XVIII THE DEVIL’S WOOD

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July 21

Delville Wood, to the right of Longueval, is a name marked on the war-maps, but some of our soldiers, who take liberties with all French place-names, giving a familiar and homely sound to words beyond the trick of their tongues, call this “The Devil’s Wood.”

It is a reasonable name for it. It is a devilish place, which has been a death-trap to both the German and British troops who have held it in turns, or parts of it. It is here, and in High Wood to the north-west of it, that the fighting continues hotly. Last night and to-day the northern end was under the fire of our guns, the southern end under German fire, and somewhere about the centre the opposing infantry is entrenched as far as it is possible to dig in such a place.

The German soldiers have the advantage in defence. They have placed their machine-guns behind barricades of great tree-trunks, hidden their sharpshooters up in the foliage of trees still standing above all the litter of branches smashed down by shrapnel and high explosives, and send a patter of bullets across to our men, who have dug holes for themselves below the tough roots.

There is no need for either side to do any wood-chopping for the building of their barricades. Great numbers of trees have fallen, cut clean in half by heavy shells, and lie across each other in the tangle of brushwood. Branches have been lopped off or torn off, and are piled up as though for a bonfire. The broken trunks stick up in a ghastly way, stripped of their bark, and enormous roots to which the earth still clings have been torn out of the ground as though by a hurricane, and stretch their tentacles out above deep pits.

The wood is strewn with dead, and wounded men are so caught in the jungle of fallen branches that they can hardly crawl through it. Even the unwounded have to crawl on their way forward to fight, over, or underneath, the great trunks which lie across the tracks.

The gallant South Africans who were here could not dig quickly enough to get cover from the shells which the enemy’s guns pumped into the wood as soon as our men had gained it, and found it very hard to dig at all, but now, I hope, our troops are more secure from shell-fire and the enemy is suffering severely from our bombardment. His machine-guns chatter through the day and night from one or two strong emplacements, and our men, lying behind their own stockades, effectively reply. In the twilight of “The Devil’s Wood” the struggle goes on, but gradually we are enclosing the place and the Germans in it are not there for long.

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July 27

At about ten o’clock this morning our troops again took Delville Wood—all but a narrow strip on the north—and perhaps it is the last time that it will be necessary to send men to the assault of this evil position which has earned the nickname of “Devil’s Wood” from soldiers who have been through it and out of it.

As one of our officers said to me this morning, “I wish to goodness we could wipe the place off the map, or burn it off. A good forest fire there would cleanse the ground of this filthy wreckage of trees which has been a death-trap to so many good fellows.”

It is a queer thing that so many trees are still standing, and that it still looks like a wood as I saw it the other day when the enemy was barraging this side of it. In spite of all the trees that have been cut down by shells the foliage still looks dense at a distance and hides all the horror underneath.

To-day many more trees have been slashed off and hurled upon other fallen trunks. If the wood had been drier the forest fire would have blazed. I am told that our concentration of guns for this morning’s bombardment secured the most intense series of barrages upon one position since the battle of Picardy began twenty-seven days ago; twice as heavy as any similar artillery attack.

The bombardment began this early morning, and took line after line from south to north above the ground held by our men, in progressive blocks of fire. Our batteries over an area of several miles, from the long-range heavies to the 18-pounders far forward, flung every size of shell into this “Devil’s Wood,” and filled it with high explosives and shrapnel so that one great volume of smoke rose from it and covered it in a dense black pall.

It seems impossible that any Germans there could still be left alive, but it is too soon yet to know whether our men found any of them crouching in holes or lying under the shelter of great trunks and roots. Perhaps a few German soldiers may come out from this place of death having escaped by what seems like a miracle, except that every day men do escape in the strangest way from shells which burst above them and under them and around them.

But there will not be many who may tell the tale of this morning’s bombardment of the wood, for the enemy has not had time to make an elaborate system of dug-outs here, deep enough to protect them from 6-inch or 8-inch shells, but had no more cover than our own men who held the wood when it was the turn of the enemy’s artillery.

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I was talking to some of these men this morning, and they all had the same tale to tell. “Devil’s Wood,” said one of them—a shock-headed Peter in shorts, who had not lost his sense of humour, though a good deal of blood, up there—“this Delville Wood, as it is called politely by fellows who don’t know the look of it or the smell of it, is easily the worst place on earth, as far as I can guess.”

“It’s just crowded with corpses, and to stay there is to join that company. The only cover one can get is to crawl under a log and hope for the best, or crawl into a shell-hole and expect the worst—which generally arrives. I had the devil’s own luck—a puncture of the left leg—so I can’t walk back there.”

He was amazed to have come out so easily, and because he still had life, and could see the sun shining through the flap of a tent, he was in high spirits, like all our men who have had the luck to get a “cushie wound,” which in this war is the best of luck to men in such places as “Devil’s Wood.”

The other men were eloquent about the German snipers who were hidden in the foliage of trees with rifles and machine-guns and waited very patiently until any of our men began to crawl through the tree trunks. That game is finished. Our bombardment this morning must have swept away all such men with whatever weapon they had.

Devil’s Wood has become more crowded with dead, and it is over these bodies that our men stumbled this morning when they went forward slowly and cautiously behind the great barrage of our guns which cleared the way for them. They advanced in waves, halting while another barrage was maintained for half an hour or more ahead. They had to cross Princes-street, which was a sunken road made into something like a trench by the South Africans, and afterwards by Scots from home, striking across the glades from west to east, and then they pushed northwards.

I have no details of the fighting, which is still in progress, but it is probable that the attack has succeeded without many casualties. It is in holding the ground that the worst time comes to the men who capture it.

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Meanwhile another attack has been made this morning, advancing eastwards to Delville Wood from Longueval, which is partly in and partly out of the wood, with the object of clearing out the enemy from the northern part of the village and joining up with the men advancing into the wood from the south, as I have just described.

Here, again, not much more of the fighting is known, but we know the difficulties of the position, and it is not surprising that the hardest fighting has been happening here. The history of the fight that has gone on in this corner of ground since July 14 is one of the most wonderful things, for sheer stubborn courage, that has been done in all this great battle.

The Scottish troops who first took Longueval, as I have described in a previous despatch, held part of the village in spite of heavy counter-attacks and incessant bombardments while the South Africans were in the adjoining wood of devilish fame.

The home-grown Scots had a trench—a poor thing, but still called a trench—running from east to west at the south end of the village, and two parallel roads going out of this trench northwards through the ruins of the village.

There were barricades up these two roads held by the Scots with machine-guns, and on the other side of the barricade, the roads were No Man’s Land leading to the enemy, who were, and still remain, in bits of copse and ruined gardens and old orchards, with their own machine-guns protected by strong emplacements.

The Scots had a severe time, under almost continuous fire, and lost heavily. At night they were attacked from the orchard land by parties of German bombers, who advanced with desperate courage although swept back again and again by rifles and machine-guns and hand-grenades. Meanwhile the South Africans were being shelled to death in Delville Wood close by, and, as I have already told, the poor remnants of them were withdrawn.

The troops in Longueval were replaced by others, who succeeded in clearing the enemy out of part of the orchard and capturing some of his machine-guns, but not enough to “clean up” this position, which was still very dangerous. It was another battalion of Scottish troops, together with English boys of the New Army, who captured Waterlot Farm, running down south-eastwards from Delville Wood, and made two or three very gallant attempts to get as far as Guillemont, and on July 22 another part of Longueval was taken a third time by these fine men, whose general has trained them to attack and to go on attacking.

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Delville Wood proved the stumbling block again. One young officer who was wounded here yesterday told me that he could get no kind of cover where he lay with his men at the edge of Delville Wood and on the outskirts of Longueval. All night long there was the swish of machine-gun bullets above him, varied with shrapnel and bits of high explosive.

He has only been out in France a fortnight, and two days ago came straight to the “Devil’s Wood,” into the heart of Inferno.

On his first day he was surprised to come face to face with a German soldier. The young officer had been given orders to push out a patrol down a sap or shallow trench to reconnoitre the position of the enemy. He had not gone many yards before he met the enemy—a tall fellow in a steel helmet, followed by forty others.

There was surprise on both sides and considerable alarm, but the English boy was first in with a revolver shot. He thinks now that he made a mistake because the Germans made no attack upon him and ran back into the wood, so that it is likely enough they had come forward to surrender, as a means of escape from our shell-fire.

Our lieutenant came back to report, dodging snipers who “potted” at him from several directions, and then lying in a ditch until a fragment of shell caught him.

“Longueval is the very devil,” says this subaltern with two days’ experience of war—and enough too. “With Delville Wood on its right it’s not a healthy neighbourhood. But of course Brother Boche is getting it in the neck all the time, so he can’t be pleased with his position.”

To-day there are other men attacking the same position, up against the same difficulties, subject to the same fire.

Those who went before them have gained the immortality of history—a poor reward, perhaps, for great struggles and great suffering, but theirs, whatever the value of it, for all time, when the secrets of the war are told.

The men who are now in are of the same breed, and will not fail for lack of courage, but as I write the guns are firing with a great tumult of noise over there, and new history is in the making so that it cannot yet be known.

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July 29

I have already described in a previous despatch the great difficulties that have confronted our men in Longueval and Delville Wood, and I left off my last narrative at a time when our troops were making a strong attack upon both of those positions—the battalions on the left endeavouring to clear the enemy from the north of Longueval, where they had machine-gun redoubts, and those on the right working up from the south through Delville Wood.

The infantry advanced stage by stage behind our shell-fire—a very simple thing to write or read, but not at all a simple matter to troops walking under the hurricane of shells and depending for their lives upon the scientific accuracy of gunners calculating their range and their time-fuses a long way behind the lines, and unable to see the infantry advancing to attack.

“It was queer to see the shells bursting in front of one,” said a bright-eyed fellow, who had just come out of “Devil Wood” with a lucky wound. “The line of them was just about seventy-five yards ahead of us, flinging up the ground and smashing everything. It was wonderful how the gunners kept it just ahead of us.”

Our men did not go through Delville Wood in one of those fine cheering rushes which are drawn sometimes by imaginative artists, and sometimes, but not often, happen. They went in scattered groups, keeping touch, but in extended order and scrambling, stumbling, or crawling forward as best they could, in a place which had no clear track.

There were not two yards of ground without a shell hole. Fallen trees and brushwood made a tangled maze. Old barricades smashed by shell fire and shallow trenches scraped up by men who had been digging their own graves at the same time made obstacles and pit falls everywhere. Our men, heavily loaded with their fighting kits, with bombs slung about them, and with their bayonets fixed, could not go forward at a bound through this infernal wood.

This wood had been taken four times by four waves of British troops. It had been retaken four times by four waves of German troops. It had been the dumping place of the artillery’s most furious bombardments on both sides, so that these English boys of ours were advancing through a great graveyard of unburied dead.

The ghastliness of the place has left its mark upon the minds of many men who are not troubled much by the sights of battle. I notice that some of them wince at the name of Delville Wood, and others—the officers mostly—laugh in a way that is not good to hear, because it is the laughter of men who realise the great gulf of irony that lies between the decent things of life and all this devildom.

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When our men advanced they were surprised to see men running away through the broken trees, and astonished, also, to see bits of white rag fluttering above some of the shell-holes. These white rags, tied to twigs, bobbed up and down or waved to and fro as signals. It was the white flag of surrender, held by German soldiers crouched at the bottom of the shell craters. From one of them a Red Cross flag waved in a frantic way.

Our men went forward with their bayonets, and shouted “Come out of it, there!” and from each shell-hole came a German soldier, holding his hands up, and crying “Pity! Pity!” which is a word they seem to have learnt in case of need.

“Some of them were so small and young,” said a man who was fighting in this part of the wood, “that their uniforms were much too big for them and their tunics came down to their knees.”

They were exceptional in youth and size, for all the prisoners I have seen since the beginning of our attack are tall, strapping fellows of the best fighting age; but it is possible that our men have come up against some of the 1916 class. When the English poked their bayonets at them, but not into them, they fell on their knees and cried for mercy.

It was mercy asked and given at a time when our soldiers were angry, for the enemy was firing a large number of gas-shells.

Early in the afternoon a good deal of the ground to the north of Longueval had been captured by very fierce fighting at close quarters in and about the orchard, where the enemy had machine-gun emplacements and a strong redoubt called Machine-gun House. Here they defended themselves stubbornly behind barricades of broken bricks and fallen tree trunks and barbed wire, serving their guns in a deadly way.

Several of our officers behaved with the utmost gallantry and led forward many bombing parties to the attack of the machine-gun emplacements, from which there came a continual swish of bullets. Our men were quite reckless in taking all risks, and made repeated attacks on this position left of Delville Wood until they captured or knocked out several of the machine-guns which had given most trouble.

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In the meantime the troops on the right were gradually pushing their way up to the top of the wood, past Princes-street (an old trench dug by the Scots, and now battered out of shape by the morning’s bombardment), and across a line of dug-outs made by the enemy—and very well made in the time. They are master diggers, the Germans, and they have the industry of ants. It is sometimes an industry inspired by fear; but, after all, fear is often the wisdom of defence, and in this case they fought longer because by night and day they had toiled to get shell-proof cover into which death could not enter easily.

Some men of ours who were first to go into those dug-outs tell me that they were as deep as those they had seen in parts of the line where Germans have had months for their work. They had plenty of head cover, of timber balks and sandbags and earth, and inside them was room for twenty men or more.

When our men came through the trees to them there were two officers sitting outside as though at a cottage doorway, and they seemed quite calm, except for their extreme pallor.

They were both wounded, but not badly, and it is our men’s idea that they had come to sit in the open in case they should be buried alive in the dug-outs by direct hits from our heavy shells. They rose, and showed their wounds, and surrendered.

Some of our men went into the mouths of the dug-outs, and cautiously, with their bombs handy, down the dark steps. There were forms huddled up in that narrow stairway, and they groaned at the touch of boots. They were badly wounded men, who had staggered down to get shelter and medical aid. Down below, in rooms about ten feet square and almost dark, were other wounded men lying about in their own blood.

A lantern hanging on a nail in one of these places gave a dim flicker of light to the scene, and showed the white, unshaven faces of the men who, as our young soldiers came tramping and stumbling down, raised their heads, but had no strength to stand up. Two or three men, unwounded, or only slightly wounded, came forward with their hands held up a little, and bowed their heads as they muttered something which meant surrender.

Early in the afternoon the enemy made a counter-attack upon the left of the wood and to the north of Longueval village. At the same time their artillery had received word somehow, by fugitives, that the wood was full of English, and that they could shell it without killing many of their own men. German “crumps” now began to crash through the trees, and a counter-bombardment of high explosives fell into the cratered earth.

The attack by German infantry was made by strong parties of grenadiers, who came down saps above Longueval and from a communication trench between Delville Wood and High Wood. They came on with great resolution, followed by machine-gunners, but they were received with rifle fire, bombs, and machine-gun fire from our own men.

Some parties managed to work their way back into the orchard, and through the scattered trees about it, and there was some close and desperate fighting. For a time our men in one of the battalions were short of bombs, and sent back urgent messages for new supplies.

“We had been hanging on to them,” said one of the boys, “because it’s always well to save them for a tight place, but of course we sent them up to the chaps in front.” It was timely help, and all the German efforts to dislodge our men broke down with heavy loss, so that the ground was strewn with their dead and wounded.

Many Germans were seen retreating over the high ground above Delville Wood, to the left. Parties of them ran along the sky-line, and then seemed to drop into a sunken road.

So Delville Wood is ours again—and it is again under the fire of German guns instead of British guns, and the trouble is to know whether it is possible for either side to hold such a place without too great a sacrifice of life. It is easier to hold now that the ground to the north of Longueval and in the western corner of the wood has been cleared of its hornets’ nests—those hiding-places of machine-gunners who were able to send waves of bullets upon our advancing men.

That trouble, anyhow, is gone, and the enemy feels the loss, because several new counter-attacks last night failed as completely as those made earlier. They were our machine-guns which met them in their old haunts, and made them pay back a heavy price for the toll they had taken before.