XXIX THE COMING OF THE TANKS

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September 16

Another day of great remembrance has been given to our history by British troops, September the Fifteenth, that will not quickly pass out of the memory of our people, for on that day, which was yesterday, our soldiers broke through the enemy’s third line of defence and went out into open country, and gave staggering blows to that German war-machine which for two years, all but two months, seemed unbreakably strong against us.

It was a day of good success, yesterday. It was no longer a promise of future victory, dependent upon all the flukes and chances of war, with their awful hazards, but, for one day at least, not looking further, the real thing.

Our men had the taste of victory, and it was like a strong drug to their hearts, so that they laughed even while blood was streaming down their faces, and said: “It’s wonderful!” when they came limping off the battlefields with wounds on fire, and said: “We made ’em run like rabbits!” when they lay on stretchers and could not move without a groan.

And it was wonderful indeed. For this day of victory came after two and a half months of continued and most bloody fighting. This new British Army of ours had not had an easy walk through after its time of preparation and training in the dirty ditches of the old trench warfare.

The task that was set to our soldiers yesterday would have been formidable on the first day of a great offensive. Coming after two and a half months, it was startling in its boldness, and showed that our generals had supreme confidence in the men, in their own powers of organisation, and in the luck of battle that comes to those who have worked for it. The enemy believed that our offensive had petered out. There is much evidence for that.

They did not believe it possible that an army of our size and strength could carry on the attack at the same fierce pace. They cherished the hope that our divisions were broken and spent, that our stores of ammunition were giving out, and that our men were overtired.

They still had faith in their own gun-power, the defensive strength of a thousand guns against the British front, and it was a reasonable faith. They had been digging furiously on dark nights to strengthen the third line of defence—the famous Flers line, which was, they thought, to be the boundary of our advancing tide, and though they were anxious, and were counting up frightful losses on the Somme, they did not expect this last disaster to them.

Yesterday I saw their prisoners coming off the battlefields in droves, and to-day hundreds of them in the barbed-wire cages behind the lines. They were dazed men, filled with gloom, and tortured by a great bewilderment.

“It is your victory,” said one of their officers, speaking to me in French. “It is our defeat. I cannot understand.”

“Germany is kaput,” said one of their non-commissioned officers. He meant that Germany is down—“in the soup,” as our soldiers would say. It was an exaggeration, for Germany has still a lot of fight left in her, but it was the belief of her beaten soldiers yesterday.

Our men were exalted—excited by the smell of victory, exaggerating also our own gains gloriously in the belief that the “last great smash had been made, and that the end of this foul and filthy war is at hand.” They “went over” at dawn yesterday filled with the spirit of victory, and it was half the battle won.

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Many of them went over, too, in the greatest good-humour, laughing as they ran. Like children whose fancy has been inflamed by some new toy, they were enormously cheered by a new weapon which was to be tried with them for the first time—“the heavily armoured car” mentioned already in the official bulletin.

That description is a dull one compared with all the rich and rare qualities which belong to these extraordinary vehicles. The secret of them was kept for months jealously and nobly. It was only a few days ago that it was whispered to me.

“Like prehistoric monsters. You know, the old Ichthyosaurus,” said the officer.

I told him he was pulling my leg.

“But it’s a fact, man!”

He breathed hard, and laughed in a queer way at some enormous comicality.

“They eat up houses and put the refuse under their bellies. Walk right over ’em!”

I knew this man was a truthful and simple soul, and yet could not believe.

“They knock down trees like matchsticks,” he said, staring at me with shining eyes. “They go clean through a wood!”

“And anything else?” I asked, enjoying what I thought was a new sense of humour.

“Everything else,” he said earnestly. “They take ditches like kangaroos. They simply love shell-craters! Laugh at ’em!”

It appeared, also, that they were proof against rifle bullets, machine-gun bullets, bombs, shell-splinters. Just shrugged their shoulders and passed on. Nothing but a direct hit from a fair-sized shell could do them any harm.

“But what’s the name of these mythical monsters?” I asked, not believing a word of it.

He said “Hush!”

Other people said “Hush!... Hush!” when the subject was alluded to in a remote way. And since then I have heard that one name for them is the “Hush-hush.” But their real name is Tanks.

For they are real, and I have seen them, and walked round them, and got inside their bodies, and looked at their mysterious organs, and watched their monstrous movements.

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I came across a herd of them in a field, and, like the countryman who first saw a giraffe, said “Hell!... I don’t believe it.” Then I sat down on the grass and laughed until the tears came into my eyes. (In war one has a funny sense of humour.) For they were monstrously comical, like toads of vast size emerging from the primeval slime in the twilight of the world’s dawn.

The skipper of one of them introduced me to them.

“I felt awfully bucked,” said the young officer (who is about five feet high), “when my beauty ate up her first house. But I was sorry for the house, which was quite a good one.”

“And how about trees?” I asked.

“They simply love trees,” he answered.

When our soldiers first saw these strange creatures lolloping along the roads and over old battlefields, taking trenches on the way, they shouted and cheered wildly, and laughed for a day afterwards. And yesterday the troops got out of their trenches laughing and shouting and cheering again because the Tanks had gone on ahead, and were scaring the Germans dreadfully, while they moved over the enemy’s trenches and poured out fire on every side. As I shall write later, these motor monsters had strange adventures and did very good work, justifying their amazing existence.

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For several days before the great blow was to be made, and while there was heavy fighting in progress at most parts of the line—the capture of Guillemont by English and Irish troops, the splendid rush of the Irish through Ginchy—there was a steady forward movement and concentration of all the men and machinery to strike at the Flers line.

Villages beyond the zone of fire where battalions had been resting and where there was the busy life of soldiers in their billeting areas suddenly became emptied of all this human interest.

The men had passed on—higher up the roads, and higher up where there was a struggling tide of all the traffic of war, with supply columns, mule-trains, guns, limber, ambulances, and troops from all parts of the Empire, surging, swirling, struggling slowly forward through narrow village streets, up long winding roads, across trampled and barren fields, through the ruins of villages destroyed a year or more ago, and out into the country of evil menace which is criss-crossed by old trenches and pitted with old shell-craters and strewn with the refuse of battles two months back in history.

Here a great army with all its material of war—incredibly vast and crowded—lay waiting for the hour when it should be hurled to the great hammer-stroke.

They were masses of men who were there the night before the battle hidden in the darkness of the earth, not revealed even by the white moonlight except in huddled crowds and camps, but as I passed them again a few hours before the dawn I thought of the individual and not of the mass, all the separate hopes and pulse-beats of these men who were going to do a big thing if luck should favour us.

And out of the darkness I thought I heard the sound of laughter rising at the thought of the monstrous “hush-hush.” Before the dawn the moon was high and clear in a sky that had hardly any clouds. It shone down upon the fields and roads so that the plaster walls of French cottages were very white under the black roofs, and rows of tents were like little hillocks of snow in the harvest-fields.

As I looked up a shooting star flashed across the sky, and I thought of the old legend of a passing life, and wondered why to-night all the stars were not falling.

Presently dawn came, and some low-lying clouds were touched with a warm glow which deepened and spread until they were all crimson. It was a red dawn.

“The promise of victory like the sun of Austerlitz,” said an officer.

Before six o’clock, summer-time, all our guns were firing steadily, and all the sky, very pale and shimmering in the first twilight of the day, was filled with the flashes of guns and shell-bursts. Heavy howitzers were eating up shells.

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I went to the right of the line, hoping to see the infantry attack to the left of Leuze Wood, as I had watched the battle here a week or two ago, and here one of the motor monsters was coming across the ground. But as the sun rose higher it drew the moisture out of all these shell-craters and trenches, and a dense white mist blotted out the ridge for an hour or more. French troops who join our line here came across country. British soldiers were moving forward on the left, silently, with the mist about them.

Overhead shells went rushing—heavy shells that travelled with the noise of trains. Forward batteries were firing rapidly and increasingly, and then sharp staccato knocking was clear above the heavy crashes of giant crumps, compared by a whimsical mind in this war with “an immortal plumber laying down his tools.”

Machine-gun fire rapped out in fierce spasms, and the German “Archies” were throwing up shells which burst all about the planes of our airmen, who came like a flock of birds over the battlefields, flying low above the mists.

They did wonderful things yesterday, those British air-pilots, risking their lives audaciously in single combats with hostile airmen, in encounters against great odds, in bombing enemy headquarters and railway stations and kite balloons, and troops, and registering or observing all day long for our artillery. They were out to destroy the enemy’s last means of observation, and they began the success of the battle by gaining the absolute mastery of the air.

Thirteen German aeroplanes (since reported by Sir Douglas Haig to be fifteen) were brought down, and their flying men dared not come across our lines to risk more losses.

On our side it was fighting “all in.” There was nothing of a killing character within our reach and knowledge which we did not use, and we turned the enemy’s own worst weapons against himself.

Every material of war made by the home workers in our factories by months of toil was called in.

The men went in with the resolve to break through the enemy’s third line without counting the cost, to smash down any opposition they might meet, and to go forward and far until they could get the enemy on the run.

A body of Scots went up to the battle-lines to the tune of “Stop your tickling, Jock,” but there was a grim meaning in the music, and it was no love-song.

English soldiers had been practising bayonet exercise harder than usual, and with a personal interest beyond the discipline. “It’s time to finish old Fritz,” was the shout of one soldier to another. “We want to go home for Christmas!”

The men fought yesterday fiercely and ruthlessly. They want to get on to the heels of the enemy, and there were moments yesterday when they saw many pairs of heels.

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The area of our attack extended on the left from the ground north of Pozières to the line recently won to the north of Ginchy on the right, and its purpose was, as I have said, to break through the third German line below Courcelette, Martinpuich, and Lesboeuf, a distance of about six miles. Time of attack was shortly after six o’clock yesterday morning, and along all the line the troops were awaiting the moment to rise, after our artillery had completed its first barrage.

On the left in front of Courcelette there was hard and unexpected fighting. As we now know the enemy had prepared an attack against us, and had massed troops in considerable force in his front and reserve lines. He sent out advanced patrols and bombing parties, while our men were waiting to go over, and immediately there was a fierce encounter.

One young brown-eyed fellow told me his own experience, and it was like many others.

“The sergeant in my bay,” he said, “suddenly called out that he had seen a signal light go up from another point of the trenches giving a warning of attack. ‘We shall have the whole lot on us,’ he shouted. ‘Look out for yourselves, lads.’”

The enemy came over in a rush. Many fell before the rifle fire of our men, but others managed to jump into portions of trench, and bombed their way up several of the bays.

Machine-guns were turned on to them, and there were not many left alive. But before the fight had ended a new one began, for our jumping-off time had come, and the assaulting troops rose as one man, and taking no notice of what had happened swept across their own trenches and the Germans who were in them, and went straight across country towards Courcelette.

They came up immediately against difficult ground and fierce machine-gun fire. South-east of Courcelette, beyond the shell-craters and bits of broken trench which the men had carried easily enough, sweeping the Germans down before them, stood the ruins of a sugar factory, which the enemy had made into a redoubt, with machine-gun emplacements.

It was one of those deadly places which have cost so many lives among our men in other parts of the battle ground now in our hands.

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But we had a new engine of war to destroy the place. Over our own trenches in the twilight of the dawn one of those motor-monsters had lurched up, and now it came crawling forward to the rescue, cheered by the assaulting troops, who called out words of encouragement to it and laughed, so that some men were laughing even when bullets caught them in the throat.

“Crême de Menthe” was the name of this particular creature, and it waddled forward right over the old German trenches, and went forward very steadily towards the sugar factory.

There was a second of silence from the enemy there. Then, suddenly, their machine-gun fire burst out in nervous spasms and splashed the sides of “Crême de Menthe.”

But the Tank did not mind. The bullets fell from its sides, harmlessly. It advanced upon a broken wall, leaned up against it heavily until it fell with a crash of bricks, and then rose on to the bricks and passed over them, and walked straight into the midst of the factory ruins.

From its sides came flashes of fire and a hose of bullets, and then it trampled around over machine emplacements, “having a grand time,” as one of the men said with enthusiasm.

It crushed the machine-guns under its heavy ribs, and killed machine-gun teams with a deadly fire. The infantry followed in and took the place after this good help, and then advanced again round the flanks of the monster.

In spite of the Tank, which did such grand work, the assault on Courcelette was hard and costly. Again and again the men came under machine-gun fire and rifle fire, for the Germans had dug new trenches, called the Fabeckgraben and Zollerngraben, which had not been wiped out by our artillery, and they fought with great courage and desperation.

Seventy men who advanced first on a part of these lines were swept down. Seventy others who went forward to fill their places fell also to a man. But their comrades were not disheartened, and at last carried the position in a great wave of assault.

Then they went on to the village. It was like all these villages in German hands, tunnelled with a nest of dug-outs, and a stronghold hard to take. The British troops entered it from the eastern side, fought yard by yard, stubbornly resolved to have it.

The Tank came along and ploughed about, searching for German machine-guns, thrusting over bits of wall, nosing here and there, and sitting on heaps of ruin while it fired down the streets. By 6.30 last evening the village was taken.

The British took 400 prisoners, and when they were brought down to Pozières last night they passed old Crême de Menthe, who was going home, and held up their hands crying “Gott in Himmel!” and asked how they could fight against such monstrous things.

The taking of Courcelette was a great achievement skilfully planned and carried out with stern and high courage by splendid men, and one monster.

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On the right of these troops there was a great assault upon Martinpuich and High Wood. Here, also, in High Wood, the Germans had been ready for an attack, and, being forestalled in that, they made a strong counter-attack which for a time had some success, driving our men back to the southern edge of the wood.

Our troops had been heavily shelled beforehand, and they found the enemy in much stronger force than they had expected in that wood of bitter memory. But these men of ours—I have met many of them before a year ago—fought very gamely.

Some among them were utterly without experience of the Somme kind of fighting and wilted a little before its ferocity of fire, but the older men, the “veterans” of a year’s service or more, cheered them up, kept them steady, and led them on.

They counter-attacked the counter-attack and regained their old line, and then to their great joy saw the Tanks advancing through High Wood and on each side of it.

“It was like a fairy tale!” said a Cockney boy. “I can’t help laughing every time I think of it.”

He laughed then, though he had a broken arm and was covered in blood.

“They broke down trees as if they were matchsticks, and went over barricades like elephants. The Boches were thoroughly scared. They came running out of shell-holes and trenches, shouting like mad things.”

“Some of them attacked the Tanks and tried to bomb them, but it wasn’t a bit of good. O Crikey, it was a rare treat to see! The biggest joke that ever was! They just stamped down the German dug-out as one might a whops nest.”

On the left of High Wood was a very fine body of troops who had no trenches to lie in but just lay out in shell-craters under a constant fire of “whizz-bangs,” that is to say, field-guns firing at short range, which was extremely hard to endure.

“It was cruel,” said one of these men, “but we went forward all right when the time came over the bodies of comrades who were lying in pools of blood, and afterwards the enemy had to pay.”

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They were co-operating with some troops on their left, who went straight for Martinpuich, that village into which I stared a week or two ago after a long walk to our front line on the crest of the ridge beyond Bazentin, looking at the Promised Land.

These men were superb and went across No Man’s Land for nearly 1000 yards in six minutes, racing. They made short work with the Germans who tried to snipe them from the shell-craters, and only came to a check on the outskirts of Martinpuich, where they were received with a blast of machine-gun fire.

It was then the turn of the Tanks.

Before the dawn two of them had come up out of the darkness and lumbered over our front line trenches looking towards the enemy as though hungry for breakfast. Afterwards they came across No Man’s Land like enormous toads with pains in their stomachs, and nosed at Martinpuich before testing the strength of its broken barns and bricks.

The men cheered them wildly, waving their helmets and dancing round them. One company needed cheering up, for they had lost two of their officers the night before in a patrol adventure, and it was the sergeants who led them over.

Twenty minutes afterwards the first waves were inside the first trench of Martinpuich and in advance of them waddled a monster.

The men were held up for some time by the same machine-gun fire which has killed so many of our men, but the monsters went on alone, and had astounding adventures.

They went straight through the shells of broken barns and houses, straddled on top of German dug-outs, and fired enfilading shots down German trenches.

From one dug-out came a German colonel with a white, frightened face, who held his hands very high in front of the Tank, shouting, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

“Well, come inside then,” said a voice in the body of the beast, and a human hand came forth from a hole opening suddenly and grabbed the German officer.

For the rest of the day the Tank led that unfortunate man about on the strangest journey the world has ever seen.

Another Tank was confronted with one hundred Germans, who shouted “Mercy! Mercy!” and at the head of this procession led them back as prisoners to our lines. Yet another Tank went off to the right of Martinpuich, and was so fresh and high-spirited that it went far into the enemy’s lines, as though on the way to Berlin.

The men were not so fortunate as the monsters, not being proof against machine-gun bullets. The enemy concentrated a very heavy fire upon them, and many fell. One boy—a fine, stout-hearted lad who had a keen and spirited look in spite of dreadful experience—told me a tale that Edgar Allan Poe might have written if he had lived to see things worse than anything in his morbid imaginings—one of our common tales.

A German crump killed a lance-corporal by his side and buried them both completely.

“It was just my steel hat that kept the earth from my face,” said the boy, “and gave me a little handful of air to breathe. It was in a wee trench we had dug to get some cover. But now I was covered too much.”

“It seemed like an hour I was there, but perhaps no more than half that time. I tried to shout, but could not. A man walked over my head, but did not know I was there.”

“Presently they saw the lance-corporal’s leg sticking out, and started to pull him. I got my hand out, and waggled it, and they started digging for me. It was just time. The veins were starting out of my head, and I was nearly gone.”

It was late in the evening before the whole of Martinpuich was taken after fierce fighting, and it was the crowning triumph of a successful day.

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The troops on the left side of the line did amazingly well, and were handled well. They took forty German officers and 1430 other ranks. Against them was the 2nd Bavarian Corps, whom many of our men had met before at Kemmel and the Hohenzollern and Ypres, glad now to pay off old scores against them.

On the right of the troops at Martinpuich the attack was swinging up to Flers across a wide stretch of difficult and perilous ground strongly defended.

The enemy was flinging over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, and many of our men fell, but the wounded shouted on the others, if they were not too badly hit, and the others went forward grimly and steadily.

These soldiers of ours were superb in courage and stoic endurance, and pressed forward steadily in broken waves. The first news of success came through from an airman’s wireless, which said:

“A Tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind.”

It was an actual fact. One of the motor-monsters was there, enjoying itself thoroughly, and keeping down the heads of the enemy.

It hung out a big piece of paper, on which were the words:

“GREAT HUN DEFEAT. SPECIAL!”

The aeroplane flew low over its carcass, machine-gunning the scared Germans, who fled before the monstrous apparition. Later in the day it seemed to have been in need of a rest before coming home, and two humans got out of its inside and walked back to our lines.

But, by that time, Flers and many prisoners were in our hands, and our troops had gone beyond to further fields.

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On the extreme right of our line of attack the fighting was hardest and fiercest of all, and is still very confused and uncertain to the north of Ginchy and in the direction of Guedecourt. In this direction the enemy fought with fine courage. Machine-gun fire swept our men from the direction of Morval and Combles, and the shell-fire was frightful in its violence.

Nevertheless, the first rush forward was magnificent on the part of the troops. They were the Guards.

“Lots of our men dropped,” said one of them, “but we didn’t look round or bother about anything or see anything of what was going on around us. We had orders to push on, and we pushed.”

The enemy resisted stoutly along his first line. They kept up a severe rifle fire and machine-gun fire until our men were right on them, and then fought bayonet to bayonet.

Large numbers of them were killed, and the troops swept through to the second line of trenches and took that.

A third wave passed through them to the third German trench, but before they reached this goal the German soldiers came out with their hands up and surrendered. Our men went on and on.

“The Boches ran like rabbits before us,” said several of them. They went too far, these soldiers, in their eagerness. One of the colonels stood up on a hillock blowing a hunting horn to fetch them back, but they did not hear, and went on still further, unsupported by troops on their right.

The officers waved on the men with their revolvers, and many fell leading their companies. It was one of the greatest charges in history, but drove out too far into the “blue” without sufficient co-operation, with troops held up lower down by strong points and machine-guns. What the situation is there to-night I do not yet know, except that our men were fighting on the outskirts of Guedecourt.

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I have no time to tell of all the great drama I have seen—the long trails of the walking wounded, marvellously brave, wonderfully full of spirits, the long columns of German prisoners tramping back from the battlefields, dejected and miserable, and other great pictures of war not yet to be written.

The German prisoners were utterly dismayed—bewildered beyond words. Some of the officers tried to shrug it off as “a stroke of luck,” but others admitted that we had surprised them by a great and brilliant stroke.

One of them with whom I spoke was a young artillery officer who had fought against us at Ypres in 1914, and afterwards against the Russians.

“The Somme is the worst of all for us,” he said. “It is fearful.”

Several German officers were appalling figures, in masks of horror, their faces as black as negroes. They had been in a dug-out blown up by one of our bombs, and it was full of Very lights, which flamed about them, and burnt them black.

It was a black day for Germany, and the hardest blow that has been struck at her heart and pride by British troops. For us the glory of the day is in the splendour of our men.