good as a bottle of beer. To-day we got something to eat. It was impossible before to bring food up into the front line under the violent curtain fire of the enemy.”

One other out of hundreds tells all in a few words:

“We came into the front line ten days ago. During those ten days I have suffered more than any time during the last two years. The dug-outs are damaged in places, and the trenches are completely destroyed.”

We do not gloat over the sufferings of our enemy, though we must make them suffer, and go on suffering, that they may yield. It is the curse of war, the black horror which not even the heights of human courage may redeem, nor all the splendour of youth eager for self-sacrifice.

I have seen things to-day before which one’s soul swoons, and which, God willing, my pen shall write, so that men shall remember the meaning of war.

But now, when these things are inevitable, we must look only to our progress towards the end, and to-day we have made good progress.

Yesterday I wrote of the position we attacked on July 1 as a great German fortress with a chain of strongholds linked by underground works.

In ten days, by the wonderful gallantry of our men and the great power of our guns we have smashed several of those forts—as strong as any on the Western front, and defended stubbornly by masses of guns and troops—and have stormed our way in so deeply that the enemy is now forced to fall back upon his next line of defence.

The cost has been great, but the enemy’s losses and the present position in which he finds himself prove the success of our main attack.

For the first time since the beginning of the war the initiative has passed to us, and the German Headquarters Staff is hard pushed for reserves.