XIV THE WOODS OF DEATH

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July 17

We are again in the difficult hours that inevitably follow a successful advance, when ground gained at the extreme limit of our progress has to be defended against counter-attacks from close quarters, when men in exposed positions have to suffer the savaging of the enemy’s artillery, and when our own gunners have to work cautiously because isolated patrols of men in khaki may be mistaken in bad light for grey-clad men in the same neighbourhood. This period is the test of good generalship and of good captains.

The weather was rather against us to-day. There was a thick haze over the countryside, causing what naval men call “low visibility,” and making artillery observation difficult. It was curious to stand on high ground and see only the dim shadow-forms of places like Mametz Wood and the other woodlands to its right and left, where invisible shells were bursting.

Our shells were passing overhead, and I listened to their high whistling, but could see nothing of their bursts, and for nearly an hour an intense bombardment made a great thunder in the air behind the thick veil of mist.

We were shelling High Wood, from which our men have had to retire for a time owing to the enemy’s heavy barrage of high explosives, and we were also pounding the enemy’s lines to the north of Bazentin-le-Grand and Longueval, where he is very close to our men. Hostile batteries were retaliating upon the woodlands which we have gained and held during the past three days.

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This woodland fighting has been as bad as anything in this war—most frightful and bloody. Dead bodies lie strewn beneath the trees, and in the shell-holes are wounded men who have crawled there to die. There is hardly any cover in which men may get shelter from shell-fire.

The Germans had dug shallow trenches, but they were churned up by our heavies, and it is difficult to dig in again because of the roots of great trees, and the fallen timber, and the masses of twigs and foliage which have been brought down by British and German guns. When our troops went into Trones Wood under most damnable fire of 5·9’s they grubbed about for some kind of cover without much success.

But some of them had the luck to strike upon three German dug-outs which were exceptionally deep and good. Obviously they had been built some time ago for officers who, before we threatened their second line, may have thought Trones Wood a fine dwelling-place, and not too dangerous if they went underground. They went down forty feet, and panelled their rooms, and brought a piano down for musical evenings.

A young company commander found the piano and struck some chords upon it at a time when there was louder music overhead—the scream of great shells and the incessant crash of high explosives in the wood. Further on, at the edge of the wood, our men found a machine-gun emplacement built solidly of cement and proof against all shell splinters, and it was from this place that so many of our men were shot down before the enemy’s gunners could be bombed out.

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One of the most extraordinary experiences of this woodland fighting was that of an English boy who now lies in a field-hospital smiling with very bright and sparkling eyes because the world seems to him like Paradise after an infernal dwelling-place. He went with the first rush of men into Mametz Wood, but was left behind in a dug-out when they retired before a violent counter-attack.

Some German soldiers passed this hole where the boy lay crouched, and flung a bomb down on the off-chance that an English soldier might be there. It burst on the lower steps and wounded the lonely boy in the dark corner.

He lay there a day listening to the crash of shells through the trees overhead—English shell-fire—not daring to come out. Then in the night he heard the voices of his own countrymen, and he shouted loudly.

But as the English soldiers passed they threw a bomb into the dug-out, and the boy was wounded again. He lay there another day, and the gun-fire began all over again, and lasted until the Germans came back. Another German soldier saw the old hole and threw a bomb down, as a safe thing to do, and the boy received his third wound.

He lay in the darkness one more day, not expecting to live, but still alive, still eager to live and to see the light again. If only the English would come again and rescue him!

He prayed for them to come. And when they came, capturing the wood completely and finally, one of them, seeing the entrance to the dug-out and thinking Germans might be hiding there, threw a bomb down—and the boy was wounded for the fourth time. This time his cries were heard, and the monotonous repetition of this ill-luck ended, and the victim of it lies in a white bed with wonderful shining eyes.

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The German prisoners have stories like this to tell, for they suffered worst of all under the fury of our bombardment and the coming and going of our troops in the woodland fighting. I spoke with one of them to-day—one of a new batch of men, whose number I reckoned as 300, just brought down from Bazentin-le-Grand.

He was a linguist, having been an accountant in the North German Lloyd, and gave me a choice of conversation in French, Italian, Greek or English. I chose my own tongue, but let him do the talking, and standing there in a barbed wire entanglement, surrounded by hundreds of young Germans, unshaven, dusty, haggard and war-worn, but still strong and sturdy men, he described vividly the horrors of the woods up by the two Bazentins where he and these comrades of his had lain under our last bombardment.

They had but little cover except what they could scrape out beneath the roots of trees. And the trees crashed upon them, smashing the limbs of men, and shells burst and buried men in deep pits, and the wounded lay groaning under great branches which pinned them to the ground or in the open where other shells were bursting. From what I can make out some of the men here retreated across the country between Bazentin and Delville Woods, for they were the men who were captured by our cavalry.

“My comrades were afraid,” said this German sergeant. “They cried out to me that the Indians would kill their prisoners, and that we should die if we surrendered. But I said, ‘That is not true, comrades. It is only a tale. Let us go forward very quietly with our hands up.’ So in that way we went, and the Indian horsemen closed about us, and I spoke to one of them, asking for mercy for our men, and he was very kind, and a gentleman, and we surrendered to him safely.”

He was glad to be alive, this man who came from Wiesbaden. He showed me the portrait of his wife and boy, and cried a little, saying that the German people did not make the war, but had to fight for their country when told to fight, like other men. All his people had believed, he said, that the war would be over in August or September.

“Are they hungry?” I asked.

“They have enough to eat,” he said. “They are not starving.”

He waved his hand back to the woodlands, and remembered the terror of the place from which he had just come.

“Over there it was worse than death.”

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Over there on the one small village of Bazentin-le-Grand our heavy howitzers flung an amazing quantity of shells on Friday morning. The place was swept almost flat, and little was left of its church and houses but reddish heaps of bricks and dust, and twisted iron, and the litter of destruction. Yet there were many Germans living here when the men of some famous regiments came through in the dawn with bayonets and bombs, Yorkshiremen and some of the Scottish all mixed together, as happens at such times. There was one great cellar underneath Bazentin-le-Grand large enough to hold 1500 men, and here, crouching in its archways and dark passages, were numbers of German soldiers.

They came to meet our men and surrendered to them. And here also lay many wounded, in their blood, and unbandaged—just as they had crawled down from the ground above where our shells were smashing everything.

If any man were to draw the picture of those things or to tell them more nakedly than I have told them, because now is not the time, nor this the place, no man or woman would dare to speak again of war’s “glory,” or of “the splendour of war,” or any of those old lying phrases which hide the dreadful truth.