XXXIII THE SPLENDID NEW ZEALANDERS

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September 23

It was inevitable that after the great battle of September 15 our line should have ragged edges and run up or down into small salients. This was due to the greater progress made by different bodies of troops; and to the way in which isolated groups of Germans held on very stubbornly to these stretches of ground not in the general line of our advance.

During the past forty-eight hours a good deal has been done to clear out these pockets, or wedges, and to straighten out the line from Courcelette eastwards.

This morning our troops did a useful bit of work in such a place between Courcelette and Martinpuich, knocking out a strong post and taking some prisoners, with whom were two officers. Elsewhere strong posts thrust out by us beyond the main trenches have been linked up, so that the line now runs in a reasonably even way from the north of Courcelette across the Bapaume Road, above Martinpuich, and so on to the north of Flers.

This linking-up and clearing-up work now done to a great extent, puts us in a stronger position of defence, to hold what we have gained, against any attempts made by the enemy in counter-attack.

He has made many attempts since September 15 to drive our troops out of the high ground, which is vital to his means of observation, and the failure of them has cost him a great price in life.

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Among the most desperate thrusts, pressed with stubborn bravery by bodies of German soldiers, collected hastily and flung with but little plan or preliminary organisation against our lines, were those directed upon the New Zealanders, who repelled them after hard and long conflicts fought out for the most part with naked steel.

In all the fighting since July i there has not been anything more fierce or more bloody than these hand-to-hand struggles on the left of Flers, and the New Zealanders have gained a greater name for themselves (it was already a great name since Gallipoli) as soldiers who hate to give up what they have gained, who will hold on to ground with a grim obstinacy against heavy odds, and if they are ordered to retreat because of the military situation round them come back again with a stern resolve to “get the goods.”

That is not only my reading of the men, and I do not pretend to know them well, but is the summing-up of an officer, not from their own country, who has seen them fight during these last few days, and who spoke of them with a thrill of admiration in his voice, after watching the stoicism with which they endured great shell-fire, the spirit with which they attacked after great fatigues and hardships, and the rally of men, discouraged for a while by their loss of officers, which swept the Germans back into panic-stricken flight.

This struggle covers a week’s fighting since September 15, when at dawn the New Zealanders advanced in waves to a series of positions which would bring them up to the left of Flers if they had the luck to get as far. On their right were the troops whose capture of Flers village I have already described, and on their left other troops attacking High Wood and the ground north of it.

The men of New Zealand went forward with hardly a check, to the German switch trench 500 yards from the starting line. They were men of Auckland, Canterbury, Otago, and Wellington, and they put their trust in the bayonet and desired to get close to their enemy.

They had their desire. In the switch trench the Germans defended themselves to the last gasp, and, as far as I can make out, only four of them were left alive after that frightful encounter. It was a fight to the death on both sides, and the New Zealanders did not cross that ditch at full strength.

On the way up they lost under shrapnel and machine-gun fire. On the other side of the ditch their lines were thinner. But they were on the other side, and the ditch behind them was a grave upon which they turned their backs to get across the next stretch of ground to trenches 800 yards ahead.

The New Zealand Rifles covered this ground quickly, moving in open order, but keeping in touch with each other by fine discipline and an esprit de corps which is better than discipline.

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That next system of trench work, two lines heavily wired and deeply dug, part of the famous Flers line, was a great obstacle. Our gun-fire, grand as it had been, had not laid all the wire low nor destroyed the trenches. A swish of machine-gun bullets showed that the enemy was alive and savage.

An infantry assault on such a line had to be paid for, sometimes by a great number of dead and wounded. But it was the day of the Tanks. Two of them had tried to keep pace with the New Zealand attack, but had lagged behind like short-winded creatures suffering from stitch—and no wonder, looking at the shell-craters and pits across which they had to bring their long bodies, crawling in and crawling out, with their tails above their heads and their heads above their tails.

But they arrived in time to attack the Flers line, and in a very deliberate and stolid way they sidled along the barbed wire, smashing it into the earth, before poking their big snouts over the German parapets, hauling themselves up, and firing from both flanks upon German machine-gun teams.

With this noteworthy help, which saved time and trouble and life, the New Zealanders took the double trenches of the Flers line, and again pushed on, another 700 yards, across a sunken road with steep banks and very deep dug-outs, where the enemy did not stay to meet them until they had established themselves on a line running westwards from the top of Flers village, now in the hands of our English lads.

One of the Tanks followed them, getting down the steep bank with its nose to earth, and lumbering up the other side like a huge elephant (without a trunk).

A German battery 1,500 yards away searched for it with shell-fire, but did not get within hitting distance of its armoured skin. Eventually it was the German battery that was knocked out by our guns.

However, this was a side-show, and the Tanks must not take all the glory away from the infantry, who had not armoured skins, alas, and who were facing murderous fire elsewhere.

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They had been ordered to swing left to make a flanking front up the edge of a valley running north-west of Flers, right away beyond the village, and this they did most gallantly, although at the time they stuck out like a thin wedge into German territory, because at that time they had no support on their left (our English fellows, as I have described in an earlier despatch, had been having a fearful time in and beyond High Wood), and on the right the other English troops were busy with the capture of Flers.

It was clearly and undeniably a hazardous position for the New Zealanders all alone out there, and they were ordered to fall back to the line going straight westwards from the top of Flers village, which they helped to hold, on the night of the 15th to 16th.

From that day onwards the enemy made repeated counter-attacks. Sometimes they were in feeble strength, shattered quickly, but they grew in intensity and numbers as the days passed, while the New Zealanders were still in a rather precarious position, “a rocky position,” says one of their officers, owing to the weakness of their left flank.

Right down on that flank Germans were still holding out in shell-craters with a way open behind them, so that supports might come down to drive a wedge between the New Zealanders and the English troops north of High Wood.

This was attempted by something like a brigade of Germans, who advanced in six or seven waves upon the English soldiers—who were outnumbered by more than two to one—in a steady, determined way. They were met out in the open with the bayonet. It was the old way of fighting men meeting men, staring into each other’s eyes, trusting to their own strength and skill with sharp steel, and not to engines of war with high explosives or quick-firing guns.

If men fight it is the best way though not pleasant and agreeable for ladies to watch from silken canopies, as in the old days of the tourney, when gentlemen hacked at each other with axes, just for fun. A New Zealand officer watched it from a little distance, and his breath came quick when he described it to me. The German ranks were broken and a remnant fled.

But it was not so long or so bloody a fight as what the New Zealanders themselves had to encounter three days ago.

The enemy struck a blow against the New Zealand troops, at the joining point between those men and their comrades on the left, who had come up to the west of Flers.

The New Zealanders—who were Canterbury men—were beaten back twice, and twice regained the ground. All through the night of September 20 until the dawn of the 21st, there was violent bomb-fighting and bayonet fighting.

There was no straight line of men British on one side, German on the other. It was a confused mass, isolated bodies of men struggling around shell-craters and bits of trench, single figures fighting twos and threes, groups joining to form lines which surged backwards and forwards and a night horrible with the crash of bombs and the cries of the dying.

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One New Zealand officer, a very splendid heroic man, was the life and soul of this defence and counter-attack.

There were moments when some of his men were disheartened because their line had fallen back, and the number of their wounded lay too thick about them. He put new fire into them by the flame of his own spirit. He led them forward again, rallying the gloomy ones, so careless of his own life, so eager for the honour of New Zealand that they followed him under a kind of spell, because of the magic in him.

They thrust back the enemy, put him to flight down the valley, remained masters of the ground when the dawn brightened into the full light of day, revealing the carnage that had been hidden in the night.

It was not the end of the fighting here. In the afternoon the enemy came again, in strong numbers—sent forward by their high command, men at the end of far telephones, desperate to retake the ground, and ordering new assaults which were sentences of death to German soldiers not at the end of far telephones but very near to British bayonets.

They came on thickly, these doomed men, shoulder to shoulder, and it was again the captain of the Canterburys who led his men against them in a great bayonet charge, right across the open.

It was bayonet against bayonet, for the Germans stood to receive the charge, though with blanched faces. For the New Zealanders came upon them at the trot and then sprang forward with bayonets as quick as knitting needles....

The Germans cried out in terror. Down the hillside, beyond, those who could escape ran, and fell as they ran. It was a rout and the end of the counter-attack.

The New Zealanders were now sure of themselves. They knew that with the bayonet they can meet the Germans as their masters. So scornful are they of their bayonet fighting that they have it in their hearts to pity them and say “Poor devils!”

To my mind, and to others, the finest heroism was shown by the New Zealand stretcher-bearers. They did not charge with the bayonet. All their duty was to go out across open country in cool blood to pick up men lying there in blood that was not cool unless they had lain there too long.

They had to go through salvoes of five-point-nines, which tore up the ground about them, and buried them, and mangled many of them. And they went quite steadily and quietly, not once or twice, but hour after hour, until more than sixty of them had fallen, and hour after hour they carried out their work of rescue quite careless of themselves.

“I am not a sentimentalist,” said a New Zealand officer to-day, as he looked at me with grave eyes, remembering those scenes, “but the work of those men seemed to me very noble and good.”

In New Zealand and in the quiet farmsteads there, those words will be read gladly, I think.

And if any words of mine could give a little extra share of honour to these Colonial boys, who have come so far overseas to fight by the side of English soldiers, I should be glad and proud too, having a heart very full of admiration for the valour of these men, who have fought in these great battles as well as any troops who shared the day with them.