XVII THE SCOTS AT LONGUEVAL

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July 20

The present stage of our advance is causing us very hard fighting for important positions on high ground which must be gained and held before new progress over open country is possible. The enemy is gathering up his reserves and flinging them against us to check the onward movement at all costs, and it seems to me that he has brought up new batteries of heavy guns, because his artillery fire is increasing.

His prisoners reveal the grave anxiety that reigns behind the German lines, where there is no attempt to minimise the greatness of our menace. The enemy is undoubtedly straining every nerve to organise a new and formidable resistance.

To-day, however, he has lost many men and valuable ground, not only in fighting with British troops, but with the French, who at Maurepas and other positions on our right have made a successful advance.

In the early hours of this morning, after a long bombardment which made the night very dreadful with noise, and the sky vivid with the light of bursting shells—such a night as I described at length a day or two ago—an attack was made by our troops on the high ground between Delville Wood and High Wood and to the west of these positions.

The enemy was in great strength, and maintained a strong defence, but he suffered severely, and was forced to retreat in disorder upon some parts of his line.

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A good deal of the fighting fell to south-country boys who once followed the plough and still have the English sky in their eyes. But not far from them were some of the “Harry Lauder lads,” who used to man the battlements of Edinburgh Castle when Rouge Dragon knocked at the gate and asked admittance for the King.

They had a bad night—“the worst a man could dream of,” said one of them, who had known other bad nights of war. They lay under the cross-fire of great shells, British and German. Field batteries were pumping out shells in a great hurry before breakfast time, but these were as nothing compared with the work of the heavies.

We were firing “Grandmothers” and “Aunties,” those 15-inch and 12-inch shells which go roaring through the air and explode with vast earth-shaking crashes. And the enemy was replying with his coal-scuttles.

“They were the real Jack Johnsons,” said a Devonshire lad who had a piece of one of them in his right shoulder. “These brutes have not been seen, I’m told, since Ypres, except in ones or twos. But they came over as thick and fast as hand-grenades. You know the kind of hole they make? ’Tis forty feet across and deep enough to bury a whole platoon.”

“The din fairly made me quake,” said a tall lad with the straw-coloured hair one sees on market days in Ipswich, and he shivered a little at the remembrance of the night, though the sun was warm upon him then.

But they did not suffer much from all this gun-fire as they manned their trenches in the darkness. The shells passed over them, and few were hurt. The attack was made before the dawn up the rising slope of ground towards high roads which used to go across from the Bois de Foureaux, or High Wood, as we call it, to Delville Wood.

Now there are no roads, for our bombardment had torn up the earth into a series of deep craters. The Germans had a line of dug-outs here, built in great haste since the first of July, but well built.

As soon as our men were upon them, the German soldiers, who had been hiding below ground, came up like rabbits when the ferrets are at work. Most of them ran away, as hard as they could, stumbling and falling over the broken ground.

“They ran so hard,” said one of our men, “that I couldn’t catch up with ’em. It was a queer kind of race, us chasing ’em, and they running. The only Germans I came up with were dead ’uns.”

But some of the Germans did not run. They came forward through the half-darkness of this dawn with their hands raised. One Cornish boy I knew took five prisoners, who crowded round him crying “Kamerad!” so that he felt like the old woman in the shoe.

Up to that point our casualties were very slight, but later on, up the higher ground, the enemy’s machine-gun fire swept across the grass and the brown, bare earth of the old trenches, and above the high rims of the shell craters. But our men swept on.

Other troops were working round High Wood on the left, and in the centre men were advancing into the wood itself, and forcing forward over the fallen trees and branches and the bodies of German dead. The enemy’s shells crashed above them, but these regiments of ours were determined to get on and to hold on, and during the day they have organised strong points, and captured the western side and all the southern part of this position.

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The situation at Longueval and Delville Wood, on the north-east of that village, has been very full of trouble for our men ever since these places were taken by some of our Highland regiments on July 14. The enemy made repeated counter-attacks from the upper end of the village, where he still held some machine-gun emplacements, and kept a way open through his trenches here on the north so that he could send up supports and supplies.

From the north also he concentrated heavy artillery fire on the southern part of Delville Wood, which was held by some of our South African troops, and maintained a violent barrage.

Nevertheless the Highlanders have held on for nearly a week with a dogged endurance that has frustrated all the efforts of the enemy to get back on to their old ground. The gallantry of these men who wear the tartans of the old Scottish clans would seem wonderful if it were not habitual with them.

Their first dash for Longueval was one of the finest exploits of the war. They were led forward by their pipers, who went with them not only towards the German lines but across them and into the thick of the battle.

It was to the tune of “The Campbells are Coming” that one regiment went forward and that music, which I heard last up the slopes of Stirling Castle, was heard with terror, beyond a doubt, by the German soldiers. Then the pipes screamed out the Charge, the most awful music to be heard by men who have the Highlanders against them, and with fixed bayonets and hand-grenades they stormed the German trenches.

Here there are many concealed machine-gun emplacements, and dug-outs so strong that no shell could smash them. Some of them were great vaults and concreted chambers of great depth, where many Germans could find cover. But the Highlanders went down into them with great recklessness, two or three men flinging themselves into the vaults where enemies were packed. They were scornful of all such dangers.

I am told by one of their colonels that in bombing down the communication trenches they threw all caution to the wind, and while some of the men went along the trenches others ran along on top under heavy fire, cheering their comrades on, and then leaping down upon the enemy.

The Germans defended themselves with most stubborn courage, and even now, or at least as late as last night, they still serve some machine-guns at one point, from which it has been found difficult to dislodge them. They are down in a concrete emplacement, from which they can send out a continual spatter of bullets down the ruined way of what once was a street.

The Highlanders dug trenches across the village, and had what they call in soldiers’ language, “a hell of a time,” which is a true way of putting it. The enemy barraged the village with progressive lines of heavy shells, yard by yard, but by the best of luck his lines stopped short of where some ranks of Highlanders were lying down in fours, using frightful words to keep their spirits up. There were hours of bad luck, too, and one was when some of the transport men and horses were knocked out by getting into a barrage. Casualties were heavy among other officers and men, but the Highlanders held on with a wonderful spirit.

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It is a spirit which I saluted to-day with reverence when I met these men marching out of the fire-zone. They came marching across broken fields, where old wire still lies tangled and old trenches cut up the ground, and the noise of the guns was about them.

Some of our heavy batteries were firing with terrific shocks of sound, which made mule-teams plunge and tremble, and struck sharply across the thunder of masses of guns firing along the whole line of battle. There was a thick summer haze about, and on the ridges the black vapours of shell-bursts, and all the air was heavy with smoke. It was out of this that the Highlanders came marching. They brought their music with them, and the pipes of war were playing a Scottish love-song:

Their kilts were caked with mud and stained with blood and filth, but the men were beautiful, marching briskly, with a fine pride in their eyes. Officers and men of other regiments watched them pass and saluted them, as men who had fought with heroic courage, so that the dirtiest of them there and the humblest of these Jocks was a fine gentleman and worthy of knighthood.

Many of them wore German helmets and grinned beneath them. One brawny young Scot had the cap of a German staff officer cocked over his ear. One machine-gun section brought down two German machines besides their own. They were very tired, but they held their heads up, and the pipers who had been with them blew out their bags bravely, though hard up for wind.

And the Scottish love-song rang out across the fields. Whatever its words, it was, I think, a love-song for the dear dead they had left behind them.