XXV THE LAST FIGHTS IN DEVIL’S WOOD

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August 29

The barren ground of the battlefields was turned into swamps this afternoon, when the clouds which had been piling up in great black masses suddenly broke after a few warning flashes of lightning and a roll of thunder.

I have been watching the usual artillery bombardment over the Pozières ridge and Thiépval, spreading eastward to the thin fringe of High Wood, faintly pencilled against the darkening sky. The guns quickened their pace at about three o’clock, and on our right the French artillery was also hammering away. Then the storm burst and nature, after all, had the best of it, though all the atmospheric effects seemed like a magnificent plagiarism of our human chemistry which has filled the sky with darkness and forked lightnings, and the earth with high explosives, and the air with noise. These thunder-claps ripping the clouds before the long ruffle of their drums, and the winking of the lightning behind the black curtains on the hills, and the queer, ghastly colours edging fantastically shaped wreaths of clouds, were enormously like our miniature tempests of hate. Nature was at war with itself, and our pop-guns seemed silly toys.

Coming down to earth, and its funny ants, called men, there has not been very much activity during the past twenty-four hours, beyond the work of the gunners. Between Delville Wood and High Wood our troops captured a German barricade, and there was some bombing about the shell-craters on the way to Ginchy, all of which gives us at last a strong grip all round and beyond that Devil’s Wood, where our men have fought so often and so hard.

There seems no doubt about it now, judging from all I heard at an officers’ mess in a big-sized tent between the bombardment and the thunderstorm, where a number of young officers told me incidents of the recent fighting there.

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It was on August 24, as I have described already, in a brief way, that the big “shove” was made all round this beastly wood and out of it on the east side, where the Germans still had some strong posts and shell-craters and machine-guns.

The troops engaged were mostly of English regiments, with one body of Scots, and they all did splendidly in spite of the tragic character of the ground and the intensity of the enemy’s barrage. Accidents happened now and then. At one point of the advance the German wire was uncut, and only eight men could get through. They killed eleven Germans in the craters beyond them, and stayed there till dusk, and came back.

On the north side of the wood the troops were hammered by shell-fire, but “stuck” it out, and went forward marvellously under the protection of their own shell-fire, while our machine-guns kept the enemy’s heads down by a stream of machine-gun bullets—a million of them—which “watered” his trenches.

There was but little hand-fighting here. Many Germans were found dead in their muck-heaps which were once trenches. Four of them ran forward to surrender so furiously that they scared one of our men who ran, too, until he realised their intention and took them prisoner. Another came running forward and was seized by the throat by his officer, who was suspicious of his intention in the heat of the moment.

There was also a bull-pup who came over and is now enjoying bully-beef.

Further on the right there was great fighting to thrust the enemy out of his last ditch in Delville Wood and to get across the ground to the east of it.

The enemy fought with high courage, and there were many bombing duels, in which one of our sergeants caught German bombs before they burst and flung them back again—which is not an easy trick to learn. A Lewis gun was thrust up very quickly to a German post where a machine-gun was concealed in a shell-crater and played its hose on the team who refused to surrender. Out of one such strong point—a nest of craters—fifty-four Prussians came up with the usual shout of surrender when our bombing parties had surrounded them.

Every man fought with reckless courage. The wounded officers carried back on stretchers brought the latest news to their brigadier, and said, “We’re doing jolly well, sir,” or explained the difficult bits of work in hand.

The stretcher-bearers went out through the heaviest fire and searched for the wounded with great self-sacrifice. One man of the R.A.M.C. was out there, over this frightful ground, for twenty hours at a stretch, saving many men, untired till the last.

One queer horror was seen. Some German sentries were found tied to posts, and one man stood there without a head, which had been blown off by a shell. It seemed some awful form of field punishment, perhaps for men who had tried to desert. Nearly 400 prisoners were taken altogether that day.

They had fought bravely—once they had the pride of Prussians. But now many of them were utterly broken, and one officer, when he was questioned, could only wring his hands and moan about the awful losses of his company.

It was fighting which continued the tradition of Devil’s Wood—where horror and heroism have gone hand in hand.

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September 2

The enemy’s attempt to recover some of his lost ground around Delville Wood has been very costly to him, and has only succeeded in two places in forcing our men back a little way, in spite of the self-sacrifice of those German soldiers who obeyed orders and came across a foul ground through the curtain fire of our guns, and fell, as they knew they must fall.

So we go back to Devil’s Wood again, and the name of its beastliness must be written down once more as a place where more dead lie among those who have lain there long, and where once more shell-fire is smashing through the charred tree-stumps and biting great chunks of wood out of sturdy old trunks still standing in this shambles.

It will be remembered, perhaps, how in the last big fighting here more than a week ago our men thrust our lines out beyond the wood, above the orchard trench of Longueval and the sunken road to High Wood, and captured the enemy’s last strong point in the north-east corner of the wood, and chased the enemy out of a network of trenches zig-zagging away from the wood towards Ginchy. Something like 400 prisoners were taken then, and in knocking out machine-gun posts, in bombing the enemy out of small redoubts, and sweeping across ground pitted with shell-craters in which lay stubborn Germans sniping our men as they passed, every quality of courage and the fighting spirit was shown by our troops engaged.

It was good to get about beyond the Devil’s Wood, and our men redug their trenches outside it with a willing industry. Then by bad luck the rain came, and heavy clouds gathered and broke, slashed by lightning, and flooded the battlefields.

It was hard luck on newly-made trenches and on the men who had dug them. I think it is difficult for people at home to understand the meaning of big rain in this war of ours; the very sandbags come slipping off the parapets, and parapets come falling on to the firesteps, and rivers come rushing down the boggy ditches.

Rifles drop and get caked with wet mud. Hand-grenades disappear into the quagmire. To get supplies up narrow ditches is tiring to the point of sheer exhaustion. So our men were tired—“fed-up” with the weather, as they would put it—when the enemy began to bombard them, not in the usual way of a war-day’s work, but furiously, with a storm of hate.

For three hours the bombardment went on and increased in violence. The front trenches had been lightly held, and the men there held on until there were no trenches, but only shell-craters and a wild upheaval of wet earth. The enemy believed, perhaps, that they had finished all our life in those muck-heaps.

German soldiers ordered to advance may, for a few minutes, have bolstered up their courage by the thought that their guns had done most of the work. Not longer than that. When the first wave of the 118th German regiment came out of their shell-craters and ditches they came full into the face of a deadly machine-gun fire, and under a great barrage of high explosives.

It was the fire of our machine-gunners which killed most of them. They fell as if swept down by invisible scythes.

The second wave came—not in a standing line, as people may imagine, but in little bunches or groups, and singly, stumbling in and out of shell-holes, in short rushes, leaping to avoid shell-bursts, but not retreating one bit from the death that waited for them. The second German wave was wiped out.

A third, fourth and fifth wave advanced, and though many of these men fell, and the waves became mingled and confused in their tide, there were enough to reach the place where our lines had been, and too many at the time for our men, who had been sorely tried, to dispute the foremost shell-craters with them.

Our troops had to fall back in one or two places along the fringe of Delville Wood and behind the line of the sunken road westward. But the enemy did not gain the ground round the wood. Even where he had damaged our trenches most we held strong posts, machine-guns in convenient shell-holes, and small groups of brave fellows in isolated bits of trench keeping their bombs and rifles dry.

During the night also our men bombed out parties of Germans in a portion of the sunken road, and regained the bit of ground for which the enemy had paid so high a price in blood.

To-day there was a blue sky again over the battlefields, and the sunlight lay over the ghastly ruin of all those villages and woodlands.

A great day for the gunners, O God!... They made the most of it, and I watched the bombardment piling up the columns of smoke and earth between Thiépval and High Wood, and a fierce German barrage between Mametz Wood and the Bazentins.

Heavy crumps were bursting also away back by Contalmaison, and once the Virgin of Albert was hidden in a smoke-cloud which rose from the ruins about it.

The sun gleamed on all our kite balloons hastening forward in the blue to watch the enemy’s lines. They were dazzling white, these “Ruperts” of the sky, and above and about them flashed our battle-planes going over the enemy’s country.

Ceaselessly the infernal clangour of great guns banged over the hills, and the shells went whining overhead. The enemy was getting the worst of it, if I could judge from the greater weight of our bombardment, but his guns were also hard at work, at long range beyond Grandcourt and Flers. He flung out a quantity of gas-shells—and the sun shone down upon all these little busy ways of men, and the fields were flooded with a golden light.