XIX THE WORK OF THE GUNS

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July 24

More ground has been gained to-day at Pozières and the Australians after their first great assault before dawn yesterday have been pushing across the Bapaume Road, which goes through the town, and bombing out the German machine-gunners and holding parties on the western side, so that not many enemies are left among the ruins or underground in Pozières itself. There is higher ground beyond, towards the Windmill, and further north, for which a fight will have to be made before the key of the position is really captured, but the advance of English regiments on the left is a menace to the enemy which must cause him grave anxiety. The line has also been thrust forward a little by a series of posts and joined up with positions in the neighbourhood of High Wood, where the enemy is again bombarding heavily, so that no further progress has been made in this direction during the day.

One curious incident was observed here by the troops holding the ground on the south of High Wood. They suddenly noticed a body of men coming out of the glades, and were surprised to see that they were in kilts.

For a moment it may have occurred to them that they were some of the wounded Scots who had fought through High Wood a few days previously. That could hardly be possible, however, because the enemy is in strong numbers in the upper part of the wood. An officer staring through his glasses uttered a word of astonishment and two of anger. The men on the sky-line were Germans dressed up in kilts taken from the dead. Our guns put some shells over them, and they disappeared below the ridge.

For the past few days the increasing strength of the enemy’s artillery, especially of heavy guns, has been noticeable, and he has been firing at longer range, and rather wildly “into the blue” in order to make things uncomfortable behind our lines.

Owing to the great superiority of our observation and the complete failure of his own aircraft—our anti-aircraft guns have hardly been called upon to fire a round during the last few weeks—he is wasting a great deal of heavy ammunition. This is different from earlier days of the battle when the German gunners had to concentrate their fire upon very definite points of attack, and were completely mastered in many of their positions by the immensity of our bombardment.

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The work of our artillery is a wonderful achievement, and all the success we have gained during this great battle has been largely due to the science and daring of our gunners and to the labour of all those thousands of men at home who have sweated in soul and body to make the guns and the ammunition.

It is only just and fair to the munition workers to say this thing and to let them know that their toil has helped enormously to break the German lines, and that without their untiring effort all the courage of our soldiers, all their sacrifice of blood would have been in vain. If they slacken off now in the factories and workshops these men of ours in places like High Wood and Longueval and Pozières will no longer have the support that is most desperately needed now that the enemy is bringing up many new batteries against us.

Flesh and blood cannot fight against high explosives. It can only die, and the whole history of the battle is not to be written in reference to bayonets or rifles but to guns. It has been, and is still, a battle of guns, and our heroic infantry has only been able to get forward or to hold its ground when the artillery preparation has been complete, and the artillery support overwhelmingly strong. Should this fail it would not be fighting, but massacre.

From the early days of the battle onwards our artillery has been great, in weight of metal, in science, in the vastness of its supplies of shells, in the superb courage and skill of its men, who have endured a continuous strain upon them night and day, for four weeks. They broke the German spirit and the German strength to the point when our infantry could attack with something like a chance, almost for the first time in this war along the British front.

By the work of aviators and artillery observation officers we knew the positions of most of the enemy’s batteries and the geography of all his communication trenches, transport roads, and supply depots. Our guns which had been brought up secretly were unmasked one morning when the great bombardment began before the battle, and poured unceasing shells upon all those positions, smothering them with high explosives and shrapnel, while the field guns closer up were cutting the enemy’s wire.

Trenches were swept out of existence, batteries were blown to bits—I have seen many of those broken German guns now standing as trophies on French lawns—and the roads were swept by storms of death. The barrage was a great wall through which nothing could pass. The German soldiers in their lines could get neither food nor water. No reinforcements could be sent to them.

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Three of our own soldiers who were taken prisoners on the morning of the first attack could not be sent back into the German lines because no escort dared to go with them through the barrage. They were thrust down into a dug-out with some of the German soldiers and saw and suffered the effect of our fire. The enemy had no food to give them, having none for themselves, and they were tortured by thirst.

For five days they endured this until nearly dead, but when the Germans were too dazed to act as guards, these three English soldiers managed to crawl out of the dug-out and by a miracle of luck escaped back to their own lines over No Man’s Land.

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A German officer, now one of our prisoners, bears witness to the work of our gunners. He was sent with his battalion from Verdun to Contalmaison and was detrained at Bapaume. There he began a painful experience of shell-fire through an accident to one of the German 12-inch guns, which burst and blew up several carriages of the train killing some of his men. But the rest of his journey was made terrible by British gun-fire. With his battalion he came down a road which was being flung up by our 15-inch and 12-inch guns. Some more of his men were killed, and he came on towards Bazentin, where he was under the fire of our 8-inch howitzers and nine-point-twos. More of his men were killed, but he went on until near Contalmaison he came within the range of our 18-pounders and lost the remainder of his men. At Contalmaison he was immediately taken prisoner by our attack and was rejoiced to come to his journey’s end alive.

“Your artillery,” he said, “is better than anything I had seen before, even at Verdun, and worse than anything I had suffered.”

All the German officers with whom I have spoken are surprised that an “Army of Amateurs,” as they call us, should produce such scientific artillery work in so short a time, and they also pay tribute to the daring of the field gunners, who go so far forward to support the infantry attacks.

“They came up,” said one of them, speaking of the Mametz Wood attack, “like charioteers in a Roman circus, at full gallop. Many of their horses were killed, but the men were reckless of danger, and placed their batteries in the open as though at manœuvres.”

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The field observing officers are audacious almost to the point of foolhardiness. Before the ground of attack has been cleared of Germans they walk calmly up with a telephonist, sit down on a crest or a knoll commanding a field of observation, and send back messages to a battery a mile or so behind.

When the territory round Contalmaison was still swarming with Germans, one of our officers went forward in this way and made himself at home on the top of a German dug-out, recording flashes and getting excellent information. He went back to his battery for an hour or two, and when he returned to his chosen spot found it occupied by Germans. They wanted to round him up, but he fired a few revolver shots and retired with dignity—to choose another place not quite so crowded with the enemy. Such tales seem fantastic and impossible. But they are true.

There is no doubt that many German batteries have been destroyed, apart from those which have been captured. I saw to-day a map, which told, by little coloured dots, a great drama of war. Each dot represented a German battery discovered by our gunners since the beginning of the battle, and each colour the day it was discovered, and they were arranged on the map so that one could see the exact distribution of the enemy’s guns, as it has changed during the course of the battle.

Soon after our bombardment began they began to drift down new batteries and there were clusters of little coloured dots at certain spots. But a day or two later they were wiped out, or withdrawn further back. There was one thick cluster of green dots to the north of Bazentin-le-Grand. It represented many batteries. A day later they had gone.

“What happened?” I asked.

The gunner officer laughed.

“We just smothered ’em.”

They were “smothered” by storms of shells which burst all over these battery positions, over every yard of ground there, so that no gun emplacement could escape.

But other dots are appearing on the map—other little clusters of colour, further away to the right. The enemy is massing new batteries, and it is from these positions that Delville Wood, High Wood, and other parts of our line are being shelled night and day with fierce and increasing violence.

Those batteries are not so easy to reach. To keep their fire down, and still more to knock them out we must have a continual increasing flow of guns and ammunition—ammunition in vast and unimaginable quantities, for the figures I have heard to-day of the ammunition we have used during the past three weeks are beyond one’s range of imagination. The munition workers at home must not relax their efforts if we are to continue our successes. It is by their labour that the lives of our men can be saved. All the time it is a battle of guns.