XXII THE HIGH GROUND AT POZIÈRES

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August 5

Last evening, just as dusk was creeping over the battlefields, the Australians, with English troops on their left, sprang over the parapets of their lines at Pozières, advanced up five hundred yards of rising ground, stormed through the trenches of the second German line, and captured the crest of the ridge which looks down to Courcelette and Martinpuich.

It was a great and tragic surprise to the enemy. They may have believed, I think they did believe, that after the series of battles in the July fighting, the spirit of the British offensive was broken, and that our troops were too tired to make fresh assaults. The German generals tried to put comfort into the hearts of their men by telling them that the British guns and the British soldiers had done their worst, and that the attack was at an end. The lull deceived them.

Because two or three days had passed without any infantry action after thirty days of unceasing battle there may well have seemed to the enemy a reasonable hope that we should content ourselves with digging in and holding the ground gained. One thing, however, must have disheartened the German troops and prevented any kind of nervous recuperation after the appalling strain of the month’s shell-fire. The British guns, which should have been worn out, and the British gunners supposed to be exhausted, went on firing.

They went on all yesterday, as on the day before and more than a month of yesterdays, with their long, steady bombardment, that bombardment which is now rumbling with its sullen shocks of sound as I write, and as it goes on night and day. Long-range guns were reaching out to places far ahead the German lines. Courcelette was a ruin. Martinpuich was falling to pieces. There is no safety for Germans anywhere and up in the lines no safety except in the deepest dug-outs for officers and lucky men.

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As many men as could get into dug-outs to the north of Pozières were down there yesterday, listening to the crashes of our heavy shells which were smashing the trenches about them and screaming overhead on more distant journeys.

The Australians and English troops, including men of Kent, Sussex, and Surrey regiments, were waiting in their own trenches.

A crescent moon came up. The woods darkened. Shadows crept down from Thiépval. Distant cornfields in the world beyond the war, so near as miles are counted, so far away in peace, became bronzed and red, and then all dark and vague in the evening mist. Above, the sky was still blue, with stars very bright and glistening.

It was, I think, about 9 o’clock—as the clock goes now in France and England—when the British troops left their trenches. They went quietly without any great clamour across that 500 yards of ground, dusky figures, the brown of their khaki no different from the colour of the earth around them, through the gloom of coming night. The Australians worked up to the right, the English to the left. Before them was the German second line on a front of about 3,000 yards, and part of that long line which was pierced and taken on July 14, between Bazentin-le-Petit and Longueval, when the British troops went up in waves and astounded the world by their achievement. It was no longer a line of trenches.

It was a wavy line of hummocky and tumbled earth along innumerable shell-craters such as I described at Montauban. Only the dug-outs, or some of them, still remained in all this chaos, filled with living and wounded and dead.

Out of the wreck of earth, as our men advanced, living men came out in groups. They came forward through the dusky night with their hands held up—pitiable shadows. Most of them were utterly nerve-broken—beaten and broken men with no fight left in them, but only an animal fear, and desire of life.

Their surrender was received, and the English and Australians put guards about them and sent them back to our lines while they went on to clear out the dug-outs of men who refused to come out, or could not come out, and to deal with those who further back had still the courage to defend themselves.

There was some bayonet fighting and bombing. From behind the German lines in isolated redoubts machine-guns were at work spraying out bullets. But our casualties were very few; all told, less, I imagine, than in any action of importance during the Battle of the Somme. The enemy’s losses were heavy. More than 400 prisoners have passed the toll-bar, and others are being brought down. In dead he lost more than that, and his wounded must number high figures. It was a blow which must be grievous to him after all the hammer-strokes of the month, and what is most significant is the troubled state of his soldiers, these dazed and nerve-shattered men who surrendered. They had no pride left in them.

These men were mostly of the 17th and 18th Reserve Division of the 9th Reserve Corps with miscellaneous drafts from various Ersatz or reserve battalions, the scourings of the last class whom Germany can, I suppose, put into the field. By that I do not mean they are physically weak or undersized—there are very few German soldiers who could be described like that—but they are not soldiers of the proud and highly-trained kind who fought in earlier days of the war. They are men with families and with a great yearning for peace, and no love of this massacre which is ordained by their warlords.

During the night the troops behind them were rallied to make three separate counter-attacks. They came on very bravely—there is nothing the matter with German courage as a rule—but in a spirit of self-sacrifice and stupidly. They walked into our barrage, and our shells caught them and shattered them.

To-day up to the time I write there has been no further attack by infantry, but the enemy’s guns have opened and maintained a very fierce fire upon the positions gained by our troops.

The new part of the German second line now in our hands makes up with the other part of his line captured on July 14 a distance of nearly 10,000 yards.

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August 7

All last night, which was still and calm, as the weather goes, there was a great hammering of guns, and this morning, when I went out in the direction of Thiépval, the artillery on both sides was hard at work. The enemy was dropping “heavy stuff” in the neighbourhood of Pozières, with occasional shots at long range into fields about quiet villages behind the lines which look utterly peaceful in the warm light of this August sun gleaming upon their church spires and upon the thick foliage of the trees around them.

It was in the midst of a tumult of guns and below the long resonant journeying of great shells on their way to the enemy’s territory that I sat to-day with some of the officers who have just chased the Germans out of their trenches to the north of Pozières.

They were all men of Kent around me. The captain is a merry soul, who laughs most heartily over his hairbreadth escapes and still more loudly when he describes little exploits which would make most men shudder at the mere remembrance.

The colonel of his battalion, who sat opposite, is of a different type, quiet and thoughtful, but with a sense of humour also that lights his eyes. And two places off was the M.O.—a doctor who loves his men and would not leave this battalion of the Kents for any other in the Army (he has patched up all their bodies after every scrap and did heroic work for them the other night).

Before the fighting began the colonel took the jovial captain up to the line “to view the Promised Land,” as he called it. And the Promised Land looked very uninviting on this high ridge—above the blackened ruins of Pozières—where the German second lines were guarded by a tangle of barbed wire. It was also difficult to look at it very long or very closely, because the enemy was “lathering” the field of observation with every kind of “crump” and shell.

“When we popped over the parapet,” says the captain, “we advanced into the middle of the Brock’s Benefit, and it was obvious that the blinking Boche had got the wind up.”

That is to say the enemy was sending up distress signals to his guns, and in the anticipation of an attack, was flinging coloured lights over to our lines so as to illuminate any British infantry who might be advancing. These lights were fired out of a special kind of pistol, and when they fell flared up with vivid red and green fires. At the same time the enemy’s machine-guns played upon any figures so revealed, so that it was almost certain death to be in those flare lights. At great risk several men sprang forward into the illumination and kicked out the burning canisters. Then in the momentary darkness, the leading companies advanced in waves towards the German trenches south of Mouquet (or, as the soldiers call it, Moo-Cow) Farm.

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The colonel of the battalion went very gallantly with his men, and as he drew near to the enemy’s line saw two figures silhouetted like his own men had been against the enemy’s lights. He called out to them, thinking they might be his own men working forward on his right. But he saw they were Germans when one man threw up his hands as a sign of surrender, and the other dropped on to one knee to fire a rifle shot. The colonel sprang forward, covering them with his revolvers, and took both of them prisoner.

Without many casualties in spite of machine-gun fire, our men reached the German trenches. Great heroism was shown by a young lieutenant and a party of bombers who went first over No Man’s Land so quickly behind our barrage that they risked death by our own shells and came against the first defence. The officer and several of this first wave were found lying wounded 400 yards further than the “jump-out” position, and it was their quick advance which scared the enemy and helped to demoralise him.

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One of the prisoners taken later was a forward observing officer, a Prussian giant well over six feet high and enormously stout, and he was put in charge of a little Kentish man standing five foot one in his socks. The German giant was very frightened at the machine-gun fire of his own people, which was whipping over the ground, and he went back crouching in a bear-like way, prodded from behind by the wee man in khaki. This sight, illuminated by the flares, was seen by the men left behind in our own trenches, and they stood up on their parapets laughing and cheering wildly.

But there were other trenches ahead, and the men “hared” off to these, and found them held by scared men. The Kentish men started bombing down the trench “like mad,” and blocked it at each end in case of accidents, while a young officer posted a machine-gun on the left of it.

The position, however, became quite obviously an untenable one, when the Germans rallied and attacked in bombing parties from the farm. Many of them were cut down by the young officer with his Lewis gun and by the Kentish grenadiers, but they brought up machine-guns and made the position “very hot.” A lance-corporal behaved very gallantly in going back 700 yards under heavy fire to report the situation, and volunteered to return with the message that the patrol could not be supported and must fall back in small groups. This he did, and returned again in safety with the other party, who brought with them three more prisoners “as samples” (to use their own phrase), including the huge officer whom I have described previously.

They have funny fellows among them—this British battalion—and the amount of comedy they extract from all this grim business is astounding. There is one of their number who was once a member of Fred Karno’s troupe, and has not lost his old instincts for a knock-about turn. When he took a prisoner he caught him by the hand and danced a “pas de quatre” with him.

“Offizier?” asked the astounded man.

“Oui, oui,” said the comic turn, “and you—prisonnier—savez?”

So much for the men of Kent, though I should like to tell more if I had the time to-night about their medical officer who tended all the wounded men of two companies and thirty wounded Germans in a subterranean dressing station (there was no comedy there), and more about their very fine and fearless colonel, and about the cheerful captain, whose adventures since the war began would fill a book as strange as the Memoirs of Marbot.

To-day other men were fighting in the same place, and I must tell at some later time the fine work of the Surrey and Sussex men.

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August 11

The enemy has made several attempts to regain the high ground taken from him to the north of Pozières, and yesterday evening, between the hours of five and seven o’clock, he sent out a strong body of infantry to attack our trenches. It was a curious, vain, and tragic endeavour, like several other counter-attacks launched at the command of the German staff by men recently brought up as support troops, knowing quite obviously nothing of the country in which they are called upon to fight, and just blundering out with a kind of desperate courage towards our lines. It was exactly thus last evening.

From the prisoners we took it is certain knowledge that these troops had no familiarity with this ground between Mouquet Farm and the Windmill, and when they were ordered to attack regarded themselves as sheep sent to the slaughter. They knew only that the Australians were in front of them, and from what they have heard of the Australians they did not have much hope.

What hope they had was in the guns behind them, and certainly, in spite of all the German guns we have knocked out by counter-battery work, and all those having had to shift their ground from day to day owing to our ceaseless searchings for their emplacements with the aid of our aerial scouts, the bombardment that preceded the German assault was intense and formidable.

The Australians “stuck it,” guessing what was to follow. In the trenches they have dug, and the shell craters, and the old German trenches which are now almost shapeless under our own and the enemy’s fire, they held on, and kept their bombs ready, and their machine-guns handy, and watchful eyes, wherever a man could see, upon a row of broken tree stumps appearing over the crest of the Pozières ridge beyond the Windmill.

Then, below the crest on the other side of the ridge—the German side—is Mouquet Farm, called “Moo-cow Farm” by men who will still jest, whatever the conditions of life. A small valley or gully runs behind the farm towards the quarries, and it was from this that the German soldiers came streaming out in open order when their guns lengthened range so that they could get forward without walking into their own barrage.

As it happened, they walked into our barrage. Our guns were waiting for them. At the end of a telephone wire was a gunner-general who does not keep people waiting very long when they are in need of his “heavies,” and many gunner officers were standing by their batteries ready to give the word “Fire!” with their guns and howitzers registered on the line across which the enemy’s troops would come as soon as they were ordered to attack.

In our lines the trench mortar batteries were making ready to hurl their high explosives, and the Lewis gunners were eager to get to work instead of standing under German shell-fire.

The enemy’s infantry came straggling forward in extended order, and in irregular waves. There were two battalions of them in the open—out in that 750 yards of No Man’s Land upon which the evening sun was shining with a golden haze—when our shells burst over them and the trench mortars made a target of them, and our machine-guns whipped into their ranks with a scourge of bullets.

The men fell face forward in large numbers. Others came on and fell further from their own lines. Men ran quickly, as though to escape from all the bursting shells into the Australian lines, flung up their arms, and lay still.

They were very brave. Quite a number of these German soldiers travelled a quarter of a mile over this open ground in spite of the terrific fire concentrated upon it before some bit of shell caught them and killed them, or left them lying there in agony.

No German soldier came through alive. Only a few men out of the two battalions escaped. Men were standing on the parapets of the German line, calling to them, calling them back, trying to save something out of this senseless slaughter that had been ordered.

The counter-attack was an utter failure, and one is left wondering why the enemy attempted such attacks, pre-destined to end in disaster. It is an expensive form of reconnaissance to test our strength.

The German soldiers would have a right to call it murder. It seems to show that the enemy’s Staff is disorganised, perhaps a little demoralised, by the continual bombardment which cuts their signal lines and prevents the sending up of supports and supplies.

The Australians are still fighting in a way which wins the admiration of their generals and Staff and of all the Army. These clean-cut men, so fine in physique and appearance that one always turns to look at them in any street of war, are not stolid fellows who can stand the test of shell-fire without suffering in spirit.

They are highly strung and sensitive, with a more nervous temperament than many of our English soldiers, but they have a pride and an heroic quality that keeps them steady, and an intelligence in the individual as well as in mass which makes them great soldiers.

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August 13

There have been no sensational advances since the great day of July 14, when our men broke through the second German line, but hardly a day passed since then without some progress being made to get a stronger grip on the high ridge which rolls down on the enemy’s side from Pozières and the two Bazentins and High Wood. This fighting has been very hard and grim, and the enemy has done his utmost to check every yard of our men’s advance by continual curtain-fire, so that to take a trench or two, or to rush over a few dozen yards of No Man’s Land, has been a perilous adventure.

It is most excellent, therefore, that last night our men were able to make a further “shove,” as they call it, of nearly 400 yards in depth on a front of about a mile. This was to the north-west of Pozières, and at the same time ground was gained on the north-west of Bazentin-le-Petit closer to the German switch-line between us and Martinpuich.

The men who have been fighting this uphill battle, for that is what it is literally and morally, have been showing remarkable qualities. It is an alliance between the Australians and old English regiments with new men in them, including some of the “Derby recruits.” Although the Australians have had the greater share of the fighting round Pozières, being in greater numbers, they are the first to pay a tribute to the spirit of the English lads, and their admiration is returned. An episode which happened a week ago shows the way in which they are sharing the struggle.

I have already written how the men of Kent went forward on August 4, and took the German line, under the command of that fine colonel and jovial captain, whose exploits will be remembered. On the right of them were the Sussex men—fair-haired fellows from Arundel and Burpham, and little old villages lying snug in the South Downs, and quiet old market towns like Chichester—Lord!—a world away from places like Pozières. The line of their trenches was in touch with the Australians, and as they scrambled over the parapets at the time of the attacks these comrades on the right shouted out to them,

“Hullo, boys, what’s up? Where are you going?”

“Oh, just up along,” said the Sussex lads, pointing to a “hotshop,” as they call it where a lot of shells were bursting.

“Is that so? You don’t say? Gosh! We’ll come with you.”

It wasn’t discipline. The men had no orders to go, as far as I can make out, but some of them certainly did go, in a friendly way, and joined in the “scrum” up there, where it was no joke.

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The story of the Sussex men is very much like that of their comrades from Kent which I have told in detail—the bombing down the trenches, the searching of the German dug-outs, the encounters with Germans who were hiding in shell-craters. But some of the episodes have a special character, worth telling.

They show the human nature of the business up there beyond Pozières. After the first rush through the German line it became a question of catching Germans in shell-holes, which are good places—or good enough—for snipers who prefer to go on killing before they die. A Sussex man who spoke some German took the risk of going out alone to one of these craters and shouted out to the men below:—

“If you don’t surrender at once we shall shoot you.”

Instantly several heads and several pairs of hands appeared.

One man came out with his hands full of gifts and, falling upon his knees, begged for mercy. He had cleared his pockets and his dug-out of little fancy articles like his watch, knife, compass, cigarette-case, scissors, silver soap-box and pipe-lighter, which he offered humbly as a ransom for his life.

It appeared later that he was in mortal terror of having his throat cut, and he was profoundly grateful when he was taken back to a dug-out and given some whisky and cigarettes. He then asked leave to tell his friends the glad tidings, and when this was allowed he went out with his guards and called to the other men. Immediately a number of them came out of their hiding-places and formed a procession with their hands up.

It was against the Sussex men that the Germans used their “flammenwerfer,” or flame-jets. It is a clumsy form of frightfulness, as I guessed when I first saw one of these machines. It takes two men to work it, one with the reservoir strapped to his back, the other pumping out the long spray of flame, which has a range of twenty-five yards. There were eight of these flame-throwers brought against the Sussex lads, but before they had done any damage the sixteen men who advanced with them were all shot down. It is not by “flammenwerfer” that the German counter-attacks have any chance of success.

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The advance last night when the Australian troops took an important line of rising ground is a further proof that the enemy has not by any means consolidated his defensive positions so strongly that they make the same kind of barrier against us as those which had to be forced in the first attacks.

In spite of all his industry in digging he has not been able to make any system of trenches and dug-outs to withstand our shell-fire. As soon as he gets on with a trench our guns register upon it and lay it flat. His one protection is in artillery retaliation, and however great its destructive power it cannot give cover to the German infantry crouching in shallow ditches, and having to come up through communication trenches ploughed by high explosives.

They belong to battalions hurriedly gathered from other parts of the line and flung in to stop the gap. They are the victims of the general disorganisation of the divisions and the staffs which have suffered most heavily from our repeated attacks. Behind them, no doubt, the German Headquarters Staff is as cool and deliberate as ever, not allowing itself to be scared by these reverses, organising new lines of defence in case of need, shifting its guns, playing the old blood-and-iron game with cold, scientific brains that are not affected by the losses or the agonies of men, except as they have an influence upon the operations.

For they are highly-trained scientists of war, these German staff officers, and in defeat, as once in victory, they will, I fancy, be as cold and as hard as steel, and as inhuman as the devil. Therefore it is idle in my opinion to hope for a sudden and sensational collapse of the German war-machine, or to argue from local weaknesses and symptoms of bad staff work a general disorder.

Nevertheless, there are many signs that the enemy is beginning to feel a severe strain upon his defensive strength and that his men are being put to an ordeal which not even all their discipline and their courage can make endurable.

For men of a certain kind of science are apt to forget that there are other things in human nature besides the chemistry of flesh and blood, and that not even the finest soldiers can be made to fight well if their spirit is broken by repeated losses.

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August 17

It is at the two ends of our recent line of attack—on the left above Pozières and on the right around Guillemont—that the interest of the present fighting for the moment gathers, and in both these districts some progress has been made by our infantry during the past day or two. The successful advance of the French, northwards from Hardecourt towards Angle Wood, and their capture of the ravine to the south-west of it helps to strengthen our lines about Guillemont, especially as some of our troops advancing from the trenches south of Malz Horn Farm, and west of Trones Wood, linked hands with our Allies yesterday.

I have already described in a previous despatch the great difficulty of working over the ground about Guillemont and the hard time some of our men have had in pushing forward to the outskirts of that town. The enemy has concentrated a large number of batteries in the country beyond, and near at hand is defending himself from many machine-gun emplacements and a maze of newly-dug trenches.

The operations yesterday in conjunction with the French are still in progress and the result at present is indecisive, but with both French and British troops closing upon them the situation of the garrison in Guillemont is not what soldiers would call “healthy.”

Yesterday morning I was more interested personally in the left side of the battle line above Pozières, as from an artillery observation post I was able to get a very clear view of our own and the enemy’s ground in this district—ground which has been won and held by English and Australian regiments with a determination and courage which I have described several times with some detail.

There before me on the sky-line was the windmill which should be as famous in the history of this war as the Ferryman’s House on the Yser Canal or the château at Vermelles, or the “Tower Bridge” at Loos. Waves of men have surged up the slope to it under storms of shell-fire. To Australians fighting for the high ridge on which it stands above Martinpuich it has been the goal of great endeavour, for which many of them have given their lives. The enemy defended it as if it were a great treasure house, though only an old building of timber and stone against which the wind of centuries has blown, turning the great black sails which ground the corn of the folk in Pozières before ever a howitzer had been fired in the world or a flying machine had come humming over the hill. The windmill is ours now. Our line sweeps round it and our shell-fire drops on the other side of the slope, barraging the enemy’s ways to and from Martinpuich.

But it is only the relic of a millhouse. The timbers have been blown to atoms weeks ago. The sails fell in the first bombardment, and all that stands now is the stone base in the form of a small pyramid as a memorial of great bloodshed.

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The enemy yesterday was dropping a heavy barrage all along our line, which runs south of Mouquet Farm and sweeps below the village of Thiépval and its wood.

On the other side of Thiépval Wood the opposing lines run very close together, and here there was not much shell-fire, but on the Pozières side the shell-bursts and smoke-clouds were drifting up and down in a steady, regular way. Our own guns were busy with Mouquet Farm (called by our soldiers “Moo-cow” Farm, or “Muckie” Farm, according to their whim), and, further off, with Courcelette, whose tall factory chimney sticks up above the ridge, and now and again one of our heavies sent a great shell crashing into Thiépval.

There were no German soldiers to be seen in that village, and no sign of human life at all. It is a ghastly-looking place, with its stripped trees, like withered limbs, and a ruined church above a row of apple trees, which stand a little separate from the village.

Above is a cemetery with broken tomb-stones and shell-craters among its graves. Beyond, on a road running northwards, is a tall crucifix with the figure of Christ looking down upon all this death.

In the trenches no man puts his head above the parapet. Several times one of our machine-guns spluttered out a burst of fire as a warning to the enemy to keep well down. The only movement over this village and battlefield was made by shells which tore up the earth and sent drifting smoke clouds across the ruins.

The doom of Thiépval is creeping closer, for our men are advancing slowly but surely around Mouquet Farm, so that it will be hemmed in. The garrison hiding in the dug-outs below those broken buildings at which I gazed yesterday must be in a state of dreadful apprehension. I should not like to live in Thiépval.

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August 20

It is quite impossible to understand the progress of our advance since July 1 without being familiar with the ground over which this has been made and the local conditions of the fighting on our present front.

In my despatches I have done my best to picture these things and to reveal the heroism of our men by describing, as realistically as one may without being too brutal to newspaper readers, the appalling difficulties they have to encounter. Even now many people wonder, I daresay, at the various pauses in the victorious progress of our troops, and look forward, day by day, to more smashing blows and greater strides over the enemy’s ground.

To me the wonder of this battle is that we should have got on so far and so fast. When one has seen the network of German trenches, their great systems of underground galleries—proof against the heaviest of high explosives—their machine-gun redoubts, against which, if even only one gun is left, it is sometimes difficult to advance, and the power of their artillery able to barrage a strip of ground which our men have to cross, it is astounding that our soldiers could have forced the enemy back from stronghold after stronghold and gained their way to the high positions of the Pozières ridge.

Take those men of ours who have won their way through a maze of trenches in this last bit of fighting between Pozières and Thiépval.

They had to force their way between machine-gun posts and scramble over ground which is like a billowy sea of earth with deep pits at the bottom of each billow, into which many of them stumbled and fell. Not good going for an attack!

Then they had to storm their way down to the enemy’s underground system of galleries, where large numbers of strong and unwounded Germans were waiting with stores of bombs and every kind of weapon.

It is true that many of these men surrender readily at the first rush of our troops, but if those dug-outs are not cleaned out at once, and if our men in their eagerness go on, it is quite likely, as it has often happened during the past six weeks, that the enemy will come up and attack them from the rear.

From one of these holes in the ground which seemed a simple little dug-out there came up, on Friday, as I have already said, six officers and over 150 men. I saw them all to-day, tall fellows with unstained uniforms and a well-fed, fresh, and healthy look.

One of the officers was quite a giant. He was wearing a steel casque of the German pattern which is very much like a mediæval helm, and he was laughing and joking with his brother officers as he marched at the head of his company. If these men had come up behind English assaulting parties who had not made sure of the dug-outs first they could have put up a very strong fight, and with one machine-gun might have done great damage.

In their underground galleries they had lived snugly and safe, sleeping on spring beds, reclining on upholstered chairs, in well-furnished rooms so much like those in the upper world that they had even false windows draped with lace curtains.

Our men have to fight below ground as well as above ground before they are in possession of an enemy position.

Above ground it is not good for a quick advance. Our guns have been bombarding so continuously that although the infantry depends utterly upon an effective artillery preparation, and not in vain, the effect of all this shell-fire impedes their progress when the time comes to cross No Man’s Land.

It is just a series of shell-craters like a wide stretch of those “trous-de-loup” which used to be dug in the old days of warfare behind the “glacis,” and have been revived again in this war, which has adopted every device known to fighting men from the time of Cain onwards.

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When some of the Australians “went over” the other night this was their great cause of trouble. They rushed forward eagerly, and before they had gone fifty yards most of them had fallen into shell-holes deeper than their own height. It was pitch dark, except for the white light of the German flares rising and falling, and when they scrambled up the shelving sides of the craters they were black as ink in this illumination and horribly visible to the German bombers and machine-gunners, who made the most of their opportunity in the time at their disposal.

I stood by a man to-day who, since July 1, has been buried alive by shell-bursts upheaving the earth about him no fewer than six times.

He is a young Australian officer, now wounded in the back and leg, and he assured me that he did not mind this premature burial very much.

“There is mostly a little air to breathe—enough to keep one going for a few minutes—” he said, “but, of course, it’s unpleasant waiting to be dug-out, if one has the luck. Most fellows mind it very much. But it don’t affect me in that way.”

This is not an uncommon experience. There are a lot of men buried in an advance when, as the official despatch says, “We made good progress.” So that progress is not a soft job for soldiers. Then the German is beginning to leave a lot of little things behind him, even if he abandons a trench in a hurry. This is a new dodge. One invention which has come into his fertile imagination is a man trap, which he sets outside his parapet or inside a shell-hole on the way to it. As soon as one of our soldiers sets foot on to it it closes about his leg with a terrific bite and brings him down like a log.

Another little device in devilry is the “tortoise bomb.” It looks very much like a tortoise if you happen to see it—which you don’t, in the dark—and it stands on four little legs. They waggle a little, but should it be unwarily touched it may detonate the bomb and blow a man to bits.

There was some heroic fighting on Friday afternoon along a road which runs from High Wood to Delville Wood. The heroes of this fight were ordered to take this road with troops on their left and right, and in spite of the shell-holes on the way and heavy machine-gun fire sweeping down on them they took the trench all right, going even a little too far, in their eagerness.

Owing to casualties in officers, the sergeants had, in some cases, to carry on the command, and they did so with the calm courage of old soldiers. The German trench, battered by our gun-fire, was full of dead, and littered with rifles and equipment. A few of the enemy stayed and fought to the death, and others ran away. Three were dragged up out of a dug-out and made prisoners. All looked good, from a fighting point of view, in this section of the trench, and would have been good if the men on the left and right had been able to come up. But they were not able to do this, and presently from the right and left came parties of German bombers, hurling their grenades at our men, who hurled back until every one of their bombs was gone.

Then they grubbed about for German bombs, and used those until they could find no more. It was time to escape, and the way out was through a narrow sap which was also a death-trap if the enemy closed about it.

But the enemy did a strange thing. They came swarming up on both sides, and each side took the other for English soldiers, and, in the dusk, bombed each other furiously over the heads of our men, who slipped away, marvelling at their luck in ill-luck. They had five prisoners when they reached their own lines, for they were joined by two other men (in addition to the three from the dug-out), one of whom was a German hero—tired of heroism—wearing the Iron Cross and another decoration.

So the fighting goes on, and it is the grit of our troops, their splendid obstinacy, their refusal to be beaten by shell-fire or shell-holes, by machine-guns or tortoise bombs, by poison gas or tear shells, by Germans above ground or under ground, or dropping high explosives from the sky—“the whole blinking bag of tricks,” as they would call it, which keeps them going always a little bit further.

Unless one knows the cost of victory one cannot tell the greatness of the victors.

14

August 23

We are getting a stronger grip upon the ridge from Pozières to High Wood. Last night the Australians gained a little more ground, so that they have pushed out a line to the north-east of Mouquet Farm, and the Scottish troops to their right have gained another hundred yards of that famous switch-line into which I took a walk the day before yesterday to see how we held the enemy’s last line of defence on the way to Martinpuich.

The switch-line exists only as a name, and in reality is nothing but a series of shell-craters in which our men have to get what cover they can, after chasing out the Germans, before digging and strengthening an effective trench.

But it is the position that counts, and if we can hold it, as I am now certain we shall, it puts the enemy at a great disadvantage, of which our guns are already making a full and terrible use. The enemy’s endeavours to counter-attack—he made two last night—have broken down under our fire with great bloodshed, and now it is not in the least likely that he will succeed in wresting back from us any of the high ground.

The importance of the position is, of course, entirely one of observation, apart from the tactical importance of having driven the enemy on to ground beyond his first and second systems of trenches and dug-outs, so that he can get no strong cover until he retires to a considerable distance.

It gives us vantage points from which we can observe his movements down the slope, rake him with rifle and machine-gun fire if he sends out working parties, and turn the guns on to him with direct observation of results.

One of the immediate effects of being on the Pozières ridge was seen yesterday, when our artillery registered something like twenty-five direct hits upon some of the enemy’s batteries. He had a great concentration of guns.

Acting in connection with our aviators, who are always observing from high places, our gunners are punishing the enemy in a very frightful way, and the ground above Thiépval and Courcelette, into which I looked for the first time at close range from the switch trench, and Martinpuich, and the barren ground to the right of it, is swept by our shell-fire.

A very realistic and tragic picture of what is happening down there beyond the high ridge is given in a letter written on August 10 by a German officer of the 133rd Infantry Regiment:

“The relief yesterday,” he wrote, “is incredible. The route taken—Ligny—Warlencourt—Pys—Courcelette, on the way to the trenches was very dangerous. During the first part the thunder of the guns was very disagreeable, and the second part was very unsafe. Heavy shells fell right and left of the road. Mounted troops, cars, field kitchens, infantry in column of route, were all enveloped in an impenetrable cloud of dust.”

“The last stage consisted of troops in single file crouching on the slope beside the road, with shells bursting overhead. Close to Courcelette a message arrived: ‘Enemy firing gas-shells, on with your gas helmets.’ It appeared to be an error. From Courcelette to our position in the line we relieved across the open. If the enemy had only noticed that, what a target he would have had!”

“Our position was of course quite different to what we had been told. Our company alone relieved a whole battalion. We had been told we were to relieve a company of fifty men weakened by casualties. The men we relieved had no idea where the enemy was, how far off he was, or if any of our troops were in front of us. We got no idea of our supposed position until 6 o’clock this evening.”

“To-night I am taking my platoon out to form a covering party. My men and I are to lie in shell holes in part of an old demolished trench of ours. The English are 400 metres away. The Windmill is over the hill. The hundreds of dead bodies make the air terrible, and there are flies in thousands. About 300 metres from us is a deserted artillery position. We shall have to look to it to-night not to get taken prisoners by the English. We have no dug-outs. We dig a hole in the side of a shell hole and lie and get rheumatism. We get nothing to eat or drink.... The ceaseless roar of the guns is driving us mad. Many of the men are knocked up. The company commander thinks we were breathing gas yesterday, which slowly decomposes the blood, and this is an end of one. What a variety of ways one can lose one’s life in this place!... It is getting light. I must start on my way back to the front-line trenches.”

From another man in the 3rd battalion of the 124th Regiment there is a letter which pays a doleful tribute to our flying men.

“I am on sentry duty, and it is a very hard job, for I dare not move. Overhead are the English airmen and in front of us the English observers with telescopes, and as soon as they perceive anything, then twenty-four ‘cigars’ arrive at once, and larger than one cares to see—you understand what I mean. The country round me looks frightful. Many dead bodies belonging to both sides lie around.”

These letters give the other side of the pictures which I have been describing. They show what German life is like below the Pozières ridge.

We are drawing very close to Thiépval, and standing yesterday on the high ground to the right of the Windmill by Pozières, within 500 yards of Martinpuich, I could see how near our lines have been pushed to both these places. Thiépval I have seen several times from the western side, but yesterday I stood to the south-east of it looking straight across the cemetery of Pozières to the long line of branchless trees and broken roofs where the German garrison awaits its certain doom.

That doom crept a little nearer last evening when some of our English troops left their trenches south of the Leipzig Redoubt, which was already in our hands, and following in the wake of a terrific bombardment on a short line of the enemy’s position took that section quickly by assault. I saw the steady bombardment of the ground hereabouts which was continuous throughout the afternoon, but, by bad luck, having gone to another part of the line, did not see the attack which followed.

It was a highly organised and grim bit of work, very quickly done and with few casualties on our side. As soon as the guns had lifted, after concentrated fire which tore up the ground and made an utter chaos of the German line of trench, our men followed. They went over in two waves, at as rapid a pace as possible over the tumbled ground. Then they went through the broken strands of barbed wire, and by men watching them from a little distance were seen to drop down into the enemy’s trench.

After a little while—less than a minute—the result of the attack was seen by a number of German soldiers coming out of the shell-craters with their hands up. A little later a large group of soldiers ran out and tried to escape. They ran as though the devil were behind them, but there was a devilish fate in front of them, for they plunged straight into a heavy fire from our guns, and disappeared.

In less than a quarter of an hour the fight was over and men came plodding back along the way for “walking wounded,” and the Red Cross flag could be seen over there in the light of the setting sun.

The enemy must have suffered heavily. Our guns caught them during a relief, which means that there was a double garrison, resulting in a double number of killed, wounded, and prisoners. Worse still for them, it seems likely that on their way up to the lines many of them were caught in the heavy barrage we had for some time been flinging across their route.

Among the 200 prisoners taken there is an ex-waiter of the Savoy Hotel, who says that he is thoroughly sick of the war, like most of his comrades, and that Verdun, from which he has just come, is a heaven compared to the battlefields of Picardy.

Some time after our assault German troops were observed to be massing for a counter-attack behind the captured position, but these were immediately dispersed by our artillery, and no attack took place throughout last night.

The result of the operation is that we now hold a line straight above the Leipzig salient and striking across to our trenches south of Mouquet Farm, where the Australians made an attack yesterday to push further forward towards Thiépval.

15

The successful advance south of the Leipzig Redoubt was due mainly to the gallant work of some Territorial troops who attacked a maze of German trenches on Friday evening last, carried them by assault, and linked up with the redoubt itself, already in our hands immediately below Thiépval, getting a closer grip at the throat of the garrison there.

I have already told how the men captured the great dug-out and took nearly 600 prisoners. They were men of the Royal Warwicks, who did that great achievement with extraordinarily slight loss to themselves. One of the most thrilling episodes of the attack was when they were held up on the right by a German strong point, from which came a stream of machine-gun fire. The men lay down in front of it, and held on until our own Lewis guns could get to work. Four times a message came over the telephone asking whether the “heavies” should shell the place, but the colonel was afraid that his men would be hit, and refused the offer each time. Then suddenly, when it seemed impossible to stop that deadly squirt of bullets, the German machine-gun ceased fire and a white flag fluttered up.

The colonel of the Warwicks expected to see twenty men come out of that bomb-proof hiding-place. To his amazement there emerged six officers, and—not 150 men (as I think I said in my last despatch) but 242 unwounded Germans and six “stretcher cases.” There were many acts of great individual gallantry among the Warwicks, and all were splendid under the fine leadership of their officers. One sergeant jumped on to the parados of a German trench and kept a machine-gun team away from their weapon until our bombing party could arrive, thereby saving the lives of many Warwickshire lads and helping to secure victory.

Further along the trench a company officer, held up at a “bomb-stop” or barricade, called for a rifle and fired repeatedly with a cool aim at the German machine-gunners on the other side, with two men by him, who kept refilling his magazine, and bombers behind him hurling grenades over his shoulders.

16

Many of the Germans defended themselves stubbornly to the death. A sentry standing outside one of the dug-outs saw our men approaching, and, turning quickly, shouted down the word “England!” to his comrades below. One of the Warwicks who was closest to him hurled his last bomb at him, and then, seizing the man’s rifle, sprang on to the parapet ready to shoot the enemy as they came up. They came up in a swarm, with bombs, and there was a great conflict which ended only when the last German was dead.

In one dug-out there was in the midst of all this horror a comic episode, like that of a clown in tragedy. A curtain divided the dug-out, and a Warwickshire man thrust his bayonet through it. Suddenly the curtain was drawn on one side and a German soldier, yawning loudly and rubbing his eyes with the knuckles of one hand, stood there, as though to say “What’s up?” He had slept heavily through the bombardment and attack, and now when he saw the English soldiers facing him, believed he was dreaming.

So the Warwicks took 400 yards of trenches along a front of 600 yards and thrust the wedge closer to Thiépval. Meanwhile, in the centre of our line of attack, English and Scots and Australian troops had been fighting for the German switch-line beyond Bazentin-le-Petit, the newly dug trench which the enemy had made feverishly to defend the high ridge above Pozières, but could not hold. They were Scottish troops who took the trench opposite Martinpuich, so gaining at least part of the ground for which we have striven since July 1.

17

It is not long ago, as the calendar counts time, though a lifetime ago for many thousands of men who have fought along the road to Martinpuich, since that village with a queer name seemed as unattainable as any dream-city. No man of ours, except our flying men, had ever seen it, for it lies just below the Pozières ridge, and before the battle opened on July 1 the ridge itself was a high and distant barrier defended all the way by great strongholds like Fricourt and Mametz and Contalmaison, and by all those woods which could be captured, as every soldier knew, only by desperate fighting.

Now, after the greatest battle in British history—a series of battles, rather, in one great and continuous attack—we have gained that ridge above Pozières and the Windmill, and, pushing up to this German switch-line, look down the slopes beyond.

There, only 500 yards away across No Man’s Land, lies Martinpuich, as I saw it myself to-day from our front-line trench, surprised that one could see so close into its ruins. To my left as I stood out in the open, above the trenches, was the windmill for which the Australians have fought—the conical base of it being all that is left as a memorial of the heroism that gained this ground, and behind was Pozières, the desolate, shell-swept ruin which is linked also, for ever, with the memory of those boys from the Overseas Dominion who gave a treasure of life to take it.

The way to Martinpuich is truly “The Street of Adventure” for hundreds of thousands of our men who have fought their way over the ground about it since that first day of July which was the beginning of the great adventure.

When I went up it to-day, further than I have ever been before, and to our last post upon it, I passed all the places which will make chapter-headings in any history of the war—the scenes of all the big battles and of all the little desperate conflicts which have been fought along this wing from ditch to ditch, in every tiny copse, in every bit of broken woodland. It is a road of immortality. Alas! also of great death—as one sees all along the way—past Fricourt and Contalmaison, over ground dotted with new-made graves, where white wooden crosses stick up above the mounds of earth, everywhere. Amidst the torn tree-stumps, now very neat in all the upheaval of these fields flung into chaos by gun-fire, now clustering thickly about piles of broken brickwork which are still called by their old village-names are crosses—crosses and graves.

Many of those graves are the size of one man’s bed, but others are broad mounds into which many bodies have been laid, with taller crosses, to the remembrance of all of them, such as that “To the memory of the N.C.O.’s and men of the — Border Regiment who fell in action at this spot on the 1st of July, 1916.” Many of them are to unknown British soldiers who could not be identified, but whose names are on the long roll-call of honour.

18

On the road to Martinpuich we passed up by Lonely Copse—just a few “strafed” trees—and by Lozenge Wood and the Dingle and Birch Tree Wood, and Peake Wood, and Acid Drop Copse. Do you remember the names? Men fought ferociously to get these places, our artillery registered on them, and I saw them in the first days of July under tempests of shell-fire. Now they can be found only by a few charred sticks, a few black gibbets, standing above heaps of ashes and the bones and dust of men.

Contalmaison, the capital of the woodlands, is on higher ground, and is still the target of German bombardments, as it was our target when I saw it first. Most of its redbrick château was standing when I looked into its windows one day from an artillery O. Pip and saw one of its towers shot away by one of our 15-inch shells, as cleanly as one could cut a slice out of a cake. Now all that is left of the château is a broken wall or two, rose coloured except where the bricks are blackened by fire, standing in the midst of great shell-craters and solid waves of earth and ash-coloured tree-trunks all hurled about.

A devilish place is Contalmaison now, and when I walked through it yesterday the foul horror of it reeked about me. In the night the Germans had flung thousands of gas-shells into it, and the stench was still prowling about, stealing out of crannies and shell-holes with faint, sickly whiffs as though from rotten eggs. And the smell of corruption came up from all the litter of battle lying there....

We went beyond Contalmaison, and were glad to leave it, for the enemy’s shells were bursting over it, and round by Bazentin-le-Petit Wood, thinned out by successive storms of shell-fire to the mere ghost of a wood, with the light striking through its leprous-looking trunks, where many unburied dead lie among the broken trenches. The ground rose gradually past Contalmaison Villa, which stood far beyond the village itself, as the country house of some French gentleman who will never see it again except in dust and ashes, and here we were out in the centre of the battleground, where our men are now fighting between the windmill of Pozières and High Wood, on the farthest line of our advance.

The battle was going on, as it goes on all through the days and nights, with never-ceasing gun-fire. The infernal tumult of it was all around us, and death was everywhere for any man whose luck had run out. Lord God in heaven! If a man had any kind of prayer in his soul, or any special form of curse for those who made this war, his lips should mutter it in a place like this.

19

It was into the famous switch trench which has been the goal of great endeavour since July 14, when our troops broke the German second line, that we went through other trenches after the long walk in the open, and looked at last into Martinpuich, first below the high ridge. Merely to see it was the supreme proof of the greatest achievement in arms ever done by British soldiers. To get as far as this, to capture the high ground where we now stood, behind earth and sandbags, looking down into the valley beyond, our men have stormed many strongholds, fought through all the ghastly woodlands from Fricourt and Bazentin and High Wood, and many have fallen all along the road to Martinpuich.

The village itself is just like any of all those ruins which have been smashed to bits in this poor France. There was no sign of human life there among the broken buildings. But there was human life, though I could not see it, in the 500 yards of No Man’s Land between our first line and the village.

In the deep shell-craters here, as thick as holes in a sieve, there are still some German soldiers living. They have no kind of trench, for there is nothing but open ground before us for 1,000 yards, now that we have taken the German switch-line, but in these holes they hide themselves at night and snipe our men by day. They are fellows who have been sent out to hold the ground as much as possible before they are dead or captured, and their officers never expect to see them again. When our guns barrage this stretch of barren land they can be seen hopping from one shell-hole to another, and it is then the turn of our snipers. They brought down thirty-five the first day, after taking the switch-line, and about as many two days ago.

More valuable than a German prisoner—for what’s the value in this war of one man’s life?—was the German machine-gun brought in a day or two ago from the ground outside Martinpuich, where it lay half-buried, but so undamaged that it is now used against the enemy with his own cartridge belts. Other queer things have been brought back. Two days after the capture of the switch-line our soldiers saw two men waving out there in No Man’s Land, and getting their glasses on to them saw that they were wounded Englishmen. A party of Scots crawled out and brought them in, as during the same day they had carried back a number of German wounded lying about in the shell-holes close to our own line.

The real wonder of our men is only to be seen in such places as this. On these battlefields, under shell-fire, they were working as calmly as though they were building sand castles on the English seaside. Behind them lay many of their dead.

I could track my way by the blood that splashed the walls of the trenches, to the place where an amateur medico patches up the bodies of broken men in a hole in the ground.

20

The ground over which I walked with a young Scottish officer—who has no emotion at all about such things because since he went first into Loos he has lived cheek by jowl with death so that any fear he may have had is killed by habit—was nothing but one great stretch of shell-craters. There was not one yard of ground into which a shell had not fallen, over thousands of yards. Some of them were small shells making small craters, others were heavy shells which had made enormous pits, and the rim of one crater met the rim of another, or mingled. And, as we walked, the sky above our heads was filled with shells continuing this work, flinging up the earth again into new hills and hollows.

From our own batteries far away behind us there came a steady bombardment of the German ground just beyond us, and the shells passed overhead with that indescribable sound which is half a scream and half a sigh, enormous in the volume of its noise. But those sounds were comforting compared with others, which were coming overhead. They were coming from the enemy’s side with a savage overwhelming roar, which ended in a rending explosion.

“Eight inch,” said the young Scot by my side. “Heavy stuff.”

It is surprising what effect an eight-inch shell can have in the way of upheaval. But one’s sensation is not that of surprise when fifty yards away, or less, a mass of field is suddenly lifted skyward and a smoke-cloud as large as a cathedral stands there strangely solid in the wind. The whole field of battle about us was vomiting up these things, and it was damnable.