XV PRISONERS OF WAR

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July 17

In spite of bad weather, which has hampered operations so that no great advance has been possible, we have made some progress to-day in the direction of Pozières.

Some of our troops stormed a double line of trenches from Bazentin-le-Petit to the south-east of Pozières, a distance of 1500 yards, strewn from one end to the other with German dead and wounded.

High Wood, or the Bois de Foureaux, as it is properly called, is to a great extent No Man’s Land, as lying over the crest of the hill our men could be shelled by the direct observation of the enemy’s artillery, over the heads of their own men in the lower edge of the wood.

Our line therefore has been drawn back from this salient and straightened out from Longueval to the long trench by Pozières, which is now approached on both sides.

Ovillers is ours, after a German post which had been bravely defended surrendered with two officers and about 140 men early this morning. There is no other news of importance to-day on the line of attack, but it is good enough, and the general position of our force is improved.

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What is the German point of view about our attack and the prospects of the war?

That is the question I have always had in my head during the last fortnight, when I have seen batches of prisoners being led down from the battlefields, and the question I have put to some of them in bad German or fair English.

It is difficult to get any clear answer, or an answer of any real value. The men have just come out of dreadful places, many of them are still dazed under the shock of shell-fire, some of them are proud and sullen, others are ready to talk but ignorant of the battle-front in which they have been and of the situation outside the dug-outs in which they crouched.

Yet there is something to be learnt out of their very ignorance, and by putting together answers from separate groups of men and individual soldiers one does get a kind of hint of the general idea prevailing among these German troops against us.

Quite a number of them have told me that they and their people were sure that the war would be over in August or September. They have been promised that but could not give any reason for belief except the promise.

“Do you think you are winning?” I asked one man—of real intelligence.

“We thought so,” he answered.

“And now?”

He raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders.

“The English are stronger than we believed.”

There seems to me no doubt that they were perfectly confident in the strength of their lines. They did not believe that such defences as those at Fricourt and Montauban could ever be broken.

The new power of our artillery has amazed them—they speak of it always with terror—and the officers especially admit that they did not imagine that “amateur gunners,” as they call our men, could achieve such results.

For the courage of our infantry they have always had a great respect, remembering the two battles of Ypres, but they count the strength of armies by the strength of guns, and until recent days knew they had the greater power.

The foundations of their belief are shaken, but only to the extent that they admit the possibility of their army having to retire to a new line of defence.

I have not found one man speak of defeat. They are still convinced that the German army will never be beaten to the point of surrender. As the German doctor whom I have previously quoted said to me a few days ago, “You are strong and we are strong. Neither side can crush the other. If the war goes on it will be the suicide of Europe.”

These German soldiers do not want it to go on. That idea in their heads is clear enough. They are weary of war, and have a great craving for peace. They want to see their wives and children again. One strain of thought creeps out in their talk. It is the suggestion that they fight not as free men desiring to fight, but as men compelled to fight by higher powers, against whom they cannot rebel.

“It is our discipline,” said one of them to-day. “We cannot help ourselves.”

I am told by one of the officers in charge of them that they talk of another inevitable war between Germany and England in ten years from now.

They have been taught to believe, he says, that we thrust this war upon them, that all through we have been the aggressors, and that Germany will seek her revenge.

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Personally, I have not heard such words spoken, but rather from several of these prisoners, a frank hatred of war as the cause of horrors and suffering beyond the strength of man to bear. They talk as men under an evil spell put upon them by unknown powers beyond their reach.

As I have said, all this does not amount to anything of real value in trying to see into the spirit of the German people. They are the opinions of prisoners, who have escaped from the worst terrors of war, but are immediately cautious of any interrogation, and perhaps a little tempted to say pleasing things to their captors. They cannot conceal their ignorance, which is enormous, because all but victories have been hidden from them until their own defeat, but they conceal their knowledge.

I was interested, for instance, to hear them deny any great suffering from hunger in their own country.

“Our people have enough to eat,” said several of them when I questioned them. When I told them of the letters captured in their dug-outs, all full of pitiful tales about lack of food, they stared at me with grave eyes, and said again, stoutly:

“They have enough to eat. Bread enough, and meat enough.”

Their first desire upon coming from the battlefields is water, which they get at once, and their next is permission to write home to their people. All of them are anxious to be sent at once to England, where they expect greater comforts than in the fields with barbed-wire hedges, where they are kept on the way down until they can be entrained.

As I watched them to-day again I thought of our men who are prisoners, and of all the great sum of human misery which has been heaped up in this war. Fortunately, in our treatment of prisoners we teach our enemies a lesson in chivalry, for it is not, I think, in our race or history, with rare exceptions, to kick men when they are down.